SpaceX Rolls Out 'Super Heavy' Booster to Launch Pad; Prepares to Test Giant New Rocket for the First Time

SpaceX recently rolled out its Super Heavy booster out of its bay to a launch pad at its South Texas-based Starbase.

A Space.com report said the company is preparing, for the first time. Specifically, the 230-foot-tall Super Heavy booster is the initial stage of the fully reusable Starship transportation system of SpaceX, which it is developing to help humans inhabit Mars, among other tasks.

The upper stage, this report described, is a 165-foot-tall spacecraft known as Starship, a model of which aced a 6.2-mile high test flight in May.

In a Twitter post, Elon Musk, SpaceX founder and CEO said, this particular Super Heavy, also called Booster 3, will not fly.

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Booster 3 to Undergo Ground Tests

Specifically, Musk announced, Booster 3 will go through ground tests intended to "pave the way for its initial orbital test flight of the Starship system" which could take place as early as this summer.

That particular flight will takeoff from Starbase. If everything goes accordingly, Booster 4 will splash down in the Gulf of Mexico, approximately 20 miles or 32 kilometers off the South Texas coast.

Meanwhile, the Starship element will power its way to Earth orbit and ultimately come down in the Pacific Ocean, close to the Hawaiian island of Kauai.

More test flights with other Starship and Super Heavy prototypes will possibly follow in comparatively quick succession.

The space company tends to set ambitious milestones, and the founder and CEO has said that Starship could be completely up and running by 2023, if both developing and testing go well.

Super Heavy and Starship Space Vehicles

Earlier, in March this year, SpaceX announced the development of Starship and Super Heavy to take humans and payloads to Mars, the moon, as well as other distant destinations.

Musk said both vehicles will be completely reusable. Super Heavy, he added, will return to this planet for a vertical landing shortly following liftoff, as the first stages of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets of SpaceX already do, and Starship will be capable of making several trips from the moon or the Red Planet.

Moreover, SpaceX already has a Starship mission, earlier reported, with, as mentioned, a targeted launch date of 2023, the "dearMoon" flight around the nearest cosmic neighbor of Earth, which Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa bought.

The 'dearMoon' Mission

An ABC News report in March 2021 described Maezawa as a controversial entrepreneur who formerly held a "girlfriend contest" for a now-obsolete Space-bound mission, that his dearMoon mission, with the aim of flying the first civilian mission to the moon, was looking for eight crewmembers to fly to, and around the moon and back on the Starship spacecraft of SpaceX.

Explaining the mission, according to a similar Fox Business report, the Japanese entrepreneur said, he would pay for the entire journey where 10 to 12 of them would be on board. He also said he was hoping, that together, they could make a fun trip. Initially, Maezawa said, his plan was to take artists from all over the world into space with him.

Related information about SpaceX's Super Heavy Booster is shown on Engineering Today's YouTube video below: