I apologize if this has been posted before,
But it knocked me out.
The increase in simplification.
I wonder if the thrust is the same?

I'd love to see an F1 in the picture for comparison.

Or something from an earlier era.

The internet is amazing...


The Raptor 3 engine is smaller than the Saturn V rocket, but it's more powerful and has a streamlined design:

Size
The Raptor 3 is about 10 ft high and 4.27 ft wide, while the Saturn V's F1 engines were 19 ft high and 12 ft wide.

Thrust
The Saturn V's five F1 engines generated 7.6 million pounds of thrust, while the Super Heavy's 33 Raptor 3 engines generate 19.5 million pounds of thrust.

Design
The Raptor 3's simplified design is the result of SpaceX applying lessons learned from previous versions of the engine.

Fuel
The Raptor engine is powered by a mixture of liquid oxygen and cryogenic liquid methane, known as methalox.

History
The Saturn V was NASA's most powerful rocket, used in the Apollo program in the 1960s and 1970s.

Height
When stacked on top of each other, Starship and Super Heavy are 394 ft tall, which is 31 ft taller than the Saturn V.

Actually the V3 Raptor is claimed to produce 560,000 lb of thrust which is about one third of the 1,500,000 lb thrust produced by a single Rocketdyne F1 engine. To get the same total thrust that the Saturn IV made would require about 14 V3 Raptors.

The specific impulse (a measure of a rocket engine's efficiency) of the two engines in space is pretty similar but the Raptor is slightly better (Raptor V3: 350, F1: 304). Some of that difference is due to the use of methane vs kerosene for fuel.

When I saw the first pictures of the V3, I assumed they left off most of the control hardware but given that they've shown videos of that same engine in a static fire test I guess I was wrong and those pictures are of a complete, ready to fire engine.

The story is that they moved everything 'inside' by using 3D printing to manufacture, in addition it's all fuel cooled.

The story is that they moved everything 'inside' by using 3D printing to manufacture, in addition it's all fuel cooled.

It was enough to fool Tory Bruno who tweeted “They have done an excellent job making the assembly simpler and more producible. So, there is no need to exaggerate this by showing a partially assembled engine without controllers, fluid management, or TVC systems, then comparing it to fully assembled engines that do.”

Gwynne Shotwell replied with this image of the same engine firing on the test stand: https://x.com/gwynne_shotwell/status/18 ... vUBm_gIWjA

“Works pretty good for a “partially assembled” engine ”

OFT#6 target is Monday the 18th of November in the afternoon.
From the SpaceX update at X:

An inflight Ship relight.
Steeper ship reentry profile to make it more spicy...
Key tiles omitted to see how that goes
Daylight ship splashdown.
Various improvements
Booster catch.

Flight 7 will be the first of the New Ship with lots of changes.