Watch: Elon Musk Shares Amazing Footage of a SpaceX Plasma Beam

May 20, 2023
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This is quite the spectacle.

Need a light?

Elon Musk's got you covered.

The Tesla (TSLA) - Get Free Report CEO took to Twitter, the microblogging site that he owns, to show off some stunning video from SpaceX, the rocket company he founded.

"One hell of a plasma beam!" Musk wrote above footage of a Raptor rocket blasting the flaming bejesus out of a water-cooled steel plate.

As Jim Carrey's character in the 1994 flick "The Mask" would say: "S-S-S-S-S-Smokin!!!"

"I wouldn't want to be standing in front of that," one person tweeted.

"The upside is you wouldn't be standing there for long," said one response.

"Witnessing the raw power of a plasma beam test!" another tweet read. "With each successful firing, we're one step closer to the stars."

It was quite a day for SpaceX, which had another double-launch on the morning of May 19, one month after the company's Starship blew up when several engines failed during the test flight.

Starship is the reusable rocket with which Musk promised to conquer Mars and to revisit the Moon.

After successfully launching 22 Starlink satellites out of Florida at 2:00 a.m., SpaceX prepared a Falcon 9 rocket to launch another round of 16 OneWeb and 5 Iridium satellites from California.

However, the launch was scrubbed pending an investigation, though SpaceX said that it has a backup opportunity tomorrow at 6 a.m. EST.

On May 13, Musk tweeted that the Raptor engine achieved a chamber pressure of 350 bar, equivalent to 269 tons of thrust, noting that "Starship Super Heavy Booster has 33 Raptors, so total thrust of 8877 tons or 19.5 million pounds.”

"To be frank, we did not expect the engine to survive a full duration run at that pressure," he said. "It is uncharted territory."

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Source: TheStreet