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During hot staging, Super Heavy shuts down all but the 3 center engines, [44] [45] while the second stage fires its engines before separating, thus the second stage "pushes off" from the first stage giving added thrust. [44] The vented interstage contains a dome to shield the top of Super Heavy from the second stage's engines.
The concept evolved from a family of Raptor-designated rocket engines (2012) [45] to focus on the full-size Raptor engine (2014). [46] In January 2016, the US Air Force awarded a US$33.6 million development contract to SpaceX to develop a prototype Raptor for use on the upper stage of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. [47] [48]
On July 11, after returning to OLM A for engine testing, B7 experienced a detonation underneath the engines during an attempted 33-engine spin prime test. [29] It returned to OLM A on August 4 with only the 20 outer Raptor engines, [30] and completed its first single-engine static fire test on August 9, followed by a second two days later. [31]
The 30-foot-wide Super Heavy first stage, loaded with 6.8 million pounds of liquid oxygen and methane propellants, stands 230 feet tall and is powered by 33 SpaceX-designed Raptor engines ...
Over the years of design, the proportion of sea-level engines to vacuum engines on the second stage varied drastically. By 2019, the second stage design had settled on six Raptor engines—three optimized for sea-level and three optimized for vacuum. [21] [22] To decrease weight, aft flaps on the second stage were reduced from three to two. [23]
When stacked and fully fueled, Starship has a mass of approximately 5,000 t (11,000,000 lb), [c] a diameter of 9 m (30 ft) [16] and a height of 121.3 m (398 ft). [17] The rocket has been designed with the goal of being fully reusable to reduce launch costs; [18] it consists of the Super Heavy booster and the Starship upper stage [19] which are powered by Raptor and Raptor Vacuum engines.
Starship engine ignition and stage separation (hot-staging) Success +00:02:46 Super Heavy boostback burn start Partial failure 12 out of 13 engines ignited +00:03:29 Super Heavy boostback burn shutdown Success +00:03:31 Hot-stage jettison Success +00:06:26 Super Heavy is transonic — +00:06:35 Super Heavy landing burn start Success
The Raptor engine uses a full-flow staged combustion cycle, which has both oxygen and methane-rich turbopumps. [ 41 ] [ 42 ] Before 2014, only two full-flow staged-combustion rocket engine designs had advanced enough to undergo testing: the Soviet RD-270 project in the 1960s and the Aerojet Rocketdyne Integrated Powerhead Demonstrator in the ...