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SpaceX Building Two Starship Designs and is Ramping Up Raptor Engine Production

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SpaceX is building two competing versions of the new Starship rocket in Texas and Florida. The two SpaceX construction teams will cooperate but also compete on the construction of reusable Starships.

Elon Musk indicated that one focus is ramping the build rate of the new Raptor rocket engines as they build the 6th through the tenth engines.

Elon plans to complete the first 100 Raptor engines early in 2020.

The SpaceX Falcon 9 with 60 Starlink satellites has an 80% chance of launching late today.

SOURCES- Twitter Elon Musk, SpaceX
Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com

15 thoughts on “SpaceX Building Two Starship Designs and is Ramping Up Raptor Engine Production”

  1. Especially considering that the prototype SLS hasn’t even made it to the launch pad yet…

  2. Yes, and he did make a point of saying “could be both” – so it’s not automatically a hacksawing contest – it’s just about not letting anybody get too cocksure and complacent.

  4. Well they sure crank out the Merlins so i’m sure they will master making the Raptors.

    28 Merlins per F9H!

  5. Don’t forget reusability, that’s another factor they would need to add to beat SpaceX and Blue Origin (when they get their act together).

  6. And it’s also a mind game for the competing managers and teams he surely put in place at both sites.

    Cutting edge companies tend to do that, to prevent anyone to feel too secure of their role and importance.

  7. The competing builds bit is very cool. Sounds like Musk is willing to burn major money to speed things along.

  8. Well. The good news is if Bezos and SpaceX pull it off, and it seems more likely by the day, the next generation of competitors will have to build even more impressive kit. We have seen 100 mton payload rockets before, internationally, but with this commercial generation we can actually afford to use the rockets AND afford to build their payloads. What will the next gen look like?

  10. SpaceX is seriously betting on production in series of everything, rocket engines, Hall thrusters, satellites, etc.

    And they need to, given they want to replace everything they have with SH/SS, going beyond with the Starlink idea.

    For me it looks they want to have Superheavy and Starship tested ASAP and use them for putting parts of Starlink faster than the FCC and most expect, probably as early as 2021.

    It’s nowadays the most feverishly active factory of space technologies in the World.

  11. Yep. If they want to have a fleet of these, they will need proportionally more Raptors.

    So making Raptors quickly in series really is a skill they want to use and develop.

  12. Remember that they want to replace everything they have with BFR, and launch
    thousands of Starlink satellites.

  13. Isn’t it the movie “Contact”?

    Why build one, when you can build two, twice the cost.

  14. The math works out to two superheavy boosters (31 x 2) and three Starships (7 x 3) with three engines left over, so not excessive

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