# SpaceX Starship: Engines & Internal Systems

How Starship's 33 Raptor engines are arranged under the booster, and how one Raptor's turbopumps, preburners and cooled nozzle work together to produce its thrust\.

By sunny\-fox\-30ba48fb

Topic: Space

[Open the interactive Jig](https://ask.jig.com/j/Ns0BQx09S9Hw)

## Transcript

### 1. Meet Starship

Starship is the biggest rocket ever flown: about 124 metres tall and 9 metres wide\. It has two stages, the Super Heavy booster below and the Ship on top, and both are built to fly again and again\.

Drag to turn the rocket\. Pinch or scroll to zoom\.

### 2. Mostly giant tanks

Cut it open and most of Starship is fuel tank\. Each stage keeps super\-cold liquid oxygen \(blue\) at the bottom and liquid methane \(orange\) above it\. Methane reaches the engines through a big pipe that runs down through the oxygen tank\.

The glowing tanks in the nose are small header tanks: they save propellant for the Ship's landing burn\.

### 3. 33 engines underneath

Look up under the booster: 33 Raptor engines in three rings of 3, 10 and 20\. The 13 inner engines can swivel to steer\. Together they push with roughly 8,000 tonnes of force\.

### 4. Meet a Raptor

Here is one Raptor engine, shown much larger on its stand\. A real one is about 3 metres tall and 1\.3 metres wide and weighs about as much as a big car, yet it pushes with about 250 tonnes of force\.

That is more than 160 times its own weight\.

### 5. Opening up the engine

Pull it apart and you find a few big pieces: two turbopumps that drive the propellant in, two small burners called preburners that power them, the main combustion chamber, and the bell\-shaped nozzle\.

### 6. Every drop does work

A turbopump is a spinning pump that forces liquid in at huge pressure\. In Raptor, all the methane goes through one preburner and all the oxygen through the other, so every drop helps spin a pump\. Then both reach the main chamber as hot gas and burn\.

Orange paths carry methane, blue paths carry oxygen\. The chamber runs at about 330 times air pressure\.

### 7. Keeping the nozzle cool

The flame inside is hotter than the metal could survive on its own\. So cold methane first flows through thin channels in the nozzle and chamber walls, soaking up heat, before it is burned\. Engineers call this regenerative cooling\.

### 8. The Ship has six engines

The Ship has 3 sea\-level Raptors in the middle, which swivel to steer and land, and 3 Raptor Vacuum engines with much wider bells that work best in the near\-vacuum of space\.

Here the Ship is lifted off the booster so you can see underneath it\.

### 9. Hot staging and coming home

Partway up, the Ship lights its engines while still attached; the vented ring lets the flames escape\. The booster flies back to be caught by the tower arms, and the Ship comes home belly\-first on about 18,000 black heat\-shield tiles\.