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SpaceX’s Starship engine breaks Russian rocketry record held for two decades

Published

7 years ago

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SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says the company’s Raptor engine, meant to power Starship and Super Heavy, has surpassed a rocketry record held by Russian scientists and engineers for more than two decades.

Known as combustion chamber pressure, Raptor has reportedly surpassed a modern Russian engine known as the RD-180, reaching forces equivalent to one Tesla Model 3 balanced on every square inch of Raptor’s combustion chamber, the hardware directly adjacent to a rocket engine’s bell-shaped nozzle.

First and foremost, it’s far too early to actually crown Raptor as the new official record-holder for combustion chamber pressure. RD-180 has been reliably flying on ULA’s Atlas V rocket with chamber pressures as high ~257.5 bar (3735 psi) since the year 2000, while Raptor has been performing subscale integrated testing for roughly two years and full-scale integrated testing for less than seven days. As such, the fact that full-scale Raptor has achieved ~269 bar (3900 psi) is an almost unbelievably impressive achievement but probably shouldn’t be used to jump to any conclusions just yet.

Thanks to the 10-20% performance boost supercool liquid methane and oxygen will bring Raptor, currently stuck using propellant just barely cold enough to remain liquid, the engine performing tests could already be made to reach its design specification of 300+ bar (4350+ psi), although Musk cautioned that he wasn’t sure Raptor would be able to survive that power in its current iteration. Nevertheless, 250 bar is apparently more than enough to operate Starship and its Super Heavy booster during most regimes of flight, although maximum thrust (and thus max chamber pressures) is probably desirable for the first minute or so after launch when gravity losses are most significant.

 

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Ultimately, the sheer speed of SpaceX’s full-scale Raptor test program is easily the most impressive and encouraging aspect of the brand new engine design. While SpaceX does tend towards testing to destruction over putting on kid-gloves around flight or development hardware, it’s safe to say that even SpaceX would avoid frivolously destroying the first full-scale Raptor after just a few dozen seconds of integrated hot-fire testing, indicating that no major red flags have cropped up since the company’s propulsion team began testing on February 3rd. In fact, Musk estimated that six separate static-fires have been performed with Raptor in the seven days since its first ignition.

As of 2017, Raptor’s McGregor, Texas test cell was fundamentally capped at test durations under 100 seconds, making comparisons difficult. Still, the best possible recent point of comparison to Raptor’s test program can be found in NASA’s series of tests of Space Shuttle engines in preparation for the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, an expendable launch vehicle being built by Boeing, Aerojet-Rocketdyne, NGIS (formerly Orbital-ATK), and others with NASA funds. Known as RS-25 under the SLS Program, the Space Shuttle engines being test-fired by NASA have already performed multiple full-duration missions to orbit and back on the four Space Shuttle orbiters built. After half a decade in storage, they are being re-tested (effectively acceptance testing) to ensure that they are ready to be expended on SLS launches.

In the first round of 2015 tests, NASA’s Stennis Space Center test stage supported six RS-25 static-fires total, ranging from two weeks to almost five months between tests. RS-25 testing has remained on a similar schedule in 2016-2018, averaging 4-6 tests annually with no fewer than two weeks between static-fires. Given that the vast majority of those ex-Space Shuttle Main Engine tests tend to last hundreds of seconds, it’s not a perfect comparison, but it offers at least a general idea of just how incredible it is to see a groundbreaking engine like Raptor test-fired almost daily just days after it was installed on a test stand for the first time.

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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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Elon Musk

SpaceX scores another massive Pentagon deal to support military satellites

Published

2 days ago

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July 29, 2026

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SpaceX just picked up another $1.6 billion from the Pentagon, with the U.S. Space Force awarding two task orders worth $1.6 billion to fly 18 Falcon 9 missions from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California through the end of 2027. The launches will carry satellites for the Space Based Sensing and Targeting portfolio, a set of programs meant to help the military detect and track airborne threats and relay that information across forces in near real time.

The award falls under National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 1, the Space Force’s faster, commercial style procurement track for missions that do not require the military’s most demanding certification process. It is also the largest single order publicly disclosed under that program so far, and the first task order issued since the Space Force nearly tripled Lane 1’s contract ceiling from $5.6 billion to $17 billion on July 17.

SpaceX to become America’s Military data backbone for missiles, drones, and warfighters

Eric Zarybnisky, the Space Force’s acting portfolio acquisition executive for space access, said the entire process, from identifying the requirement to signing the contract, took about two months, including a month set aside for companies to prepare proposals.

SpaceX is not just launching these satellites. It already holds the contracts to build two of the programs within the same portfolio, $4.16 billion for the Space Based Airborne Moving Target Indicator system and $2.29 billion for the Space Data Network Backbone, which Teslarati covered in May. That means SpaceX is now responsible for both building key pieces of the military’s next generation sensing network and getting them into orbit.

With this latest award, SpaceX’s Pentagon contract total for 2026 alone tops $8 billion, adding to a defense portfolio that already includes the Golden Dome missile defense software group SpaceX joined in April and a string of GPS launches it inherited after ULA’s Vulcan rocket ran into a booster anomaly, which we detailed in March.

Lane 1’s vendor pool technically includes seven companies: SpaceX, ULA, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Stoke Space, Impulse Space, and Relativity Space. In practice, SpaceX remains the only provider with the combination of launch cadence, flight proven Falcon 9 hardware, and West Coast infrastructure to support a campaign requiring roughly one Vandenberg launch a month for the next year and a half.

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Some lawmakers have flagged the growing concentration of national security launches with one company as a risk worth watching. For now, the Space Force keeps backing SpaceX, with it being the company that shows up ready to launch.

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Elon Musk

Elon Musk sheds two new bits of detail on Starship after 13th test launch

Published

3 days ago

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July 29, 2026

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Credit: SpaceX

Elon Musk shed two new bits of detail on Starship following its 13th test launch, which was an overwhelming success.

SpaceX launched Starship for the 13th time last Friday after two delays: one on Monday when several Raptor engines did not ignite, and another on Thursday due to unfavorable weather conditions in Starbase, Texas.

The launch was overwhelmingly successful. SpaceX was able to complete a necessary test of the heat shield tiles by increasing the acceleration of Starship from launch throughout the flight; 20 Starlink v3 satellites were released with no issue; the Super Heavy Booster landed safely in the Gulf of America, Ship successfully reignited engines while in space; and it also splashed down without incident in the Indian Ocean.

SpaceX Starship just nailed something it’s never done before

Nevertheless, more details are coming out about Starship, and Musk is doing the talking.

Starship Will Be Retrieved in the Ocean

Musk revealed on Tuesday night that Starship would be recovered by a ship in the Indian Ocean. SpaceX routinely tries to recover Starship after splashdown in an effort to find out more about the flight by examining the spacecraft afterward.

This helps engineers find out more about why things might have happened, allows them to examine any potential damage or anomalies that might have occurred, and increases the chances of an even more successful flight next time thanks to the additional information recovered.

Ship Could Have Been Caught by Tower Arms, Musk claims

Musk has already indicated that SpaceX will plan to attempt a catch of Starship with the 14th test flight. While this would be a major accomplishment, it would be an expected next step, considering the fact that the Super Heavy Booster has already been caught by the chopsticks on numerous occasions.

A ship catch would be a great indication of where SpaceX stands in terms of reusability and launch cadence. A successful catch with relatively no incidents would be a good sign that SpaceX is nearing a more frequent launch of Starship, but also that the reusability of the massive rocket would be something many would expect in the near future.

It is a necessity to make life multiplanetary.

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Elon Musk

Elon Musk updates the SpaceX timeline for Mars

Published

3 days ago

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July 29, 2026

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Rendering of a colonized Mars by way of SpaceX
Rendering of a colonized Mars by way of SpaceX

Elon Musk has updated his timeline for when humans will walk on Mars and for when ships will simply get there.

The objective of getting to Mars has been one of Musk’s biggest goals since becoming a serial entrepreneur and realizing that time on Earth is limited. Musk has said several times he hopes to die on Mars, and not by impact.

Musk now believes that people will be on Mars in “roughly 5 to 7 years.” He said that a Mars lander will get there “a few years sooner.”

The response from Musk comes after NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said that SpaceX’s biggest priority is the Moon and not Mars. Because of this, Isaacman conceded that he believes nuclear power and propulsion investments will provide “potentially the pathway with the fewest miracles required to put four people on Mars in the next 10 to 15 years.”

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Of course, this is what NASA can do through taxpayer funding and nuclear investments, he added.

Musk’s grand ambitions are much more optimistic than most, and it is certainly a double-edged sword. This is not the first time timelines for Mars have been somewhat lofty, especially to those normal thinkers like you and me, not super geniuses like Musk.

SpaceX Board has set a Mars bonus for Elon Musk

In fact, the SpaceX and Tesla frontman has said on at least a dozen occasions that we could be on Mars in the coming years. Musk said 2020 would be the big year as early as 2009. In 2020, he was “highly confident” of a landing in 2026, and had even said 2024 in a best-case scenario.

The point is, the range has varied, and it’s anyone’s guess when we’ll get there. This latest adjustment to the timeline is typical of Musk, and while the Moon has seemingly taken priority over Mars, it is still worth mentioning that the ultimate goal is to make life multiplanetary, and it starts potentially with the Red Planet.

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