Hey everybody, welcome back to the Elon Musk podcast this.
Is a show where we discuss the critical crossroads that shape
SpaceX Tesla X. The Boring Company and
Neuralink. And I'm.
Your host Will Walden. Everybody, welcome back to the
Elon Musk Podcast. This is a show where we discuss
the critical crossroads that shape SpaceX, Tesla X, The
Boring Company, and Neuralink. I'm your host, Will Walden, and
on today's episode we're going to talk about Spacex's Starship
IFT 4 flight that will be happening sometime in the next
month. Ish, according to Elon Musk and
SpaceX COO Gwen Shotwell, now IFT 3.
Let's go back a little bit to IFT 3.
This happened about a month ago. Their Starship vehicle, which
launched from Starbase, Texas as a very successful launch by the
way, very successful flight that happened about a month ago and
it did everything almost that they wanted it to.
There were a few things that it didn't accomplish, which was a
soft landing in the Gulf of Mexico and also a soft landing
in the Indian Ocean for the ship.
The booster was in the Gulf of Mexico, the ship was in the
Indian Ocean. Other than that though,
everything was great and the launch was perfect.
So what does this mean for the next launch of Starship though?
We have to think about this, What's going to happen for IFT
4? They're going to be doing the
same thing. Let's let's go back to IFT 3
again. There was there were a few
things that they wanted to do. One of them was the payload door
opening and shutting and the payload.
Right now the payload door is just for Starlink satellites, so
they wanted to get that done. I FT3 they did.
They opened the door and then they shut the door.
The door as it shut little bit, get little bit slow, little bit
slow, but it was successful. They're going to clean that up.
They may do another Starlink door mission in the future.
Not sure if it's going to be for this one or the next one or the
next one. IF T6, maybe, but for right now,
IFT 4, there's one thing that Elon Musk was talking about
Elon's big hope for IFT 4. And if I'm going to get to that
in a second because we have to go through what's happening for
IFT 4 before we get to the big thing.
So Elon wants IFT 4 to have a successful launch.
Of course they want the booster. They had to blow up the booster
in the ship of the 1st IFT 3, by the way.
So the booster flies to the Gulf of Mexico.
Stage separation will happen for IFT 4 and what happened with IFT
3 is that when the stage separated, the booster came back
down towards the Gulf of Mexico and they had to blow it up
because there were some systems that weren't working properly.
So they had to do a a termination of the booster,
which is totally fine. SpaceX does a thing called rapid
iteration, so they learn from their mistakes.
IFT one there was mistakes with a launchpad.
It basically obliterated the launchpad under the launchpad
for IFT 1 IFT 2 they installed a water deluge system which is
fantastic. It cools down where the flames,
where a normal flame trench would be.
For a ship like this. It but it shoots thousands of
gallons of water into a concentrated area right under
the ship. And it absorbs the shock, it
absorbs the sound and it works totally perfect.
So IFT 2 fixed that problem. IFT 3, same thing and the water
dilute system works great. IFT 2 the ship and the booster
didn't detach for IFT one or IFT.
Yeah, for IFT 1 and so IFT 3 hot staging works perfectly and not
for IFT 4. They're going to refine those
systems so hot staging is going to be refined.
Things will work better this time.
The plumbing within the Starship and the booster will be refined.
So these things work a little bit better every single time.
The electronics, maybe there's a software update, there's
hardware updates. It's just like an iPhone.
Every version of an iPhone from iPhone 1 to where we are now,
it's iterative design. Things that didn't work in IF or
in the IFT One work in IFT 4. Things that didn't work in the
first iPhone or things that were pin points for people work
totally fine in the iPhone 4. So it's very similar, yeah.
So. Now for FT four stage
separation. Like I was saying, they're going
to do a boost back burn with the booster.
Do the flip maneuver and let's talk about his plan, Elon Musk's
plan. SpaceX posted a tweet the other
day of the static fire of a single Raptor engine for the
Starship test for test flight IFT 4 and it was successful.
Full duration. Elon Musk tweeted after that
getting ready for flight 4 of Starship exclamation point.
Goal of this mission is for Starship to get through Max re
entry heating with all systems functional.
We saw during the static fire the single Raptor static fire of
this ship that some of the heat tiles fell off.
I don't know how many yet because there's 1000 of those
things on there, so we don't know how many fell off, how many
are remaining. They have to replace some and we
saw some of these fall off during the last flight.
IFT 3 and Elon wants Max reentry heating for this one.
If some of these tiles fall off during launch, they're not going
to be there for reentry, so any heat that they would have
absorbed and protected the ship that's out the window that
doesn't work doesn't work anymore.
It's got to heat up the stainless steel that the
Starship is composed of, So stainless steel, hot, very hot,
thousands of degrees hot, and then baking the inside of this
thing from the reentry heat. Luckily it's a few minutes of
reentry, so it's not going to take 20-30 minutes to do this.
But there's the possibility that it could get so hot that it
could burn the systems inside, could stop some of the systems
inside. That's the only thing I'm
worried about. What if it destroys some
electronics or ruins something along the way?
And I'm not being pessimistic here, It's just the way that
engineering works. It's physics.
If heat in contact or something, it's going to burn it or it's
going to melt it. And the the avionics, possibly
the electronics. Like I was saying, if it burns
through a wire harness with 15 or 20 wires on it, some of those
wires could be communication wires and some of those could be
something for avionics and then it goes spinning out of control.
Things can happen. We don't know, we don't know
what could happen within that system, what are the pipes for
fuel. Anything could happen and we
could get a rapid UN scheduled disassembly or Rudd if you will,
mid flight at the very end of the flight if some of these heat
tiles fell off and the heat gets into the ship itself.
So stainless steel steel gets really hot really fast.
I I don't know if you have a stainless steel pan that you've
ever used, but they conduct heat very well.
I know SpaceX is using a very a very proprietary stainless steel
for this, so they may be able to ablate some of that heat by.
Itself but. As of right now, we see that the
heat tiles falling off is a possibility, but that heat could
actually stop this light, and they're going to have to find a
way to attach these heat tiles in a more proficient way and
efficient way in the future. So that's all I'm really worried
about. But Elon's tweet goal of this
mission is for Starship to get through Max re entry heating
with all systems functioning. That's what he's really worried
about. I don't think there's going to
be any other tests that they're really, really worried about in
this. They do have a payload door on
this. It looks like maybe they're
going to do a fuel transfer that they were supposed to do an IFT
3. We're going to do that again.
We're going to see in the coming weeks they're going to start
tweeting some stuff. Elon and SpaceX are going to see
tweeting some stuff in the coming weeks about this mission.
So stay tuned here and I'll give you as much information as I can
when I get it. Hey.
Thank you so much for listening today.
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