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 So Boeing is kind of
going through some stuff right now.
They've initiated a legal action against Virgin Galactic, and
they've alleged the unauthorized retention of proprietary
information exchanged during their collaboration on a new
mothership project. And this is for Virgin
Galactic's space program. The aerospace Titan of Boeing
seeks the judicial directive to prevent future further misuse of
this data. In a legal filing to a federal
court in Alexandria, VA, Boeing claims that Virgin Galactic
continues to hold on to confidential Boeing data
originally shared under a 2022 partnership agreement.
This situation has escalated to a formal lawsuit highlighting a
breach of trust between the two entities.
Now, at the heart of this dispute is the mothership's
development. This is part of the system that
launches space planes to significant altitudes.
Now, Boeing and Aurora Flight Sciences had a partnership, and
it was aimed at producing an advanced mothership for Virgin
Galactic's future space tourism endeavors.
Now, Virgin Galactic's ambitions include the rollout of its Delta
space plane, designed to offer more frequent suborbital tours.
The company is simultaneously enhancing its current mothership
EVE to boost production efficiency and maintenance
simplicity. Now, despite the initial
collaboration, the partnership between Virgin Galactic and
Aurora Flight Sciences dissolved, leading to the
current legal standoff. Virgin Galactic's failure to
destroy certain trade secrets as per their agreement is central
to Boeing's lawsuit. The trade secrets in question
encompass decades of Boeing's expertise in aircraft
development and operation. Boeing argues that Virgin
Galactic's actions not only infringe on proprietary rights,
but also pose a risk of exposing these secrets to competitors.
Virgin Galactic has responded to the lawsuit, denying the
allegations and asserting its intention to contest the claims
vigorously. Boeing, on the other hand, has
refrained from further comments on the matter.
This lawsuit surfaces as Virgin Galactic progresses in its space
tourism ventures, having successfully conducted its first
commercial spaceflight and several subsequent missions
bringing private astronauts to suborbital space.
Virgin Galactic's financial strategy hinges on the success
of its Delta space plane, though, projecting substantial
profits from its operation. Despite the potential of the
existing EVE Mothership to launch Delta, a new mothership
could enhance operational capabilities.
Now, the legal complaint also addresses Virgin Galactic
cessation of payments to Boeing and Aurora linked to the
Mothership Development Project with outstanding invoices
mounting to about $27 million. You know, the breakdown of the
partnership reportedly stemmed from budgetary and timeline
constraints leading to the premature cessation of
Mothership's development efforts.
Boeing and Aurora's lawsuits delineates the alleged
misappropriation of specific technical equations and test
data, which are considered proprietary and offer a
competitive edge in aircraft design and performance modeling.
The dispute extends to Virgin Galactic's refusal to eliminate
documents containing these trade secrets, The Virgin claiming
rights to this information under the terms of their agreement.
The aerospace conglomerate is seeking financial redress for
the unpaid work and additional compensation for the
unauthorized use of the trade secrets.
Aiming to safeguard its technological advancements,
Virgin Galactic's focus has recently shifted towards the
Delta class space plane with less emphasis on developing a
new mothership. This pivot reflects the
company's adjustment to more demand for space tourism in this
market. Now it's complex thing going on
here. Intellectual property
partnership dynamics. If a company dissolves, who gets
the ownership of the data and who controls the ship?
There's challenges here, and the collaboration between Boeing and
Virgin is going to continue, but more so in the courtroom.
The outcome of this lawsuit could have ramifications for
both Boeing and Virgin Galactic, potentially influencing future
partnerships between the two and the sharing of proprietary
information between them. Now let's shift focus a little
bit. Let's go over to SpaceX.
Let's go to their Starship program.
Just recently, Ship 29 was on the pad.
Now this means that they're testing for the next flight of
the Starship, which is IFT 4. Now IFT 4 is an important flight
because IFT 3 went really well and IFT 4 which means integrated
flight test 4. This is the number, the 4th one
that they're doing. They're gonna be doing something
that we didn't really know, but Elon Musk tweeted about it and
I'll let you know what happens there in a second.
But on the 25th they did a static fire A6 Raptor engine,
static fire of the Starship ship 29, and then they did a single
static fire of a single Raptor engine using the header tanks
for flight 4 yesterday on 3/27/2024.
Now the ship is currently being lifted off the pad as I record
this, which means it seems like testing is done.
They're gonna probably move it back to the Bay and do some fine
tuning of the ship, fine tuning of the engines and get it ready
for the flight. Now when this happens, Booster
is going to come out towards the flight deck, go down towards the
pad. Booster 11 is the booster that
they're gonna be using and there will be testing on Booster 11 in
the upcoming week or so. So they have to do some
cryogenic testing, which means they fill it full of really cold
liquid, subzero liquid. And also they're gonna be doing
some static fire testing of their engines.
Fair enough. Fire is they basically just test
the engines on the pad so it doesn't actually fly.
They clamp it down, they shoot off the engines real quick.
Sometimes it's a full duration, which could be anywhere between
a few seconds and a few minutes depending on the rocket and the
engines. But we're expecting a full
duration static fire test of the booster and some spin Prime
tests in the coming week or so. So it will be moved down to the
pad within the next few days, before the weekend probably.
So once that's done, Elon and company said that they want to
get this done by mid-april and I think that's possible with this
testing schedule here. But the most important thing
that Elon has said is that after this single engine, Raptor
engine static fire for the Starship 29, Elon tweeted goal
of this mission is for Starship to get through Max re entry
heating with all systems functioning.
So the goal of the next mission, we thought everybody in the
aerospace industry, we're leaning on Starlink, Starlink,
Starlink. They have to get something done
with Starlink. They have to launch a Starlink
into orbit, or you know, something like that, or at least
get the mechanism working properly.
They did a a Bay door test last flight on IFT 3 seemed to go
pretty well. There's a little hitch in the
giddy up when they were closing the door, it seemed like, but
they'll fine tune that and get it ready for this next flight in
subsequent flights. So what they're really focusing
on, according to Elon, is to get to maximum re entry heating with
all systems functioning and if they do a maximum or if they do
a re entry with maximum heating, they know that they can go to
orbit and come down wherever they're going to come down in
the future. Right now for IFT 4, they're
going to be coming down the Indian Ocean for subsequent
flights as well. So we're not exactly sure where
they're going to go for flights when they go to full orbit, but
for the foreseeable future, it's going to be be in the Indian
Ocean. So it's gonna be exciting.
We should have onboard cameras for the whole flight, so take
notice of that. You can check out the flight on
our YouTube channel, Space News Pod on YouTube, and you can also
check out more analysis on that Channel as well.
So please take a second, check that out and I'll see you over
there. Hey, thank you so much for
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