The Revolution Blog

SpaceX’s latest rocket booster is an absolute beast

Saturday, Aug 28, 2021

If you know Hamilton, you know that MASSIVE and HEAVY are our two middle names. So it would be sheer negligence, really, if we didn’t acknowledge the big buzz in one of the biggest industries we serve: Space.

That’s right. We’re talking about the monstrous Booster 4 that recently got briefly “test-mated” for about an hour to SpaceX’s Starship rocket to the Moon. Dubbed “Super Heavy,” this booster is the Starship’s best friend and likely to become the King of Space, weighing in at 300 tons empty and capable of holding more than 3,000 tons of propellant.

In preparation for its planned orbital test flight (hopefully later this year), the pairing of Starship with Super Heavy this month set a world record for the world’s tallest rocket. Stacked together, they stand a whopping 395 feet tall. One crucial requirement of Starship is that it must lift heavy payloads to orbit. That’s why SpaceX is sparing no expense on the Super Heavy. It will be the most powerful launch vehicle ever, designed to exert 14.5 million pounds of thrust for liftoff, which is approximately double that of NASA’s Saturn V rocket used for the iconic Apollo missions. Super Heavy has a massive stack of 29 Raptor engines.

She’s impressive, but is she flightworthy? For now, Super Heavy Booster 4’s next milestone will be a second trip from the build site to the launch pad, likely in the next few weeks. Just this month Elon Musk commented on Twitter that SpaceX could launch Starship’s maiden voyage to the moon “probably sooner” than 2024.

We’ll be watching.

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