Elon Musk Announces That Raptor Engine Test Has Set New World Record (space.com)

Iwastheone shares a report from Space.com: A test fire of SpaceX's newest engine reached the power level necessary for the company's next round of rocket designs, CEO Elon Musk said on Twitter. "Raptor just achieved power level needed for Starship & Super Heavy," he tweeted on Feb. 7, four days after he shared a photograph of the first test of a flight-ready engine. [Musk added: "Raptor reached 268.9 bar today, exceeding prior record by the awesome Russian RD-180. Great work by @SpaceX engine/test team!"

The Raptor engine is designed to power the spaceship currently known as Starship as part of the rocket assembly currently known as Super Heavy (previously dubbed the BFR). The first Raptor test fire took place in September 2016, when the company was targeting an uncrewed Mars launch in 2018. Three Raptor engines like this one are built in to the Starship Hopper, which has been under construction in Texas and which SpaceX will use to begin testing the rocket technology in real life. Eventually, SpaceX plans to assemble 31 Raptor engines into the Super Heavy rockets, with another seven Raptors on the Starship itself.

Comments

Re:Signed up to go to Mars ?

[Sique]

There will never be much space mining in the Asteroid Belt.

• The whole mass of the asteroid belt is rather small, smaller than that of the Earth Moon.
• The asteroid belt consists mainly of the same stuff than the Earth Moon and the Earth's crust anyway, and the later have more of it.
• The energy required to move something from the Asteroid Belt to the Earth is so high that the cost will by far outnumber the possible revenue for selling the stuff. Even if you mine an asteroid consisting of pure gold or platinum, you will pay more for the fuel to get there and back than you can possible sell the gold and platinum for on Earth.