Elon Musk Tweets Out Photos, Stats For The New Engine

The rocket motor that Elon Musk hopes will power missions to Mars was test-fired Sunday night at at their facility in McGregor, TX.

Musk posted images of the test firing on Twitter, as well as some of the specifics for the engine. He said that the chamber pressure for the Raptor is nearly three times that of the Merlin Engine, so about the same size for a given area ration.

The goal for the production Raptor engine is a specific impulse of 382 seconds and thrust of 3 MN (~310 metric tons) at 300 bar.

The Raptor was first introduced four years ago. It is intended to be a multi-stage engine that could eventually boost people and material to Mars, but also be reusable to reduce the cost of those missions.

Forbes reports that SpaceX entirely funded the development of the Raptor engine until 2015, when the U.S. Air Force allocated nearly $34 million to assist with development of the upper stage prototype.

In something of a Twitter skirmish, Jeff Bezos tweeted out images of a model of the "New Glenn" two-stage rocket being developed by Blue Origin.

The images were taken in a wind tunnel, according to the U.K. newspaper The Daily Mail. Bezos, the founder of Blue Origin, said testing of the scale model of the rocket, which would be second in size only to the Atlas V, has been going on for three weeks.  "Exciting results from 3 weeks of wind tunnel testing of #NewGlenn at transonic & supersonic speeds. Validated our CFD" Bezos tweeted.

(Images from Twitter. Top: Raptor Test Fire provided by Elon Musk. Lower: New Glenn wind tunnel provided by Jeff Bezos)

FMI: www.spacex.com, www.blueorigin.com