SpaceX Raptor Rocket Engine

thingiverse

Its full name is Velociraptor, but all its friends simply call it Raptor. Somewhere between 25 and 40 Raptors will power the Super Heavy, the first stage of a Starship on its way off planet. The number of engines on the Super Heavy keeps changing as the design comes together. The Starship itself will have 3 more Raptors configured for sea level flight and 3 configured for vacuum. The first Raptor took flight in July 2019 powering the Starhopper in a proof of concept flight. A second flight followed a year later and was of a full scale Starship but without a nose cone. It looked like a flying grain silo, and it thrilled my heart. But none of that is the reason this engine will change rocket history. The Raptor is the first full-flow staged-combustion, methane-guzzling rocket engine. It’s fueled by cryogenic liquid methane (CH4) and liquid oxygen (LOX), rather than the RP-1 kerosene and LOX used in SpaceX’s prior Merlin and Kestrel rocket engines. The Raptor has about twice the thrust of the Merlin 1D engine that powers the Falcon 9 and like the Merlin, the Raptor is designed for reusability. It must endure thousands of on/off cycles and shrug off the hostility of the space environment. I expect to see a Starship land on the moon by the end of the decade. Maybe even Mars.