Elon Musk says that Raptor engine production has reached one every two days. This is a runrate of 180 per year. The previous Merlin engines had reached a production rate of 400 engines per year. SpaceX will likely at least double Raptor engine production to the old Merlin engine level in 2022.
SpaceX needs 29 Raptor engines for a full Super Heavy Booster and seven engines for a fully loaded Starship. SpaceX current Raptor engine production levels are enough for five fully populated Super Heavy Boosters and five fully loaded Starships.
SpaceX likely needs about 100 Raptor engines to complete the testing phase for Super Heavy and Starship. SpaceX should have two Super Heavy Starships ready for long term usage at the end of this year. Two Super Heavy Starships flying once every two weeks would be able to match the launch rate of the Falcon 9 fleet but with four times the payload.
SpaceX is performing orbital duration engine testing.
Raptor production is approaching one every 48 hours
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 30, 2021
SOURCES- Engineering Today, SpaceX, Elon Musk
Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com
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Because you don't want peak capacity to approach needed capacity.
Something happens (like a shut down for a pandemic) and everything start crumbling down.
They don't do it now, that was just a peak rate.
Seems like a "we have the capacity to" type of thing.
Why do they produce 400 Merlin engines per year when they have never used more than 200?
The difficulty is ramping up production and maintaining quality control. QC is absolutely critical for items like rocket engines, that have to operate reliably with very small margins.
Ramping up QC will likely prove more difficult than ramping up production.
I've talked to somebody who worked in a Tesla Gigafactory. Some of the stories I heard do not fill me with confidence in their capacity to ramp up production while maintaining statistical capability.
Should be easy to ramp up production by just increasing the production lines.