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.
Can we talk for a second about Space XS Starship in Starbase,
Texas? Because they're building the
most massive launch tower at Starbase.
It's going to be over 400 feet tall.
It'll launch and catch Starships on the Gulf of Mexico.
It's going to be the wildest thing that's going to happen in
the next some amount of time. We're not exactly sure yet, but
let's go back in history if we can.
Let's rewind a little bit in the journey to Spacex's Starbase's
first launch tower, the Mechazilla, if you will, complex
process. It was about 13 months from the
beginning phases until they actually stacked the Starship on
the launch tower. Then it took them a while to
actually launch a Starship. But we're not gonna talk about
the actual launch. We're gonna talk about how long
it may take them to do Starships tower #2 at Starbase. 13 months
for the first one. The tower began mid 2020 ish and
significant process and milestones were achieved
throughout 2021. So think about this, in the
middle of the year, August ish, they started construction.
First significant structures began to rise in 2020.
So the the base of the tower started being put together.
The tower assembly, the structure of the launch tower
started taking shape in early of 2021.
But by August, the major components, including the
chopsticks. I was there for the delivery of
the chopsticks. Actually, I watched the
chopsticks drive down the road right past me and they're used
for catching and stacking of rockets.
And that's when they were installed about August 2021, I
believe was August 2021 that they got all of the major
components together. And then by January 2022, the
tower was fully constructed and underwent various testing.
You know, it was integration of the launch or the catch arms,
the the lift arms, if you will, the chopsticks and other systems
which actually controlled the launch systems and the tower
itself, including venting and lighting and the the pneumatics
to raise up the rocket when you put it on those arms.
All of that was being built about early 22.
The tower was fully construction and underwent numerous tests for
for months, you know, integration of the towers other
systems and they finally lifted a a test fully stacked rocket in
February of 2022 and I believe it's February 10th of 2022.
I was there in Brownsville at Starbase when they did this
first lift. I went down February 14th and I
got footage of it. February 10th, after they
stacked it and they open up the roads again, I got some footage
of it. And then this was what we all
thought was going to be the first Test article that was
going to launch from Starbase Ship 20 and Booster 4.
So 4/20 was going to be in all right, the first rocket to
launch. But that wasn't the case, so
they took it all down. It was a beautiful sight.
I get to see it from numerous angles.
I got really close to it. It was wonderful.
And Elon did a talk from there too.
Now what we're going to talk about today is how much time
it's going to take for them to complete Tower Two as Starbase.
So now that we have a back story here, about 13 months from the
initial groundwork around the first tower till the complete
construction and stacking around 13 months, we're already into
tower two. All of the, the major components
have been delivered of the, of the core of the tower to
Starbase, at least most of them as far as we know.
And there could be more because they haven't shown us exactly
how tall this is going to be. And they also, Elon hinted that
this is going to be more complex than the first one.
So we actually don't know all of the components for this yet.
We know a lot of them. We know there's going to be
catch arms. We know there's going to be a
pneumatic system to raise and lower it.
We don't know what's going to be used as the actual kind of
engine to push the rocket up and down.
You know, we're not exactly sure because there's more piping
more, it might be actually a, a very more, a much more simple
process than tower one. Because Elon said his engineers
came to him and said, hey, the, the tower one, let's just kind
of throw everything away and let's start over.
We have this really great design which we think will be better
than Tower One. So what they're doing is they're
probably simplifying all of the parts.
Elon has said this so many times, the best part is no part.
And as an engineer myself, I'm a front end developer engineer, I
know this is true. The less amount of code that I
can use to get the job done, the better off the final product is.
So that's exactly what they're doing here with Starbase's Tower
Two. Now, a lot of us in the media
here have thought that Starbase's catch tower, which
was going to be tower two, we thought tower two was going to
be just catching and tower one was going to be launching and
stacking. But that's not the case.
Elan has said Tower 2 will be for launching, catching,
refurbishing, basically everything you need to do for
the tower, you know, as far as the tower goes.
And then of course, well, it won't be refurbishing, but you
know, doing some, a little bit of Labor to get it ready for
launches. But if there needs to be a
really like massive refurbishing, it can go back to
the production facility right down the road about a mile away.
And Starbase is becoming a massive city almost.
It's crazy. They're, they're building new
housing down there. So the, the people that work
there will have a place to live nearby because Brownsville, TX
is actually about 30 minutes away.
And you have to drive down this crazy long highway in the middle
of nowhere with no facilities, there's no gas, there's no
chargers for Teslas or anything along the way.
It's like 25 minutes of nothing. And then finally at the very,
very, very end of this road, literally at the Gulf of Mexico,
you get to Starbase. So they were, they're building
these, this launch tower, the quick release, everything's
going to be completely different.
And the engineers at SpaceX are literally the best in the
business. So when they start stacking
this, we're gonna see pieces of this stacking atop of each
other, of course, like a normal tower.
But we'll see it simplified. And we're it's gonna be a
megastructure. It's gonna be over 400 feet
tall. The Starship itself is about 400
feet. So if they wanna do Starship
version 2, Starship version three, it has to be a massive
tower down there. So it could be 450, almost 500
feet tall by the end of the stack.
I'm not sure. They haven't told us what
they're going to how high they're going to stack this
thing yet. I haven't heard anything from
Elon or anybody at Starbase how tall they're going to make this
thing. I've seen drafts of this
blueprints that I've I've gotten behind the scenes.
I can't show them to you, but somebody's shown me some, some
items that I, I can't really talk about too much, but it
looks massive. That's all I can say.
I was, I wasn't even supposed to
tell you that I got those blueprints.
But we're going to keep it in there because, yeah, it's, it's
a fun, it's a fun thing to know. But it could be massive.
The second tower could be much bigger than the first tower.
And we've had hints of that from Elon.
He said, yeah, it's going to be bigger.
We but we don't know exactly how big it's going to be, right.
We can guess. All we can do right now is guess
because the components that they have now stack those up and
we'll have pretty similar to what we have now, probably a
little bit bigger and then they might add more components in the
future. So who knows?
We've had, I've had a comment on my last video of somebody that
said they're not gonna catch the booster until the next tower is
done. Elon said the next booster will
be caught at Starbase. So tower one, which you see over
there, over that side, over there, that's tower one.
They they want to catch it for IFT 5.
And if that's the case, if they want to catch it for IFT 5 and
something goes wrong, it could be months before they rebuild it
and they're not going to be ready for IFT 6 or tower two
isn't going to be ready for IFT 6.
It's going to take, if they do a similar strategy to the first
one, which I think they're gonna have a streamlined process.
So I don't think it's gonna take 13 months this time.
It may because it might be more complex but simpler, if that
makes sense. Like a much more complex
structure, but with simpler hardware and simpler piping and
electronics and stuff. So it it could be just the, the
build of a thing is simpler, but it could take preparation and
could take months, almost a year to get this thing completed.
So if they do catch it, if they go for it on IF T5 and Kathy
leaders has said we're not sure yet, but then Elon came out on
Twitter or on X saying we're going to catch it on IF for IFT
5. So it's all still up in the air.
If they run the numbers and they think they can do it and it
looks good during the flight, they'll probably do it for IFT
5. Also, Elon's the biggest hype
man. So we all know that Elon is up
in his head thinking we can figure it out.
Like, why don't we? Why can't we figure this out?
And for him, that's how he thinks.
He doesn't think in absolutes. He thinks of what happens if we
don't do it. Well, then we failed.
You know what? Why can't we do it?
That's how he thinks. Like, why can't we?
He never thinks like, oh, there's all these roadblocks in
the way. He doesn't think like that, and
that's why he's so successful. It's not about the roadblocks.
It's not about the things that the engineers and typical
engineering, typical engineers put up roadblocks to themselves.
Well, these systems work. So we can't go around these
systems and build something new. We can't innovate 'cause our
systems work. Why do you think ula and Blue
Origin are so mad at SpaceX because that's how they think.
They're boring. You know it they're they're they
think like strict guidelines. They have strict guidelines.
SpaceX, Elon especially goes, what are these strict
guidelines? OK, engineering guidelines
definitely have a purpose. If you don't have these strict
guidelines, then things go wrong.
But if those strict guidelines get in the way of progress, get
rid of those guidelines, throw them out the window and move
forward. So this next tower, the
engineers were like, we're throwing all this stuff out of
the window that we did for IFT or for the tower one, and we're
gonna build our dream tower. We're gonna build an engineering
marvel that's going to put us so far ahead of ula Blue Origin,
basically the only other heavy lift rockets out there that
nobody can compete for a very long time.
Modern marvel. That's what this thing is.
It's going to be a modern marvel.
It's going to be an engineering feat that no one's seen before.
The SLS tower, massive. And the cool.
You know what's cool about the SLS tower too?
It moves the whole rocket like it.
It moves it incredibly slow. The crawler moves a giant 300
some odd foot tall rocket from the production facility from the
high Bay all the way to the launch site.
SpaceX doesn't do that. They take the booster and the
ship separately. They raise them up with the
arms, they stack them on top of each other and then they're
ready. Of course, there's things in
between like they're not just ready.
They have to, you know, do some testing or whatever, but they
they don't drive it down the road all put together, which is
a smart thing to do. You know, you don't need a
massive tower. Plus they only have the little
Rd. They have like A2 lane Rd. to
get down and they're like, how do we do this?
And their rocket is as big as a road is A2 lane Rd.
It's like 30 feet wide. The thing is massive.
So they couldn't do that. There were there were
constraints for them to build here.
So they had to build what you know, the basically like a a is
a barge, like a, a land barge basically to move this thing
down or they they hired one or they rent one or whatever.
So, and then they finally have their own.
So The funny thing about this next tower is that we don't
really know what it's gonna look like.
We know actually, we, we know one thing, Elon, Elon has said
this. The the arms are going to be a
little bit smaller. They're gonna be just big enough
for the rocket or the booster, I should say, or the rocket too,
to be caught on. So the rapid reusability of the
booster and the rocket itself, the Starship, it, we may start
to see that happen really soon. And the reason why we need this
is because SpaceX wants to go to Mars eventually.
But the first step is to get to the moon.
Artemis 3, they'll be sending people to the moon.
SpaceX needs to refuel Starship numerous times.
And the only way they can do that is to catch the boosters,
refurbish them, you know, send up another Starship.
They could have a fleet of 50 boosters in 50 starships or
whatever you know, or 20 Starship or whatever, you know,
it depends on the ratio there. But could they just have 4
boosters that work really well? It's just continuously launch
land, launch land, launch land and send up 10 starships to to
the refuelling station. That's a possibility.
All they have to do is stack them up.
It would take, especially for the Artemis program, it would
take them about a week to do all the launches.
I think 7 days to a week or something, somewhere somewhere
around 7-7 days. I think the calculations were
that SpaceX could possibly get all of the boosters and all of
the Starship fueling Starships into orbit, the tankers, and
also they need the tankers. They need to test the tankers at
Starbase before they launch them from KSC.
So we're probably not gonna see the tower at Kennedy Space
Center be built until after tower two at Starbase is
completely finished and tested rigorously with different
variations of starships, because they need to know that it works.
You know, they could probably start it and realize that the
design works really well, and then they can build it over at
Kennedy Space Center. They'll go through all the
testing, make sure everything is great, and then they'll start
building over a Kennedy Space Center.
But I'm guessing tower two. I mean, tower one was 13 months
until full stack around 13 months from 2020, like mid 2020
to February 2022. That's a long time.
So somebody said they're not gonna catch the the booster
until tower two. Yeah, if you want to wait a
year, you know, I have T6. No, they're not gonna wait a
year for IFT 6, but there will only be a few launch attempts
left in this year at Starbase. So there's a possibility they
continue to launch from Starbase in the beginning of next year.
They also continue to build the the tower two.
They'll refine tower one because they're gonna need both towers,
You know, they're gonna need both towers to continue testing.
So one of them will probably primarily before catching tower
two, I think is going to be more of a catch tower or more
something that they can catch with because that's going to be
their final design Tower one, they could probably catch with
that too. I'm not 100% sure.
I'm not. So that's that's where I differ
from a lot of Youtubers out there is that like, I'm not 100%
sure about this stuff. And people that say that they're
sure about this stuff are full of crap.
Like they have some data, right? But like we know everybody
that's, you know, that's been right.
Eric Berger is like the only dude you can trust 100% Think
about Eric. So what I what I do with my
timelines is like, what does Elon say?
And then what does Eric say? And then it's somewhere near
what Eric says is when things actually happen.
Elon is very he's a hype man and he wants stuff done as fast as
possible. His timelines are ridiculous.
Like if everybody works as hard as Elon, it would be done by
now. But then you get Eric Berger in
the process and he knows engineering, you know, he knows
what's up. So I kind of look at both of
those numbers. Elon says it'll fly in four
weeks. Eric says 8 weeks, probably 7
weeks. You know, so we're around there.
So the tower, the second tower probably be done in a year
somewhere around there just because the first one, unless
it's massively more complex or they run into something with
with, you know, building these things out, fabricating
something. It could take longer, but
somewhere between somewhere in a year before the actual tower is
completely constructed. So next year, like mid next
year, maybe, maybe first four months of next year would be a
good estimate for this. So let me know in the comments
down below. And thank you for watching this.
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actually be built? Let me know in the comments down
below what you think and give me a reason if you have one,
because I know there's information out there.
And the information I've sifted through, most of it is like it's
there. You know, the information's out
there, but there's not a lot of like complete information out
there. But I can tell you what the
design I saw of the tower and it was as far as I know was an
official design. It looks incredible and it looks
like. There could be, let's just say
more than meets the eye. That's all I could say.
That's all I can say. So thank you for watching
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