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.
I'm your host, Will Walden, and on this episode we're going to
be talking about IFT 4 some because that just happened,
which is really great. It turned out pretty great for a
SpaceX. Also, we're going to be talking
about what's next for Starship, IFT 5, IFT 6 possibly.
And then we're going to get into some of the next thing, which is
a huge deal. SpaceX and Starship on the
surface of Mars, retrieving some samples.
What's that all about? OK, so let's go to IFT 4.
It happened yesterday. Absolutely as perfect as you can
get for this flight. What SpaceX was aiming to do for
this is to soft land the booster in the Gulf of Mexico, which
they performed. Florida State, Absolutely
perfect. There's one.
Raptor out. But that's OK.
As they flew out, it was fine. Everything was fine.
All the systems work great. Booster landed in the Gulf of
Mexico. They tip it over.
It's in the Gulf of Mexico now somewhere and it's about 7
minutes into the flight that all happened.
Boost back burned, everything was great, and then stage
separation, everything perfect. Everything was perfect,
everything looked great. And then the ship kept going.
The ship separated, kept going all the way to the Indian Ocean,
did the belly flop maneuver, which who knew that was going to
happen and who knew if that was going to be successful.
SpaceX had a pretty good hunch that it was going to be
successful and they did all the engineering possible to make it
successful. And what we saw was the Starship
going through the atmosphere, going as.
Hot as possible. And then soft landing after it
did the kick maneuver so it could go straight vertical and
soft landed in the Indian Ocean. Perfect.
We didn't have any video of it landing, but they did hear the
Raptors roar. As it touched.
Down soft landing in the Indian Ocean.
Now this is for IFT 4. So IFT 4 is a massive success
for Starship. Not only did they successfully
do this mission, but now they set themselves up for the next
few missions. And what they?
Can accomplish now before IFT 4 started, before they even
launched the thing, Elon was on social media, he was talking
about what's next, what's up for IFT five?
Well, he wants to continue down this path.
The same thing he wants to nail the landing.
He wants to make sure the Starship lands in the Indian
Ocean, but he wants to make sure that the booster lands at
Starbase, on the chopsticks at Boca Chica, Texas, next to the
Gulf of Mexico, on land at their facility where they launched
these things. Not in the Gulf of Mexico where
it's safe, where they won't destroy anything if they mess up
or. Nowhere close.
To land they, you know, like IFT 4 was nowhere close to land.
So the IFT 4 incident report will be much less than IFT.
Three. Because nothing really happened
that was out of the ordinary. This is exactly what they
wanted. So landing the booster in the
Gulf of Mexico and landing the ship in the Indian Ocean.
Exactly what they wanted. So IFT 5 Elon wants to bring the
booster back to the star base facility after only doing one
test of the landing of the booster.
Is this kind of an insane idea? And he was on Ellie in space
too. She interviewed him.
Go. Check out that interview, it's
great. But watch this whole thing
first. I need I need the the watch time
so. She interviewed him, he was
adamant about landing it. He's super excited about landing
it for IFT 5. Are they going to?
Do that. I'm not 100% sure if they will.
It seems like Elon wants to and if they get enough data from the
booster landing, this shows that they were absolutely pinpoint
precision in the Gulf of Mexico. I don't see why they.
Wouldn't try it. Other than there's not a really
more than one test case. Whenever you do engineering,
whenever you do science, anything, when you're testing,
coding anything, test it against a few different things.
Test it a few times, test it three or four times.
Make sure everything works properly because the next one,
there might be something that's. Busted on it.
Might be something that's not exactly perfect, and it might
not land precisely, but even in that case you could.
Detonate it over the Gulf of Mexico if you.
See something? 'S wrong.
But what happens if something's wrong in the last few seconds or
the last, I don't know, 20 seconds when it's over?
Starbase ready to land? Well, that's a.
Whole different thing. And yes, the.
Booster is about 250 feet tall, it's made out of stainless steel
and it's absolutely massive. So if it does come into Starbase
scream in a hot and they can't destroy it on its way back,
well, there's going to be some problems.
And that's something that I don't know if the SpaceX
engineers will push back against with Elon, because sometimes
Elon pushes back against them. There was early times in Space
XS history that the engineers want to do something with carbon
fiber or some sort of synthetic. And Elon pushback said, hey,
let's do this in stainless steel because stainless steel's easy
to get, It's easy to manufacture.
And also we can ramp this up really fast because we have to
iterate these designs. We have to do hundreds of these
rockets in order to make life on Mars a thing.
So do you think the engineers are going to set like push back
on Elon? I don't know.
That's going to be, that's going to be a tough one for the
engineers because Elon's the head of engineering over there.
He's the head of everything. So if they push back against
him, I don't know I I think that they should wait a few times
I've talked about this before, but I do think they should wait
a few times before they actually land the rocket back at starbase
just to make sure that everything is absolutely
accurate with the landing. Let me know in the comments down
below if you think it'll land on the.
Fifth attempt IFT 5. Now there's something else that
Elon and company over at SpaceX are going to be part of in the
near future. Well, I would shouldn't say near
future, but in the future with NASA, this is a huge deal.
So right now we have a Rover on Mars which is collecting samples
of soil and possible life, you know, old life on Mars.
And they need some way to go pick up those canisters.
And Eli and the company of SpaceX have just won a.
Contract with NASA. To go try, and I shouldn't say
go try and pick it up yet, but they're going to demonstrate how
they could pick up these little canisters like this big, like I
don't know how to say it on the screen, but about that big of
Martian soil, Martian, Martian regolith that could contain
ancient life. So if they get this contract,
it's like a $1.8 million contract around there, almost
$2,000,000. I think it's 1.5 actually.
Then if they do this properly, SpaceX would be launching a
Starship to Mars. But the Starship alone can't get
the the samples of the regolith of the soil from Mars.
They have to have some sort of Rover.
So SpaceX may fit what I think they're gonna do.
I think they're gonna get a cyber truck and put it on Mars
and equip it with something, I don't know, or maybe a small
Rover, I'm not sure. But they can fit a massive
amount of things into a Starship.
So whatever they have to do, whatever they have to do,
whoever they have to team with to get another Rover down there
to go pick up all these samples. I think SpaceX will one.
They're already partnered with NASA to land on the moon, right?
They're already partnered with NASA to fly astronauts.
They're already partnered with NASA for all the Falcon Nine
things. So Starship, once it's proven on
the moon, could easily, I shouldn't say easily because
engineering's super hard, but they could make it.
And Elon has said this, that it's easier to land on Mars than
it is on the moon because there's actually some gravity
there. And it, it'll be a fun, fun
thing to watch if they can actually get the Starship to
Mars, land it, and then a Rover pops out of the Hatch.
Or what if they send people to Mars?
What if that's their proposal? What if what their proposal
isn't, hey, we're going to send a Rover like everybody else.
We have 4 astronauts that are willing to do this and we can
train them, we can give them space suits, we can do
everything. And they can walk on Mars, go
grab these samples, bring them back.
And maybe there's a Rover that would look like a cyber truck
that they drive around to get these samples.
That would be, they'll be so cool, but that's all speculation
right now. They haven't won the contract
yet and they have a little while to do this.
So we're going to keep our ears and eyes open to see what
happens with this. But this, that's a huge, huge
deal. Now, IFT 6, what's going to be
happening with that? We're not 100% sure because if
they try to do the landing at Starbase, then IFT 6 is going to
be similar to what they do with IT5 unless IFT 5 completely
fails, then they'll go back to the drawing board and go back to
the go back to the Gulf of Mexico.
But IFT 6, IFT 7, not 100% sure what they're going to be doing.
But if they do land a booster on IFT five, I think IFT 6, they're
going to try to go to orbit and I think they're going to launch
a few Starlink satellites just as a test.
Even one would be a a great test.
So let me know what you think in the comments down below.
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