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

Signed up to go to Mars ?

[wolfheart111]

This Shits Looking all to real... :)

Re:Signed up to go to Mars ?

[ShanghaiBill]

I just wish they'd hurry up and start recruiting space miners to go to the asteroid belt.

You read too much sci-fi. IRL, when miners go to the asteroid belt, they will be robots, not humans.

There is no practical reason to send humans beyond earth orbit. Robots don't need life support, they don't need expensive ultra-reliable gear, and they don't need to come back home.

https://xkcd.com/695/

Re: Signed up to go to Mars ?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

More accurately, you have twenty times more widely dispersed low-grade oxides that would require fucking up the whole crust and atmosphere that we live on/in to get to than 16 Psyche has 90% pure metallic material. How much of your stuff is practically recoverable?

Re:Signed up to go to Mars ?

[jabuzz]

What physics reasons are these? I suspect you are getting confused with the fact that iron-56 is the most stable element going, However out the the ten most abundant elements in the Milky Way galaxy, carbon is number four and iron only number six. Even in the solar system carbon is significantly more abundant than iron.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Now when we have reached the heat death of the universe it will all be iron-56, but that is many trillions of years away.

Re:Comparison to Saturn V rockets

[Rei]

I love the various hacks that have been used in rocketry over the years to deal with "difficult problems", which throw away a bit of performance in order to not have to deal with them. One of the most recent ones that springs to mind is that North Korea "dealt with" the stability problems on their missiles by adding a ring of stationary (no axial rotation, aka non-maneuvering) grid fins around the base. They deliberately increase the drag of the first stage in order to keep it stable (like a shuttlecock).