A large number of Raptor rocket engines installed on a Super Heavy booster.
Elon Musk/Twitter
A senior NASA official this week said SpaceX has done “very well” developing a vehicle to land humans on the moon’s surface, taking steps to address two of the space agency’s biggest concerns. .
NASA selected SpaceX and Starship for its Human Landing System in April 2021. In some ways, this was the riskiest choice of NASA’s options, as Starship is a very large and technically advanced vehicle. However, due to the company’s multibillion-dollar self-investment in the project, SpaceX submitted the lowest bid, and from its previous work with SpaceX, NASA was confident that the company would eventually deliver.
Two of NASA’s biggest technological development concerns have been the new Raptor rocket engine and the transfer and storage of liquid oxygen and methane in orbit, said Mark Kirasich, NASA’s deputy associate administrator overseeing development. of Artemis missions to the moon. However, at a subcommittee meeting of NASA’s advisory board on Monday, Kirasich said SpaceX has made significant progress in both areas.
on Raptor
The Raptor rocket engine is critical to Starship’s success. Thirty-three of these Raptor 2 engines power the Super Heavy booster that serves as the vehicle’s first stage, and six others are used by the Starship’s top stage. For a successful lunar mission, these engines must be successfully re-ignited on the surface of the moon to return astronauts to orbit in Starship. If the engines fail, the astronauts will likely die.
“SpaceX has been developing very quickly,” Kirasich said of Raptor. “We’ve seen them make Raptor 1.0. They’ve since upgraded to Raptor 2.0, which firstly increases performance and thrust and secondly reduces the number of parts, reducing the time it takes to manufacture and test. build these things really fast. Their goal was seven bikes a week, and they reached that about a quarter ago. So now they’re building seven bikes a week.”
To put this into perspective, the Raptor 2 rocket engine produces about 510,000 pounds of thrust. This is nearly identical to the amount of thrust produced by the RS-25 engine that will be used to power NASA’s Space Launch System rocket. This engine was designed and developed by Rocketdyne for the space shuttle program in the 1970s, and the company has decades of experience manufacturing it.
In 2015, NASA Aerojet awarded Rocketdyne a $1.16 billion contract to “reboot the production line” for the RS-25 engine. Again, that was money to restore the production facilities, not to actually build the engines. NASA pays more than $100 million for each of these. With this seed funding, the goal for Aerojet Rocketdyne was to produce four of these engines per year.
Kirasich said that as it builds and tests Raptors, SpaceX quickly repeats these processes and produces higher-quality engines.
