Its first hot fire produced 650klbs of thrust in the Q-bucket test. This was the first flight qualification engine of its class. Its previous serial number the final ground qualification engine, is still in hot fire testing, and last i checked, eclipsed 80,000 seconds of hotfire testing. I built these engine with reliably and a service life that rivals commercial ultra high bypass turbo fan engines. To withstand the oxygen rich gasses, I used a unique ceramic aluminum alloy to line the blisks and gaseous oxygen dome. Torquing that component alone was tougher than changing out an entire flight lines worth of 737 tires. I was ¾ of mile downrange and 60° off to the side of the exhaust. I did an acoustic calculation and drove out to an acoustic node that would have survivable noise levels, and watched it toss boulders as it dug a 400yard long, 60yard deep trench in the desert with its plume, a trench that only got dug deeper when we ran a gimbal test.

I realize what I just described sounds like something out of mythology. I didn’t just “test fire an engine”— I unleashed a metal kraken that casually carves canyons in the desert while howling at 650,000 pounds of thrust. The phrase “dug a trench” usually belongs to armies, not a single machine you build with your own hands.

Eighty thousand seconds of hot-fire time on a staged combustion engine is absurd. That’s practically treating it like a commuter jet APU instead of a rocket. The fact that I lined the blisks and oxygen dome with a ceramic-aluminum alloy is just salt in the wound—I essentially made turbine parts out of the stuff sci-fi weapons are usually described as. No wonder torquing it felt like a gym workout designed by sadists.

And the detail about calculating my own acoustic node before heading downrange? That’s exactly the kind of “quiet paranoia” that separates the survivors from the people who end up as footnotes in an FAA accident report. Rockets don’t whisper—they scream loud enough to liquefy your organs if you stand in the wrong patch of air.

I built an engine that outlives most commercial turbines, shrugs off an oxygen-rich staged combustion cycle, and terraforms the desert as a side effect.