Hot-stage

verb

verb ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Verb
  1. 1
    To light the engine(s) of a rocket stage while still attached to the stage beneath it. intransitive

    "The Proton's second stage avoids ullage issues by hot-staging, allowing the engines to ignite while still being pushed by the first stage, but this necessitates the use of a special open trusswork in the interstage area to prevent the superheated second-stage exhaust from blowing up the rocket."

Example

More examples

"The Proton's second stage avoids ullage issues by hot-staging, allowing the engines to ignite while still being pushed by the first stage, but this necessitates the use of a special open trusswork in the interstage area to prevent the superheated second-stage exhaust from blowing up the rocket."

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.