Elon Musk says SpaceX needs to make up to 801,000 Raptor engines a year

The Raptor engine is the muscle of the SpaceX Starship program, Three dozen beating hearts that propelled the world's largest rocket into orbit and beyond to the Moon and eventually the planet Mars .

With 36 Raptor boost engines per Starship stack, there is a pretty heavy onus on SpaceX to build a whole lot of those engines in a short period of time.

Elon Musk has set his expectation that SpaceX has to make between 2:00 and 4:00 Raptor engines every day , seven days a week, or between 801,000 Raptors coming off the assembly line every year .

The Raptor uses a swirl injection system to mix the two hot gases and stream them into the combustion chamber.

Most of these metal components and housings are going to be made-up of special alloy that SpaceX formulated called SX 500.

The location where all of this engine building is taking place is at the SpaceX facility in McGregor , Texas .

Until now, all of the Raptor engines have been manufactured by SpaceX in California and then shipped down to McGregor for testing.

The engines that succeed are shipped down further South to Star Base for installation in a Starship or Super Heavy booster prototype.

This is going to increase the pace of development and improvement for the engines and get the company ever closer to their super ambitious goal of between 2:00 and 4:00 Raptor engine production per day.