SpaceX Starship 120m rocket full Stacked Testing, 33 Engines Firing!
Huge thanks to:
LabPadre: https://www.youtube.com/@LabPadre
Starship Gazer: https://twitter.com/StarshipGazer
Evan Karen: https://www.youtube.com/@EvanKaren
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After rapidly stacking Ship 24 and Booster 7 earlier this week, SpaceX has begun testing a fully stacked Starship rocket for the first time in three months, ready for a full wet dress rehearsal and 33-engine static fire.
Meanwhile, SpaceX is launching Falcon Heavy for the US Space Force’s Mission today.
All this and more in today's episode of Alpha Tech:

Elon Musk’s SpaceX could start the countdown for its first orbital launch!
On Jan 14, 2023, SpaceX conducted propellant load testing on Starship 24 and Super Heavy Booster 7 at the orbital launch mount.

Standing around 120 meters tall, Starship is unequivocally the largest and most voluminous rocket ever built. With its 33 Raptor V2 engines, the fully assembled Ship 24 and Booster 7 stack would have likely weighed around 4000-5000 tons. Starship has a peak thrust of 75.9 MN and can deliver more than 100 t to low Earth orbit, which would classify the rocket as a super heavy-lift launch vehicle.

For its recently fully-integrated test, though, SpaceX appears to have put Starship through a fairly limited cryogenic proof. The lack of frost on Ship 24 would make me hesitant to call it partial full-stack WDR. But def a partial Booster 7 WDR if using methane and oxygen, plus some limited and ambiguous Ship cryo loading.
For Ship 24 and Booster 7’s combined debut, Super Heavy was filled maybe 10-20% and Starship around 25-50% of the way with either liquid nitrogen (LN2) or a combination of LN2 and liquid oxygen (LOx). It’s difficult to tell but it’s unlikely any methane (LCH4) fuel was involved.

Beyond the basic mechanical demonstration that Super Heavy Booster 7 is strong enough to support a partially loaded Starship, which probably wasn’t in doubt, it’s likely that the main purpose of this first full-stack cryoproof was to ensure that all the systems required to fuel Starship on top of Super Heavy were working as expected. That’s no small feat given that Starship is both the tallest rocket and largest upper stage ever assembled. To fully fuel a Starship for an orbital launch, around 1200 tons of propellant (or LN2 for a cryoproof) – equivalent to the weight of more than two entire Falcon 9 rockets – must be pumped around 85 meters up Starbase’s integration tower.
SpaceX Starship 120m rocket full Stacked Testing, 33 Engines Firing!