The new Cortes-800 amplification system provides terawatt peak power in a compact package. Seeded with our compact Trestles Ti:sapphire oscillator, the Cortes-800 consists of three chirped pulse amplification (CPA) stages that fit on a single optical table. Pulse energies of greater than 1.5 J are achieved before compression in a vacuum chamber. Active feedback and pulse shaping allows the Cortes-800 to produce extremely high contrast ratios, and sub 30 fs output pulses with peak powers greater than 40 terawatts. Fully integrated timing and control software make the Cortes- 800 a perfect tool for the study of high energy laser- matter interaction. The initial stage of the system consists of the TRESTLES-20 femtosecond oscillator pumped with a 532 nm, 6 W DPSS laser. Generated 20 fs pulses are temporally stretched with Offner triplet technology to 400 ps. To pre-correct for spectral changes incurred as pulses pass through the system, the stretched pulses pass through an acousto-optic programmable dispersive filter. The AOPDF compensates for gain narrowing and wavelength shifting in the amplification stages and for dispersion due to propagation through system components. Before insertion into the first amplification stage, a PISMO Pockels cell pulse picker is used to gate single pulses at a repetition rate of 10 Hz from the oscillator pulse train. The stretched, shaped and picked pulses are then amplified by a WEDGE-10 multi-pass amplifier, providing high contrast ratio. After the initial amplification stage the pulses pass through a spatial filter to increase the beam diameter and improve the spatial quality of the beam. A second PISMO Pockels cell is used to increase the temporal contrast ratio and to protect STAGE-1 from back reflections. The spatially expanded pulses pass through STAGE-2, a 5-pass multi-pass amplifier. Another spatial filter is used to clean the beam before the final amplifying stage, STAGE- 3. The 4-pass power amplifier increases the pulse energy to 1,500 mJ per pulse. Pulse compression takes place within a sealed vacuum chamber with a dielectric grating compressor. Grating position, and thus final pulse duration, are adjusted with the help of computer controlled motorized stages. A deformable mirror (DM) coupled with a Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor is used to correct wavefront distortions, resulting in a 0.8 Strehl ratio.