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SpaceX sends “radically redesigned” Starship engine to Texas for hot-fire tests

As of September 2017, subscale Raptor engines had been cumulatively fired for more than 1200 seconds in just 12 months of testing. (SpaceX)

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7 years ago

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SpaceX has shipped one of the first of a group of Starship engines known as Raptor, described last month by CEO Elon Musk as “radically redesigned”. A culmination of more than 24 months of prototype testing, the first flight-worthy Raptor could be ignited for the first time as early as February.

According to Musk, three of these redesigned Raptors will power the first full-scale BFR prototype, a Starship (upper stage) test article meant to conduct relatively low-altitude, low-velocity hop tests over the southern tip of Texas. Those tests could also begin next month, although a debut sometime in March or April is increasingly likely.

Effectively designed on a blank slate, Raptor began full-scale component-level tests in 2014 at NASA’s Mississippi-based Stennis Space Center, evolving from main injector development to oxygen preburner hot-fires in 2015. Soon after Raptor’s prototype preburner design was validated at Stennis, SpaceX moved testing to its privately-owned and operated facilities in McGregor, Texas, where Raptor static fire testing has remained since.

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Just days before CEO Elon Musk was scheduled to reveal SpaceX’s next-generation rocket (BFR, formerly known as the Interplanetary Transport System or ITS) in September 2016, he announced in a tweet that propulsion engineers and technicians had successful hot-fired an integrated Raptor prototype – albeit subscale – for the first time ever. Just 12 months later, Musk once again took to the stage to announce an update to BFR’s design, while also revealing that prototype Raptor engines had already completed more than 1200 seconds (20 minutes) of cumulative hot-fire tests, an extremely aggressive and encouraging rate of progress for such a new engine.

Although Raptor undoubtedly borrows heavily from much of the same expertise that designed Merlin 1 and operated and improved it for years, that is roughly where the similarities between Raptor and M1D end. M1D, powered by refined kerosene (RP-1) and liquid oxygen, uses a combustion cycle (gas-generator) that is relatively simple and reliable at the cost of engine efficiency, although SpaceX propulsion expertise still managed to give M1D the highest thrust-to-weight ratio of any liquid rocket engine ever flown. Still, measured by ISP (instantaneous specific impulse), M1D’s inefficient kerolox gas-generator cycle ultimately means that the engine simply can’t compete with the performance of engines with more efficient propellants and combustion cycles.

While SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Heavy rockets – powered by Merlin 1D and Merlin Vacuum – are more than adequate in and around Earth orbit, a far more efficient engine was needed for the company to enable the sort of interplanetary colonization Musk had in mind when he created SpaceX. Raptor was the answer. Ultimately settling on liquid methane and oxygen (methalox) as the propellant and a full-flow staged-combustion (FFSC) cycle, Raptor was designed to be extraordinarily reliable and efficient in order to safely power a spacecraft (BFS/Starship) meant to ferry dozens or hundreds of people to and from Mars.

An excellent NASASpaceflight article explores the engine’s journey from a blank sheet to integrated static-fire tests and offers a deeper explanation of the technical details.

Raptor enters a new era

For all the extensive and invaluable testing SpaceX has done with a series of prototype Raptor engines, the engines tested were subscale versions with around 30% the thrust of the c. 2016 Raptor and around 40-50% of the updated c. 2017 iteration, producing almost the same amount of thrust as Merlin 1D (914 kN to Raptor’s ~1000 kN). In September 2018, Musk described Raptor as an “approximately…200-ton (~2000 kN) thrust engine” that would eventually operate with a chamber pressure as high as 300 bar (an extraordinary ~4400 psi), requiring at least one of the FFSC engine’s two preburners (used to power separate turbopumps) to operate at a truly terrifying ~810 bar (nearly 12,000 psi).

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Conveniently stood beside a Merlin 1D engine also ready for hot-fire acceptance testing, the Raptor engine spotted departing SpaceX’s Hawthorne, CA factory last week was reportedly immense in person, towering over an M1D engine. Raptor also featured a mass of spaghetti-like plumbing (complexity necessary for its advanced combustion cycle), with a significant fraction of the metallic pipes and tubes displaying mirror-like finishes. Most notable was an obvious secondary preburner/turbopump stack and the lack of any exhaust port, whereas M1D relies on a single turbopump and exhausts the gases used to power it. Raptor’s full-flow staged-combustion cycle uses separate oxygen and methane preburners to power separate turbopumps, significantly improving mass flow rate and smoothing out combustion mixing.

 

Unlike all previous hot-fired Raptors, those shipping now to McGregor, Texas are expected to be the first completed engines with a finalized design, arrived at only after a period of extensive testing and iterative improvement. They also appear to be full-scale, meaning that the test bays dedicated to Raptor will likely need to be upgraded (if they haven’t been already) to support a two- or threefold increase in maximum thrust.

SpaceX’s Starship hopper will need three finalized engines, meaning that the Raptor now in McGregor, Texas may not have been the first to arrive. Nevertheless, the shipment of full-scale hardware is always an extremely encouraging milestone for any advanced technology development program, while also foreshadowing the first imminent static-fires of the “radcally redesigned” rocket engine. With hardware now at the test site before January is out, a February test debut – one month behind a January debut teased by Elon Musk last December – is not out of the question.

Check out Teslarati’s newsletters for prompt updates, on-the-ground perspectives, and unique glimpses of SpaceX’s rocket launch and recovery processes!

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Eric Ralph is Teslarati's senior spaceflight reporter and has been covering the industry in some capacity for almost half a decade, largely spurred in 2016 by a trip to Mexico to watch Elon Musk reveal SpaceX's plans for Mars in person. Aside from spreading interest and excitement about spaceflight far and wide, his primary goal is to cover humanity's ongoing efforts to expand beyond Earth to the Moon, Mars, and elsewhere.

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Tesla FSD takes owner on a 20,000+ mile joy ride

Tesla owner David Moss just pushed his intervention free FSD streak past 20,000 miles total.

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41 minutes ago

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July 26, 2026

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Tesla FSD 14.3 [Credit: TESLARATI)

Tesla Model 3 owner David Moss has spent the better part of eight months turning his vehicle into a rolling stress test for Full Self-Driving, and this week he pushed his single, continuous FSD streak past 20,000 miles without a human intervening.

Moss, a Tacoma, Washington resident who sells LiDAR scanning equipment for a living, first drew wide attention in December 2025 when he logged 10,000 consecutive miles on FSD v14.2. Days later he drove from the Tesla Diner in Los Angeles to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, covering 2,732 miles in two days and 20 hours with zero disengagements, the first verified coast to coast autonomous drive in Tesla’s history. Tesla even featured the trip as an official customer story in March. That original streak eventually reached 12,961 miles across 30 states before ending in rural Wisconsin in January, when snow and single digit temperatures forced Moss to take over.

Tesla FSD successfully completes full coast-to-coast drive with zero interventions

He started over, and this run has gone further. In late May, Moss drove 3,760 miles across Canada with two companions, from Horseshoe Bay in Vancouver to a Tesla showroom in Halifax, again without a single intervention, a trip Tesla AI software VP Ashok Elluswamy publicly congratulated him for on X. In June, he pushed the same unbroken streak south, aiming to link the Canadian border to the Mexican border, and crossed 10,000 miles on Tesla’s newly added in car streak counter along the way, the first driver to do so since Tesla began showing confetti animations for the feature.


It’s worth noting that every mile is logged through the FSD Database, a community run tracker built by Tesla influencer Omar Qazi, well known as @WholeMars on X, that pulls telemetry straight from the car and records disengagements down to a tenth of a mile. That verification is what separates Moss’s numbers from casual claims on social media.

The streak itself is a fairly recent addition to Tesla’s software. FSD v14.2 introduced a Self Driving Stats panel tracking the ratio of autonomous to manual miles, and v14.3.4 added the live streak counter in June, which resets the moment a driver brakes, wrenches the wheel or cancels navigation. Reaching 20,000 miles on that counter means a single Tesla drove itself through countless highways, city grids, construction zones and Supercharger stalls without a single reset.

Moss has said the goal was never to set a record for its own sake, but to show, mile by verified mile, what the software can already do.

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Elon Musk

Elon Musk explains what happens when AI outsmarts all of us

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12 hours ago

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July 26, 2026

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Elon Musk told The Economist that artificial intelligence will likely surpass the combined intelligence of every human on Earth within about five years, and that humans may not remain in charge once that happens. In a wide-ranging interview with editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes, recorded at Giga Texas for the outlet’s Insider series, Musk compared the widening gap between AI and human intelligence to the gap between humans and chimpanzees.

“It’s hard to imagine that the chimpanzee would be in charge,” he said, addressing what happens to human authority once AI moves far beyond us.

Elon Musk reiterates his most optimistic prediction yet with “UHI” forecast

Musk’s timeline stretches out from there. Five years for AI to out-think humanity combined, ten years before humans lose meaningful control, and by 2036, he says, money itself may stop mattering.

Musk notes that if robots and AI produce more goods and services than people could ever consume, currency loses its purpose. He told Beddoes that governments could respond with direct payments, what he called “universal high income,” a term he first used in an X post last August describing a future where “everyone will have the best medical care, food, home, transport and everything else.”

He also floated a more surprising prediction that deflation, and not inflation, would become the bigger economic problem, since expanding the supply of goods and services faster than the money supply grows would push prices down rather than up.

None of this is new territory for Musk, who has spent years describing an “age of abundance” built on Optimus and autonomous vehicles. What’s notable is the timing. The interview landed the same week Tesla shares dropped roughly 19 percent following a second quarter earnings report that beat on revenue but missed badly on profit, and as SpaceX stock continues to slide from its post-IPO peak.

Musk’s own net worth has fallen close to $700 billion since mid-June, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, even as he describes a future where personal wealth stops being the point.
Musk did not dodge the risk side of the equation either. He put the odds of AI contributing to human extinction somewhere in the 10 to 20 percent range, then arrived at what he called his “philosophical conclusion” since the technology cannot realistically be stopped and the arguably better response is to keep building it and hope the outcome leans toward abundance rather than catastrophe. “I’ve gone from exhilaration to terror regarding AI,” he told Beddoes, “even intraday.”

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Elon Musk

Tesla adds new ‘Traction Control Modes’ for better handling in any conditions

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12 hours ago

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July 26, 2026

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Credit: Tesla

Tesla is adding a new “Traction Control Modes” feature to its cars for better handling in any conditions. These features will roll out to the Model 3 and Model Y, the two vehicles in Tesla’s lineup that typically do not have drive modes for various conditions.

Tesla did include this in the Model S and Model X, as well as the Cybertruck.

The new feature will roll out with the 2026 Summer Update, which Tesla announced last week and subsequently started rolling out to some owners today. The Summer Update is the latest iteration of the usual four seasonal releases the company rolls out throughout the year. These releases typically feature some owner-requested features, as well as improvements to things like the Full Self-Driving suite.

Tesla reveals 2026 Summer Update with crazy fixes to Nav and more

This release is no different. Among the changes are improvements to Navigation, new customization options with wraps and how they can be shared and stored, more functionality with the Tesla smartphone app, and new gamification with self-driving.

However, Tesla announced today that it was adding another feature to the Summer Update. Traction Control Modes will now be available with the release

Tesla describes them:

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“Choose from three updated Traction Control Modes: Auto for normal driving conditions, Slippery Surface for icy or wet roads, Stuck Assist when stuck in snow, mud, or sand. The mode resets to Auto at the start of each drive. To select, go to Controls > Dynamics > Traction Control Mode.”

The use of these modes will help improve a Tesla’s overall performance in less-than-ideal conditions. Typically, these traction control modes monitor wheel speed through sensors and track engine power to adjust responsiveness in various conditions.

These drive modes are not an ultimate solution to all driving conditions; just because there is a “Stuck Assist,” doesn’t mean your Tesla will dig itself out of a foot-and-a-half trench during a blizzard. It is important to remember that some of these scenarios also require some assistance from the driver. For example, driving in sand requires tires to be aired down significantly to increase traction and control.

However, this will be a welcome addition for those who use the Full Self-Driving suite and might not be convinced of its performance in adverse conditions. Some of us prefer to be in control in rain, snow, or ice, which is totally understandable. However, adjusting the Traction Control Mode while utilizing FSD in snow, rain, or ice could increase confidence and overall experience.

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Tesla’s Summer Update is already rolling out to some owners, so it should be making its way to most of the fleet over the next several weeks. The Spring Update rolled out at a very conservative pace, so if you don’t have it by the end of August, don’t be too upset. It might just be Tesla’s method.

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