First Look Inside SpaceX's Starfactory with Elon Musk (Everyday Astronaut)
Questions on ElonsFAQ asked in this interview (4)
Transcript
0:00Tim DoddHi, it's me, Tim Dodd, the everyday astronaut. Welcome back to Starbase Texas. This is of course where SpaceX is building their Starship vehicles. This is part one of two parts.
0:09Tim DoddIn part one, we're going to take you around the factory, see what's new, see the ships, see the boosters, see Star Factory from the inside for the first time and just learn a lot along the way.
0:18Tim DoddSo stay tuned for part two where we'll take you out to the launch pad and we'll also follow up with Elon after the launch and see how it went.
0:24Tim DoddSo without further ado, let's go on another tour with Elon Musk.
0:28Elon MuskCool.
0:28Tim DoddSo yeah, as we were saying, I mean obviously a lot has changed in the last couple years. I mean this has maybe in theory,
0:37Elon MuskI don't know, I mean, looks exactly the same. It hasn't changed a bit.
0:40Tim DoddWhat once was tense is now a permanent looking factory.
0:43Elon MuskYeah, it used to be intense, intense and now it's in a building.
0:49Tim DoddYeah, yeah.
0:50Elon MuskSo we've got this pretty good looking rocket factory building that we've almost completed. Completed the exterior. This will enable us to have serialized production of the rocket, especially the ship, which would ultimately be made, you know, long term.
1:09Elon MuskProbably be making a thousand a year of the ship. Yeah, well, you know, got to build a city on Mars.
1:15Tim DoddYeah, that's insane to think about.
1:18Elon MuskYeah, I mean we may not build a thousand year right here, but I think this is capable of 100 a year. Really? Sure.
1:25Tim DoddWow.
1:25Elon MuskIt's only a ship every three days. That's nothing.
1:30Tim DoddWell, it's funny because now, you know, if you think about it, even Falcon 9 these days, you're producing a second stage about every two days. And a few years ago that would have been impossible, you know, no one would have imagined.
1:42Tim DoddYeah. That they're building.
1:43Elon MuskThis year we'll make almost 200 upper stages of Falcon. That's unbelievable. Next year probably over 200.
1:50Tim DoddThat's, you know, so that's a cadence of people I don't think are, you know, just even, you can't even imagine, you can't even fathom that kind of, you know, output like that.
2:01Elon MuskFalcon 9 is, is actually a heavy lift vehicle. So, you know, it's, there's roughly £40,000 to orbit. Yeah. So which is in the normal rocket language would be of heavy lift.
2:16Tim DoddYeah.
2:17Elon MuskSo now Starship's going to be able to do 100 turns to orbit with Starship 2, maybe a little more than that with Starship 3, like at the 9 meter diameter essentially when the 9 meter diameter is sort of fully stretched out to what ends up being from 120 meters total length to probably 140 or something like that,
2:44Elon MuskThen this is like a lot of optimizations and improvement. Engine improvements, heat shield, mass improvements, reducing the amount of propellant needed for landing. Kind of basically do all the things that we've somewhat done with Falcon 9 and you get to a pretty efficient vehicle.
3:02Elon MuskI think we'll be able to do over 200 tons to a useful orbit with starship. So. And that's with full reusability, which is insane. So that's twice the Saturn V with full reusability and full and rapid reusability.
3:16Elon MuskSo the booster and the ship are coming back to the launch site.
3:19Tim DoddRight. Should we take a look at what's going on in there? So as far as you know, we're seeing all this, you know, you're talking about even version one maybe be able to do less than 100.
3:33Tim DoddBut is version one really even gonna. I feel like version one in my head.
3:36Elon MuskVersion one is to the point of, and really kind of starship. We're version 1.67. I don't know, it's like we're like many iterations through on version one. Yeah.
3:52Tim DoddSo and it's just like a, it's just a canvas, it's like a, it's a test experiment still at this phase. It's just, I don't think people, they see it and they don't understand that this is all just still a giant test at this stage.
4:06Elon MuskYeah. One way to look at technology is to look at it as like you're rendering an image in successive levels of detail. So the first layer of the image is very, very blurry and things are out of place.
4:19Elon MuskAnd then with the next pass it gets a bit more defined and things kind of shift into place and you do another pass and another pass and eventually it's something that is refined and actually works.
4:32Elon MuskBut we're in uncharted territory with starship. So there's not like nobody's ever made a fully reusable orbital rocket. And that's really the critical breakthrough necessary for life to become multi planetary.
4:45Elon MuskFor us to become a true space faring civilization, we have to achieve full and rapid reusability. So I call it rapidly reusable reliable rockets.
4:54Tim DoddR squared or R R R R. Yeah, yeah.
4:57Elon MuskPirate space pirates. There we go. So
5:04Tim Doddand it's. The thing is that people need to remember is getting, achieving orbits and solved. I mean you guys have been getting to Orbit for a long time, reusing it.
5:13Elon MuskI mean, getting to orbit at all was solved in the 50s, right. So I really don't think there's another point in an expendable rocket, in my opinion, or at least I think the math clearly demonstrates that there is no point in an expandable rocket.
5:29Elon MuskYou have to achieve reusability. We have reusability in cars, we have it in airplanes, we have it in bicycles, horses. It's bizarre to not have reusability in any other form of transport.
5:41Elon MuskBoats. It would be insane to chuck a boat away after every trip. But this is how rockets have worked for the vast majority of time. In fact, SpaceX is still the only rocket that has any reusability with Falcon 9.
5:55Elon MuskSo with Falcon 9, we bring the boosters back, we refly them frequently, we bring the fairings back, refly those. It's only the upper stage that is expanded. Now, Falcon 9 does not qualify as rapidly reusable because most of the time the booster is landing on a ship in the ocean.
6:15Elon MuskRight.
6:16Tim DoddSo it takes a few days to get it back. Oh, that's speeding up like crazy. I mean, the cadence out of the Cape is unbelievable.
6:23Elon MuskYeah, we're trying to squeeze every like quarter of a knot that we can out of the drone ships.
6:28Tim DoddYeah, seems that way.
6:30Elon MuskYeah. We're jacking up the power on the ships, streamlining, streamlining them, increasing the power on the tugging vessel. So we just haul ass as quickly as possible.
6:40Tim DoddWell, yeah, I think you just had your fastest turnaround just last week. There was a. I mean, it was something like, I don't remember the time, but it's something like two days or something from catching back and then out to catch again was just insane.
6:52Tim DoddIt used to take so much longer. And those are all those little things that people just aren't necessarily paying attention to that are continually improving.
6:59Elon MuskAnd yeah, the SpaceX Falcon team is doing an incredible job of achieving fast turnaround reusability, given the architecture. Yeah. Now that's still, however, a couple days to get a booster back and then at least a few days to refurbish it for flight is still not rapid by aircraft or vehicle.
7:25Elon MuskTake cars, boats, planes.
7:27Tim DoddRight.
7:28Elon MuskYou know, doing a trip every four days is not, we're not cut it in a car.
7:32Tim DoddRight.
7:32Elon MuskOr an aircraft. Right. So with, with Starship, the booster comes back to the launch site, is caught by, caught by the arms or, you know, this would be quite spectacular to see giant Mechazilla arms catching a rocket in midair.
7:47Elon MuskAnd, and then those, those Arms put it back on the launch site so you can have the booster back on the launch mount in. Well, it's going to come back and land in like five or six minutes.
8:00Tim DoddRight.
8:02Elon MuskSo then you probably get it back on the launch site in. Well, if you really push it, probably get it back on launch site in 10 minutes.
8:08Tim DoddRight.
8:10Elon MuskOr even five minutes. And then you can fill it up in half an hour so you could be ready to go an hour later from the booster standpoint. And then if you've got ships lined up, you can drop another ship on, you know, fill it with propellant and in theory, you could be launching every couple hours.
8:34Tim DoddYeah, it's hard to imagine now, but it was hard to imagine where Falcon 9 is today. You know, 10 years ago, no one would have imagined what Falcon 9 is doing now.
8:43Tim DoddSo I think time will tell that you can just keep chipping away at all those little improvements. So do you think you actually fly?
8:50Elon MuskFalcon 9 used to have reusability measured in months, then weeks, then days. But for Falcon 9, the architecture is limited to. You really can't compress it down less than several days when you take the landing out to sea.
9:06Elon MuskAnd then the necessary refurbishment of the booster, that is required. So with, with, with Starship, we'll take it from days to, to hours. Wow. Do you think? Yeah. And then.
9:18Elon MuskYeah, so then the ship has to go around the Earth and, and depending upon what orbit it has, it's got to have a ground track that comes back over the launch site.
9:26Tim DoddRight.
9:26Elon MuskSo that could take several orbits. So the ship could take, you know, several hours, sometimes half a day or
9:34Tim Doddsomething like that to come back reline.
9:35Elon MuskYeah, yeah. So you'd want to have a lot more ships than boosters. Yeah. So if you're really going for max launch rate, you probably want roughly, I don't know, five ships for every booster.
9:46Elon MuskYeah.
9:46Tim DoddAnd that's what you guys are building, a pretty massive cadence here of ships and boosters already now, do you think?
9:55Elon MuskWell, I mean, yeah, it's pretty slow compared to what it will be like. Very slow. But we're also iterating the design so like each one is a little different from some cases, a lot different from the last one.
10:10Tim DoddYeah. Are any of these, what Are any of these going to be the V2 yet? Are we starting to get close to some V2 hardware yet or.
10:25Tim DoddYeah,
10:30Elon MuskThe stretch version is basically V2. Well, I guess depends on whether we call it V2 or don't call it V2. The slightly stretched version is V2 ugly. So yeah.
10:51Elon MuskSo you can see what we have here is a starship with, I've seen the heat shield side and the non heat shield side. Yep. It's got the, what we call the PEZ dispenser for tossing out the next generation starLink satellites, the V3 satellites.
11:09Elon MuskSo those will be very wide diameter, like, like sort of 7 meter diameter satellites. So you know, 22ft or something like that.
11:18Tim DoddRight.
11:20Elon MuskSo
11:22Tim Doddare these actually gonna be like, are we hoping to see after. Let's say this test goes well tomorrow, do you think the next one's actually gonna go for orbit and start deploying test, like testing out, trying to deploy starlink?
11:34Tim DoddOr are we. Where do you think we're in, in that whole mix? Like is that maybe a few more down the road to start actually deploying payloads into orbit?
11:42Elon MuskWe'll see how this mission goes. I mean this, this year is not, not about delivering satellites for starship. It's all about ironing out the design question marks. So the, I mean the major things that remain to be solved for starship, the biggest, the single biggest one is what does it take to get through the high heating of reentry.
12:08Elon MuskSo you can see the heat shield that we have there. We have some, well, let's say like unsolved questions on the heat shield, a bunch of which we don't even know that they are questions and some we're aware of because there have been challenges in the past like with space shuttle, the sort of hinge area and the hinge gap and sealing that hinge gap and not having hot gas just go flowing super fast through the interface there.
12:44Elon MuskYeah, well, where the flap hinge is. Yep. Because if you get hot gas flowing through rapidly, that'll cook anything doing the tile. So you've got a block. We've got a hot gas seal at the forward and rear flap hinge.
13:02Elon MuskAnd so, you know, one of the key questions is, does that seal work? We think it'll work, but it may not work. Then there are some questions of how well do the tiles stay on.
13:20Elon MuskThere's a fundamental challenge here where the tiles are ceramic, so they're very brittle. They're like a coffee cup or a dinner plate. So you've got essentially a whole bunch of dinner plates stuck to a steel surface.
13:36Elon MuskThe steel surface is getting cryogenically cold because of the propellants. So it's shrinking.
13:43Tim DoddYeah.
13:45Elon MuskSo on ascent the, the rocket is, has shrunk.
13:49Tim DoddYeah.
13:50Elon MuskSo you can't have the gaps in the tiles be too tight or they will just shatter against each other. The gap will be too tight.
13:57Tim DoddYep.
13:59Elon MuskThen when it's coming in for landing the shuttle, you no longer have the cryogenic propellant in the main tanks and the shuttles, the tiles get very hot, so now they want to expand.
14:11Elon MuskSo you've got a contracted inner surface and expanding tiles.
14:16Tim DoddOh, geez.
14:17Elon MuskYeah, right. And the thing is like, you can't have a big tile gap because then the plasma will get in there and melt the primary structure behind it.
14:26Tim DoddExactly.
14:27Elon MuskSo like what's the, what's the right tile gap? And that's going to vary depending upon where you are on the rocket, on the ship, you know, so it's going to be like some parts of the ship have cryogenic propellants, some don't.
14:43Elon MuskThere's also how well do the tiles attach? If we attach them and they, and we accidentally break one, but it's hard to see then that that could be an issue.
14:54Tim DoddRight.
14:56Elon MuskAnd we currently think we're, we're probably not resilient to failure of a, to loss of a tile in the hot sections of the, of the ship that are the, the tank portion.
15:12Elon MuskSo the, the, so if the pressurized areas. Yeah, the pressurized areas, exactly. So and technically the nose will be pressurized too. So if the pressurized areas lose a tile and then you melt that area, that'll cause it to pop.
15:27Tim DoddRight, right.
15:27Elon MuskSo the ship will explode. Yeah. So now people have asked like, why are there some missing tiles in the rear of the ship?
15:34Tim DoddWell, like right now, Flight four, you got I think three tiles missing right now.
15:39Elon MuskYeah, yeah. So those are in the rear of the, of the ship, which is an unpressurized region. Yeah, yeah. So that's an unpressurized region where we think we can see.
15:50Elon MuskWell, you can have a melt through of the unpressurized region and it will not cause failure of the vehicle.
15:57Tim DoddYeah.
15:58Elon MuskLike you might have a little hole there or something.
16:00Tim DoddRight.
16:01Elon MuskBut it's not going to pop the vehicle.
16:03Tim DoddRight. So that's, you're literally doing it as like an AB test almost of like.
16:06Elon MuskYeah.
16:07Tim DoddWhat happens if.
16:08Elon MuskYeah, what happens if we lose the tile? Now we do have plans for a secondary shield beneath the tiles that is much better than what we have right now.
16:19Elon MuskSo right now we, and some of this, I can't say the details of it because it's like itar control this sort of secret. But the current material we use we think is not resilient to a tile failure.
16:34Elon MuskWe have a new design that we think is resilient to a tile failure.
16:40Tim DoddSo behind the underlying structure.
16:42Elon MuskYeah. And essentially it's got ablative. So if you lose the tile, you have to replace the ablative.
16:48Tim DoddRight, right, right.
16:49Elon MuskSo you'd have to. You'd lose out on reusability because of the lost tile and the ablative.
16:56Tim DoddBut you have a.
16:56Elon MuskBut at least it's intact.
16:57Tim DoddYeah. You recover it, refurbish it, and get it back out on the fleet. That's cool.
17:04Elon MuskAnd especially for carrying people. Ultimately, we expect starship to carry it maybe 100 people at a time to Mars and also to the moon.
17:13Tim DoddYeah.
17:14Elon MuskThen, you know, it's got to be super reliable. It's got to have no, ideally no single point of failure.
17:22Tim DoddRight. So have you given up? A long time ago, you're talking about transformational cooling or active regen and stuff. Did that just kind of didn't make the trade or.
17:39Elon MuskThe mass trade that we did. I think it's this point like it's four years ago or something like that, maybe five.
17:51Elon MuskIt seemed like at that time it would be at least twice as heavy as a ceramic heat shield. Now, since then, the weight of our ceramic heat shield is grown, and then when you factor in the secondary shield, that's additional mass.
18:08Tim DoddRight.
18:09Elon MuskSo I don't know. It may not be that big of a difference between actively cooling a heat shield and having ceramic tiles.
18:23Tim DoddHave you seen what Stoke Space out in Washington is working on where they have a. It's, of course aerospike's gonna come out of my mouth because for some reason, aerospike comes out every time we're talking about anything.
18:33Tim DoddBut it's a Aerospike. But the base plug is actually the active regen heat shield. And so as it's expander cycle, so as it comes back through the atmosphere, it's actually, you know, heating.
18:43Tim DoddThey're using hydrogen to. To actively regenerate, you know, and cool the heat shield and just gets dumped out the. The nozzles, basically, as it's, you know, as it's going.
18:52Tim DoddAnd that actually also gets some of the gaskets vented out through the middle. So you also have like a boundary layer there too, of, of gaseous helium or hydrogen in the front.
19:01Tim DoddAnd it's being actively regen. I think it's. It's a really cool, cool concept. And I was really impressed. It's a. It's. It made me just think about, like, regen, you know, active regen in a different way.
19:11Tim DoddAnd I thought that was pretty neat. But I know you guys had Talked about the transpirational cooling years ago. So it's. I didn't know if. Yeah,
19:21Elon MuskI think it's probably correct that, that a ceramic heat shield is going to do better than transpiration. There's also the question of like if once. If you go to Mars and you're coming in at hot and you're coming.
19:32Elon MuskOr you can, you're coming back to Earth, you're coming in. If you come back from, from Mars to Earth, you're coming in very hot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not clear whether transpiration cooling could succeed there.
19:44Elon MuskYeah.
19:46Tim DoddHere's my wacky dumb idea of the day is on the inside of the tank, if you had like a thermal camera, you have like a fire hose with cryogenic coolant.
19:54Tim DoddJust spray. If there's a hot. A burn through.
19:56Elon MuskSure.
19:56Tim DoddSpray it down from the inside. I don't know. I'll just, I'll always be happy to throw out the dumb, the dumb ideas. Especially when you have header tanks there, you know, that are filled with the cryo, all pressurized, ready to go.
20:12Tim DoddYou know, all it's going to take is one. One heat shield tile missing potentially and could have a bad day.
20:19Elon MuskYou know, there's a lot of ways to solve the problem.
20:23Tim DoddYeah.
20:23Elon MuskSo the. I mean, what matters is that it is solved.
20:30Tim DoddYeah.
20:32Elon MuskEven though, like. Yeah. There are many ways to achieve full reusability. What matters is that it is achieved.
20:42Tim DoddYeah. 100.
20:43Elon MuskAnd then once you're in the sort of over the hump of full reusability, whether one system is slightly better than the other is a secondary concern.
20:52Tim DoddRight. Yeah. It's tomato, tomato at that point. Yeah, yeah. Should we keep moving along here?
20:58Elon MuskYeah.
21:00Tim DoddSo when, with Flight 3, when it, when it broke up, that was mostly just because obviously it couldn't maintain orientation, so it didn't even have a chance
21:09Elon Muskof having the heat shot. You would have noticed that the engines. There's a lot of like fire coming from the engines area, just not, you know, that's not good.
21:18Tim DoddYeah.
21:19Elon MuskOn re entry.
21:19Tim DoddRight. Definitely not when the engines aren't on. Yeah.
21:23Elon MuskSo this is, you see, we're just finishing. We try to get the shell completed as quickly as possible, but we still have a lot of work to do on the interior of the factory.
21:35Elon MuskBut this will dramatically improve the production of the rocket.
21:41Tim DoddYeah.
21:41Elon MuskIt's being able to move from one station to another, which is a linear adjacent flow.
21:48Tim DoddI mean, I assume. I don't really know what that means, but.
21:51Elon MuskWell, I mean the thing that really matters for you Know, people talk about the moving production line of sort of Henry Ford and the automobiles. What actually matters is linear adjacent flow as opposed to a production line that moves.
22:03Elon MuskHmm.
22:04Tim DoddSo.
22:05Elon MuskSo the, so it's simple.
22:07Tim DoddOkay.
22:08Elon MuskOkay. Like one thing leads one, one step leads to another.
22:11Tim DoddYeah.
22:11Elon MuskAnd it just. And things move along in a cadence.
22:13Tim DoddOkay. Yeah. Yep. And you don't have to have the physical.
22:17Elon MuskIt doesn't matter whether it's a conveyor belt or not. That's secondary concern.
22:20Tim DoddYeah, Got it.
22:21Elon MuskDoesn't matter. It just matters that there's a tempo. So every station has roughly the same amount of work time and things move from one station to the next station and the specialization of labor at each station.
22:34Tim DoddYes.
22:35Elon MuskSo these are the principles that actually matter.
22:37Tim DoddAnd that's what you guys kind of solved by doing the tents first. Because you could just willy nilly rearrange things, see how things are actually falling, see what order things were going in.
22:45Elon MuskBut the tents were very inefficient once you know what you want to build.
22:48Tim DoddYes.
22:48Elon MuskYeah, yeah.
22:49Tim DoddSo it was the, your five step thing of don't get too far along in the automation before you.
22:54Elon MuskYeah. You don't know what you're going to build.
22:55Tim DoddYep.
22:57Elon MuskLike it's difficult to convey just how, how much like you know, this, this is, you know, we don't even know what the rocker would look like. Yeah, yeah. So.
23:08Tim DoddAnd in some senses you still don't necessarily know.
23:12Elon MuskIt's still changing at this point. We're confident of that. This architecture will. Is at least one of the solutions. That's not to say there couldn't be other solutions like the one you talked about, but this will work.
23:28Elon MuskIt's just a question of ironing out the bugs, improving the performance of everything from the engines to the avionics to the primary structure, the heat shield, everything. And that's.
23:42Elon MuskBut it will work. I think I was mentioning, or I was beginning to say that. So the most important, the toughest remaining problem is a reusable orbital heat shield.
23:57Elon MuskSo nobody has ever made it reusable. Orbital heat shield. So the space shuttle is closest, but that took I think something like nine months and thousands of people to refurbish.
24:07Elon MuskSo it's difficult. One cannot call something that requires so much work to refurbish as truly reusable. Certainly not rapid.
24:14Tim DoddYeah.
24:16Elon MuskSo for the first time ever, there needs to be a rapidly reusable orbital heat shield, which no one has ever done. So it's a hard problem. So that's why I'd Say that's the number one biggest remaining problem.
24:29Elon MuskAnd the goal of this flight, and really the flights for the rest of this year is get through the high heating so the heat shield survives.
24:45Elon MuskAnd the ship is still operational. Is able to steer to a specific location and do a landing boat in the ocean.
24:52Tim DoddYes.
24:55Elon MuskAnd then the booster we wanted to build for this flight to come back and do a landing burn at a specific location. Yep.
25:02Tim DoddHow far out is that going to be, do you know?
25:04Elon MuskIt's pretty far out. I mean we're. But I think we're pretty close to that. If we don't solve it on this flight, I think we'll solve it in the next two or three flights.
25:16Elon MuskSo just having the booster do the host staging, come back, you know, do a boost back, steer correctly and to a precise location and do a landing burn and then essentially do a simulated tower catch.
25:35Elon MuskSo it's like. So will the tower actually, no, it's just a. Okay. The rocket will think it's not trying to get caught by the tower.
25:41Tim DoddRight.
25:42Elon MuskAt least I thought it'd be kind
25:43Tim Doddof cool if the tower mimicked it, you know, out here to make sure. Because I even wonder, like, how do we know the tower is going to be okay, you know, like after a launch like that to be able to.
25:53Elon MuskWell, we operate the tower after the launch so we can tell if there's any damage.
25:57Tim DoddYeah.
25:59Elon MuskBut yeah, if this launch goes perfectly, we'll be able to. We'll have the booster, the boost back and arrow controlled descent to a specific location, initiate a landing burn and be caught by an imaginary tower.
26:19Elon MuskYep.
26:20Tim DoddYep.
26:20Elon MuskAnd then the ship, if things go perfectly, probably won't. It'll get through high heating. It will still be fully operational. It will control itself to a specific location and in the ocean and then initiate a landing burn and also pretend it's getting caught by the tower.
26:43Tim DoddWow.
26:46Elon MuskNow I think it. I think we've got maybe a 50, 50 chance of the heat shield working.
26:53Tim DoddI mean, that's decent. Yeah, yeah.
26:56Elon MuskLike it's a high uncertainty, but like roughly 50, 50. But if not on this flight, then in the next two or three flights. I think we'll solve that.
27:07Tim DoddYeah. When you guys, let's, let's kind of head over here. You guys did make a decent amount of changes to hopefully ensure re entries better this time. Like you added some new roll thrusters.
27:18Elon MuskOh, yeah, yeah.
27:19Tim DoddAnd a few things like that.
27:24Elon MuskYeah.
27:24Tim DoddWhat, what happened there that the roll thrusters got. Because they got clogged, it sounds like.
27:30Elon MuskYeah. Yeah.
27:31Tim DoddDon't tell me that was the, the old conversation we had of hot gas thrusters and all that stuff. Or is it.
27:40Elon MuskI'm still confused because they got ice, ice in the valves.
27:45Tim DoddOkay. In the valves.
27:46Elon MuskNot necessarily.
27:47Tim DoddOr in the. Somewhere along the stream
27:52Elon Muskthey got clogged by ice. We're not sure exactly how, but if water ice will get into the oxygen side, there's a small amount since we're. The location that we're tapping off the engine is not.
28:07Elon MuskIt's not pure O2. It's got a little bit of a water ice. It's. It's. It's ox rich gas.
28:16Tim DoddIt is oxygen. So is it coming off the actual.
28:18Elon MuskYeah.
28:19Tim DoddLike exhaust or the turbine side?
28:21Elon MuskYeah.
28:21Tim DoddReally?
28:22Elon MuskYeah.
28:23Tim DoddSo wouldn't it have.
28:24Elon MuskWouldn't even have a little bit of ox rich gas. But it's, you know, it's got burns fuel.
28:30Tim DoddYes. Wouldn't it have a little bit of CO2 in it too then? And can that turn into an ice. Can you freeze CO2 at that temperature? Because I think.
28:38Elon MuskYeah, well anyway, it's got stuff that can turn solid at cryogenic temperatures. The thing that's relevant.
28:47Tim DoddSo. Yeah, ice, whether it be water ice or. Yeah, or CO2 ice or whatever. Ice, ice.
28:54Elon MuskSolid stuff that just. That blocks.
28:56Tim DoddBlocks things.
28:57Elon MuskBlocks things. So we've improved the sort of ice strainers or the ice catchers, we've improved the valves and something I think we'll do in the future is move to.
29:10Elon MuskFor critical valves, series parallel valves. So any one valve failure does not, no matter what happens, does not take up the ability of the ship to orient itself correctly.
29:22Tim DoddSo are you avoiding doing like a. More of a traditional heat exchanger, like a round raptor, you know, like, like I think Merlin probably does that where it has a heat exchangers to heat up to be able to write all.
29:33Tim DoddYeah. I'm curious. I've never heard of an engine using like already combusted to be able to be the oil gas, you know like off of the, off the pre burner.
29:43Tim DoddThat's pretty unusual, I think. At least I don't know.
29:46Elon MuskYeah, well, our rocket is autogenously pressurized. So we're pressurizing the fuel side with gaseous fuel and the oxide with mostly gaseous oxygen. And now in the case of autogenously pressurized, we have to create the gas.
30:04Elon MuskWe're not merely warming up a gas, we have to produce the gas.
30:08Tim DoddOh, interesting. Is that how the shuttle did it too then? Because the shuttle ran on the RS25s had autogenous pressurization on the hydrogen side?
30:16Elon MuskYeah, I think that.
30:17Tim DoddWell, I guess. I don't know if it's on both.
30:19Elon MuskWas it on both? I don't know.
30:20Tim DoddI don't know.
30:21Elon MuskI think was at least on the hydrogen side. So maybe on both. But when you have autogenous pressurization, you've got to produce the gas, not just heat it up.
30:36Tim DoddOkay.
30:37Elon MuskSo there's a lot more mass you've got to produce. Come up with.
30:40Tim DoddYeah, literally.
30:42Elon MuskYeah. It actually affects our max power on the. Especially on the fuel side. So the fuel pump has to work well, both pumps have to work harder. But the fuel pump especially is a limiting factor.
30:54Elon MuskLike if we turned off autogenous pressurization on the fuel side, we'd actually be able to get more power out of the fuel pump.
31:01Tim DoddOh, yeah. Because you're having to drive all that.
31:03Elon MuskYeah. You've got a gas fire.
31:05Tim DoddYeah.
31:05Elon MuskYou're. You're bleeding mass flow. Right from the, you know, from the engine. Yeah, from the engine.
31:12Tim DoddYeah.
31:14Elon MuskAnd yeah, I mean, there's quite a lot of work in taking a cryogenic liquid and heating it up to be a hot gas.
31:22Tim DoddRight.
31:24Elon MuskSo, you know, phase transition and that big temperature delta. So it's actually a lot of work to produce the hot gas from a cryogenic liquid.
31:32Tim DoddThat's crazy. So is that what. Also. Can we kind of step in here and see the. All the boosters? This is crazy. Is that what also was the blockage of the ox tank on the booster too, then?
31:42Tim DoddSimilar ice buildup blockage, or was it on Flight 3, the Raptors were shutting down during boostback burn and had ice build up. Is it a similar thing to that?
31:51Elon MuskSorry, it's hard to hear you.
31:52Tim DoddYeah. Is that what caused the booster to shut down on flight three with the ice. Ice buildup? Was it a similar type of thing, like an autogenous pressurization issue that clogged a few of the engines?
32:05Elon MuskYeah, we didn't have enough pressure to start the engines. Okay, so we're low pressure start. The full answer is quite complicated, but because arguably we could have started with.
32:19Elon MuskWith lower pressure or we didn't need to start all the engines anyways. This time we expect to have a lot more pressure and we are able to start at lower pressure and we don't need to have all the engines fire.
32:34Elon MuskOkay, cool. You know, hopefully.
32:36Tim DoddYeah.
32:36Elon MuskSo
32:40Tim Doddthis is crazy. Wow. The scale is just almost impossible to imagine.
32:50Elon MuskThree boosters.
32:52Tim DoddWow. That's just insane. This looks so cool.
33:03Elon MuskDang a Lot of engines.
33:06Tim DoddYeah, it's an insane amount of engines. I mean, right here we're looking at, what, 99 engines for these three vehicles?
33:15Elon Musk99 engines, 99 Raptors on a wall.
33:18Tim Dodd99 engines and a ship ain't one.
33:22Elon MuskYeah.
33:22Tim DoddThat's absolutely insane. The scale of these things, it's just hard to fathom. Wow. So you guys are trying to move down to three grid fins, is that right? From the four, is that.
33:36Elon MuskIt's not a high priority. It's a mass optimization. You definitely only need three, and I think technically you could do it with two if you're willing to oscillate.
33:49Tim DoddYeah. Like turn for Riyadh, then roll again for pitch.
33:52Elon MuskYeah, that's definitely. You know, you're asking for a bit of trouble if you just have two grid bins.
33:59Tim DoddRight.
34:00Elon MuskBut it is technically possible.
34:02Tim DoddRight?
34:04Elon MuskThe three. Three, for sure.
34:09Tim DoddBut that's.
34:09Elon MuskThat's like a, that's a fairly minor optimization.
34:12Tim DoddRight. With the, the cowbell diverter things, you know, the, the ullage gas thrusters or whatever. I need to clear something up for myself because I'm getting confused. So cold gas thruster, we'd say, like.
34:25Tim DoddWould be like a nitrogen thruster where it's just literally compressed nitrogen goes out of monoxide.
34:30Elon MuskCold gas is room temperature. Gas usually is room temp.
34:33Tim DoddAnd then are we. Would we consider that almost like a warm gas thruster?
34:37Elon MuskYeah, warm gas thruster.
34:38Tim DoddAnd then like, a hot gas would be where it's a reaction, probably like a bi propellant thruster still.
34:42Elon MuskBut for both the booster and the ship, you don't really need much control. The attitude control needed is small, so you just can't have a leaky valve or a stuff valve.
34:54Tim DoddYeah, that seems. I, I, this is like the third time.
34:58Elon MuskIt's all cold gas. What is Falcon is all cold gas. We've done, I think, six starts, so it's. It's cold gas that has been maintaining propellant settling and attitude control for, you know, 12 hours.
35:15Tim DoddRight. Yeah.
35:17Elon MuskSo.
35:18Tim DoddAnd you have a lot of it on tap, so that's. I don't know why that's still a hard one for me to fathom. Even though we've talked. This is the third time.
35:25Elon MuskIt's got a lot of hot gas.
35:26Tim DoddYeah.
35:26Elon MuskWarm gas, especially when it's empty.
35:28Tim DoddIt's all warm, warm gas.
35:31Elon MuskThe delta V needed is tiny, so very tiny pressures are needed, so. Yeah.
35:41Tim DoddSo how much do you feel like after you fly? How much is it like. Oh, God, we have to change all of these like, is it, is it literally you find something on one and then you're literally like immediately having to make changes on all these things.
35:54Tim DoddLike everything that's in production.
35:55Elon MuskYeah, you're just. There's hundreds of learning lessons that actually take place. Not a few. Yeah, hundreds. If you go to a detail level, there might be thousands of changes.
36:04Tim DoddThat's when you get software involved.
36:06Elon MuskI'm sure it's software for sure. I'm just taking. Talking hardware. If you just look at the hardware changes across the ship and the booster and the engines, it's thousands of changes between each flight.
36:20Elon MuskBut many of them are very small. But a very small change could be a big deal.
36:24Tim DoddImagine how long it'd take a traditional aerospace company that had a rocket they're working on to make a thousand changes between flights and then fly it two months later.
36:33Tim DoddI mean, that's what we're doing here. This is barely over two months from the last flight and the vehicle's had over a thousand changes.
36:41Elon MuskEasily over a thousand, several thousand probably.
36:46Tim DoddSo that's insane.
36:47Elon MuskLike I said, a bunch of them are little changes. But say like, is it different in a way that could have an effect on the rocket? Yeah, yeah. So it's probably several thousand.
36:56Tim DoddAnd do you feel like for now, are you generally like kind of over building them to just try to get through the point of being able to prove the heat shields, prove all the stuff and then eventually you'll work on max?
37:06Elon MuskWe're trying to answer the questions that I mentioned. The biggest question being what does it take to get through max heating with a reusable heat shield, then being able to have the booster come back and be caught by the tower and have the ship also come back and be caught by the tower.
37:25Elon MuskYeah. So those are the three very big things that need to happen.
37:29Tim DoddAnd that's in your mind when you're launching these, including like flight 1, 2, 3. Those are the questions. Like those flights are just to answer those questions.
37:37Elon MuskFull reusability.
37:38Tim DoddSee, I think people just don't understand that. That's. You're not looking at trying to get out there and launch a satellite tomorrow. You're trying to answer questions.
37:47Elon MuskThe payload for all the flights this year is data. Data just to learn things. So it's design refinement to understand what actually. What, what works, what doesn't work. Yeah, you know, some things sometimes work which can throw you off because it worked once but doesn't work again because the combination of factors isn't the, the same.
38:10Elon MuskSo you want to Have. So the first things you'll find are like fundamental errors of design where success was not one of the possible outcomes. Then in some cases, it's kind of like Russian roulette.
38:22Elon MuskSuccess is sometimes possible, but once in a while you blow yourself up. Yeah. So that's going to require a lot of flights to figure out. Like the 1 in 10 failure, the 1 in 100 failure, that kind of thing.
38:35Elon MuskThere'll be a whole bunch of things like that.
38:37Tim DoddWell, kind of even like the SN stuff. When 8 was darn close to landing, 9 was almost a reversion feeling, 10 was better, 11 was worse. Like there's a little bit of a ping pong as things were kind of being tried and tested.
38:48Tim DoddAnd you're still kind of in that phase even. Even at this scale. I just don't think people are used to that, you know?
38:54Elon MuskYeah. I mean, a lot of those, like early tests were also just about us learning how to work with stainless steel as the primary, primary structural element and working with liquid methane and with a full flow stage combustion engine as the.
39:15Elon MuskAs the engine. So a lot of what people saw was that the flight, you know, did it land or not land? But we're just trying to figure out how do we work with steel.
39:25Tim DoddRight.
39:25Elon MuskAnd how do we work with a methane as a fuel and a new engine architecture. And a totally new engine architecture.
39:32Tim DoddAnd new flaps, like things that are just.
39:33Elon MuskYeah. And do the flaps new and novel? Yeah, you have to actuate the flaps. You need very powerful actuators for the flaps because there are a lot of force.
39:42Elon MuskIt's like an airplane moving its wings.
39:43Tim DoddRight, right.
39:44Elon MuskSo these are very powerful actuators that are needed.
39:47Tim DoddYeah, absolutely.
39:50Elon MuskSo. And all of the engine to vehicle interactions are very complicated. But you don't really see those on the test stand. When you're firing the engines on the test stand, you don't get the engine to vehicle interactions.
40:07Elon MuskAnd then you've got different engine to vehicle interactions in flight that you do on the ground. Yeah.
40:12Tim DoddOh, 100%. Especially when you're changing orientation of a vehicle and different g forces and zerog. I mean, all the things.
40:18Elon MuskThere's no test stand that can test a rocket up to 17,000 miles an hour doing six GS.
40:24Tim DoddRight.
40:25Elon MuskIn, you know, every different orientation.
40:27Tim DoddRight, exactly.
40:28Elon MuskIt's not. It's not possible. Yeah. So you have to fly it. Yeah. You do as much as you can on the ground, then you got to fly it. Try to figure things out in simulation.
40:37Elon MuskBut a lot of things are not going to be included in the simulation. So it'll work in some but not in reality.
40:41Tim DoddExactly. It's crazy. Shall we keep moving?
40:46Elon MuskYeah, that's.
41:13Tim DoddThank you.
41:22Elon MuskWe're just about to derig from the crane.
41:32Tim DoddJeez.
41:37Elon MuskWow. Are we good for a home down here? As you can see, the Raptor is a lot cleaner than it used to be. It looks like there's less stuff but.
41:47Elon MuskYeah.
41:48Tim DoddAlready.
41:49Elon MuskYeah.
41:50Tim DoddBut these, these are still not like the. We're not to V3 here yet. Right. Is the V3 the same thing as like the Lee engine? Is that.
41:57Elon MuskAre those sort of. The lead engine was. I think we will do that at some point. But that's like a. That's really a total tear up.
42:06Tim DoddReally.
42:07Elon MuskYeah, yeah. It looks like the lead engine but it's way more expensive because it still has printed parts for example.
42:14Tim DoddYeah.
42:15Elon MuskSo but the. Yeah. The next gen Raptor engine needs no heat shield.
42:23Tim DoddRight. So
42:26Elon Muskand because it's exposed, it has to have cooling. So there's integral cooling circuits throughout all the parts. So it looks very simple on the outside, but it's complicated on the inside.
42:34Tim DoddLike even all throughout the, like the pre burner and the gas manifolds and everything.
42:39Elon MuskIt's all, all that stuff you see stuck on the side disappears.
42:42Tim DoddWow. And that's actually like that's being worked on now already. That's already.
42:47Elon MuskYeah. We have a design. We have a design that works. It looks like the engine isn't complete.
42:54Tim DoddWell, yeah, you had that render on that presentation. It just looked like literally like a.
42:59Elon MuskIt looks like it's missing parts. Yeah, yeah. But it's actually just the, the secondary circuits and integral cooling are part of each part. So. So if you have a secondary cooling circuit, you run the secondary cooling circuit or secondary flow circuit through the various parts.
43:16Tim DoddRight.
43:16Elon MuskAnd we also eliminate a whole bunch of bolted and welded joints. So especially the bolted joint joints. You really want to get rid of those? Yeah, yeah. You know, bolts and flanges and seals will help especially if they're hot.
43:36Elon MuskSo. Yeah. The next gen Raptor engine is actually a little difficult to service because there are parts that are. That don't have a flange anymore. It's just welded shut.
43:48Tim DoddRight, right, right.
43:49Elon MuskYeah.
43:49Tim DoddSo you're just hoping to be able to get the design up to be so reliable. Hopefully that.
43:53Elon MuskYeah, you just don't need a service. You need to change a part. You need to literally cut it open.
43:57Tim DoddWow. So you'll probably. At this point you might as well just like swap out the whole Engine, I assume.
44:01Elon MuskAnd just cut it open. Yeah, yeah, get it open. So yeah, I mean there's a massive, massive bolted flange for the hot gas manifold that's transferring hot gas from the fuel recharge.
44:19Elon MuskThe hot gas from the fuel pump side. Yeah, you can see that it's. Well, it's hard to point at because up in the air. But the thing that joins the
44:32Tim Doddfuel.
44:32Elon MuskYeah, the fuel turbo pump to the oxygen pump.
44:35Tim DoddYeah, the kind of band looking thing.
44:36Elon MuskYeah, the band looking thing that has a monster flange at the top and bottom. And you want to get rid of those two.
44:45Tim DoddAnd that's to hold a lot of pressure.
44:47Elon MuskHot. That's a lot of pressure.
44:49Tim DoddHot pressure.
44:49Elon MuskYes. Jeez. I mean you can see there's a lot of flanges here. I. This valve is like. Oh, this, this pump is like made of flanges.
45:01Tim DoddWow.
45:02Elon MuskFlange, flange, flange, flange, flange.
45:03Tim DoddAnd our.
45:03Elon MuskAnd I. I mean these are beast,
45:05Tim Doddbeast level flanges and these are all there. So there is no like active cooling inside of two like this or the current version of Raptor like this. There's no current version.
45:15Elon MuskDoes not have. There's. There's no, there's no.
45:19Tim DoddWell,
45:21Elon Muskthere technically is some, but there's not. The current version of Raptor does not have sufficient cooling to be able to resist being in the. In hot gas plasma. It's not.
45:34Elon MuskYeah, it would melt.
45:36Tim DoddThat's still why I need this shield here.
45:37Elon MuskThat's why it's. It's heavily shielded. But next gen a bunch of the flanges you see here will disappear and we'll have integral cooling and integral secondary flow circuits.
45:49Tim DoddYeah,
45:52Elon Muskyeah.
45:52Tim DoddDo you guys look. Is it possible to do.
45:54Elon MuskThere's a whole bunch of engines down there pretty densely packed. It's a lot of thrust.
46:01Tim DoddIt's a lot of thrust. That is crazy.
46:04Elon MuskIt looks like when you go to
46:05Tim Dodda Christmas tree store or something.
46:07Elon MuskYeah.
46:08Tim DoddThat's insane.
46:09Elon MuskEach one of these is the most advanced rocket engine ever made.
46:12Tim DoddAnd they're just being cranked out like it's nothing.
46:15Elon MuskYeah. Super high pressure, high efficiency. You got a full flow stage combustion. All the goods. Yeah.
46:26Tim DoddIs there, has there ever been any. Look into like. I know. You know with aircraft turbines you can do you know like some kind of cooling on the actual turbine blades.
46:35Tim DoddIs there any way to do any kind of cooling on the turbine blades
46:38Elon Muskand we've had that discussion many times. We probably head back into the. And see the main factory.
47:03Tim DoddI just can't believe how Much has changed out here. You have two mega bays. I mean last time I was out here there was only one mega bay and neither nothing had doors.
47:11Tim DoddNow you have doors.
47:14Elon MuskThat's a pretty good feature. Comfort.
47:19Tim DoddIt's turning into a real factory know. Yeah.
47:21Elon MuskWell this is a real factory that we're building here.
47:23Tim DoddYeah.
47:24Elon MuskSo quite big.
47:28Tim DoddIt's hard to keep up with everything out here.
47:32Elon MuskYeah. So this is a, we'll finally have a real factory for starship. Not just making it intense. Yeah. So long term we want to try to get the thrust of Raptor up to, to around 330, maybe a little higher.
47:49Elon MuskMaybe 335 metric tons. So that'll take us to a 10,000 ton thrust at lift off.
47:56Tim DoddThat's absolutely absurd. Sorry, that's absurd. Yeah, yeah, like beyond absurd. That's coming up on three times the amount of power as a Saturn V. That's.
48:04Elon MuskYeah, that'd be roughly three times the Saturn V. Yeah, that's what you need like 22 million pounds of thrust at Saturn V is 7.5.
48:13Tim DoddOh my gosh. Absolutely insane. Well and I think you know, there's this kind of feeling of why aren't we, aren't people doing things like the, you know, the Saturn V being built in the, you know, here in the 60s.
48:26Elon MuskSaturn V is primitive compared to starship.
48:28Tim DoddYes. And it's insanely expensive. It wasn't sustainable.
48:32Elon MuskYeah. And it was, it was expendable. So yeah, Starship is in a, I mean just any rocket that is fully reusable which no one has achieved because it is extremely difficult.
48:47Elon MuskNot because they didn't think about reusability.
48:51Tim DoddRight, right.
48:52Elon MuskSo it was just too hard. So. And obviously we haven't achieved that either. You know we've got a. I'm hopeful that we will achieve it by next year. So.
49:09Elon MuskBut at least we have a situation where we have a design where success is one of the possible outcomes.
49:14Tim DoddYeah.
49:15Elon MuskSo no prior design. Was success one of the possible outcomes for full reusability?
49:24Tim DoddWell if you think about it, let's say you guys for some reason just were like okay, screw it, we have to launch 300 metric to tons to orbit. You could absolutely, you could, you could expend a rocket if you like absolutely had to for some reason.
49:37Elon MuskYeah, but it's pointless.
49:38Tim DoddIt would be pointless. But like you have that capability like for the first time since it's added five.
49:44Elon MuskWell I mean generally if you can do 200 tons reusable, you can do double that. Expendable.
49:50Tim DoddRight. 400 tons.
49:51Elon MuskYeah.
49:51Tim DoddYeah. Which is insane.
49:53Elon MuskYeah.
49:53Tim DoddI mean, even to the point of if you had to do, let's say you had to do, you know, HLS or something to try to speed it up or something, you know, orbital refueling is not done or something.
50:02Elon MuskNo orbital refilling. I mean I don't recount checkers before they hatch, but orbital refilling is really just docking with ourselves. We dock with the space station all the time.
50:10Tim DoddRight.
50:11Elon MuskA space station is way harder to dock with than ourselves and.
50:14Tim DoddBut will it be all docking up to a, to like a depot? Is that kind of the plan? Is there to be an orbital.
50:20Elon MuskIt depends on how quickly you want to launch. So if you're going to the moon, I don't know, I don't think you need a depot. I think you just send a ship up and send tankers immediately.
50:33Elon MuskYeah. And your boil off rate will not be too bad. Okay, so now for the moon. You'd want to have a dedicated Earth orbit to moon system because you don't need a heat shield, right?
50:46Elon MuskWell, I mean, shield the break, I suppose. Well, probably actually. Yeah. The moon's like hotter than it seems because it doesn't have an atmosphere.
50:55Tim DoddRight.
50:56Elon MuskSo you can't use the atmosphere to break. So but if you have time, I guess you probably have anyway, it's like. Yeah, yeah. For landing on the moon, obviously you don't need flaps, don't need a heat shield and you need very little thrust.
51:14Tim DoddRight.
51:15Elon MuskBut you do need pretty big landing legs. Right. So in case you, one leg lands on a boulder and one lands on a crater and you don't tip over.
51:26Tim DoddRight.
51:27Elon MuskSo.
51:32Tim DoddBecause that's, you know, I think hls, I don't think a lot of people understand that we're going from a 16 ton lunar lander with the Apollo program to a, you know, I mean, I don't even know how heavy HLS is going to be when and when it lands.
51:45Tim DoddIt's going to be at, you know, at least 10 times that massive and. Or wait, yeah, at least 10 times that massive and acres of volume compared to anything that was landed during the Apollo program.
51:58Tim DoddAnd I just think that people aren't necessarily ready for how, how big starship will be on the moon. It's basically a habitat when it's on the moon, you know, it's not just a little tiny tent like the Apollo lunar landers.
52:14Elon MuskYeah. But I think the next step is to go beyond Apollo and have a permanently occupied base on the moon.
52:20Tim DoddYeah.
52:20Elon MuskLike Moon Base Alpha. That's the next step. So you don't want to just have a few people there for a few hours. You want to have a permanently occupied base.
52:31Tim DoddRight. This factory is huge.
52:34Elon MuskYeah.
52:36Tim DoddAnd I guarantee we came back in a year, it'd be just up and running like a normal factory already.
52:43Elon MuskI mean it'll be. This will be full with equipment in three months. Jeez.
52:48Tim DoddSo is there a decent amount of like new stuff that's like. Is there hardware coming in here and tools are coming here that'll unlock like. Yeah, just mostly production rate or even like new ideas or what's that kind of like.
53:01Elon MuskI mean you can build any given design in an artisanal way slowly with, you know, by having a lot, a lot of crews come to the same station. But in order to have real production, you've got to move from one station to another where you have the same amount of work at each station.
53:18Tim DoddRight.
53:19Elon MuskSo this is meant to have a lot of stations. So you'll see a lot of work in progress. You'll be able to see very clearly where the, where the blockages are.
53:34Tim DoddAnd make changes to it then.
53:35Elon MuskYeah.
53:38Tim DoddIt's so funny to think about how, you know, we're only five years ago out here when the mark one and all you had was authent and Stargate was the.
53:48Tim DoddThe biggest thing out here. That little Stargate thing and now you. I almost missed it trying to pull into Stargate today.
53:53Elon MuskCuz it looks like a little hut.
53:55Tim DoddYeah. It's like dwarfed by absolutely everything else out here already.
53:58Elon MuskYeah.
53:59Tim DoddIt's just crazy. Oh, that feels nice.
54:03Elon MuskAir conditioning.
54:04Tim DoddHoly crap. It just keeps going.
54:07Elon MuskYeah.
54:08Tim DoddI thought that was the main thing.
54:10Elon MuskYeah. Jeez. There was more behind that wall.
54:13Tim DoddYeah. Holy crap. So this is more of a real factory here. This is what the other side will look like.
54:21Elon MuskThe other side will look like this. You know, there we're. We're obviously just checking each tile to make sure it's not cracked and it's well seated.
54:31Tim DoddHow are you feeling about the. The way they're actually secured on there? Like the, the mounting point. Is that decent?
54:36Elon MuskI'm continuing to iterate on the mounting point. It has a. You know, 99% of the time it works well. So it's just a question of figuring out what are the 1% that have issues where it causes a towel to crack or some other problem.
54:53Tim DoddI always keep thinking that one of the big challenges that you can't access the. You can only access it. You can't access it from either side. Really? Like, there's not a bolt you can screw on because you have.
55:02Elon MuskIt's a snap on.
55:02Tim DoddIt has to be a snap on. Have you ever seen the, like, furniture mountings where, like, you have two pieces of wood joined together and then you spin a magnet on one end and it spins the nut on?
55:13Tim DoddI've always wondered, like, if something like that could be.
55:16Elon MuskI mean, this is basically. It snaps on and you pretty much have to break the tile to pull it off.
55:22Tim DoddReally? Yeah.
55:25Elon MuskThat's meant to go on and stay on. Yeah.
55:28Tim DoddAnd we still see, like, even on the. The parts that aren't tapered up, you know, like on the mains body. Body, we still see some horizontal seams. What's the deal with those seams?
55:38Tim DoddI know those pretty bad.
55:42Elon MuskNo, they don't really matter that much. They're just different sections of the nose cone. So now this is somewhat of a debate. You could wait until the whole nose cone is made and then put the attachment point points on at that point.
55:59Elon MuskSo currently we put the tile attachment points on in sections.
56:03Tim DoddOkay.
56:04Elon MuskSo that's why you've got a line, the horizontal line. Okay. Yeah.
56:08Tim DoddIt's probably just a lot harder to. Once it's all manufactured, it's just so massive, it'd be hard to put all the attachment points on. Is that kind of the problem?
56:16Elon MuskThere's more than one way to skin a cat. This is just a cat getting skinned.
56:20Tim DoddYeah, yeah, yeah.
56:21Elon MuskIt's not. It's not. Say that there is not a better way to do it. Yeah, there are. The first order of business is to get one way at all.
56:30Elon MuskThat works.
56:31Tim DoddYep.
56:32Elon MuskThereafter to optimize.
56:33Tim DoddYep.
56:44Tim DoddWatch your step.
56:46Elon MuskThere's still a lot of work we got to do here.
56:48Tim DoddOh, that's cool. Cool looking.
56:50Elon MuskThat's.
56:51Tim DoddIs that the. The landing tank for.
56:53Elon MuskYeah, it's a header tank. Header tank there.
56:57Tim DoddThat's insane. Jeez. And then are those COPVs propped up against it like that then? Is that what those.
57:04Elon MuskYeah. Jeez. Gotta pressurize the head. Attack with something. And the engine's on. On.
57:11Tim DoddExactly. Wow.
57:29Tim DoddSo the, like the PEZ door that we see on Starship now, is that. Do you think that's going to stick around or is there still going to be like a chomper someday or is it.
57:37Elon MuskWell, for the Starlink satellites, they're pretty flat, so.
57:41Tim DoddSo the chomper makes sense.
57:42Elon MuskThere's no point in having a giant fairing for a, you know, flat little. It's a giant flat pancake.
57:47Tim DoddRight. What did the door test go reasonably well on the last one or Because I think you guys aren't doing anything.
57:54Elon MuskI had some issues.
57:55Tim DoddYeah. It's pretty rudimentary, of course, I assume.
57:59Elon MuskYeah. But it's wild that you've got this sort of really quite sophisticated factory on a sandbar. On a sandbar by the Rio Grande.
58:07Tim DoddYeah. Yeah.
58:09Elon MuskIt's like an alien spaceship landed.
58:12Tim DoddRight. Seriously, these are these thrusters here then. Is that what these are?
58:19Elon MuskLittle jetpacks? This will take the detailed stuff of the. That might run afoul of some Itar stuff deal. Yeah. I mean, I don't know if anyone is going to copy us.
58:33Elon MuskThat would be. It's a hard thing to copy.
58:46Elon MuskIt's come a long way since three times. Yeah, it sure has. I mean, everything's clean in this. There's no mud and dust. It's better when it has doors on it.
58:56Elon MuskYeah. I mean, everything used to have mud and dust.
58:59Tim DoddYes.
59:00Elon MuskAnd birds and things. There's always some finite mud and dust. But it's much smaller than.
59:05Tim DoddIt's a long ways from. I mean.
59:10Elon MuskYeah, Yeah. I mean, the mark one thing, it looked like the junkyard in Tatooine, which was charming. Yeah. There was a lot of dust and mud. I mean, Mach 1 was conceptual as a concept piece.
59:29Elon MuskYeah. I'd say concept art.
59:32Tim DoddYeah, absolutely.
59:35Elon MuskYeah.
59:35Tim DoddSo James pointed out that this actually wraps all the way around the, like. Yeah. All of that still back there. There's more to it.
59:42Elon MuskYeah.
59:43Tim DoddThat's the dome line. Jeez. That's the dome line and the coils. That's the starter lines over there. That's crazy.
59:51Elon MuskYeah. So we do have an existing factory that's wrapped around the one you just saw. That's where we make the ship and the booster.
59:59Tim DoddSo then that will open up and you'll start serpentining it basically through there.
1:00:03Elon MuskYeah. That will take down that wall there. That is. Once we have the doors on the other side, we'll take down that wall and then you'll just have factory will just kind of go as far as the eye can see.
1:00:16Tim DoddIt's so much bigger than I thought from the road. I mean, it looks big from the road, but it's insane. It's ridiculous.
1:00:22Elon MuskObviously, the sections get gradually bigger as you go south.
1:00:27Tim DoddRight.
1:00:28Elon MuskSo that's why things start off sort of short and then get taller as you go along.
1:00:32Tim DoddEven. Yeah. Even the roof line does that.
1:00:33Elon MuskRight. Roof is going to get bigger if the pieces get bigger.
1:00:37Tim DoddThat's absolutely crazy. Are you guys still using Like I remember, you know, back in the day, there's a lot of like Tesla motors being used, actually.
1:00:45Elon MuskYou said that way.
1:00:46Tim DoddOkay, so there's a lot of Tesla motors being used, like, you know, for the fins and all that kind of stuff. And maybe even the grid fins had like literally a Model S motor or something.
1:00:56Tim DoddAre you still kind of using some Tesla parts like that?
1:01:00Elon MuskYeah, we just use the Tesla drive units to actuate the grid fins and
1:01:06Tim Doddthe big flaps still to the. On ship.
1:01:14Elon MuskYes. Sorry. Yes, essentially. Sorry, I was thinking about something else. Yeah. Hey,
1:01:25Tim Doddthe.
1:01:27Elon MuskYeah, we use the. We try not to use hydraulics. It's all electro actuation.
1:01:33Tim DoddYeah.
1:01:34Elon MuskSo the engines are also gambled electrically.
1:01:40Tim DoddYep. So you're really moving away from hydraulics wherever possible.
1:01:43Elon MuskReally. Yeah, there's almost. I think there's actually no hydraulics in the vehicle. If there's hydraulics, some very tiny little part, but I think there's none.
1:01:53Tim DoddThat's wild. Actually. I can't even think of another.
1:01:56Elon MuskThere's pneumatics, right?
1:01:57Tim DoddA lot for all the valves and everything, obviously.
1:01:59Elon MuskYeah.
1:02:02Tim DoddThat's crazy. Jeez. It's surreal compared to what it was.
1:02:10Elon MuskYeah. Just a little bit ago.
1:02:13Tim DoddWow. It just keeps going and going. That is crazy.
1:02:20Elon MuskYeah. From one little tent.
1:02:24Tim DoddYeah. This starting to make Hawthorne look tiny. And Hawthorne's a.
1:02:27Elon MuskA big. Well, Hawthorne's actually a whole campus.
1:02:34Tim DoddAbsolutely crazy.
1:02:36Elon MuskThat's Meme Street.
1:02:38Tim DoddMeme street, yeah. Is that. Is that what it says now?
1:02:43Elon MuskThat's what. That's what it's called. All right.
1:02:46Tim DoddI think we're jumping in a different
1:02:47Elon Muskcar here, but if you look at the street sign, we got Meme Street. Yeah, it's literally called Meme Street. That is its official name. It used to be called Weems and we changed it from Weems to Memes.
1:03:00Tim DoddThe Important things. I love it. Holy crap. Was that incredible or what? Huge thank you to especially Elon Musk for showing us around and following up and just teaching us so much about what's going on and showing us the inside.
1:03:15Tim DoddHuge thanks. Amazing. And I also owe a huge, huge thank you to our supporters, especially those over on Patreon. If you want to support the work we do here, head on over to patreon.com everydayastronaut and now is a great time to be a supporter because we already have part two up for review.
1:03:29Tim DoddSo again, patreon.com everydayastronauts to catch part two right now. But even if you're not a supporter, fear not, Part two is coming out once reviews are done, so be sure you're subscribed so you don't miss out.
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1:04:02Tim DoddThanks everybody. That's going to do it for me. I'm Tim Dodd, the everyday astronaut, bringing space down to earth for everyday people.