SpaceX To Use New Booster, Ship for Orbital Test

In a tweet yesterday, Elon Musk announced that SpaceX will use a new booster and ship for their first orbital test flight. The current compo of Booster 4 and Ship 20 will be retired without a test flight. This means that the first orbital test flight will occur no earlier than sometime in May, and that is likely an optimistic target.  

Crucially, Musk revealed that the first Starship to attempt an orbital-class launch will now feature upgraded Raptor V2 engines – engines that require an entirely new thrust structure design. That already all but guaranteed that B4 and S20 had been overtaken but Musk also explicitly confirmed that they would be replaced with a new pair in a later tweet.

That new pair – widely assumed to be Super Heavy B7 and Starship S24 – feature a wide range of design changes, including substantially modified header tanks, an entirely new nosecone design, new layouts for secondary systems (pressurization, avionics, heat exchangers, etc.), and more. Most importantly, their thrust structures – giant ‘pucks’ machined out of steel – have been tweaked to support new Raptor V2 engines instead of the Raptor V1 and V1.5 engines that have been installed and tested on all Starship and Super Heavy prototypes to date.