SpaceX celebrates the build of its 100th Starship Raptor engine

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Rocket engineers and employees of the Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) celebrated the build of the 100th Raptor engine on Monday.

CEO Elon Musk had revealed in May that the production of the Raptor engines has ramped up and SpaceX is producing one every 48 hours now. This is a super-big and super-powerful rocket engine that takes an immense amount of engineering effort to produce. So, 1 every 48 hours is a big achievement on the SpaceX part.

SpaceX constantly needs this new breed of rocket engines for Starship high-altitude flight tests and now even more since the static fire tests for the Super Heavy rocket booster prototypes have begun.

SpaceX rocket engineers celebrating the 100th build of the Raptor engine.
SpaceX rocket engineers celebrating the 100th build of the Raptor engine. SpaceX team in a group photo from the company’s HQ in Hawthorne, California.

This 100th Raptor engine for Starship and Super Heavy rocket booster was completed at the SpaceX rocket factory and headquarters in Hawthorne, California.

To further boost the production of the Raptor engines, SpaceX is starting to build another Raptor production factory at its rocket development facility in McGregor, Texas.

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Distance between SpaceX Rocket Development Facility in McGregor, Texas to Starbase launch facility in Boca Chica, Texas.
7 hr / 444 miles distance between SpaceX Rocket Development Facility in McGregor, Texas to Starbase launch facility in Boca Chica, Texas. Credits: Google Maps.

“We are breaking ground soon on a second Raptor factory at SpaceX Texas test site. This will focus on volume production of Raptor 2, while California factory will make Raptor Vacuum & new, experimental designs,” Elon Musk tweeted earlier this month.

8 Raptor engines in a single picture at SpaceX Rocket Development Facility at McGregor, TX.
8 Raptor engines in a single picture at SpaceX Rocket Development Facility at McGregor, TX. The photo is titled “Fellowship of the Raptors” by Elon Musk.

“By “volume production”, I mean 2 to 4 engines per day. That’s super high volume for big rocket engines, but low volume by automotive standards,” Elon Musk further explained in a follow-up tweet.

According to Elon Musk, the production of Starship, Super Heavy, and Raptor engines needs to constantly ramp up at SpaceX in order to transport a large number of humans to Mars and build a sustainable city on the red planet by 2050.

SpaceX performed the first Super Heavy rocket booster static fire test last week, in this preliminary test, the booster was equipped with only 3 engines. However, SpaceX aims to ramp up to 32 Raptors on the Super Heavy for full-scale testing later this year.

Even a 33 Raptor engine config on the Super Heavy booster is under consideration as Elon Musk endorsed a render of a 20-10-3 configuration on Twitter.

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“Very accurate. Some of these design trades are still open, but will be resolved soon,” Musk replied to the Raptor configuration design render above.

The 20-10-3 configuration = 20 fixed engines installed in the outer ring, 10 gimbal engines in the inner ring, and 3 gimbals in the center.

Congratulations to SpaceX on this big achievement and good luck for future ventures, still a lot of hard work remaining as the mission is so grand “making human life multi-planetary.”

SpaceX fired the first Raptor engine back in Feb 2019, Musk had proudly shared the following photo and video of this event at the time.

Video of the first Raptor engine firing, mach diamonds can be seen in the engine exhaust coming out at supersonic speeds.

Stay tuned for future updates on Starship and SpaceX, follow us on:
Google News | Flipboard | RSS (Feedly).

Video: Three new Raptor engines were delivered to the SpaceX Starbase Boca Chica launch facility yesterday (Tuesday, 27th July 2021).
Iqtidar Ali
Iqtidar Alihttp://www.teslaoracle.com
Iqtidar has been writing about Tesla, Elon Musk, and EVs for more than 3 years on XAutoWorld.com, many of his articles have been republished on CleanTechnica and InsideEVs, maintains a healthy relationship with the Tesla community across the Social Media sphere. You can reach him on Twitter @IqtidarAlii

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