Welcome back to the Deep Dive and today, wow, we have a
massive stack of updates on the Starship program.
It really feels like like the company has just fundamentally
changed gears. It really does.
We're not just watching big rockets explode anymore, are we?
No, not at all. It's a completely different
phase. It feels less about the
spectacle, you know, the big fireball, and more about the the
ruthlessness of the engineering. Ruthlessness.
That is the perfect word for it, right?
It is. The pace has shifted from let's
see what happens to something more like we need to make this
boring. And we have ton of data today
covering what, 4 critical pillars, Yeah. 4 big ones.
The survival testing of Booster 19.
A pretty physics defying update to the Raptor engines.
A really aggressive corporate acquisition.
Oh yeah, we have to get to that one.
And a strategic pivot that basically changes the road map
from Mars direct to Moon first. That moon pivot is the one that
really got me because, you know, the goal is Mars.
It's on all the T. Shirt.
It always has been. But we're going to find out why
maybe, just maybe, taking a detour to the moon is the only
way to make Mars happen in our lifetime.
Exactly. And that's the mission for this
deep dive to connect the technical updates, you know, the
hardware. The nuts and bolts.
To the bigger strategy, the dream of making us multi
planetary. OK, so let's get into it.
Let's start with the big one, the heavy hitter booster 19 the.
Juggernaut. Yeah, the sources are calling it
a juggernaut, but to me, I mean, it looks just like the others.
It's a big shiny grain silo. What's so different here?
Well, it's all about what's under the skin.
Booster 19 is what the sources are calling a version three
prototype. So not just a small tweet.
No, this is a structural overhaul and to get why that
matters, you have to look at what happened to its
predecessor, Booster 18. Right, Booster 18, that one,
that one didn't have a great day.
To put it my wildly it arrived at the Massey test site, which
is basically their torture chamber for these things, and it
ruptured almost immediately. So it didn't even get into the
real testing. It didn't even make it deep into
the campaign. It failed structurally before
the real pressure was even on. Wow.
A day one failure that's a nightmare for any engineering
team. It is so you can imagine when
Booster 19 rolled out, they were not taking any chances.
They had to prove that this version 3 design fixed whatever
fatal flaw killed Booster 18. So they just threw everything
at. Me everything.
The sources described the testing regime as nothing short
of an impossible test run. Impossible test run.
I love that I was reading the logs on the frosty campaign.
It just sounds miserable for a piece of metal.
Frosty is an understatement. They're running tests daily.
We're talking cryo tests where they load it with freezing cold
propellant. And that stuff is what, hundreds
of degrees below 0? Oh yeah.
Liquid oxygen, liquid methane. When you pump that into a steel
tank, the metal shrinks. It gets brittle.
It wants to crack. And then right after freezing
it's solid. They do the opposite.
Right. They hit it with ambient
pressure tests. They fill it with gas at normal
temperatures to check for leaks. So you're freezing it, then
warming it, banding and contracting this giant structure
over and over again. That's thermal shock.
It should be creating micro fractures all over the place.
It should be. And then there was this one
moment. A photographer named Jordan
caught it on February 6th. The depressing.
Oh I saw the pictures. The description was just wild.
The rapid depressurization event, it's where they simulate
A catastrophic failure. They fully pressurize the tanks.
We're talking millions of pounds of force pushing outwards.
And then just RIP the vents open.
Just like that, and the photos show these massive chunks of ice
just shaking loose and falling off the booster, with these
heavy vapor clouds sinking all around it.
It sounds incredibly violent. It is.
The air around the rocket just instantly condenses because of
the cold gas. It creates this heavy sinking
fog. Visually it's stunning.
But from an engineering standpoint.
Even more impressive, usually when you stress a new airframe
this hard, especially after the last one failed so badly, you
expect to see something. A sensor trips, you see a crack,
something. And with Booster 19.
The word used in the report was unimpressed.
The booster was unimpressed. It just marched through these
tests without a single visible issue.
No leaks, no ruptures, nothing. That is an insane turn around to
go from a booster that literally bursts on arrival to one that
just shrugs off that kind of test.
It tells you the design changes in version 3 work.
The cryo campaign is done. It's already back in the mega
Bay getting its engines installed.
OK, but let's go back to that failure on Booster 18.
You said it ruptured. Why?
What was the actual point of failure?
So this leads us right into our second pillar vertical
integration. The failure of 18 wasn't
actually the main tank design, it was a COPV rupture.
COPV OK, stop. We need to explain that because
it sounds like super generic aerospace jargon, but what these
things are is kind of terrifying.
They really are. COPD stands for Composite
Overwrapped Pressure Vessel. So think of like a high pressure
scuba tank, but instead of just steel, it's wrapped in layers
and layers of carbon fiber. They hold gases like helium or
nitrogen at thousands of PSI. So they're basically controlled
bombs strapped to the inside of the rocket.
Effectively, yes, and if one of those let's go, it releases an
enormous amount of energy, it can easily take out the whole
stage, which is probably what happened with Booster 18.
So SpaceX bought these tanks from an outside supplier.
The part fails. The normal corporate playbook is
you call the supplier, you yell, you demand a refund.
Maybe you sue them, or you find a new vendor and then you wait
six months for them to spin up and build you a new prototype.
But this is SpaceX. So their solution wasn't to ask
for a fix, their solution was to buy the company.
Wait, they actually bought the supplier?
Yep. They acquired the aerospace
subsidiary of a company called Hexagon Puris ASA for $15
million. This was the company making
those exact cylinders. That is the ultimate I'll do it
myself move. It's not by the part, it's by
the factory. It's classic vertical
integration and it makes perfect sense.
First, you just eliminate all the communication lag.
No more waiting for emails. Exactly.
You don't have SpaceX engineers emailing some external vendor
about a valve fitting and waiting three days for a reply.
Those engineers are now in the same building.
They're on the internal Slack. Right, the per my last e-mail
delay is gone. Gone.
But more importantly, it lets you customize everything.
Before Hexagon was making these cylinders for general aerospace,
you know, satellites, maybe other rockets.
They were kind of off the shelf. They know.
Now they're making them specifically for Starship.
They can change the carbon fiber weave to handle the exact
thermal stresses of a Starship launch.
They're not stuck with what's in a catalog.
That shows just how serious they are about quality control, the
sources hinted that may be previous issues were just, you
know, ground handling mistakes or something lost in translation
and by. Bringing it in house, they
control everything. If a faulty part is holding up a
multi billion dollar program, well spending 15,000,000 to own
the solution is actually pretty cheap.
It's an. Investment in speed And Speaking
of speed and power, let's shift to the engines, the shiny new
toys, the. Raptor threes, yes.
The reports say SpaceX just produced its 100th Raptor 3.
I think it was engine #1O2 spotted down at McGregor and.
This is where the engineering nerds, myself included, start to
get really excited. Well, count.
Me in because the stats on Raptor 3 versus Raptor 2, they
just look impossible on paper. It's smaller, it's lighter, but
it's way more powerful. How does that even work?
It's a. Total paradox.
OK, let's run the numbers. Raptor 2 was an incredible
engine, pushing around 230 metric tons of force.
A workhorse. But to hold a workhorse Raptor
3, it's hitting about 280 metric puns.
That's a 22% jump in raw power. Do they?
Just turn up the dial. How do you get that in a?
Way yeah, they crank the chamber pressure they went from 300 bar
in Raptor 2 up to 330 bar in Raptor 3.
Some tests are even hitting 350. That's.
Just I can't even imagine that kind of pressure.
It's like having an elephant stand on your gum, but the
elephant is also on fire. That's.
A pretty good analogy. Now, usually when you pump that
much more fuel and pressure through an engine, you just
destroy your efficiency, yeah. Dumping fuel for raw power like
a drag racer. And the mass flow, which is the
amount of fuel rushing through it did go up.
It went from about 1600 kilograms per second to almost
2000. So it.
Is guzzling more fuel it? Is but, and this is the really
crazy insight, the specific impulse or ISP which is the
efficiency metric also went up it.
Got more efficient? Yes.
It went from about 330 seconds to 350 seconds.
That's a 5% increase in efficiency.
Hold on. It's burning more fuel per
second, but it's getting more thrust.
For every drop of fuel, it burns you.
Got it. Despite that higher flow rate,
it actually burns about 4% less fuel for every ton of push it
generates. It's leaner and meaner.
How is that? Possible more power and better
mileage at the same time it comes.
Down to how they built it. If you look at a picture of a
Raptor 2 engine, it's just this tangled mess of plumbing.
Oh yeah. It looks like the back of a
washing machine exploded. Tubes and wires everywhere.
Total chaos. Now look at Raptor 3.
It looks naked. It looks like 1 sleek piece of
metal. OK, yeah.
Where do? All the pipes go they're.
Inside the walls of the engine, they're using this advanced 3D
printing to print the cooling channels and the manifolds
directly into the structure so. Instead of welding a tube onto
the outside, the tube is now a tunnel running through the metal
skin. Exactly.
And because of that one change, they got a roughly 75% reduction
in joints 70. 5% fewer joints, yeah, OK.
That is the killer stat for me, right?
Think about the plumbing in your house.
Where does it leak? Always.
At the connection, the elbow, the valve.
Never in the middle of a straight pipe, it's always at
the joint. By basically printing the system
as one piece, they just deleted 75% of the potential failure
points and I'm. Guessing fewer joints also means
less weight, A huge. Weight reduction Raptor 2 was
about 1630 kilograms. Raptor 3 is down to 1525.
They shaved over 100 kilos off the engine Which?
Doesn't sound like a lot until you remember there are 30, three
of them on the booster. Exactly. 100 kilos times 33
engines is 3.3 metric tons. That's 3.3 tons of free payload
capacity you just created. That's an entire pickup truck
full of supplies you can now take to orbit just from making
the engine lighter. That's.
Incredible. But the engineering is just the
tool, right? The big question is where are we
pointing this thing? And that brings us to the
biggest strategic shift in this whole update, the moon pivot
this. One has caused was a lot of
waves online. For years Elon Musk has been
laser focused on Mars. Mars city occupy Mars.
It's a whole brand. It is, but recently all the
rhetoric has shifted. The new focus is a
self-sustaining lunar base before the Mars City.
And I could. Already hear the Internet
screaming? Mars is cancelled, but that's
not really what's happening, is it?
No. Not at all.
Mars is not cancelled, but the path to Mars has changed because
of a really brutal reality of orbital mechanics.
It's called the alignment window, right?
The. Home and transfer window
exactly. Earth and Mars, they're like 2
runners on a circular track. They only line up for an
efficient throw from one to the other once every 20-6 months
over. Two years.
That's a long time to wait for the bunts.
It's. A complete disaster for
innovation. Imagine this.
You launch a ship to Mars. It takes six months to get
there. What if it crashes on landing or
a life support seal fails? You can't just send a repair
crew you. Have to wait almost two years
for the planets to line up again just to try sending a fix the.
Feedback loop is just agonizingly slow.
It's. The iteration killer.
SpaceX thrives on rapid iteration.
Test, break, fix, repeat. You can't do that on a 26 month
cycle. You'll be dead of old age before
you get the prototype right So. Enter the moon.
Enter. The moon loop.
The moon is only three days away.
If you refuel in orbit, you can get there and maybe 2 and you.
Can go pretty much anytime you want.
You can. Launch three times a week if you
had the Rockets ready, so if. Something breaks on the moon,
you get. The data back instantly.
You fix the design, you launch the new version next week.
Not in two years. That makes.
Perfect sense. It's a training ground that's
right in our backyard, they call.
It a tech accelerator, all the stuff you need for Mars
habitats, radiation shielding, water recycling, growing food.
Developing that on Mars for the first time is terrifyingly
risky. But.
Developing it on the moon is just and inconvenienced if it
fails, right? If your toilet breaks on the
moon, you can abort the mission and be home in three days.
If your toilet breaks on Mars, that.
Is a very, very bad day. So the moon lets them perfect
all the survival tech, but the sources also mention a pretty
big economic angle to this off planet production.
Yeah, this. Is where it starts to sound like
science fiction, but the physics checks out it.
Really does. If you have a base on the moon,
you can start manufacturing things there.
The source specifically mentioned AI satellites.
Why would? You build a satellite on the
moon. Gravity.
The moon has 1/6 of Earth's gravity and basically no
atmosphere. Launching from Earth is hard.
You're fighting thick air and a deep gravity well.
It's why rockets are 90% fuel. But.
On the moon on. The moon you might not even need
a big rocket for cargo you could use a mast driver, which.
Is essentially a giant electromagnetic rail gun.
That's it. You use solar powered rails to
just shoot the finished satellite into orbit or even
back towards Earth. You're not burning tons of
chemical fuel, the potential output is immense.
So by. Going to the moon first.
They aren't giving up on Mars. They're building the factory
that builds the technology to get to Mars.
Precisely building the moon base builds the capital and the tech
to make that Mars timeline, which is still the twenty 30s,
actually feasible. Instead of just a pipe dream.
It turns a crusade into a supply chain supply.
Chain. Yeah, that sounds boring.
But boring is how you actually get big things done.
It is. And that really brings us full
circle. Look at what we've covered.
We have a frost covered Juggernaut Booster 19 that
survived these impossible tests because of a better design we
have. Them literally buying a company
just to stop leaks and get better quality control on one
component we. Have a lighter, stronger joint
free engine in Raptor 3 that basically prints its own veins
to be more efficient and. It all culminates in this
strategic pivot to the Moon to speed up the whole development
cycle by escaping that 26 month Mars window.
It's a. Lot of moving parts, but they
are all finally moving in the same direction.
That's. The big take away The So what
for someone listening to this I. Think it redefines what we think
of as progress in space. Progress isn't just planting a
flag anymore. Progress is building a
logistical system. It's factories, reusable
engines, rapid transit. It's about making space travel
mundane. Mundane.
Is good mundane means reliable? Mundane means maybe I can buy a
ticket one day. Exactly but.
Before we sign off, I want to leave you with one last thought.
It came from some notes on the Crew 12 mission, and it really
stuck with me. We talked about all this amazing
hardware, but the human element has these bizarre challenges we
haven't even solved. Oh, this?
Is a good one the medical supply problem, right?
As we look at these long missions to Mars or even long
stays on the Moon, think about this.
We can't even take IV fluids to Mars because.
They expire. Exactly.
Saline bags, antibiotics, all of it has a shelf life of about two
years. A round trip to Mars could
easily take longer than that. So the next Great frontier isn't
just a bigger rocket, it's. Space Pharmacy.
It's. Figuring out how to manufacture
medicine from scratch using recycled water in 0 gravity.
Because if you get a simple infection on day 800 of the
mission, the medicine you packed on earth might just be useless.
Chalk dust it. Really just highlights the
incredible fragility of keeping humans alive away from Earth.
The hardware is hard, but keeping the squishy people
insight it alive, that's the real challenge it sure.
Is, but that is a deep dive for another day.
Thanks for listening. Stay curious and we'll see you
on the next one.