Comment by arijun
4 hours ago
> moved a lot of stuff "inside" the engine
The level that they managed to fit everything inside of a simple-looking package was so high that the CEO of ULA (the Boeing/Lockheed Martin rocket company) thought they were lying when they first showed pictures [1].
[1] https://www.benzinga.com/news/24/08/40279896/spacex-presiden...
The reason he was so skeptical is that for other engine manufacturers, there are generally different teams working on different parts of the engine, and because Convay's law the final artifact generally ends up looking like the organizational boundaries of the company that made it, with cleanly separated parts for every sub-organization that you can see in the final assembly. One of the things that SpaceX is good at is optimization across these kinds of boundaries, integrating hardware in ways that would be difficult for a more traditional organization.
The way it was explained to me early on was that the newest Raptor engines had simply eliminated many of the different types of test sensors, specifically because sufficient testing had been performed that they weren't getting useful data out of them any more.
I'm not some kind of insider, though.