On the heels SpaceX’s initial brand new Falcon Heavy booster in just two years beginning its trip to Florida, yet another of the enemy ’s three primary stages was seen on its strategy from Hawthorne, California into McGregor, Texas.
Set to be the first Falcon Heavy launching since June 2019, SpaceX is working around the clock to prepare three fresh first-stage boosters – two side boosters plus a single ‘center core’ – along with also an expendable upper stage using a series of static fire acceptance tests at its McGregor, Texas growth centers. Like all the 60+ Falcon boosters and 110 Falcon upper stages SpaceX has built and launched in the last 11 years, that new Falcon Heavy hardware has to pass a gauntlet of tests ahead of the provider deems them fully complete and ready for flight.
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Ahead of – or during – the process of actually fabricating and constructing the airframe of Falcon boosters and upper stages, SpaceX first manufactures their respective Merlin 1D (M1D) along with Merlin Vacuum (MVac) engines and ships those individual engines to McGregor, Texas for acceptance testing. The McGregor team frequently conducts multiple Merlin along with Raptor static fire tests daily, nominally shooting each engine to get anywhere from a few seconds to six or even more minutes to ensure optimum performance and verify their wellbeing.
If problems arise during testing, then those engines can frequently be scrutinized and repaired by onsite engineers in Texas, but in addition, there are instances where misbehaving hardware is going to probably be sent back to Hawthorne to get broader rework before beginning the inactive fire process again. Finally, once engines have passed static fire testing, they’re shipped back to Hawthorne and set up on their various boosters or upper stages.