SpaceX's Starship megarocket may indeed get off the ground next week.
SpaceX cleared a big hurdle on the path to liftoff on Thursday (May 7), conducting a static-fire test with Starship's Super Heavy first stage at its Starbase site in Texas. The company lit up all 33 of Super Heavy's Raptor engines while the booster remained anchored to the pad — and everything apparently went well.
"Full duration and full thrust 33-engine static fire with Super Heavy V3," SpaceX wrote in a Thursday post on X that shared two videos of the 14-second-long test. (One video is about a minute long, but it seems to be a slow-motion version of the trial.)
This was the first successful full-up static fire test for a V3 Super Heavy. SpaceX performed a 10-engine trial with the same booster in March and ramped up to a 33-engine test on April 15. Both of those static fires ended early, however, due to issues with ground equipment.
The Starship upper stage (known as "Ship") that will launch on Flight 12 already has a successful static fire under its belt: It ignited all six of its Raptors on April 14.
Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket in history. It stands more than 400 feet (122 meters) tall and can haul more than 100 tons of payload to low Earth orbit.
SpaceX is developing the huge vehicle to help humanity settle the moon and Mars, among other tasks. And Starship is in NASA's plans as well; the agency picked Starship's upper stage to be one of the crewed landers for its Artemis program of moon exploration.
If all goes well, Ship will fly on the Artemis 3 mission in late 2027, perhaps along with the other private Artemis lunar lander — Blue Origin's Blue Moon. Artemis 3 will remain in Earth orbit, testing rendezvous and docking operations using the lander(s) and Artemis' Orion space capsule. (The first Artemis moon-landing mission will be Artemis 4, which is currently targeted to launch in late 2028.)
Starship has flown 11 suborbital test missions to date, the first occurring in April 2023 and the most recent in October 2025. The lengthy delay between flights 11 and 12 owes partly to a mishap involving the original Flight 12 Super Heavy, which was destroyed during a pressure test this past November.
Flight 12 will be suborbital as well, so there will be more boxes to check even if everything goes well on the upcoming test launch. Before it can fly an Artemis moon mission, for example, Starship will have to be outfitted with a life-support system and show that it can reach orbit and be refueled away from Earth.
