SpaceX test-fires Starship Super Heavy booster ahead of critical Flight 14 (video)

SpaceX just took another step toward the highly anticipated next test flight of its Starship megarocket.The company conducted an engine test with Starship's giant first-stage booster, known as Super Heavy, on the launch pad at its Starbase site in South Texas on Friday (Aug. 28)."Full duration 33-engine static fire with the Super Heavy booster preparing for Flight 14," SpaceX wrote in a Friday X post that shared two videos of the test.SpaceX fired up all 33 engines of its Super Heavy booster to gear up for the next Starship test flight, which will mark the first time the vehicle goes orbital. (Image credit: SpaceX)As that post indicates, SpaceX is gearing up for the 14th test flight of Starship, a megarocket that consists of Super Heavy and a 171-foot-tall (52 meters) upper stage known as Starship, or Ship for short.The company has already vetted the engines on Flight 14's Ship, firing up all six of them last week at Starbase. SpaceX is believed to be targeting mid-September for Flight 14, which will be a big milestone in Starship's development — the vehicle's first-ever orbital trip. Ship will also apparently deploy operational payloads into orbit on the flight — a batch of SpaceX's next-gen "Version 3" Starlink satellites. Ship successfully deployed 20 V3 Starlinks on Flight 13 last month, but on a suborbital trajectory, and the satellites soon crashed back to Earth.Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, and both Super Heavy and Ship are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable. SpaceX therefore thinks the megarocket can revolutionize spaceflight, helping humanity expand its footprint out into the solar system.NASA is invested in the vehicle as well. The agency chose Ship as a crewed lunar lander for its Artemis program, which aims to build a base near the moon's south pole in the coming years. If all goes to plan for SpaceX, Ship will fly on NASA's Artemis III mission to Earth orbit in mid-2027 and land astronauts on the moon on Artemis IV in late 2028. (NASA picked a second crewed Artemis lander, Blue Origin's Blue Moon, which could fly on one or both of those missions as well).