SuperDraco

SuperDraco is a hypergolic-propellant rocket engine designed and built by SpaceX as part of its Draco family, and it is the engine behind the launch escape system of the SpaceX Dragon 2 crew capsule. Eight of them, mounted in four pods of two, give fault-tolerant propulsion that can pull the capsule away from a failing rocket. It burns monomethylhydrazine with dinitrogen tetroxide, a storable, non-cryogenic pair that ignites on contact, so the engines can be fired months after fuelling, restarted many times and throttled deeply, from full thrust down to about one fifth. Each engine is capable of about 73,000 newtons of thrust, roughly 200 times the Draco thruster and more than twice the Kestrel. Its combustion chamber is 3D printed in Inconel, and development was partly funded by NASA. The same engines were flown on the DragonFly test vehicle to prove propulsive landing, and a pad abort test succeeded on 6 May 2015.