Weekend Of Triumph: Musk's SpaceX Conducts Starship Test, Sends Crew-7 To Orbit, And Bolsters Starlink Array

Elon Musk‘s rocket manufacturing company, SpaceX, had a happening weekend, starting Friday evening.

Starship Super Heavy Booster 9 Static Fire: The company conducted the second static fire test of its Starship Super Heavy Booster 9 on Friday evening. The test was a success, with all 33 raptor engines firing up and all but two of them running for the entire test duration, producing about 7.9 million lbf of thrust (~3,600 metric tons) ahead of the rocket’s upcoming second flight test.

Crew-7 Mission: After the static fire, it was all about the crew-7 mission. At 3:27 a.m. ET on Saturday, the Falcon 9 launched the Dragon spacecraft and Crew- 7 to orbit from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli, European Space Agency astronaut Andreas Mogensen, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Satoshi Furukawa, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Konstantin Borisov were aboard the spacecraft, named Endurance, which previously carried Crew-3 and Crew-5 to the space station. The mission is NASA’s seventh crew rotation mission with SpaceX to the space station.

The spacecraft, which has already spent over 300 days in space, docked with the space station on Sunday at 9:16 a.m. ET.

“Dragon docks with Space Station. Strange to think that they're both traveling at ~25 times speed of sound!,” CEO Musk tweeted.

Starlink Mission: After launching crew-7 in the early hours of Saturday, SpaceX at night launched 22 Starlink satellites to low-Earth orbit from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 9:05 p.m. ET, summing up the busy weekend.

Image Credit – SpaceX

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