SpaceX CEO celebrated the first test firing of a full-scale, built-for-flight Raptor engine for his Starship super-rocket in the usual way tonight: by tweeting about it.
“So proud of great work by @SpaceX team,” Musk wrote in a series of tweets from SpaceX’s test facility near McGregor, Texas.
Scaled-down versions of the methane-fueled Raptor rocket engine went through testing as far back as two and a half years ago, but Musk said this weekend’s test marked the “first firing of Starship Raptor flight engine.”
Tonight’s tweets fired up SpaceX enthusiasts on Reddit, who went so far as to debate the source of the colors seen in imagery from the test. Here are highlights from the tweetstream::
Preparing to fire the Starship Raptor engine at @SpaceX Texas pic.twitter.com/8JCOi1BG6z
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 1, 2019
First firing of Starship Raptor flight engine! So proud of great work by @SpaceX team!! pic.twitter.com/S6aT7Jih4S
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 4, 2019
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 4, 2019
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 4, 2019
Exciting!
Can you explain why we are seeing so many different colors and what each means?— Daniel Davis (@DanielDavisA) February 4, 2019
Engine use methox torch igniters. Green tinge is either camera saturation or a tiny bit of copper from the chamber.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 4, 2019
Methalox torch igniters… So what starts those? Is there like a spark plug or something?! OR LASERS?
— Everyday Astronaut (@Erdayastronaut) February 4, 2019
Gaseous CH4/O2 & heavy duty spark plugs. Basically, a ? of insane power ?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 4, 2019
Will you do an AMA on r/SpaceX so that we can get more of this awesome information? Pretty please?
— Jack Lishman (@jclishman) February 4, 2019
Will do, although SpaceX reddit is very well-informed. Really impressive analysis by some commenters.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 4, 2019
In an earlier tweet, Musk said SpaceX would start out making a 440,000-pound-thrust version of the Raptor, to be used on the Starship interplanetary spaceship as well as its Super Heavy first-stage booster. There’d eventually be 31 Raptors powering the reusable Super Heavy, and seven Raptors on the Starship.
The initial version would make it possible “to reach the moon as fast as possible,” Musk wrote. That should come as welcome news to Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, who’s paying to ride a Starship around the moon by the mid-2020s.
Separate follow-on versions would be customized for use on the Starship or on the Super Heavy, packing a punch of as much as 550,000 pounds each at liftoff. That’s equivalent to the power of the BE-4 rocket engines that Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture is developing for its New Glenn rocket.
Musk’s ultimate goal is to use the Starship / Super Heavy system — previously known as the Mars Colonial Transporter, the Interplanetary Transport System, the Big “Falcon” Rocket or the BFR — to send settlers to Mars.
A prototype version of the Starship, dubbed the Starship Hopper, is under construction at another SpaceX facility on South Texas’ Gulf Coast. Musk has said the prototype could start doing short-hop tests within the next month or two; although that schedule may have been set back by a storm that damaged the Hopper last month during construction.
