if there's one thing that sets SpaceX apart from their competition in the Aerospace industry it's the courage to dream up crazy ideas that no one else would even consider to be possible if there's a second thing that makes SpaceX a very special company it's their ability to take those crazy ideas and actually make them into a reality and the starship's Raptor engine is a perfect example of this innovation in action the Raptor is more than just another rocket engine it is the rocket engine reinvented let's start at the beginning with the first production rocket engine
from SpaceX the Merlin we saw a few different iterations of the Merlin design as SpaceX progressed with their initial Falcon 1 rocket testing the Merlin 1C was the engine that powered the first successful Falcon 1 launch and went on to be used in the first five flights of the Falcon 9 SpaceX is currently using the Merlin 1D engine across their full line of Falcon 9 and Falcon heavy boosters the design of the Merlin engine was a product of the chaotic early days in the life of SpaceX to have a private Tech startup company from California
enter into the field of orbital rocket launches was outrageous back in the early 2000s unprecedented no one thought they would succeed and therefore no one was investing any money in the project Elon Musk was self- financing the whole thing with his Paypal Fortune which was a lot of money but SpaceX was burning through cash as fast as they were burning Rocket Fuel so elon's mission statement for the Merlin was to build a rocket engine as simple and cheap as possible so what does that look like let's talk briefly about how rocket engine works just so
we're all on the same page the basic concept here is actually not that hard to grasp inside the main body of a rocket there are two propellant tanks one is for oxygen the other is for fuel the oxygen side is the same for every kind of Rocket because fire needs oxygen to burn this is like blowing air into your campfire to intensify the Flames to make oxygen into rocket propellant you first have to liquefy it you convert oxygen from a gas to a liquid state by super cooling it to a cryogenic temperature the boiling point
of oxygen is 83° C or - 297 F so at any temperature below that it will stabilize as a liquid it's pretty cool then on the fuel side the Merlin uses a chemical called rp1 which is basically just purified kerosene it's cheap and accessible and is liquid at ambient temperature when the rocket engine starts two pumps will move both the oxygen and fuel at very high pressure into the combustion chamber where the two liquids are combined and ignited and that combustion is going to release a massive amount of energy as the propellants burn and expand
to create pressure all of this energy will exit the combustion chamber through the throat this is like blowing out a candle by pushing the air in your lungs out through a small opening in your lips you create a high pressure inside your mouth and force the gas to exit through a small opening then all of that high pressure high temperature combustion exhaust exits through the nozzle where it expands from the size of the throat to the size of the nozzle opening this expansion actually accelerates the exhaust to an even faster speed than when it left
the throat the greater the expansion ratio from the throat to the end of the nozzle the greater the acceleration of the exhaust this process converts pressure into thrust the faster we can throw that exhaust gas out of the back of the nozzle the faster the rocket will move forward every action has an equal and opposite reaction in the Merlin engine design those twin pumps for the fuel and oxygen are powered by something called a gas generator this is like a miniature rocket engine with its own combustion chamber and nozzle except instead of pointing straight out
the bottom this mini engine fires directly into a turbine now the pressure from the combustion reaction is spinning a turbine which is connected to a main shaft that power ERS both of the main fuel and oxygen pumps after the gas has done its work of spitting up the turbine the excess is vented out the side of the engine through an exhaust pipe this is what we call an open cycle gas generator and this design goes all the way back to 1944 and the first longrange ballistic missile ever created the German V2 rocket so when Elon
asked for the easiest and cheapest rocket engine possible this is exactly what he got now imagine being able to see this incredible view of outer space through your window every day I can't offer you a spaceship but I do have the next best thing display while we continue to explore the wonders of the universe I'm going to tell you how to bring them into your own home with display's massive collection of stunning images from outer space displate is a unique metal poster designed to capture all your passions we just picked up a collection for the
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now you can swap your displates anytime you want simply take off your metal poster and slap another one on go to www.d display.com sspace or use my code Space Race to access my discount this is available for one week only so do it today the Merlin engine continues to be a fantastic product for SpaceX right up until this day and it will probably continue on like that for several years but when it came time to begin development on the next generation of SpaceX vehicle it was going to require the next generation of SpaceX Engine with
the Starship Elon Musk had a new mission statement for his engineers build the most complex rocket engine ever made give it the highest thrust to weight ratio of any engine in existence and power it with a new rocket fuel that no one has ever used before so the time to just fall back on classic designs from the 20th century was now long gone this was time to reinvent the rocket engine so let's start with the new fuel source instead of kerosene the Raptor is now burning methane Just Like Oxygen methane needs to be liquefied at
a cryogenic temperature to make it into a suitable Rocket Fuel so that adds an extra layer of complexity to the system but it's worth the trouble let me explain kerosene is a longchain hydrocarb carbon which means that it is very difficult to fully combust and convert into gas you're going to end up with a lot of solid matter Left Behind as a byproduct of the combustion even inside an environment like the combustion chamber of a rocket that leftover carbon solid is what we would typically refer to as soot just black dust and the same as
the inside of a chimney that soot has a tendency to cling onto the inside of a rocket engine and cause a buildup known as cing now since a typical rocket engine goes straight to the bottom of the ocean after being used once that typically doesn't matter but in a reusable engine like the Merlin that cing all needs to be scrubbed out in between launches and that's just not going to cut it with the Rapid reusability schedule that Elon has in mind for Starship he wants these things launching multiple times per day methane is mostly hydrogen
with one single atom of carbon for every four atoms of hydrogen so it's pretty easy to fully combust that carbon and leave nothing behind as a byproduct for example if you have natural gas in your home that's almost entirely methane and you can burn it all day in your furnace or stove without having to worry about carbon residue so that's fuel now how does the internal system of a Raptor engine compare to the old Merlin the design of the Raptor is called a full flow staged combustion cycle and it's an exceptionally complex layout of pumps
turbines and plumbing let's go back to our engine diagram in the Raptor cycle the liquids move from the tanks to the main pumps and then directly into a pair of gas generators both the fuel and oxygen hit their own individual turbines so unlike every previous engine which has used a single turbine either on the oxygen side or in rare cases the fuel side the Raptor is the only Engine with dual gas turbines now instead of everything rotating on one main shaft we have independent turbines and pumps for each tank when the cryogenic liquid reaches these
turbines the first thing it will encounter is a pre- burner that's a miniature rocket engine and the pre- burner combusts the liquid just enough to transform it into a gas but since neither the oxygen or the methane can combust on their own there needs to be a cross connection between the two pre-burners that allows a little bit of oxygen to join the methane flow and a little bit of methane to join the oxygen flow once combustion is achieved the exhaust gas is blasted into the turbine housing where it spins the blade the turbine blade spins
the pump and that sends our now gaseous propellants into the combustion chamber at extreme pressure but wait a second if the turbine spins the pump and the pump sends the liquid into the turbine then how does the process get started in the first place well SpaceX uses equipment on the launch Mount to externally spin start the turbines this is why the Starship launch Mount is considered to be a stage zero for the main rocket it is integral to the successful ignition of the booster two things to note here number one this system has no exhaust
pipe for the gas to escape after the turbine that's why we call the Raptor a closed cycle as opposed to the Merlin's open cycle so in a raptor all of the pressure from both of the gas generators is held inside the system making this an extremely high pressure operation this is also another area where methane shines as a clean burning fuel source because we are not venting the exhaust from the pre-b burner if you tried this with kerosene fuel the soot would very quickly build up inside the system and ruin everything number two there is
no direct path from the fuel or oxygen pump to the combustion chamber that means all of the methane and all of the oxygen have to pass through a pre-b burner before they reach the chamber this is why we call the Raptor cycle full flow staged combustion so now we have both our oxygen and methane exiting their turbines as very hot and very high-press gases and that gas on gas reaction when they hit the combustion chamber is going to produce the most efficient combustion possible significantly more energy is going to be generated by gas on gas
than by liquid on liquid Elon Musk claims that this reaction is over 99% efficient the maximum that physics will allow Elon says that only God himself could possibly do a better job at combining molecules than the Raptor combustion chamber now if that all sounded very complicated that's because it is it's rocket science after all Elon has referred to igniting the Raptor engine as a delicate dance between the fuel system and the oxygen system everything is interconnected and everything affects everything else so if anything goes wrong or even if the methane and oxygen cycle gets even
slightly out of sync with each other then the whole engine will explode or at the very least parts will melt so we know how the Raptor does what it does let's talk about what all that means for the performance and power of this engine the Raptor is a relatively small engine that produces a relatively massive amount of thrust the current Raptor version 2 is creating 230 metric tons of thrust at sea level this is not the most powerful rocket engine that title goes to the F1 engine that lifted the Saturn 5 rocket it had more
than twice the thrust of a Raptor but it was also an absolutely humongous engine that you could park a Jeep inside of by comparison the Raptor is super compact at 3 m tall and 1.5 M wide at the nozzle this allows SpaceX to pack 33 of them into the 9 M diameter booster raptor is much smaller than a close equivalent such as the rs25 engines that powered the space shuttle and have also been adapted to the SLS Moon rocket but the rs25 only produces about 1990 metric tons of thrust so Raptor has an unmatched power
to weight ratio the Raptor weighs in at just 1,600 kg while the rs25 is nearly 3200 kg and Raptor accomplishes this by running the combustion chamber at significantly higher pressure than any other rocket engine in the world the Raptor 2 chamber pressure is currently 300 bar which converts to about 4,351 lb per square in for comparison the old Merlin engine chamber pressure is down at around 100 bar remember that the rocket engine uses the throat and the nozzle to convert pressure into thrust so more pressure means more thrust Elon Musk says that the work going
forward on the Raptor design will be primarily to make the engine more simplified and therefore cheaper and faster to produce this comes back to one of elon's favorite sayings the best part is no part which is at the core of his first principles philosophy the steps that Elon follows when he's designing something are to first question the constraints and requirements and make them less dumb AKA don't follow any rule that doesn't make sense then second delete any part of the design process that isn't necessary if you aren't forced to put back at least 10% of
the things that that you deleted then you didn't delete enough step three optimize step four accelerate step five automate and we can already see that in action with the transition from raptor 1 to Raptor 2 there are significantly fewer Parts visible on the new engine Elon says that he wants to delete all of the fiddly bits from the engine that means integrating more of the small pipes and wiring into larger conduits and replacing bolted fanges and solid welds Elon says that by integrating more components of the engine they can actually remove the shrouds which are
essentially protective heat shields obviously removing anything from a rocket ship design is going to make it lighter and cheaper which is absolutely critical for sustainable space flight this process will also continue to make Raptor cheaper and more production friendly which is the ultimate main goal you may wonder why do they need so many engines if the rocket is going to be fully reusable well we've got to think longer term here that's where elon's head is at his end goal with Starship is to make these Rockets as common as jet airliners are today a fleet numbering
at least 1,000 ships or more these ships would be in constant operation for Transit between the Earth and Mars the Earth and the moon or even using the ship as a point-to-point transport on the Earth itself the endgame of the Starship is to become one of the most important vehicles ever created in human history this is right up there with the first sailing ships that crossed the ocean and connected the globe the Starship can connect the solar system
