SpaceX's Crazy New Raptor 4.0 Design With 4X Upgrade Is Totally Insane!

SpaceX's Crazy New Raptor 4.0 Design With 4X Upgrade Is Totally Insane!
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#alphatech
#techalpha
#spacex
#elonmusk
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0:00 Raptor 4 Revealed
0:47 Evolution Explained
2:40 Engine Breakthrough
5:10 Engineering Challenges
7:02 Cost Revolution
8:43 Mars Logistics
10:23 Nuclear Future
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SpaceX's Crazy New Raptor 4.0 Design With 4X Upgrade Is Totally Insane!
This single engine could completely redefine how humanity escapes the Earth.
Nope, it's not the Raptor 3 — this is its successor, the Raptor 4. It builds directly on everything SpaceX pushed to the limit with Raptor 3, then goes further. Raw power, reusability, production cost — all of it taken to a level that wasn't considered possible even a few years ago. And if Elon Musk gets this right, the question of humans on Mars stops being if — and becomes when.
But before we dive into the Raptor 4, let’s take a moment to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the great United States of America! Our channel is also about to turn 5 years old, so hitting that subscribe button would be an amazing gift for us, thank you!
Alright, let’s get into it!
SpaceX's Crazy New Raptor 4.0 Design With 4X Upgrade Is Totally Insane!
For many people, the Raptor 4 is still just a rumor — something that doesn't actually exist yet. After all, we've only seen three official versions fly so far. But that's not the case. The Raptor 4 is very real.
Elon Musk has confirmed it multiple times on X. This is the engine SpaceX plans to use on their massive Starship Version 4. When fully stacked — Super Heavy booster plus Starship — the whole vehicle could reach up to 142 meters tall. Just for perspective, the current launch tower at Pad 2 is about 144.5 meters high. The rocket and its own launch tower are nearly the same height. Let that sink in.
Because of that massive size and weight, the Raptor 3 simply won't cut it. Elon has already confirmed that Starship V4 is targeted for the end of 2027, which means we'll very likely see the Raptor 4 sometime next year.
SpaceX's Crazy New Raptor 4.0 Design With 4X Upgrade Is Totally Insane!
So the big question is: what makes the Raptor 4 so much more powerful that the Raptor 3 can't handle it?
Before we get into the technical details, let's look at the development history of the Raptor line — because there's a very clear pattern here that most people miss.
Raptor 1 was the initial test version. Raptor 2 was the stabilized, refined version of that foundation — mature enough that SpaceX pulled off three successful tower catches with the Super Heavy booster. Then came Raptor 3, a major architectural leap built on everything Raptor 2 taught them. And because it's brand new, it's still in that phase every cutting-edge engine goes through: high performance, but reliability still being dialed in.
Following that exact pattern, Raptor 4 should be the version that takes all the breakthroughs from Raptor 3 and turns them into something mature, mass-producible, and cheap enough to build at industrial scale. This isn't speculation — it's the same playbook SpaceX has run with every single generation of Raptor so far.
2:40
So what does that actually look like?
A more powerful, more compact, cleaner engine. And while the Raptor 4 won't dethrone the Saturn V's F-1 in pure brute force — that engine produced a staggering 680 tons of thrust per engine, with a nozzle large enough to drive a small car through — raw thrust was never really the point.
The F-1 used an open-cycle design. A small portion of propellant was burned just to drive the turbopumps, and that exhaust was dumped overboard — energy lost forever. Its chamber pressure sat around 70 bar. For the 1960s, that was remarkable. By today's standards, it's the baseline.
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