SpaceX announced on Thursday that it plans to conduct a dress rehearsal next week for the first flight of its Starship rocket, designed to take humans to the moon and Mars, and that the test flight that could take place the following week.
“Starship fully stacked at Starbase,” the space company said in a tweet accompanied by photos of the rocket with all of its stages.
The first and second stages have so far only made separate test flights.
“The team is working towards a launch rehearsal next week, followed by Starship’s first integrated flight test about a week later, pending regulatory approvals,” SpaceX tweeted.
The space company needs a green light from the US civil aviation regulator, FAA, to launch such a flight.
It conducted an impressive test of the 33 Raptor engines of Starship’s 69-metre-high first stage, dubbed Super Heavy, at its Boca Chica base in far south Texas in February.
Only the rocket’s second stage has made suborbital test flights, several of which had ended in huge explosions.
Starship has been chosen by NASA to land its astronauts on the Moon during the Artemis 3 mission, which is officially due in 2025.
The Artemis 2 crew, which is due to fly to the Moon and then around it without landing, will be carried by NASA’s SLS rocket, the most powerful rocket in the world for now… until Starship comes on stream.
