SpaceX has just posted a series of amazing photos showing the power of the Super Heavy rocket's 33 Raptor engines, as they simultaneously fired up and provided energy to lift the Starship rocket off the launch pad during a test flight on November 19.
SpaceX boss Elon Musk also shared the photos on his own X account and revealed that: "Each Raptor engine produces twice the thrust of all four engines on a Boeing 747, and there are up to 33 such engines that make up the Super Heavy rocket."
33 Raptor engines are attached to the Super Heavy booster that powers the initial liftoff stage of Starship, and generate a whopping 7.7 million kilograms of thrust at launch, making it the most powerful booster ever to successfully take off.
In fact, the thrust output generated by Super Heavy is nearly double the 3.9 million kg recorded by NASA's new Space Launch System (SLS) rocket on its first test flight in 2022.
Likewise, Super Heavy is also more than twice as powerful as the Saturn V rocket with 3.4 million kg of thrust generated during the launches that took Apollo astronauts to the moon more than 50 years ago.
But SpaceX's work doesn't stop there. Elon Musk's engineers are planning to increase the power of the Raptor engine to the point where the Super Heavy booster will be able to generate an incredible 10 million kilograms of thrust during liftoff.
Such additional power would significantly enhance Starship's ability to carry heavier payloads on future missions to the moon, and possibly even Mars. It would also result in a significant improvement in the rocket's overall launch performance, as the increased thrust would reduce gravity losses during ascent, as the rocket's energy would be used to accelerate rather than fight gravity.
The more powerful Super Heavy booster could also pave the way for even larger Starship variants than the current version being tested, which is already massive at up to 120m long.
In short, improvements to Starship's Raptor engine have the potential to help SpaceX achieve its goals of reducing launch costs, increasing payload capacity, and improving the overall performance of the launch system.
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