Four SpaceX Starship are Ready and Next Generation Raptor Engines Soon

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Elon Musk says the next-generation Raptor engine that is robust enough not to require a heat shield. It will also have more thrust, higher Isp and many other improvements.

The SpaceX Starships have been upgraded. There are three completed version 2 Starships.

Here is a summary of the known information about the current and planned SpaceX Raptor engines.

The SpaceX Raptor engine already enables the SpaceX Super Heavy Starship to have more than double the thrust of the Saturn V. Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk biography talked about the SpaceX 1337 having critical breakthoughs beyond the SpaceX Raptor.

Elon Musk and SpaceX are looking at extreme ideas like deleting the whole hot fuel gas manifold and merging the fuel pump with the main chamber injector. Elon Musk told his team that We are on a deletion rampage”. All questionable tubes, sensors and manifolds were deleted.

Elon also has looked at removing the entire skirt of the booster.

The performance of the SpaceX Raptor engines is already very good but LEET 1337 will have even higher chamber pressure which will enable more thrust. The SpaceX LEET 1337 engines will be simpler, lighter and cheaper. SpaceX will likely be able to build them at ten times the production volume from the same sized factory that will now make 4000 Raptor engines each year.

Starship has 6 engines now but Elon has said they will add 3 engines to get to 9 engines for the Starship upper stage. Future SpaceX Starship may have an additional 3 Raptor Vacuum engines for increased payload capacity.

If SpaceX Raptor engines currently cost $1 million each. There are nine engines for a Starship and having Starship at double the cost of the engines means a complete Starship costs $18 million.
If future SpaceX Raptor engines cost $500k each. Nine engines for a Starship. Starship at double the cost of the engines means a complete Starship costs $9 million.
If the SpaceX 1337 engine costs $200,000 each then nine engines on a Starship could reduce the price of a complete Starship to $3.6 million.
If the SpaceX 1337 engine costs $100,000 each then nine engines on a Starship could reduce the price of a complete Starship to $1.8 million.

8 thoughts on “Four SpaceX Starship are Ready and Next Generation Raptor Engines Soon”

  1. Last launch was spectacular, all engineers firing, hot staging. We want another one soon. SpaceX is now the hold up for Moon missions, they need 100 safe launches,make it so!

    • That is going to set things back. It will take time for SX to hire all new engineers and bring them up to speed.
      Hopefully, this is the last time SX fires all engineers.

  3. What makes you think the the cost of the body is always proportional to the cost of the engine or that the cost of the engine is going to go down by that much?

    • To a first approximation, it’s a reasonable guess; but you’re right in that Brian should have kept the rest of the Starship cost constant in order to compare apples to apples, which would yield 13.5 MUSD.

  4. Focus on fixing the problems that kept you from reaching your goals. More sensors to capture what is going on inside the rocket and better radio to make that information available. Once you have reached your goal you can start using the new raptors.

    • Not entirely. Starship costs should go down as they build more and automate that as well.
      OTOH, there is no reason to believe it will go down by same %. In fact, it is near certain that it can not.

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