I was just looking at the SpaceX site, seeing if there was any new info about their upcoming launch, when I stumbled across this picture of a hotfire test of their Merlin-1C regeneratively cooled engine. According to a recent article somewhere, the engine has now been test fired “dozens” of times (Credit: Cory Stewart/SpaceX) :
How sweet is that? I want one.
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Jonathan Goff
President/CEO at Altius Space Machines
Jonathan Goff is a space technologist, inventor, and serial space entrepreneur who created the Selenian Boondocks blog. Jon was a co-founder of Masten Space Systems, and is the founder and CEO of Altius Space Machines, a space robotics startup in Broomfield, CO. His family includes his wife, Tiffany, and five boys: Jarom (deceased), Jonathan, James, Peter, and Andrew.
Jon has a BS in Manufacturing Engineering (1999) and an MS in Mechanical Engineering (2007) from Brigham Young University, and served an LDS proselytizing mission in Olongapo, Philippines from 2000-2002.

Latest posts by Jonathan Goff (see all)
- Random Thoughts: A Joint International Debris Remediation Effort - October 22, 2021
- Unorthodox Reusable Lunar Landers Concepts - June 12, 2021
- Goff Family 2021 Summer Sabbatical Part 1: Utah Trip - June 1, 2021
Jon, sorry to disturb your peace, but this has to be said. I am taking an exception with the hotlinking. And not only you hot-linked the image, you apparently linked to the big image and then told browsers to down-scale it. This is not a good Net citizinship, indeed it’s not.
— Pete
The new pictures of the dragon are also interesting. And there’s this interesting comment on the dragon page: “All systems designed to support long durations in space, including potential lunar fly-by missions”.
Must say that this is a beautiful picture that I hadn’t caught. Thanks!
If you have an LCD that displays in portrait mode, it’s especially striking.
Dan Schmelzer
Loose the turbomachinery, and it starts to look a lot sexier 🙂
but yeah, please dont hotlink, providing a local downscaled copy and an url to original would be the best behaviour
I see that you have been following the happenings of the SpaceX program. I thought you might like to know that the X-Prize foundation is ramping up for another contest as well. You can follow the first stages at http://www.zannel.com/xprixe