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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.
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.
The RD-181 has the record for the highest chamber pressure for a flown engine. (And the RD-180 is only a few psi behind, so I'm not going to slam Elon for mixing them up.)
But the Raptor is currently a test-stand engine, and the record for tested engines is over 300 bar.
Testing an engine at a higher pressure than it flies in order to demonstrate a safety margin is of course completely normal. Aerospace uses a lot smaller margins than the factor of 2 used in a lot of civil engineering, but I expect a test at at least 110% of flight pressure.
So while this is an impressive demonstration worthy of praise, it is not any sort of record.