Starship· guided tour

Raptor Engines

the thirty-three

Super Heavy sits on thirty-three Raptor engines: three in the centre, ten in a middle ring, twenty in an outer ring. No rocket has ever flown with this many.

How many
33
Arrangement
3 rings
Total push
73.5 MN
How it works

More engines means more redundancy. If a handful stop working, the rest can usually still finish the job, the same idea as the nine engines on Falcon 9, just taken much further.

For the grown-up

The 33-engine layout (3 centre, 10 middle, 20 outer) gives engine-out capability at almost any point in ascent and lets the booster throttle down to just its three centre engines for hot-staging and landing, rather than needing a dedicated smaller engine for those phases.

SpaceX Starship