SpaceX will attempt to conduct static tests of all 33 engines of the Starship rocket on February 9. This test could allow the company to launch into orbit within a month. Speaking at the Federal Aviation Administration’s Commercial Space Transport Conference on Feb. 8, SpaceX president and chief operating officer Gwynn Shotwell announced the upcoming test, the last major technical milestone before the spacecraft’s first orbital launch attempt.

“Tomorrow is a big day for SpaceX. We’re going to try out a 33-engine static fire amplifier for Starship,” he said. “This is really the last ground test we can do before we fire them and go.”

The company has been hinting that testing is coming for a while. Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX’s vice president of flight assembly and reliability, said at a conference on January 27 that testing could be done next week, but warned that “we still have a lot of work to do to get there, and we don’t.” light”. A successful test could prepare the company for an orbital launch attempt in the near future. “This first flight test is going to be really exciting. It will happen in the next month,” he said.

The static ignition test will mark the first time that all 33 Raptor engines in a superheavy launch vehicle have been fired. Most of the motors fired simultaneously in the booster are 14 which causes damage to the pads.

After the speech, Shotwell told reporters that he believes the changes the company has made will prevent damage to the pads in a stronger test in the future. “I don’t expect the site to experience the problems we had with a 14-engine static fire,” he said. “We did some work on the notebook.” He did not specify the changes.

Orbital flight testing will require a pending FAA launch license, which includes implementation of at least some of the measures outlined by the FAA in an environmental review published in June for Starship launches from SpaceX’s Boca Chica, Texas test site.

“We’ve been working on all mitigation measures since we got this,” he said of environmental review, including working with state and federal agencies. Regarding the license: “I think we’ll be ready to fly as soon as we get the license.”

Starship is crucial to SpaceX’s long-term plans, from deploying the second-generation Starlink constellation to landing NASA astronauts on the moon as part of the agency’s Artemis Lunar Exploration Campaign. It is also designed for very high performance and flight speed, which Shotwell emphasized in his presentation.

“As far as we can, Starship will be as similar to aircraft operations as possible,” he said. “We want to talk about dozens of launches a day, if not hundreds of launches a day.”

He said he expects Starship to make at least 100 flights before carrying people for the first time. That’s a challenge as the company prepares a version of Starship to land on the Moon for NASA’s Artemis 3 mission, currently scheduled for 2025. He told reporters later in the day that he called the 100 flight milestone “a great goal” but suggested it wasn’t a requirement. “I wish I had done hundreds of them sooner. “I think that would be a great goal, and it’s possible for us to achieve it.”

He noted that the company aims to launch 100 Falcons this year. “If we can do 100 Falcon flights this year, I would like to do 100 Starship flights next year. I don’t think we will do 100 Starship flights next year, but maybe 100 flights in 2025.”

First, he said SpaceX needed to get Starship into orbit as soon as possible. “We’re going to do a test flight, we’ll learn from this test flight, and we’ll do more test flights,” he said. “The goal isn’t to blow up the launch pad. That’s success.”