The SpaceX Starhopper seems like the fastest development of a prototype rocket outside of a wartime rocket program. The purpose of the inexpensive testing is to have the first flight tests of the new Raptor engine. Three of the engines have been placed in a row and the tests will allow control software to be tested and the throttling of the engines to be tested.

The Starhopper rocket should be stacked and welded into one piece within a few days or weeks. The Texas launch pad is still being built and is still piled dirt.

The work on the rocket and the launch pad will come together over the next 60 days and then the rocket will be moved to the launch pad for a first flight in March or April 2019.

It is a pristine specimen, preserved as it was formed. Other similarly shaped objects have been modified over time due to their closer proximity to the Sun. Learn more about this distant object explored by our New Horizons spacecraft: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-Article.php?page=20190102

NASA’s DART mission is on track to launch in June 2021 and collide with an asteroid called Didymos in 2022.

The Latest on NASA’s New Horizons’ New Year rendezvous (all times local):

12:33 a.m.

A NASA spacecraft opens the new year at the most distant world ever explored, a billion miles beyond Pluto.