ThrustMaster 9000 aerospike rocket engine

The ThrustMaster 9000 aerospike rocket engine was a model of falt-nosed, wedge-shaped podracer engine manufactured by Galactic Power Engineering. The company's GPE-3130 Podracer used twin aerospike engines for its primary thrust, with smaller ramjet engines on nacelle-mounted outriggers augmenting the larger engines and powering the vessel's altitude jets. The podracer was designed for little else beside speed, which its engines provided, but due to their power control curve the vehicle was incredibly hard to handle, especially in tight spaces or on sharp corners. The aerospike engines also required large amounts of maintenance, made the GPE-3130 look akward, and used a volatile fuel that exploded at the slightest provocation.^[1]

In 32 BBY,^[3] the Gran podracer Mawhonic used a GPE-3130 with its engines painted green during the Boonta Eve Classic podrace on the desert planet Tatooine. During the race, the rival racer Sebulba forced Mawhonic's vehicle into a cliff face in Mushroom Mesa, causing the left-hand aerojet engine to explode. Loose from the vehicle's repulsorpod, the second engine then continue on alone before dropping to the desert floor and tearing apart as it tumbled through the sand.^[2]

Behind the scenes

Jay Shuster's concept art of Mawhonic's engines

ThrustMaster 9000 aerospike rocket engines first appeared in the 1999 prequel trilogy film, Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace. Concept art of engines was created by Jay Shuster on November 18, 1996, and a one-eighth scale maquette of the entire vehicle was also made.^[4] A full-scale model of the engines was also then created for use in the film, with all of the podracers being created over a period of five months from surplus military airplane parts in England. They were then shipped to Tunisia on July 17, 1997 to be filmed, but a severe storm on July 30 damaged all the podracers to some degree, with the damange ranging from having parts ripped off to almost complete destruction. The international crew who had been about to return to England remained in Tunisia and were able to repair the damage so that the starting grid scene could be shot in Chott el Gharsa between August 5-6, 1997.^[5] The engines were first identified in Endless Vigil, a 2016 Star Wars Roleplaying supplement for Fantasy Flight Games' Star Wars: Force and Destiny game.^[1]

In the non-canon LEGO Star Wars: The Freemaker Adventures episode "Race on Tatooine,"^[6] which aired on July 18, 2016,^[7] Mawhonic is shown using his podracer and its engines in the 29th Annual Bricklayers' Classic podrace on Tatooine. During the event, the bounty hunter Dengar at one point boards the Gran's pod and then jumps from the repulsorpod on to one of the ThrustMaster 9000 aerospike rocket engines before leaping forward onto the racer^[6] Gasgano's Ord Pedrovia vehicle.^[8] The engines have also appeared in two non-canon LEGO adaptations of the Boonta Eve Classic race shown in The Phantom Menace, first "Exit from Endor," the first episode of LEGO Star Wars: Droid Tales,^[9] which aired on July 6, 2015,^[10] and then in the 2022 video game LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga.^[11]