The Angry Astronaut is doing a live discussion
Is The Raptor The Achilles Heel For Starship?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xN-9dgJm59M
This is an interesting angle and worthy of discussion, but I just could not digest AA's format for this discussion. Constantly breaking train of thought to thank whatever patron throws a buck into the chatroom is no way to have a content driven presentation, especially when you then have to also add praise for each region of the country/world that each donor is from.
Evidently the mass fractions are so close, and the efficiency of Raptor so high, that this scope of reusability is just not possible with any other chemical rocket engine. Merlin, BE-4, RS-25, F1, whatever. Can't do it without full flow staged combustion. Which has never been done before Raptor.
What we have going on here is on par with the end of the turboprop and the rise of the jet engine, but also at the same time the peak of chemical rocket propulsion. There is just no getting significantly better, without eliminating chemical reaction mass (i.e. that giant container of O2) in favor of some other means of energetic acceleration to enjoy the benefits of Newtonian physics.
