Hey everybody, welcome back to the Elon Musk Podcast.
This is a show where we discuss the critical Crossroads, The
Shape, SpaceX, Tesla X, The Boring Company, and Neuralink,
and I'm your host, Will Walden. If you want uninterrupted
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show notes. This episode is going to be a
little bit different. I'm going to be talking off the
cuff about Spacex's Starship, which will be doing its third
test flight, hopefully on Thursday of this week.
Now, either Thursday or Friday. We're still waiting for the FAA
to approve Starship's flight, but everything else is in place.
SpaceX has tested the rocket booster numerous times.
They've done cryogenic testing, which means they fill up the
booster with cryogenic fluid and that makes it absolutely super
cold because when a rocket fires its engines, it gets extremely
hot. Now the fuel inside is pumped
through. They make sure that the
cryogenics work. They make sure that all the
plumbing works on the base station down at stage zero.
Stage zero is where they launched the rocket from.
So they have the the rocket launching facility down at Boca
Chica Beach, which is also known as Starbase, and the ground
facilities, they've had a huge revamp recently they've added
new, I've added new fuel decks, they've added new plumbing to
the thing. It's been millions of dollars in
the making and they've also added new piping.
They've added new electronics to the the launch deck.
They've also added a water deluge system, and if you're not
familiar what a water deer system is, it basically pumps
millions of gallons of water underneath the rocket for noise
suppression and so basically the rocket doesn't explode the
launchpad. This has kilotons worth of
power. It is the most powerful rocket
and the biggest rocket that's ever flown.
They made it to space last time for the Ift 2 flight, IFT 1
didn't go too well, but it went, you know, better than expected.
Elon has said numerous times he didn't think it was gonna even
get off the pad, but it cleared the pad, it launched And now the
wonderful thing is they learned from the mistakes in IFT One
from IFT one and both the rocket and the booster and the ship
itself. Starship exploded during IFT
One. Same thing happened during IFT
2, but during IFT 2 they started this thing called the Hot
staging technique, and hot staging is when they ignite the
rocket which is on top of the booster during stage separation.
So about 50 seconds into the flight, I think it's about 50
seconds. About a minute into the flight,
they start to separate the the rocket and the booster itself.
And that's right after Max Q, which is the most dynamic
pressure that's put on the rocket during this flight.
And once they make it past Max Q, they know they can go to the
next stage, which is stage separation.
Now stage separation is very important because you can't send
the rocket booster and the Starship to space.
The booster has to come back, land, get refurbished and then
go up again. So what they did last time, hot
staging at about a minute ish into the flight, they separated,
started separating the booster and the ship.
And when they did that they ignited the ship's rocket
engines, which is in itself this is a rarely done move in Space
Flight because it's just not needed.
But something this powerful like need to push the booster away
from the ship and they need that extra kick that the ship can get
from the booster because it's pushing against the booster as
the booster still pushing forward and up.
So they use that kick stage the the hot staging to push it up
even further and faster. So when they do that, the
booster gets sent back down towards Earth.
It does a flip, almost a full flip at that point, and then
it's going to reignite its engines.
The booster will reignite its engines, 33 Raptor engines when
they started, but they're going to do a few of them on the way
back in, what they do with a Falcon 9 rocket, very similar.
And then they'll land the booster.
This time I FT3, which we're talking about, they're going to
be landing that softly in the Gulf of Mexico.
Now, if this all goes as planned, the booster won't blow
up. They'll do a very soft landing
in the Gulf of Mexico because they have to learn how to land
this. Elon said it took about 15
flights for the Falcon 9 to land properly.
Now if that's the case, SpaceX has about 10 more flights before
the booster will land properly and the ship will land properly.
But for Falcon Nine, they didn't have a top half of it.
The fairing in anything on top of the booster is expendable,
except when they send people to space.
So the fairing just falls back down to Earth for a Falcon 9.
And with Starship, there's a whole upper stage that they have
to land, and they're going to land this thing vertically.
Now the difference between IFT 2 and IFT 3?
There's a couple. There's a few things we have to
talk about as far as differences go, But before we do that, let's
talk about what happened to the IFT 2 ship.
It's a few minutes into the flight after the stage
separation, after the booster blew up.
As it was doing the flip, they did the flight termination
system because they figured that the booster wasn't going to make
it, so they blew it up. And few minutes into the flight
after that, the ship was exploded as well because it
wasn't going to make it. They released too much fuel they
were going to do, they're going to bleed some fuel out, and then
they had to terminate the flight at that point.
So Booster didn't make it, Ship didn't make it.
But from the data that they gathered from both of those
occurrences, they made improvements for IFT 3.
So when IFT 3 happens, we're hoping for a full stage
separation, hot staging, and the flip maneuver by the Booster.
This thing is massive by the way.
If you've never seen this thing, it is about 250 feet tall.
So think of a 25 story building, One of the biggest things that's
ever flown to be honest with you, because it's so round as
well. It's so big.
It's 30 feet around, it's 9 meters in diameter.
So The thing is massive, massive.
And they're gonna do the flip maneuver, soft land it in the
Gulf of Mexico, hopefully. And if they do that, that is a
huge win. That's huge for a SpaceX 'cause.
Then they can move forward with a guided soft landing at to
certain parts of the ocean, or they can have a or sorry, the
Gulf of Mexico. Or they could do a guided burn
back towards Starbase and eventually I don't think they're
gonna be doing it right away. They have another launch tower
that they want to build before. I believe they're going to do a
some sort of landing at Starbase.
So having a landing pad at Starbase would be OK catching it
with the tower, that's what they're going for because they
can't do a landing on the booster without catching it.
But if you've never seen the the Catch tower, it's it's also
massive 400 foot tall 410 I believe it is 413 feet tall.
It's a massive structure and when they catch this thing 250
foot tall booster on a 400 foot tall tower, it's going to be
absolutely amazing. So if they do that event,
they'll do that eventually. I'm probably going to give them
about 10 more flights before they even try that.
They have to do a bunch of guided flights, make sure that
everything works perfectly fine, and then if they can get it
mailed for five or six flights in a row, I believe they'll be
ready to catch it. But they need to get the second
tower up, because if something does happen to the catch tower
or the launch tower, it's the same thing.
Launch and catch is the same thing, so something happens to
one of the towers. They need to have a backup
because they can't just wait months.
If the booster comes in hot, breaks a bunch of stuff 'cause
there's hundreds of miles of cables and pipes that connect
everything at Starbase if anything goes wrong.
This thing is made out of stainless steel too.
So if anything goes wrong, shards of stainless steel could
explode and just devastate some of these pipes, some of the
tankers, some of the tanks equipment nearby, it's it would
be a massive process to get it back up and flying.
And also at that point they have to deal with federal
regulations, if FAA, etcetera. And then that's going to be a
big deal. So if something happens that's a
mishap, they have to do a full mishap investigation and it
could push them back a year. So they have to make sure this
is absolutely perfect for IFT 3. They're going to try to land the
booster in the Gulf of Mexico and they're going to, which this
is a cool part. They're going to launch the
Starship all the way to the Indian Ocean.
Before they were going to go to the off the coast of Hawaii,
Kauai for the first two flights. That was their plan and they
switched it to the Indian Ocean for safety reasons.
We're not exactly sure, Elon and SpaceX hasn't released the
details about the safety reasons, but they're gonna be
landing in the Indian Ocean. And when they land in the Indian
Ocean with a ship, they would have done a few things in
between the launch and the landing.
One of those things is a fuel. It's they're moving fuel from
one container to another container within the Starship
itself. This is for a bigger problem
that SpaceX is solving, which is they're gonna be doing in orbit
refueling. So they need to make sure that
the fuel can actually move around the Starship, and also
they're going to be checking the payload doors for Starship, and
the payload doors are very important payload doors.
It's a Pez dispenser at this point for the Starlink missions.
Now Starlink, if you're not familiar, it's Spacex's
broadband rural satellite Internet service, and it's a
massive moneymaker for SpaceX. Now, if they could launch
hundreds of Starlinks in a month as opposed to 30, it would be a
game changer. For SpaceX, it would.
The revenue would increase dramatically.
They can have more coverage and more people using the service.
Better service for everybody. It's just a no brainer.
And Starship can hold an infinite amount more than a
Falcon 9, there's just no comparison to it.
So if they can nail this time the next flight, they may launch
some Starlink satellites into orbit, adjust to test it and see
if it works. So that might be an interesting
one for IFT 4, but IFT 3, if they do, they're just going to
test the mechanism to launch those out and the Hatch, things
like that. And as far as we know, that's it
except for landing in the Indian Ocean and getting to orbit or
getting the space for the Starship.
And as far as we know, that's the those are the big ones,
those are the big takeaways for this launch.
I want to, I want to thank you of course for listening to the
show. If you are a Space Flight
enthusiast, come check us out over on YouTube.
Space news Pod. Space News Pod on YouTube is my
Space Flight channel. Please take a second.
Go over there. Subscribe.
Gonna be doing a live launch for the Starship tomorrow morning,
Thursday morning at 7:00 AM, so get ready for that.
It's going to be wild. Hopefully the FAA comes through
with the launch license within the next 12 hours.
That's all we got though, and that's all we're waiting for.
Thanks again, everybody. Take care of yourselves and I
will see you in the next one. And make sure to subscribe to
the show too. And the Space news pod on
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