As it moves towards the second highly anticipated orbital flight test of its Starship rocket, SpaceX is busy testing Starship's Raptor engines at its facilities in McGregor, Texas. These engines are essential for Starship's success, and although SpaceX has been developing them for years, the complexity of the rocket often leads to engine problems during flight. As part of its developmental tests, the firm shared footage of a rare Raptor test where the engine was gimballed at an angle to the horizontal test site. Crucially, the test was a long duration test fire which the engine performed with ease, showing that engine problems might soon become a thing of the past for SpaceX.
SpaceX's Long Duration Raptor Test Fire Lasts For More Than Twenty Seconds
Before it can fly any rocket, whether the Falcon 9 or Starship, SpaceX tests all of its engines at its facilities in McGregor. McGregor is one of the company's oldest sites and has contributed to the development of all of SpaceX's rocket engines. The latest engine to the firm's portfolio is the Raptor engine, designed exclusively for Starship. While SpaceX is yet to fly the full Starship stack successfully, it has already upgraded the Raptor, and the latest variant that has been publicly disclosed is the Raptor 3.
The engine has been firing up for years now, and problems with its combustion chamber were among the reasons some of the tests in SpaceX's upper-stage Starship campaign failed. Raptor is significantly more powerful than the Merlin engines, which power the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets. According to Elon Musk, the Raptor 3 can generate 590,000 pounds of thrust, and the engine might have entered volume production since the test that generated this thrust took place in May.
While May's test achieved a peak thrust of 590,000 pounds, this might not be the upper limit of the Raptor V3 engine. Roughly two months after the test, Musk took to X (formerly known as Twitter) again and shared that increasing the Raptor engine's thrust by 20% at sea level is possible. Comparing it to the 510,000 pounds of thrust of the Raptor 2 engine, the Raptor 3 engine can potentially generate a whopping 600,000+ pounds.
SpaceX has stopped sharing rocket engine testing footage as of late, and the only footage of the tests is available online through dedicated onlookers. One such clip surfaced early last year when a Raptor 2 engine's combustion chamber melted during a test run in the early stages of the Raptor 2's development.
The latest Raptor footage shared on X is of a unique test that shows the engine firing for a "long duration" test while it is angled to the ground. Most Raptor tests take place on a horizontal test stand, as opposed to the vertical stand for the Merlin engines. During these, the engine is generally parallel to the ground, but this time around, SpaceX confirmed that it was gimballed at 15 degrees.
This is an important factor since the angle of the rocket engine stresses several components while it is generating hundreds of thousands of pounds of thrust. A test such as this one assures engineers that these components perform according to expectations. While SpaceX's footage is a little over 20 seconds, visuals captured by Adam Cuker and posted on X show that the test lasted for more than two minutes.
You can take a look at SpaceX's footage below:
Long duration test fire of Raptor while gimbaled 15 degrees pic.twitter.com/HuYqmtE8fc
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 17, 2023
WccftechContinue reading/original-link]
