Starship V4 claims 33 Raptor engines
- Elon Musk’s recent Starship V4 comments point to a much bigger vehicle than the social post suggests, with a 2027 target and 42 engines. - The eye-catching number is 10,000 metric tons of liftoff thrust, but that figure was tied to 33 engines at 300 tons each. - That matters because V4 now looks less like an engine swap and more like a full vehicle stretch beyond today’s Starship.
Starship is SpaceX’s giant fully reusable rocket system — the one meant to haul satellites, lunar cargo, and eventually Mars hardware. So when a social post says “Starship V4” will hit 10,000 metric tons of thrust with 33 Raptor V4 engines, that sounds huge. But the catch is that the cleanest reading from Musk’s own recent comments is messier and more ambitious than that. The 10,000-ton figure appears to describe a 33-engine booster target tied to future Raptor performance, while Starship V4 itself has also been described by Musk as a longer vehicle with 42 total engines and a 2027 flight goal. ### Where does the 33-engine claim come from? It comes from the current Super Heavy booster layout. SpaceX’s live Starship page still describes Super Heavy as using 33 Raptor engines and lists current thrust at 7,590 tf for the system’s first stage architecture. So “33 engines” is not a random number — it is the baseline booster configuration people already associate with Starship. ### What is the 10,000-ton number actually saying? Basically, it is a propulsion target. The reported line tied Raptor V4 to about 300 metric tons of force per engine, which would put a 33-engine cluster right around 9,900 to 10,000 metric tons of force at liftoff. That math checks out. But that does not, by itself, prove a finished V4 vehicle will still use only 33 engines. ### So is V4 really a 33-engine rocket? Probably not, at least not if Musk’s later V4 description is the one SpaceX is working toward. Multiple writeups preserving his August 26, 2025 X post quote say Starship V4 “will have 42 engines” once “3 more Raptors are added into today’s layout. ### Why does the engine count get confusing? Because people are mixing booster engines and total vehicle engines. Today’s stack is commonly described as 33 engines on Super Heavy plus six on the ship. A “42-engine” V4 claim likely means total engines across a stretched booster-and-ship together. ### How big a jump is Raptor V4 supposed to be? A meaningful one, if the targets hold. Publicly circulated figures put Raptor 3 at about 280 tf, while earlier Raptor versions were lower still. So a 300 tf Raptor V4 would be an incremental step per engine, but multiplied across dozens of engines it becomes a very large jump in total liftoff thrust. ### Does that make the Saturn V comparison fair? As a rough scale comparison, yes. Saturn V liftoff thrust was around 3,400 metric tons-force, so 10,000 tf is close to three times that. But comparisons like that are mostly about spectacle. What matters more operationally is payload, reuse, reliability, and how often SpaceX can fly the thing. ### What should you actually take away? The social claim is directionally plausible on the engine math, but too narrow on the vehicle. The stronger takeaway is that SpaceX appears to be aiming for two things at once — higher-thrust Raptors and a physically larger V4 architecture. Until SpaceX publishes a proper spec sheet, “33 Raptor V4 engines” is not the final shape of Starship V4.
