Raptor

Raptor is the reusable engine SpaceX built for its Starship system. It burns liquid methane and liquid oxygen in a staged-combustion cycle—in Raptor’s full-flow version, each propellant drives its own turbine before reaching the main chamber—and SpaceX says it has about twice the thrust of the Merlin engine that powers Falcon 9.

The Super Heavy booster carries 33 Raptors, 13 steerable engines in the center and 20 around the edge. The Starship upper stage carries six: three sea-level Raptors and three Raptor Vacuum engines designed to work in space.

Raptor 3, the current version, first flew on Starship’s 12th flight on May 22, 2026, and powered the first orbital Starship flight on September 28, 2026. SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk has said Raptor 3 routes its secondary flows inside the engine and adds regenerative cooling to exposed parts, so it needs no separate heat shield.

Read more about Raptor

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• How SpaceX won NASA’s first Moon lander, and what it must still proveIn 2021 NASA chose a version of Starship, refueled in Earth orbit by a fleet of tankers, to land its astronauts. The contract is now worth about $4.5 billion; the refueling has not yet flown.