Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. News

SpaceX’s Starhopper test rocket successfully completes its first hop

By
Add as a preferred source on Google
SpaceX's Starhopper
SpaceX

SpaceX successfully launched a test prototype of its future Starship rocket, called Starhopper, on Thursday. The test version of the rocket was launched from a location in Texas and was able to hover in the air for a few seconds before it returned to the ground and landed.

That might not sound all that impressive, but it was the first time SpaceX was able to get the rocket off the ground using its next-generation rocket engine called Raptor.

Recommended Videos

The spacecraft is called Starhopper specifically because it was designed to do those short takeoffs and landings, or “hops.”

STARHOPPER'S FIRST HOP!!!!

The launch happened a day after the company had to abort a test launch of the rocket. On Wednesday, the rocket’s engine appeared to fire up, but then flames and smoke appeared at the top of the spacecraft and SpaceX scrapped the test.

Commenting during a livestream Wednesday, SpaceX engineer Kate Trice said “As I mentioned before, this is a development program — today was a test flight designed to test the boundaries of the vehicle.”

A similar test last Tuesday evening also ended in flames.

Starship, the big brother to the Starhopper vessel being tested, is ultimately expected to be used as a commercial spacecraft. Unlike some other spacecraft, the vessel is expected to be entirely reusable. When completed, it will be able to take off and land multiple times, similar to an airplane.

Engine cam pic.twitter.com/3cWHU50353

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 26, 2019

Thursday evening’s test took roughly 15 seconds.

Another test of the vessel is expected to happen in a week or two. Thursday’s test had the vessel fly 65 feet in the air. The next test will attempt to have Starhopper fly considerably higher, 650 feet in the air.

Thursday was a banner day for SpaceX. Along with the successful Starhopper test, the company launched its Dragon spacecraft into orbit using a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force station in Florida earlier in the afternoon. The ship contains about 5,000 lbs of supplies and experimentation equipment bound to arrive at the International Space Station on Saturday. That launch went off without a hitch after SpaceX was forced to scrap a planned launch on Wednesday due to bad weather.

SpaceX hopes to have Starship ready for commercial flights by 2021.

Emily Price
Emily Price
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Emily is a freelance writer based in San Francisco. Her book "Productivity Hacks: 500+ Easy Ways to Accomplish More at…
Topics
Chinese startup claims its brain implant takes just 10 minutes to place, no skull surgery required
StairMed Technology's vein-based BCI could beat Neuralink's roughly two-hour surgery on speed, but the device still hasn't undergone human trials.
Art, Plate, Crystal

Brain implants, like the ones made by Elon Musk's Neuralink, typically involve open-skull surgery. But a Chinese startup says it can skip that step entirely, threading its device into the brain through a vein in a procedure that reportedly takes as little as ten minutes. According to the South China Morning Post, Shanghai-based StairMed Technology is one of several companies pursuing this approach, as the country pushes to expand its homegrown brain-computer interface (BCI) industry.

Faster than Neuralink, on paper

Read more
This bizarre email flaw is leaking corporate secrets to anyone who buys the right domain
Security researchers discovered companies are accidentally sending sensitive emails to domains that outsiders can register.
Maill app icon notifications

You don't always need to hack into a company's systems to get its secrets. Sometimes, the company will simply email them to you. A new report by WIRED's Matt Burgess has uncovered a bizarre email security problem in which companies are inadvertently sending sensitive information to domains that can be registered and controlled by outsiders. Security researchers Cory Solovevich and Mike Sheward discovered that seemingly harmless addresses such as noreply and deleteduser can become unexpected gateways to corporate information when the domains behind them aren't properly controlled.

The "hack" is buying the right domain

Read more
I found 3 ChatGPT features that turned out to be way more useful than I expected
ChatGPT on iPhone

I use ChatGPT pretty much every day, but somewhere along the way, I’ve also developed a habit of poking around and looking for features I haven’t tried yet. Some discoveries are genuinely useful, while others are the kind I’ll probably remember once every six months.

Every once in a while, though, I stumble across something that actually changes how I use ChatGPT. That happened recently with three features I’d somehow been overlooking. I’ve started using all three regularly now, and if you spend a lot of time in ChatGPT too, I think you’re missing out by not giving them a shot.

Read more