SpaceX
SpaceX’s first Starship engine suffers “expected” damage during Raptor test fire
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says that the first full-scale Starship engine to be tested has already been pushed to the point of damage less than three weeks after the campaign began, setting the stage for the second full-scale Raptor to take over in the near future.
According to Musk, while most of the damaged pathfinder Raptor’s components should still be easily reusable, the assembly of the second finalized engine is “almost done” and that Raptor will take over near-term testing rather than waiting for repairs to the first engine. This is undoubtedly an extraordinarily aggressive test program, particularly for such a new and cutting-edge rocket propulsion system, but these latest developments are ultimately far more encouraging than they are concerning.
Merlins. The max chamber pressure run damaged Raptor SN 1 (as expected). A lot of the parts are fine for reuse, but next tests will be with SN 2, which is almost done.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 21, 2019
Although the Raptor engine family began integrated subscale static fires way back in September 2016, SpaceX’s propulsion team finalized Raptor’s baseline design and completed assembly, shipment, and an integrated static fire of the first full-scale engine on February 3rd, considerably less than three weeks before Musk took to Twitter. Aside from confirming that the new Raptor had been damaged during its most recent static fire several days prior, Musk indicated that the failure (unsurprisingly) was primarily attributed to the engine reaching the highest chamber pressures yet.
Raptor’s main combustion chamber (the bit directly above the nozzle) has been designed to nominally operate at and reliably withstand extraordinary pressures of 250+ bar (3600+ psi), performance that demands even higher pressures in the components that feed hot methane and oxygen gas into Raptor’s combustion chamber. One prime example hinted at by Musk in a 2018 tweet is its oxygen preburner, used to convert liquid propellant into a high-velocity gas that can then feed a dedicated oxygen turbopump. Aside from the absurdly corrosive environment created by extremely hot gaseous oxygen, the preburner must also survive pressures that could peak as high as 800+ bar, or 12,000 psi.
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- SpaceX’s world-class rocket propulsion team has been progressing through early full-scale Raptor tests at an incredible speed. (SpaceX)
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- Full-scale Raptor’s first static fire test, February 3rd. (SpaceX)
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- Raptor’s business end with a Musk-for-scale. (Elon Musk)
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- Starship revealed a trio of Raptor mockups when SpaceX technicians moved the assembly from stand to ground. (NSF – bocachicagal)
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- A September 2018 render of Starship (then BFS) shows one of the vehicle’s two hinged wings/fins/legs. (SpaceX)
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- BFR (2018) breaks through a cloud layer shortly after launch. (SpaceX)
A lack of technical detail means that it’s hard to know what thrust or main chamber pressure Musk had in mind when referring to exotic alloys that would be needed to survive those pressures, but the performance statistics of a Raptor with a preburner operating at 800+ bar would probably outstrip anything Musk has thus far described. In other words, it’s safe to assume that Raptor has probably not been pushed to those performance levels just yet, although it’s still a distant possibility. More likely is that 800+ bar in the oxygen preburner is an extreme stretch-goal that will take concerted research, development, and optimization to achieve, with Raptor having suffered damage somewhere below those levels while still reaching eye-watering performance figures.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 4, 2019
For an engine as complex as Raptor, there are countless dozens of potential failure modes the appearance of which would come as little surprise for an engine just days into full-scale testing. Above all else, the Raptor test schedule held by SpaceX’s world-class propulsion team – be it self-motivated or driven by reckless management-by-spreadsheet – has been fast-paced in the extreme, taking the first high-performance Raptor ever built from standstill to more than 90% thrust and chamber pressures of almost 270 bar (3900 psi) in – quite literally – less than one week. In the same period of time, more than half a dozen static fire tests (ranging from 1-10 seconds) were performed.
Within a few days of that February 10th milestone, in which Raptor reached chamber pressures comparable with the most advanced modern engines (namely RD-180/190/191), the engine was apparently pushed dramatically higher still, reaching a chamber pressure (and thus thrust) that wrought damage on some of the more sensitive parts of the engine’s plumbing. Despite the fact that the second production Raptor is apparently already “almost done”, Musk suggested that it would already feature changes (of unknown gravity) to mitigate the failure modes experienced by Raptor SN01.
SN2 has changes that should help
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 21, 2019
In an industry where NASA and contractors like Aerojet-Rocketdyne will spend months between static fire tests of Space Shuttle engines that have each literally flown multiple (if not) dozens of missions to orbit and have a demonstrated performance and reliability record that is measured in the hundreds of thousands of seconds, the speed and agility of SpaceX’s Raptor development and test program is breathtaking. What remains to be seen is just how comparably reliable and successful the end results (i.e. operational Raptor) will be, but an attitude that actively accepts and even pursues testing to destruction can ultimately only serve to benefit the finished product at the cost of destroyed hardware and many on-ground lessons learned the hard ways.
Given the immense success of SpaceX’s Merlin family of engines and the aggressive strategy of development and continuous improvement that brought it from Merlin 1A to 1D and MVacD, SpaceX is clearly not fumbling around in the dark when it comes to Raptor R&D.
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Elon Musk said he is planning to give “every one of his SpaceX shares to every kid in America” in 2027, stating that “this will be the first of many.”
SpaceX went public earlier this year, and its stock price has been relatively stable since leveling off shortly after its IPO. Based on its current price, it’s a gift of just over $10 billion to children across the United States.
It appears to be closely related to President Donald Trump’s bank accounts for children, which were set up earlier this year as Trump Accounts.
Just hours earlier, Anthropic had announced the establishment of its Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, “a new wholly-owned entity dedicated entirely to public benefit.” Musk responded by stating he recommended “giving the shares directly to the public,” and that he would be doing it that way.
Just a little bit later, Musk said children across the U.S. would be getting a share from him:
Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America.
This will be the first of many.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 19, 2026
There are roughly 70 million children, meaning someone under the age of 18, in the United States, according to the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics. Musk’s ownership of SpaceX stock shows he has around 849 million Class A shares of SpaceX stock, according to filings with the SEC.
Investor's Corner
SpaceX’s biggest earnings test yet lands Tuesday, and Tesla shareholders should be watching
SpaceX reports earnings Tuesday as Wall Street watches AI spending, Starlink growth and Tesla merger
SpaceX reports third quarter results after the market closes Tuesday, with a webcast at 4:30 p.m. ET streamed on X, and Tesla follows a day later. Bloomberg consensus, cited by Pepperstone, calls for revenue of $12.89 billion, adjusted EBITDA of $6.62 billion and adjusted EPS near $0.15. That would be about 65% growth from the second quarter and SpaceX’s first profitable quarter since its IPO. Analysts expect roughly $6.4 billion from AI and $4.9 billion from Starlink, which is projected to reach 14.3 million consumer subscribers. Capital spending is forecast at $19.6 billion, leaving free cash flow near negative $11.6 billion.
The numbers matter because SpaceX has spent months trying to win over a skeptical market. It priced its record IPO at $135, spiked to $225.64, then sank near $105 in early August. Friday’s close of $146.03 sits about 28% below the June high. The Q2 report beat on revenue at $7.8 billion and put Starlink at 12 million subscribers, but $18.4 billion of capex hurt the stock. Since then SpaceX reached orbit on Starship Flight 14 with 26 Starlink V3 satellites, agreed to buy 800 MHz spectrum for about $8 billion as part of its Starlink Mobile push, and signed a fourth compute hosting deal in four months worth roughly $13 billion a year from December. Management is targeting more than 2 gigawatts of compute by year end and a $100 billion annualized revenue run rate. Evercore ISI, which raised its target to $275, said the quarter may be judged more on those targets than the reported figures
All of this sits under the Tesla merger question. Barclays analyst Dan Levy expects an all stock deal in which SpaceX buys Tesla at a premium, using reference values of $2.1 trillion and $1.5 trillion, and said an announcement would need to come by late October or early November to be voted on at Tesla’s December 6 annual meeting. Barclays estimates Musk would hold about 37% of the combined company and 56% of the votes. Musk said in July that combining companies cannot be discussed on an earnings call, but an investor question asking when SpaceX will merge with Tesla is sitting on SpaceX’s Q&A platform, and Teslarati has tracked how the Roadster demo revived the talk.
If a deal happens, Tuesday’s result would effectively set the price Tesla holders would receive. Their shares would convert into SpaceX stock, along with exposure to a company with a heavy investment on AI, while Tesla itself expects 2026 capex above $25 billion. A strong quarter and calmer spending would make that exchange easier to sell. Another round of heavy capex and a falling stock would make it harder.
News
SpaceX’s Gwynne Shotwell just made a quiet gesture toward Tesla
SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell quietly followed Tesla on X, and merger watchers noticed right away.
SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell has started following Tesla’s official account on X, a small change that landed in the middle of a very loud merger conversation. Whole Mars Catalog joked about it on Sunday.
A follow is not an announcement, and neither company has said anything about a deal. What gives the moment weight is the timing. Barclays analyst Dan Levy has told clients that an agreement could come before Tesla’s annual meeting, which must be held by December 6, with SpaceX as the buyer in an all stock deal, as we reported after the Roadster unveiling. Wedbush’s Dan Ives has stuck with a 2027 timeline.
“Shit, I better start following their X account if i’m gonna be helping run the company”
— Whole Mars Catalog (@wholemars) October 18, 2026
Shotwell is the executive most worth watching if the two companies do move closer. When Musk was asked at the All In Summit why Tesla and SpaceX remain separate, Shotwell sat next to him and said SpaceX personnel had already moved into xAI to fill leadership and engineering gaps. The businesses were integrating “faster than I thought,” she said, though “not fully integrated yet.” Her responsibilities have also grown since SpaceX absorbed xAI, and she now oversees operations that include Grok and the company’s AI compute buildout.
The financial links are already there. Tesla’s $2 billion xAI investment turned into a stake of less than one percent in SpaceX, the two share the Terafab chip project in Austin, and Musk exercised his 2018 Tesla options a week after SpaceX began trading, a sequence analysts flagged as giving SpaceX public shares to use in a deal. Musk holds about 20 percent of Tesla and controls 85.1 percent of SpaceX’s voting power, according to our earlier breakdown.
The next test is close at hand. SpaceX reports its second earnings as a public company on Tuesday after the close, and Tesla follows on Wednesday. Musk told analysts in July that “we can’t talk about combining companies and that kind of thing on an earnings call,” so a direct answer is unlikely from either stage. Tesla shareholders can still submit and vote on questions through the Say portal until 4 p.m. EDT on Monday, and the merger is a recurring theme in the queue.
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