SpaceX CEO Elon Musk showcased the company’s revamped engines for its Starship launch vehicle late on Friday which needs no heat shields and provides more thrust than older versions.
What Happened: The new version of the engine, called Raptor 3, does not require any heat shield as everything is regeneratively cooled. It is lighter and has more thrust and higher efficiency than Raptor 2, Musk said.
“Truly, a work of art,” Musk wrote about the engine while adding that the team at SpaceX put a “staggering amount of work” into it. “Getting close to the limit of known physics,” Musk wrote about the engine in another post.
With the new version, SpaceX has got the fundamental architecture of the engine right but there will still be “thousands of improvements” going forward, Musk warned. He also noted that the induced mass of the new version of the engine, though better than the previous version, has a “lot of room for improvement.”
SpaceX subsequently shared pictures of the new version of the engine while noting the differences between the three different versions of the engine the company has made to date.
| Raptor 1 | Raptor 2 | Raptor 3 | |
| Thrust | 185tf | 230tf | 280tf |
| Specific impulse | 350s | 347s | 350s |
| Engine mass | 2080kg | 1630kg | 1525kg |
| Engine + vehicle-side commodities and hardware mass | 3630kg | 2875kg | 1720kg |
SpaceX Execs React: SpaceX’s senior director of satellite engineering Ben Longmier took to X on Sunday to applaud the raptor team for their work on the latest version.
“Raptor 3 is an engineering marvel,” Longmier wrote. “Might be some more juice to squeeze with a lot more difficulty. The heat fluxes involved exceed all other engineering devices outside of explosives, high-power lasers, and high-power proton/electron beams. There are entire multi-state regions in the US that don’t process as much thermal power as a single Starship booster taking off.”
SpaceX VP of Launch Kiko Dontchev also noted that the Raptor team “relentlessly ran the algorithm on the design-and-build process of the v3 engine.”
Why It Matters: The raptor engine is used exclusively for SpaceX’s ambitious Starship launch vehicle.
During the fourth test flight in early June, Starship sustained damage to its flap while also losing many heat-shield tiles designed to protect against the extreme heat of reentry to Earth’s atmosphere. The entire flight lasted one hour and six minutes from launch. The key object of the flight was to re-enter Earth and the mission achieved it while withstanding damage.
Last month, Musk pegged the fifth flight of Starship for around Aug. 2. However, the flight has seemingly been delayed.
For the upcoming flight, the goal is to catch the booster back at Starbase using the launch tower’s mechanical arms, marking a significant demonstration of Starship’s reusability.
SpaceX is expected to have at least six test flights of the Starship this year, as per CEO Elon Musk‘s latest estimate from March.
NASA is currently relying on the success of Starship to land humans back on the moon as part of its Artemis program. The last crewed lunar mission occurred in 1972 with Apollo 17. Since then, no crew has traveled beyond low-Earth orbit.
Musk, meanwhile, is hopeful that the Starship will enable the company to take humans to Earth’s neighboring planet Mars as well.
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Photo courtesy: SpaceX