Future Unity
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With the Starship, SpaceX is building the biggest and most powerful spacecraft. It will
open up new frontiers in space for humankind by helping Musk fulfill his burning desire
to put permanent residents on Mars. However, the Starship depends on the Raptor
rocket engine that SpaceX is building in-house to lift off and travel through space!
In this video, we dive into SpaceX’s newly revealed Raptor engine!
A spacecraft is not flightworthy without the rocket engines that will provide the thrust
needed to lift off and escape the earth’s gravitational pull. There, when SpaceX
conceptualized the Starship as a spacecraft that could lift more than 100 tonnes of
payload to low earth orbit, it knew it needed powerful rocket engines.
The Starship’s booster was initially purposed to offer 16 million pounds of thrust, but
Musk’s subsequent comments suggest it could reach 17 million pounds. Whichever the
case, the Starship would generate more than double the thrust produced by the most
powerful rocket ever to fly, the Saturn V, which flew for the last time in 1973 and
generated 7.6 million pounds of thrust.
Unlike an aircraft that speeds horizontally before taking off, the Starship, like most other
rockets destined for space, takes off vertically, meaning its thrust must be higher than
its weight.
This immense power is needed for the Starship to play its role of moving lots of cargo
around. Its topmost mission is to Mars, which will see it transport tonnes of cargo
between the earth and the Red Planet. It will also be configured to move people.
SpaceX was not in short supply of rocket engines. For example, SpaceX’s Falcon
Heavy powerhouse uses a collection of Merlin engines made by SpaceX itself. SpaceX
made two types of the rocket engine. The sea level Merlin engine produces 845 kN of
thrust by burning propellant made from RP-1 and liquid oxygen and is recoverable and
reusable.
The vacuum variant uses the same fuel but has a significantly larger expansion nozzle
to maximize the engine’s efficiency when the spacecraft is in vacuum condition in
space. It produces 981 kN of thrust, and SpaceX claims it has the greatest efficiency
ever for an American-made hydrocarbon rocket engine.
However, this Merlin engine was not good enough for the Starship, and SpaceX
decided to build a whole new rocket engine. It developed and refined the Raptor engine
while working on the Starship itself.
The Raptor engine began flight testing on the Starship prototype rockets in July 2019.
The Raptor engine is plenty powerful and can produce 2 MN of thrust. It stands 3.1
meters high and has a diameter of 1.3 meters.
To get the desired result, SpaceX used a combination of innovative design and unusual
propellant, which we will get into.
SpaceX used what is known as a full-flow staged combustion engine, quite unusual in
the rocket industry. In fact, the Raptor is only the third engine in history to use this
design. And the first two, the first in the old Soviet Union and the second in the US,
never made it past testing.
The Merlin uses the open cycle system.
What does full-flow staged combustion mean? It means the pump spins a turbine to
drive the engine using a preburner to initiate the process by injecting a small amount of
fuel. In a traditional open-cycle engine, some propellant is spent to begin this process,
but with the Raptor, every drop of fuel available is used, making it one of the most
efficient rocket engines ever made.
This makes the Raptor have about three times more pressure than the Merlin despite
being similar in size. In actual fact, the Raptor engine is the highest pressure rocket
engine ever built. However, there is another major for the better pressure to size ratio,
which we shall see later.
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