SpaceX is once again putting Starship through a fascinating test.
It’s called “hot staging,” which is a method for separating the Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy rocket after liftoff when Super Heavy has burned through most of its fuel and is ready to break away.
Almost all rockets go through a process during launch called “stage separation,” in which the bottommost rocket booster diverges from the rest of the rocket or spacecraft.
When SpaceX launches its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, for example, the first-stage booster — or the bottommost portion of the rocket — breaks away from the upper part of the rocket less than 3 minutes into flight.
The Falcon 9 does so using “pneumatic pushers” that are housed within the rocket’s interstage. That’s the black band that can be seen around the middle of the Falcon 9.
Starship, however, won’t use pneumatic pushers. Instead, the Starship spacecraft will simply fire up its own engines to push itself away from the Super Heavy booster.
Essentially, it’s separation by blunt force trauma.
Starship’s interstage has some large vents installed to direct the blow of the engines — aiming to make this method safe for the booster.
Hot staging was a huge point of interest during the last test flight, as SpaceX hadn’t tried such a method before.
Ultimately, the hot-staging attempt in November appeared to work.
Starship’s next attempt at hot staging should occur 2 minutes and 44 seconds into the mission.
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