SpaceX Raptor Test Fired into a Water Cooled Steel Plate

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SpaceX Raptor is test fired into a water cooled steel plate.

51 thoughts on “SpaceX Raptor Test Fired into a Water Cooled Steel Plate”

  1. would like to see SpaceX’s engineers doing ir video of engine intake (RaptorNext) with www .pcigases.com/oxygen-solutions/technology/membrane-technology/ for global common wealth (?)
    (Thx)

  4. Mars has 1/3 the gravity Earth has and and the Starship has six engines. I’m sure they’ll figure something out including building raised launch mounts, flame trenches, etc.

  5. Chill, spacex has been doing things that others at the top of space industry said couldn’t be done. Don’t let them prove you wrong as well. Just enjoy what’s actually being accomplished and give credit where it’s so due. No one in the world has done what space x has done. Not even close. It’s far too easy to criticize online when it’s not you.

  6. Well I fail to see how space-x is going to take off from Mars to come home. Are they planning on hauling a steel plate to Mars to take off from?

    • less gravity there. less thrust for liftoff and it’d be with the starship which has far fewer engines.

    • Mars gravity is 1/5 of Earth. Don’t need the booster to launch there. Just the top (Starship). Much less thrust required to launch from Mars.

  7. Just one return launch like this from the moon or Mars will blackout the view from Earth for weeks as it heaps tons of dust material into orbit occluding the surface

  8. This project is a failure. It’ll never get off the moon or Mars without blowing gigantic craters. Combustion is not the way of the future. We need other forms of levitation. Must go forward not backward

    • I do agree that “levitation,” would be great. In regards to SH Booster and Starship, remember: Mars gravity is 1/5 of Earth. Don’t need the booster to launch there. Just the top (Starship). Much less thrust required to launch from Mars. The moon requires even less thrust than Mars. This is not the same thrust/cratering/etc problem we face on Earth. Not even close.

    • gravity is caused because of mass of space objects (interacting through force or bending of space&time ‘spacetime curvature’)
      What should counteract mass, besides an equivalent in energy (and density thereof) on a space craft propulsion system? (Anything else is unknown science and if possible at all (examples in universe?) far off modern theories in physics

      (, but yes it is imaginable in (our) minds with science fiction, and ‘Murphy’s Law’/’yhpruM’s Law’ would imply that this could happen on ‘a (relative) probability’ (or will happen if entropy/time allows for us) within our reach in time?))

      “Combustion is not the way of the future”
      What’s an example off fusion in universe for higher energy densities we could imagine and technologically manage? Timescale?

  9. I think a lot people need to go back in history we did not get to the moon in the 60’s overnight it took 10 Apollo missions before the 11th finally made it and it cost lives to get there so testing is good.

  10. They had been developing raptor for about 10 years. They must make them way more reliable. Multiple engines didn’ work as intended the last time it blew.

    • That was due to damage from debris from the pad getting obliterated, not because of reliability problems

          • No, this is before the debris; They didn’t light because an automated system didn’t like their state.

            That booster had the previous generation Raptor engines, the ones on the next booster are improved.

  11. Spacex was forced to wait so long for permissions from anyone who had an opinion that the equipment was beginning to be outdated. The continuation of such long processes to build anything in this country gives China a nearly insurmountable ability to build and go. They decide to do something and it gets done. No arguing along with stopping the never ending lines of people questioning everything is the only way to fairly compete with China. In this country we nitpick every move. How can we be competitive with anyone doing so.
    Mistakes were made with structure of Spacex pad for sure but it shouldn’t cause dramatic delays with building and testing. More soap box texting to follow. Get it together US and Texas governments and within reason, allow the work to go on otherwise, when everyone is shocked and appalled by China having their choice of spots on the moon, this will be the reason.

    • You are correct sir. The US Congress allows this beauricratic nonsense to continue. It keep all their friends employed with useless paperwork and emails going back and forth. The Congress is full of weak beta males and feminists.

    • The problem is that SpaceX, specifically Musk, is seen as a domestic political enemy of the current administration. The moment the Biden administration took control, every regulatory agency started throwing obstacles in the way of everything Musk was doing.

      The only thing actually limiting this political storm headed Musk’s way is that both Nasa and the Defense department NEED Starship to be successful.

  12. Why not just make an artificial lake some tens of meters deep, and put the launch tower on pilons that extend down into the lakebed. How deep would that bed to be to be effective

    • Way below the existing water table. The exhaust has to support a rocket weighing thousands of tons, remember; The pressure is unavoidably very high.

      Rough approximation: Starship, full stack, weighs about 5,000 tons. Sitting on about a 9m diameter exhaust plume. Say, 80 tons per square meter. A cubic meter is, conveniently, 1 metric ton.

      So the exhaust could, at first approximation, penetrate about 80 meters deep, or 263 feet.

      Not really going to go that deep, but 100 feet wouldn’t be surprising.

  13. this thing is supposed to take off fron lunar and martian surface from unprepaired sites. first launch was a real test of that concept. very cool to watch tests.

    • It will be Starship taking off from Mars and the Moon, not the main booster, so no problem.

    • The moon is 1/7th the gravity. Easier to land and take off. About 20% of the power needed on earth.

      • When they take off from the moon it will only be starship (not super heavy) and due to the low gravity will likely not even light all its engines.

      • Super heavy isn’t going to the moon, and moon variant starship will have super Draco like engines further up the body for take off. So this test is not at all representing a moon takeoff.

      • Nah. The damage here was done by the 33 engine booster lifting 5,000T at 1.3 g’s acceleration.

        Landing on the Moon and taking off again will just be the much lighter Starship upper stage, and only 1/6th g needed. The thrust level is enormously lower.

        An even so, the lunar lander version is going to do the final approach and initial liftoff using a ring of small engines around the top of the rocket, as far from the ground as possible.

      • Very little gravity/atmosphere on the moon, so -50% on the thrust which was tested and very little damage occurred, so it would be fine for takeoff on the moon…

    • The difference is on the moon they need WAY less energy to take off minimising the damage as it is on earth

  14. The problem with rockets this size is that the engines have to start their launch sequence inside T-10 and build up enormous thrust (compared to Falco)just to break free of the gravity holding them down. The 16 million pounds of thrust is basically focused into a confined space which is why NASA uses a flame trench or “bucket “ along with a water suppression system. I think it was folly on SpaceXs’ part to launch with just a water system. Also recovering the booster won’t have the same thrust when returning but the suppression system will require a rapid turnaround to prevent damage to the launch complex.

    • I believe SX wanted to test new ways of doing things. Current water deluge system are pretty large in foot print.
      Looks like SX is trying to find ways to make a more compact system.

  15. This is going to work. It takes so much energy to turn water into steam, it is so cheap, and it absorbs acoustic energy. The key development is the sinking of reinforced piles beneath the pad.
    I’d bet the next launch will orbit .

    • I’m skeptical. One engine firing at a plate sure but 30+ firing all at once. That steel is going to get red hot and if water is circulating in tubes it could get interesting as to how it reacts since water likes to expand by a factor of like a 1000 to 1 or so. I hope I’m wrong but we’ll have to see.

      • I hope Im wrong, but I agree with you. The amount of pressure the steam will create is going to be explosive, sandwiched between two plates of red hot steel and relatively close to its source?
        They definitely need a flame diverter.
        It’s going to be interesting!

      • They’re pumping water through holes in the plate at a higher pressure than the engine exhaust is supposed to reach. Taking that water from room temperature to high enough to burn through steel is going to absorb a huge amount of energy, and in the mean time there’s more water coming up behind it, pushing that superheated steam away.

        Keeping in mind that they manage to keep the combustion chamber in their engines, exposed to much higher temperatures at about 300 atmospheres, from melting, I kind of think that calculating heat transfer rates is something SpaceX is actually good at. So I’m not concerned for the plate.

        My actual concern is that the engine exhaust impinging normal to the plate, and only 2-3 booster diameters below the rocket, might set up some kind of destructive (to the rocket!) turbulence or resonance.

        You can see in the video that the exhaust plume doesn’t settle down into any consistent and symmetric flow pattern. It shoots off this way, then that way, pushes back then retreats. It’s chaotic.

        That much energy right below the rocket behaving chaotically is not good. A diverter in the center would organize the flow and make it steady and predictable.

        • I have always thought that the steel plate idea should have a crown in the middle of it that tapers down as you work towards the edges. I don’t know the math for something like that. It seems plausible that would act as a diverter also for the pressures created by all of the engines firing at once. As well as a larger Gap from the top of the launch pad where the rocket would be positioned in the launch phase I think that could easily be accomplished not by raising the pad but lowering the plate and the ground outside of the plate creating a larger Gap that could possibly offset the pressures and the acoustics.

          • Instead of a crown, make a virtual aerospike water flow. Make the holes in the plate larger in the middle and smaller as it goes to the circumference. More water in the middle and less in the outer.

            Fake ramp, based on water flow creating more pressure in the middle of the rocket.

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