SpaceX Raptor Rocket Engine by chuckmiester9

Last crawled date: 3 years, 3 months ago

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.