And the nozzle, so as you're saying, there's a bunch of different design options,
but it's a critical part of this, how you do that conversion.
Which is basically like how much can you convert is really like the ultimate game.
How much pressure and heat can we convert into thrust?
Like that's really at the end of the day.
That's what a rocket engine is.
The following is a conversation with Tim Dodd, host of the Everyday Astronaut
YouTube channel, where he educates and inspires all of us with detailed but
accessible explanations of rocket engines and all things space travel.
This is a Lex Friedman podcast to support it.
Please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now, dear friends, here's Tim Dodd.
Can you give a brief history of SpaceX rockets?
So we've got Falcon one, Falcon nine, there's different versions of those.
Falcon Heavy, Starship and also the Dragon Castles and so on.
Well, yeah, Falcon one is where it all started.
The original intent and the original idea of SpaceX was Elon wanted to try
to get something to Mars, you know, he saw that NASA didn't have a current Mars
plan and he wanted to go to Mars.
So he decided how do I best do this?
He literally wanted to at first purchase a rocket from from Russia.
So then on the after a foiled attempt at doing that, he decided that he was going
to try to develop his own rocket and the Falcon one is what came out of that
process and he developed a pretty incredible team.
Like, I don't know how exactly he stumbled upon the team that he stumbled
upon that quickly, but the people that he assembled were amazing and they built
the Falcon one, which was a single Merlin engine followed by an upper
stage engine called the Kestrel engine, pretty small compared to the things
today, but that Merlin engine continued to evolve into being the power plant
for the Falcon nine.
They went from a small lift launch vehicle up into the medium class launch
vehicle so they could provide services for NASA.
That's one of the big things they first kind of hung their hat up was they
got the opportunity to fly cargo to the International Space Station under
origin is called the COTS program, the commercial orbital transportation
services for NASA, which evolved into the commercial resupply contracts.
And that's when SpaceX developed both their Dragon capsule, which is a
uncrewed at first spacecraft that can dock to the ISS and the Falcon nine
rocket that can take it to the International Space Station.
And then Dragon rides on it's a thing up top that rides on the big booster
thing that that launches it into orbit.
Exactly.
Yep.
The Falcon nine is the the semi truck.
The Dragon capsule is the payload, you know, it's the thing being
dropped off basically at its destination.
And in this case, the destination is the International Space Station.
And yeah, so they developed those relatively quickly and became a
commercial success before, you know what they're now the number one launch
provider in the world, launching more mass to pay to orbit than anybody
else, launching more frequently than countries, the entire country of China
who's going crazy right now with launches granted China beat them by
two launches this last in 2022.
But prior prior year, SpaceX beat the entire country of China.
I mean, it's it's nuts.
And just like you said, SpaceX still beats China even this year in
terms of the amount of payload those so all the mass to orbit, right?
That China had like 60 something, a couple more launches, but the there
was just like small cubes that type of launches.
Exactly.
Like some of them are literally like 100 kilograms or something, you know,
like not not large payloads.
And so SpaceX customers are different in different sort of whoever wants
to send payloads up into space.
Yes.
But right now their biggest customer is actually themselves with Starlink.
With Starlink.
One of the biggest reasons they've launched so much mass to orbit is
because Starlink is designed around the payload fairing and the payload
capabilities of the Falcon 9 rocket.
So, you know, because they're vertically integrated, because they
build their own satellites because they're building their own rocket.
They can literally design a system that's, you know, another manufacturer
might have made a more square satellite that was heavier or something.
But SpaceX looked at it from a blank slate and said, here's our
constraints, our payload mass constraints or volume constraints.
And they made a funky looking satellite at things like the size of a, you
know, it's like a table folded up, which isn't anything I've, you know,
really ever seen before.
So, but it's purpose built to fit as efficiently as possible inside
their fairing and inside the capabilities of that rocket.
So therefore, because they're launching those like an insane amount, you
know, a dozen, you know, 40, 50 times a year or whatever, they're, they're
just putting up insane amounts of mass like we've never seen before.
What about the different versions of Falcon 9 so we can linger on them?
What are some interesting memories to you of the different developments in Falcon 9?
The very first Falcon 9s had a square array of engines.
It had like a 3x3x3 grid of their Merlin 1 engines, the 1Ds.
And I think it only lasted, I don't remember if it was two or four flights
before they went into this octawode configuration where there's eight, like
a ring of eight engines with a center engine in the middle, still in the same
diameter that the rocket was, the fuselage was more or less the same,
3.7 meter wide diameter, but the actual thrust structure changed.
And one of the big efficiency gains was you no longer have, you know, a corner
engine and then like a edge engine and then another corner engine.
You can just make eight of the same, you know, kind of part of the octawab.
It's called, you know, the same shape and then your interchangeability
and your manufacturability becomes a lot simpler.
So that was kind of one of the bigger upgrades at first.
And they kept stretching it.
Every time they like touch this thing, it got longer and like or taller and taller
technically. And then the next big feature that you saw in 2014 would have
been they added landing legs to a Falcon 9 rocket, which is, I was at, that was
the first launch I ever went to, was actually to see, you know, CRS-3,
so commercial resupply mission three, and it was probably their, God, I don't
remember what that was like, their 14th or 15th launch or something, like pretty
early on. And people were literally laughing at the idea of them putting
landing legs on it. They just thought it was stupid.
They're like, why are they wasting, why is this billionaire Elon Musk guy
wasting his time trying to land a rocket? It's not going to work.
So you said the Mars planet was there in the beginning.
What about the reusability of rockets?
Was that there in the beginning?
I think reusability definitely, you know, it's a necessary part of making
any kind of interplanetary mission, you know, in order to actually do that,
just financially, you have to start reusing these things.
In terms of the development of the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9, how early on did
the goal of reusing the rocket, having the rocket actually land, how early did
that goal creep in?
I can't speak for Elon and SpaceX, but it was pretty, you know,
immediately they wanted to try to recover. And as a matter of fact, I think
the very first two Falcon 9 rockets and Falcon 1, I think they even wanted
to try to recover using parachutes to recover the first stage.
And now fast forward, you know, almost 20 years later, and Rocket Lab's actually
doing a concept like that, where they're pulling a parachute after the first stage
is re-entering and they actually are trying to recover it with a helicopter.
It's going to try to snatch it out of the air. They've actually done it.
They've actually done it successfully once.
How does the helicopter grab the rocket?
With this giant, like, drag line and a hook.
Oh, wow.
And then they'll literally just, like, grab snags onto the parachute.
Wow.
And it's pretty amazing. But this is a small rocket.
The rocket's only about a metric ton. The booster is empty.
So the rocket releases parachutes, like, really high up.
I'd love to see this. Yeah.
It's an interesting idea. There's so many interesting ideas and possibilities.
Like, SpaceX basically just innovated a lot of different weird ideas
just in the pursuit of making things more efficient, reusable, all of that.
So basically, thinking from first principle is how to solve this problem.
And so what you find is, like, you'll get all these kind of crazy kind of solutions.
And with SpaceX, they weren't even getting to the point of the booster
surviving re-entry long enough to be able to pull the parachutes.
You know, they're mass fractions.
You know, and in that varies, every single rocket's different.
You know, for instance, Rocket Lab uses carbon composite fuselage and tanks.
Or, you know, same thing.
And that's very, very lightweight.
Has really good mass fractions.
And therefore, their drag coefficients and things like that,
they were able to survive re-entry of the first stage,
which is something that SpaceX wasn't able to do at the time.
What's kind of the big, I think, breakthrough for SpaceX
with reusing the booster is they realized we have to basically slow down
before we hit the atmosphere.
So they actually do what they used to call a re-entry burn,
which I still think is the correct term, because it is re-entering the atmosphere.
But now they call it the entry burn, and they light up three of the nine Merlin engines,
not only to slow it down, but actually, even while those engines are firing,
it creates, like, a literal force field as it's falling through the atmosphere.
Interesting.
But it also decreases the velocity by almost half, or around half.
And then that, therefore, decreases the amount of, you know,
the biggest thing with the atmosphere is that as it gets compressed against
the front of anything flying through the atmosphere,
the compressed atoms just get hot.
And they can get so hot they turn into a plasma,
and they get so hot they can just absolutely destroy anything.
So they slow down enough that the air molecules don't end up, you know,
destroying the vehicle on re-entry.
And then they realize, I think at some point, it's probably a similar crossover.
They're like, well, if we're lighting the engines already that slow down in the atmosphere,
we can just use that same engine to land.
And so, like, well, what if we just stuck landing legs on it
and just landed the thing vertically?
And next thing you know is December 21st, 2015,
they did exactly that for the first time they landed.
So you were there before that, then, right?
Yeah, yeah.
In 2014.
Yep, early 2014.
So that, and for me, like, that was so fun watching, you know,
that was like the peak of me just becoming obsessed with this idea.
I'm watching with, like, and back in the day, it was like months between launches.
You know, so a launch was like a big idea.
I'd wake up at 3 a.m. to watch this landing attempt or whatever, you know,
and every, you know, there's CRS-4 almost landed, CRS-5 almost landed, CRS-6,
CRS-7 blew up.
I was watching that on, I think it was like a Saturday morning,
or maybe a Sunday morning.
And I remember watching that and watch it blow up.
And I was like, oh my God, now what, you know, and it blew up on ascent.
It was their first failure.
So it was their 18th flight, I believe.
CRS-7, the upper stage had one of the bottlers bottles inside the tanks
that are filled with helium and one of those bottles broke off on ascent
and actually just completely overpressured the upper stage.
And the upper stage blew up and the whole rocket went kaboom in an uncontrolled manner.
And so then they came back with vengeance and when they came back,
the first mission back is the first time that they landed a rocket, which was awesome.
So the return to flight after the anomaly was landing a rocket.
Stuck the landing.
Yep, nailed it.
Well, actually the first time, so the first time you were there, what was that like?
What do you remember from that day?
Just, I was surprised at how much bigger the rocket was than I imagined.
I was, I originally, when I was going down to Kennedy Space Center,
I was disappointed that I wasn't seeing like a, you know, I didn't know a ton about rockets.
I knew enough to like know what a space shuttle was, what like the Saturn V was, you know,
but that was probably about the end of my knowledge.
I just remember being disappointed that I wasn't seeing a big quote-unquote NASA rocket flying.
You know, I was thinking in my head like, oh, I'm going to see this launch.
It's probably going to be like, you know, three stories tall or something, you know,
just some little skinny little stick and some little firecracker and yay, you know.
And I think I'd almost been pitched that too.
I think the people that I was working for at the time, I think they kind of were downplaying it.
It's like, well, it's not a big rocket here.
It's not going to be that exciting, you know.
But we get out there to the pad and I'm like, this thing's huge.
This is not a small rocket.
Like this is, it's, you know, it's 70 meters tall, 220 feet tall.
It's huge.
And I think people forget like the scale of that, you know.
It might look skinny and tall and all this stuff, but it's still a very, very large piece of machinery.
It's physically about as large as you can ship.
The booster is about as big as you can ship across the country period without like completely shutting down highways.
You know, it is made within those exact specifications of, of like having, you know, lane privileges and bridges and everything.
It's, you know, 12 feet wide, 3.7 meters wide and it's 45 meters long.
So it's like exactly what you can fit with a pretty standard, you know, like before you start getting into crazy amounts of problems shipping the rocket.
And it's huge.
It's huge.
And people just don't understand that.
And so when I saw it with my own eyes, I remember just being like, this is so much cooler than I thought.
Is it hard to believe that that thing is going to have to lift off the ground and launch up into the air?
Maybe that's the most humbling aspect of it.
That's something that size.
Humans have come up with a way to take something that size and launching, launch it up into the air.
Yeah.
There's certainly a very humbling aspect when you watch it actually leave.
Was, was there a sound to it?
Was there like a feeling?
What were the different experiences you first remember?
Well, ironically, I didn't end up getting to see that one fly.
Oh.
I went home.
My camera saw it.
I left my camera out there, like a remote triggered camera.
My first images as a launch photographer at the time was, was CRS3, but I went home and scrubbed too many times.
So this is back in the day, they were scrubbing like often and they'd be like a three day, five day, seven day.
You just never knew.
So I go home and I watched the live stream of it.
So I didn't even get to experience my first launch.
And anyone that's ever tried to, you know, go to a launch is probably empathize because yeah, scrubs are very common in the spaceflight world.
So that one I didn't get to see.
But since then, obviously I've been able to attend very many launches.
How much do you understand the control involved in the landing?
How difficult is that problem?
I couldn't tell you a single thing about like the code and like the avionics behind it, but I can tell you all the hardware that makes it happen.
If that helps.
Well, that, I mean, to me, it seems like whenever I talk to people, they say it's not that big of a deal in terms of the level of intelligence and the control.
But to me, it's just like when you observe it, it seems incredible because all the variables involved, all the uncertainties involved, all the, because there's aerodynamics.
There's different temperatures, there's so much going on with the fuel, the burning, the combustion, just everything that's going on to be able to perform control at such high stakes effectively.
Like, you know, that code is probably not written in JavaScript, I guess is what I'm saying.
Actually, no, I don't, if I remember, again, this is well outside of my domain, but they're coding in a common language.
It's probably going to be C.
Yeah.
I'm pretty sure it is.
And that was one of the things that was weird is that Elon, when he, you know, started SpaceX was like, we're just going to code in the most common language so that we don't have to like have people learn this archaic, you know, weird thing.
And we can just literally pull people off the streets and be like, here, write it, you know, and.
Yeah, it's probably C++.
I mean, it'd be epic if it was like Python or something, but I don't, I think like reliable systems have to be written in C.
C++ probably, which is a common language, which is something.
I imagine like NASA engineers would probably have to use some kind of proprietary language in the olden days for security, for privacy, all that kind of stuff.
Well, in the olden, old, old days, like they were inventing code and language from scratch.
For sure.
It's just still incredible that it's able to do that.
Like just the feat of engineering involved is truly, it's like one of the marvels to observe about these rockets coming back to Earth.
That they're able to land.
Like the drama of it is just incredible to see.
Yeah.
Well, one of the fun things to remember too with specifically with the Falcon 9 and the Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy Boosters.
I mean, it's the same thing basically.
They shut down all but one of the nine engines.
And even with that one engine at its minimum throttle setting, it's still too much thrust to hover.
So as this rocket's coming down, if they start a little bit too early, if they light that engine too early,
it will actually stop above the ground and will not be able to lower itself.
It will literally stop like, say it stopped 200 feet above the ground.
They're only options to kill the engine and then it's just going to fall those 200 feet.
So they, it's what we call like a suicide burner, a hover slam, kind of interchangeable terms.
Because your thrust to weight ratio is never below one.
So they have to actually literally be riding the throttle.
So what you do is you kind of start, ideally, you know, you kind of start like in the middle of your window of throttle range.
So let's pretend your engine can throttle down to 40% of its maximum rated thrust.
You might start at like 70% of thrust in the middle of that like window of where it had bearing.
So that, so if all of a sudden it's kind of coming in too hot, you have room to throttle up.
If we're coming into, you're actually, you know, a little too early, you throttle it down.
You have a little bit of wiggle room.
And it's just amazing how smoothly and how perfectly they're able to still control that thing.
Even though they're down to one engine out of the nine and they're still riding like the finest margin of what's possible.
And they're continually playing with that to try to get it.
Cause every, every bit of fuel they're using and propellant they're using to land is propellant they weren't using to put something into space.
So they want that to be as efficient as possible.
So they're really like watching them hone that in and, and just continue to evolve and edit that and just get it to be the workhorse.
And we're coming up on a hundred consecutive landings, perfect landings, a hundred.
I think they've done like a hundred and fifty something landings altogether, a hundred and sixty altogether.
But we're talking like in a row without blowing up, which I think, you know, five years ago was completely experimental and insane.
And now we're coming up to the point where a hundred in a row, it's like, this is becoming more reliable in the landing, which is not the primary mission.
This is purely for SpaceX's like gain is to recover the booster.
It has nothing to do with the effect of getting the payload on orbit, you know, most of the time.
And the landing is really only for their, their benefit and their gain.
Long-term gain, like it's a long-term investment in, in being able to recover the, the, the boosters.
Can you believe all this was done basically 10 years?
So we've seen this development over a period of 10 years.
So like where we started commercial space flight at scale to today,
where it's almost almost starting to be mundane.
Yeah.
I can't really believe it.
I mean, obviously, even just in the, I think I'm a fairly fair weather fan really didn't start paying attention to like 2014.
Yeah.
And just seeing what it was like back then to what it's like.
Like I don't watch every launch at all anymore.
Like I'll catch the big ones.
I'll stream some of the really big ones.
But like back in the day, I, like I said, would wake up in the middle of the night to catch these streams or, you know, catch these launches and watch them because they were such a big deal.
And there's maybe only five of them a year, you know.
And so it was a really big deal.
Nowadays, it's like, oh yeah, there's literally like two a week on average now.
It's insane from SpaceX alone, let alone, you know, United Launch Alliance, Rocket Lab, any of the Chinese missions, you know, I mean, all there's countless.
It's insane.
It's hard to really, really, really hard to keep up with.
I wonder at which point in the future, the number of launches to orbit will exceed the number of launches of airplanes, like on the surface of Earth.
Yeah, I have to admit, I kind of have a hard time extrapolating out that far.
You know, there's a lot of people that are like big futurists and really do think about like interplanetary stuff and think about colonizing Mars and stuff.
I have a hard time predicting like when Starship is going to fly, the orbital launch, you know, and that's like imminent-ish, like month or two scale time frame.
And yet I'm still like, I can't tell you when that's going to, I can't tell you anything about like when we're going to land on Mars or what that's, what that economy and what that, you know, the scale of launch operations is going to look like in order to do that.
Because it's just so hard to, I wouldn't have predicted where we're at today five years ago, you know, it's, it's insane.
It's so hard to predict and yeah, but it's funny because there's so many like new companies starting up trying to predict that and it's a really exciting, you know, startup culture right now.
I think when you make certain engineering decisions and hiring decisions and like what you focus on in terms of both business and engineering, it's good to think on the scale of 10, 20, 50, 100 years.
This is one of the things that Elon is exceptionally good at, which is asking the question, okay, this might seem impossible right now, but what's the obvious way to do this if we look out 20 years?
And then you start to make decisions.
You start to make decisions about robotics, about brain and computer interfaces, about space travel there.
They make a lot of sense when you look at the scale of 10, 20, 50, 100 years and don't make any sense if you look at the scale of just months.
So, but of course the actual work of day to day is focused on the next few months because there's deadlines, there's missions they have to accomplish.
Anyway, we are returning back to the brief history of space rockets.
The Falcon Heavy.
So what else is there?
So we talked about Falcon 9 and the rapid development there, what other flavors of Falcon is there and how does that take us to Starship?
Yeah, realistically, the Falcon 9 evolved more or less, kind of like just got more powerful and a little bit longer and more capable.
But nowadays they fly what's called the Block 5, even though it's like the eighth or ninth iteration of the Falcon 9, but they call it Block 5.
It's the one that has the black landing legs, the black interstage.
They have a fleet of roughly 10 or so that are doing the majority of the legwork these days and they're flying, you know, up to 15 times.
I think right now is the current booster leader.
They're also recovering the fairings so the nose cone of the rockets are frequently, if not every time being recovered.
Same with the booster for the most part.
And the only thing being expended is the upper stage and that's kind of where the Falcon 9 is ending.
It really doesn't make sense to develop that infrastructure any longer, so they went with the next step, which is go even bigger physically.
So they have more margin for upper stage reusability.
And that's what we see with Starship and Super Heavy.
So the Super Heavy booster, the whole system is confusing.
The whole system is kind of considered Starship, but technically the Starship is just the upper stage, which is also like the spaceship, which is also the upper stage.
And then the booster itself is considered the Super Heavy booster.
And that's what they've been working on.
Publicly it came out in 2016 at the time it was the ITS, the Interplanetary Transportation System.
Later, and I think by the end of that year, 2017, it kind of became known as the BFR, the big Falcon rocket.
Yes.
Yeah.
And then I think it was about end of 2018, they started calling it Starship.
But that is where we're at today, and that's what they're working full steam ahead on.
And what about Dragon? Do we mention Dragon, Crew Dragon, Cargo Dragon?
Yeah.
So they went from the cargo version of Dragon that flew about 20 times successfully to the International Space Station, except for that one CRS-7 where the rocket blew up and the capsule obviously didn't make it to the ISS.
Then they went into the Dragon 2, which has two variants, it has a crew variant, so we just call it Crew Dragon, and then there's the cargo version of Dragon 2.
And that's just an updated, sleeker, sexier version of Dragon.
And ironically, it's heavier altogether, so you'll never see those cool return to launch site landing.
The booster is coming back to land for CRS missions anymore like we used to, but they landed on the drone ship anyway.
And yeah, that's been flying successfully.
So there's Starlink, Dragon, Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and Starship system.
It's kind of the whole SpaceX world really.
In terms of the spaceships involved, what to you are some of the major milestones in that history?
We kind of mentioned a few sticking to landing.
Is there something that kind of stands out?
Yeah, I would say definitely the big ones obviously, like any of the first, like the first flight of Falcon 1, first flight of Falcon 9,
first time they went to the International Space Station, the first time they landed a booster,
the first time they reused a booster, which is I think about six months after.
No, it was a year after, it was SES-10 2017.
It was the first time they reused one of those boosters, and that was a big milestone.
Can we even, yeah, we recovered one, we caught one, it's like we got one, now what?
That was the first time they reflew one.
Yeah, then Flying Humans was a huge one, DM2, Bob and Doug for NASA.
Bob and Doug, yeah.
Bob and Doug, that was incredible.
That was a huge, huge step I think for SpaceX was flying people.
So it's the first major commercial launching of humans out into space.
Yeah, and not just into space, because there's been people that have done space flights with suborbital hops,
but going into orbit, and especially docking and rendezvousing with the International Space Station,
it's a big deal, it's a whole, until you really understand the physics involved and the scale involved
of just crossing the Karman line, going straight up versus going into orbit,
they're just completely different things almost.
What about Starship?
Are we in a place where we can talk about milestones with Starship?
Has there been, or has it just been an epic journey of failure and successes, of testing and so on?
What would you classify at this point as a milestone, a Starship or BFR, whatever the name was able to achieve?
Well, so far the milestones we've seen, I'd say the first one would be the hop of, they call it Star Hopper,
and it's basically a very rudimentary rocket, but it was the first time they utilized their new Raptor engine
to produce thrust to fly something.
It first flew like, literally like three meters off the ground or something, like tethered to the ground,
then it flew like 15, and then finally it flew 150 meters, and that was in 2019,
and that was the first big milestone of Starship.
Then after that we saw SN5, SN6 kind of do the similar, like 150 meter hops with a little bit more elegant systems,
you know, proving out more of their tank building, proving out more of their, you know, a lot of just subsystems,
and then the big ones, physically, were in end of 2020 and early 2021 when they flew the SN8, 9, 10, 11 and 15.
What does the N stand for in SN?
I think it's serial number.
SN, these are just names, numbers, numerical representations of the different testing efforts.
They skip some numbers, right?
Yeah.
If they scratch a test.
Yeah, and lots of times it'd be like literally they're building, you know, at Starbase, and what SpaceX is working on,
like the one foot is always in front of someone else's foot, and like the arm is not knowing what the leg is doing sometimes.
They will have someone working on, you know, they'll just be like, hurry up and build 40 of these tank sections,
and you build the bulkhead, and you build the downcomer, and you build the header tank, blah, blah, blah,
and all of a sudden like, oh, we actually evolved that, we don't use that header tank now.
So that's going to go on to this one.
So they'll have like parts of certain rockets built, and it's like, ah, literally scrap it.
Like not scrap it like in the, you know, joke term, but like literally just go scrap it.
And they, so they just evolve and iterate so quickly.
There were some epic explosions.
I think Starship, something about it, probably just the amount of fuel just leads to some epic failures.
Would you say Starship is the source of the most epic failures in terms of size of explosion?
So you can literally measure in like a yield of explosive power, you know, like you could TNT.
Like you can take a look at how much propellant is left over at the time of the explosion.
And, you know, Starship, what's flown so far, even though it's physically one of the largest flying objects ever,
just with the upper stage alone, they've not filled it more than like 10 or 20% full of propellant.
And so it actually hasn't been, the failures have been really epic looking, big visual fireballs,
but in terms of spaceflight, they're still pretty small explosions, believe it or not.
They could still go bigger.
Oh yeah, a lot, a lot.
And of course, the test payload of a Tesla Roadster was launched.
I forget what year that was.
Yeah, that was 2018.
That was quite epic. Would you put that on a milestone?
Oh yeah, yeah, Falcon Heavy demo was like definitely a big, big, big milestone.
Is that funny to you that there's a Roadster floating out there?
Yeah.
Do we know the location of that Roadster at this point?
Oh yeah, WhereIsRoadster.com.
Yeah.
Oh yeah.
Where's, is it orbiting something?
Yeah, it's orbiting the sun.
So it's orbiting the sun.
It's orbiting the sun and its orbit is basically between the Earth's orbit and beyond Mars.
So I think of like 2.5 AU if I remember right.
So it's beyond Mars's orbit at its highest point and it's back at Earth, kind of at its lowest point.
I wonder if there's a mission where you're going to somehow connect with it once again
and like place extra things into it.
I wonder how challenging that is technically.
Oh yeah, it could absolutely be done.
You know, the hard thing at this point because it's on an eccentric orbit would be rendezvousing with it
because you kind of had to be in alignment with its orbit to really line up well with it.
Yeah.
But yeah, I mean someday I don't see any reason why we couldn't at least send for sure an uncrewed,
you know, if Elon wanted to just fly a robot out there to check up on it and photograph it or something.
Like we could, that could be well within the realm of things.
Get an optimist robot up there.
So that was the story brilliantly told by you of the rockets for SpaceX.
What about through the lens of engines?
Can you give a brief history of the SpaceX rocket engines that were used that we have in covers?
You mentioned it all started with the Merlin engine and a Kestrel engine.
Yeah, through that lens.
Yeah.
What's there?
Engines are relatively small number, which is easy for us.
There's the other Merlin and Merlin's evolved throughout time to be from like the Merlin to the Merlin 1C to the Merlin 1D
to the Merlin 1D full thrust and all these other kind of tweaks of the same architecture.
Kestrel ended with Falcon 1.
They also have the Merlin vacuum engine, which is the upper stage engine for Falcon 9.
Same relative system, but just optimized for vacuum.
So it has a much larger bell nozzle.
There's the Draco thrusters, which, you know, you kind of can consider engines.
They are rocket engines, but they're just small. They're not like the orbital engines.
There's the Super Draco engines, which are the abort thrusters on Crew Dragon capsule.
And then nowadays they have the Raptor engine and the Raptor vacuum variant.
But they've already had two versions of Raptor.
We've already seen kind of the Raptor development engine.
We've kind of seen like a Raptor 1.5 whereas kind of taking hints of the future Raptor.
But now we're well within what you'd consider a Raptor 2 variant.
That's really it.
Yeah, for the Raptor.
Maybe I'll ask you that separately.
But I like in general and people who doesn't know whoever the astronaut is.
But if you don't somehow know, go check your YouTube channel out.
You're an incredible educator about the super technical
and the more sort of even the philosophical, the actual space travel.
So you go down to the raw details of it.
And there's just great videos on the Raptor engine.
I think you have one on Merlin and also the actual tours with Elon
where he discusses some of those things.
On one of the tours he says, he's full of good lines, that guy.
He says something about the number of fiddly bits.
And the number of fiddly bits was decreased between Raptor 2 and Raptor 1.
And I think that's actually a really beautiful representation of the engineering efforts there
which is constantly trying to simplify.
Increase the efficiency of the engines but also simplify the design so you can manufacture it.
And in general, simplification leads to better performance and testing and everything.
So the number of fiddly bits, I'm sure there's a Wikipedia page on that now
as an index is actually a really good one.
Well, and when you think about it, I don't know of any other company prior
that had kind of tried to measure their performance of their engine
not in thrust to weight ratio or how efficient it is in specific impulse
but literally in dollar to thrust ratio.
How much does this engine cost?
How much thrust can it produce?
And using that as a trade study instead of just pure metrics of...
Because at the end of the day, okay, if it's cheaper and does X amount of work
even if it's less efficient, it can actually be better long term.
And so I guess another way is not even just thrust.
I don't know if that metric is used but basically the cost of getting one kilogram of thing up into space.
That's basically what they're trying to minimize.
Especially, yeah.
At the end of the day, that is definitely the ultimate metric
is how much does one kilogram cost to orbit eventually.
But it's so funny because spaceflight is just the ultimate compromise.
Every little thing, any variable can just change everything else.
So you can tweak so many different things to get to different numbers and conclusions.
But even things like on your first stage, when the rocket's pointing straight up
and the engines are pointing straight down, you're dealing more with the thrust to weight ratio of the rocket.
So how much thrust is it producing versus how much is gravity pulling down on it?
It's actually a more important metric than how raw efficient the engine is.
So it's funny that in space, it's kind of the opposite.
Thrust to weight ratio doesn't really matter.
What really matters is the actual, the specific impulse.
It's called the nozzle escape velocity or the ejection velocity
of how fast the gas moving is, like the more important number on orbit.
But it's just so crazy because there's all these, I would just love to see the trade studies
when you're trying to figure out, is this more important than this or this or this?
And it's like, you change this one little thing and all of a sudden,
everything changes.
It's just even the profile, the launch profile, the trajectory of it.
I mean, everything, everything.
I wonder what that trade out discussions are like
because you can't really perfectly plan everything.
And you always have to have some spare leave way,
especially as you're testing new vehicles like Starship.
Yeah, margins are important.
Yeah, having a margin given all the uncertainty that's there.
That's really interesting, like how they do those kinds of trade-offs
because they're also rapidly designing and redesigning and re-engineering.
And ultimately, you want to give yourself the freedom to constantly innovate,
but then through the process of testing, you solidify the thing that can be relied upon,
especially if it's a crewed mission.
Yeah.
How to do that in a rapid cycle.
I remember at some point that NASA, as they're leading up to flying humans
for the first time for NASA, there's some talk that we're going to do a design freeze
because SpaceX does evolve and iterate so quickly.
They were saying that it was leading,
because especially at the time, it was a mission called AMO-6 and they lost a rocket.
They've only lost two rockets ever, really, as far as trying to get something to space.
For the Falcon 9, sorry.
And the second one, AMO-6, that was back in 2016, so it's been a long time.
But at the time, they're looking at flying humans in the near future.
It's like, if you guys keep tweaking this thing every time you take it out to the pad,
there's going to be a problem.
And so there is some pressure from NASA to slow down on that iterative process.
But that is also why they were able to evolve the Falcon 9 to be what it is today
because they did just evolve it so quickly.
Literally, one after another was never really the same.
And we're definitely seeing that with Starship now.
It's evolved so quickly that you just can't even keep up with it.
So there's a fascinating culture clash there.
Have you just, in observing and interacting with NASA folks,
seen them sort of grow and change and evolve themselves,
sort of inspired by this new developments in commercial spaceflight?
Oh, yeah, there's a lot of, especially around DM2, there's a lot of talks
and the press conferences and stuff where you'd hear people say,
this is well outside of our comfort zone to work with SpaceX in this manner
because we take this approach to things.
We're X, Y, and Z in this way, the way we normally certify things.
And we're not used to SpaceX like, well, let's just try it and do something to a point.
And so they said it ended up being fantastic.
They loved working that way because it was just less paperwork almost and more just do.
But at the same time, SpaceX, I think, even expressed,
I don't remember if it was Hans Kunigsman or someone in a press conference said,
well, we really liked having someone just double check us
so that we're not doing something super stupid right before we test something, you know.
So there was a cool collaboration because it is two very different philosophies
of development and managing space programs.
I wanted to talk to you a lot about engines and maybe about Starship
and maybe about your own becoming an actual astronaut.
But let's just go there before all that and talk about the actual culture of SpaceX
and your conversations with Elon.
You've toured SpaceX facilities with him.
You've interviewed him. You've interacted with him.
What have you learned about rockets, about propulsion, about engineering,
about design, about life from those interactions?
He's pretty transparent, open human being as an engineer, as a leader, as a person.
I would definitely say the biggest takeaway I've had from my times with Elon at SpaceX
is the idea of questionnaire constraints.
He says that a lot, but he also does it a lot.
There'll be times where you'll see him change on a dime
because he's rethinking of something in a newer, different way.
For me, I think we all put constraints on ourselves.
We think about our own limits on things that we can or cannot do.
I think it's made me question why did I say, no, I can't do that
or just off the top of my head.
A good example, so in Iowa, I live in Iowa,
or half the time or whatever,
there's a bike ride across the state of Iowa called Rag Brie.
Every year, thousands of people get together and they ride across to Iowa.
It was last summer, I met up with some friends,
and they were like, hey, do you want to go on Rag Brie this year?
I'm like, it's like a week away.
They're like, yeah, you want to go?
I'm like, yeah.
So I did.
It was one of those moments where I was proud of myself
because it's easy to just be like, no, I'm not ready or this is my constraint.
It's like I'm not in shape, but just question that.
And so I think when it comes down to questioning your own constraints,
it's yes, even to that level,
why do you question yourself on what you can and cannot do?
So that's for your personal life is really powerful,
but a little bit more intuitive.
I think what's really hard is to question constraints in a place like aeronautics
or robotics or autonomous vehicles or vehicles,
because there's experts everywhere that have done it for decades,
and everyone admires those experts and respects those experts.
And for you to step into a room,
knowing not much more than just what's in a Wikipedia article,
and to just use your intuition and first principles,
thinking to disagree with the experts,
that takes some guts, I think.
Well, you can't have everyone doing that either.
There has to be some humility of knowing that something is a hardened concept
and especially, I'm not an engineer.
I don't do this stuff,
but I can imagine you sitting there having spent six years on a type of valve
that perfectly manages crowds and propellants or whatever,
and someone walks in and says, why don't you just put a heater element in there?
Because we've done that 40 times or whatever.
I'm sure there are things like that that are very frustrating,
but I don't know what that's like.
The thing is with the experts, they're always going to be frustrated
when the newbie comes in with their first principles thinking,
but sometimes that frustration is justified,
and sometimes it's just stubbornness for failing to acknowledge a better way.
I've seen it in both directions, which is really interesting.
You need both, but that tension is always going to be there,
and there has to be almost like a dictatorial imperative
that breaks through the expertise of the way things have been done in the past
to push forward in a new way of doing it.
Elon's done that.
I've seen a lot of great engineers do that.
In the machine learning world, because there's been so much development,
I've seen that happen.
Usually when there's rapid development that starts to come into play.
I've seen that autonomous vehicle space,
brain-computer interfaces that Elon has evolved with, all of it.
It's kind of fascinating to watch.
What about the actual design and engineering of the engine?
Since you've learned about so many different kinds of engines over the past few years,
what stands out to you about the way that engineering is done at SpaceX
or that Elon does engineering?
The hardest thing to remember is how much stuff was developed in the 50s and 60s.
The concepts finally being utilized today were already literally done in the 60s.
A lot of the things that SpaceX is doing isn't a novel concept per se.
For instance, the Raptor engine utilizes the full flow stage combustion cycle engine.
That was already developed by the Soviets in the 60s for an engine called the RD-270.
On paper, 100% it makes sense because you're basically extracting the absolute maximum potential
of the chemical energy in both propellants.
At the end of the day, you have to be dumb enough to say,
we're going to try using this thing because it's actually really complicated to do what they're doing.
At the same time, so are rockets. Rocket engine is already stupid complicated.
Adding 10, 20% more pain in the butt during the R&D,
if it's in the long, long, long 20, 30-year existence or whatever future of that engine,
is that going to be worth it? Obviously, SpaceX said,
yeah, I think we can actually develop this Raptor engine.
It's just interesting to see the things that have been looked at or even reusability.
The space shuttle was reusable. The upper stage, the shuttle itself, the orbiter,
that thing was, for all intents and purposes, a reusable rocket.
Now, did it live up to its expectations? Not necessarily.
It left a lot of bad taste in people's mouth on the ideas of reusability.
For SpaceX to come back into the room and on the table and say,
we're going to use a reusable rocket. Specifically, we're going to do a fully reusable rocket.
You know, a lot of people are, even still today, a lot of people are going,
yeah, you're not going to be able to do that.
Even today? Even today?
Yeah.
So, like, long term, you're not going to be able to reuse at scale.
Yeah.
But definitely, I think the number of people that are saying that today is a small portion
of those that were saying that type of thing five years ago.
You know, when Elon did that announcement in 2016 for the ITS,
it was very, very aspirational and people were just like, yeah, right.
You know?
And there's a large number of people that had the factual reasons to think that and do that.
You know, at the time, they'd only landed like two rockets or something, you know,
when they did that, or maybe three. It was a very small number.
When they announced that actually they had just lost a couple months prior,
they just lost AMO6.
So they like, they were still this young blossoming company and they come in and be like,
we've figured out reusability and now we're going to go full scale
and make the world's biggest, most heaviest, most powerful rocket ever
and we're going to fully reuse it and it's going to go to Mars.
It was just pretty out there.
Like it really was.
And, you know, it's all about perspective.
But now, again, we're coming up on 100 consecutive landings of an orbital class rocket
that's, you know, 45 meters tall, 3.7 meters wide.
Like this thing is huge, weighs 20 metric tons, even empty when it's landing.
That thing's already huge.
So seeing the success of that, I think people are now more like, well, okay,
maybe there is actually the opportunity to be fully reusable.
That's definitely probably the biggest constraint that I think has been questioned.
That is being.
Reusability, yep.
And then of course, like the broader one of cost of bringing down costs,
that you're able to kind of bring down costs so much,
something like colonizing Mars or many trips to Mars will be a possibility.
Yeah.
People don't even, it seems so far out that they don't even have time
or give effort to questioning it.
Yeah.
But it's the implied questioning.
Can you really do that many launches?
Actually do it.
Can you actually do it?
Yeah.
It's looking, I think it's one of those things where you look at the curve.
You know, you look at like 10 years ago, that was ridiculous.
Yeah.
Following this curve, if SpaceX goes from, you know, two years ago launching,
I don't remember what it was, 40 times to 60 times to 100 times this year.
Is there, is there amount?
And if we just keep extrapolating that out, if they,
maybe not that exponential, maybe it goes more linear or whatever,
what's 20, 30 years, like the amount of stuff we can put on orbit
and the potential we have to do things, like, absolutely.
Now, I don't want to put a time for it.
Like, you know, yeah, I think, but you got to think it's,
we're increasing the number of launches.
We're increasing the amount of things in space.
We're increasing the amount of payload on orbit.
That's probably not going to decrease anytime soon.
And therefore, eventually, like the idea of going to Mars is absolutely reasonable.
Let me ask a difficult question that needs to be asked here.
Can SpaceX continue its successes without Elon?
This long-term mission to Mars.
I think the discussion about Tesla and autopilot or robotics
or neural-linked brain-computer interfaces is a question wholly separate from the SpaceX question.
Because there's a lot of other competitors doing some different but amazing engineering
that Tesla is doing in both autonomous vehicles, semi-autonomy or full autonomy.
And obviously in vehicle design and electric vehicles,
there's a lot of people that are doing incredible brain-computer interfaces.
But while there is a lot of competitors to SpaceX,
and we'll talk about many of them, they're doing amazing work,
it seems like he's really driving progress here over the past 10 years.
What do you think about that?
Okay, the first thing I think to remind people is just how many brilliant people do work
in each of these companies, obviously.
You know, Elon's had some of the best teams assembled ever.
Just incredible people. He knows this.
He will gladly tell people, and he says it often,
like the amazing people, the amazing teams here.
So it is important to remember that.
That being said, there is something to Elon's just super far forward,
not taking no for an answer on things approach.
And almost to his dismay, I think he is afraid of the sunk cost fallacy so much
that it almost gets to the border of being, you know, like throw out everything
before it's even, we've known it or not,
but at the same time, like it moves the needle so fast so far.
So as far as the question of would SpaceX continue to like succeeding
and be able to ultimately go to Mars without Elon,
the Mars thing I think would probably be hard to uphold without it.
I think a lot of that drive for Mars is from Elon.
It is maybe too fantastical for the average person and the average employee
and maybe the average CEO that might step in
to have a company's mission be to go to Mars.
Or even governments, clearly, because like you said, the Mars plan was non-existent for NASA.
Yeah, still really, there isn't much, you know.
So I think if, how many people, I'm sorry to interrupt,
how many people are talking about it's obvious that we need to become multi-planetary.
Right, there's not, there's the Mars Society and like serious leaders of engineering efforts
or nations and so on.
Yeah, which it does seem, if you think about it, that it's obvious.
Yeah, and the grand eventuality, it is obvious.
Of human civilization and this whole human experiment we have here,
we should be expanding out into the cosmos.
100%.
So I think the big mission, if we're measuring SpaceX's success on getting to Mars or not,
I think they'd have a really hard time continuing to fulfill that drive without Elon at the helm.
Now, I think there's a certain balance and beauty of Elon specifically when it was Tesla and SpaceX,
where Elon will go in, you know, have mild tornadoes around the factory and the engineering,
you know, and like mix everything up and things get sometimes just totally thrown together,
you know, and totally just like get it done, just to get it done and start moving that direction.
And then he'll leave and go do that same thing, you know, at SpaceX or Tesla vice versa.
And then there's a little bit of a calm where people come back in and they fill in those gaps,
you know, and I think that's kind of always been a pretty healthy thing, honestly, is like,
I think if he is too focused on any one thing, it almost is like spin too much, you know, like too many tornadoes.
Yeah, too many tornadoes.
And I think it could almost be like, you need someone to come back in and like, you know, like backfill almost.
I've heard definitely stories of like, like, well, probably a good, a good example would be last, last,
well, was that last year or two years ago, 2022?
Yeah.
Was that, yeah.
No, 2021, they did the first full stack of the Starship Super Heavy.
And they called it the big surge, all of a sudden, like thousands of SpaceX employees, you know, came down to Starbase,
and they just started building like you wouldn't freaking believe.
I mean, it's just things going crazy.
It was actually in the middle, that first interview I did with him was in the middle of that surge.
There was like commotion, like you wouldn't believe you couldn't hardly talk because there's just so much going on.
People just welding and blah, blah, blah, you know, everything they did during that period was basically scrapped.
Because it was just not done very well.
But they got a fully stacked Starship rocket out on their launch pad.
You know, and it set, I think at some point you kind of have to stabilize some things enough and just say like,
this is what we're doing to catalyze some things and say, now do that.
It's almost like do it for fake, now do it for real almost.
It's funny because through that time, because I had a lot, a lot of conversation with them.
I think that process was hugely stressful.
There was a sense, I don't know where that sense is today, but there's a sense that Starship is going to be very hard to pull off.
Yeah.
Borderline impossible to pull off.
And that was really weighing heavy on him and the team and everybody.
Yeah.
So like to have this chaos of development is fascinating.
Yeah, big time.
And I think they really had to push, you know, if they hadn't done that, if they hadn't done that big push,
you know, we might only be now seeing a rocket stacked for the first time.
You know, it might be a lot more finished rocket, a lot more high fidelity, a lot more flight worthy rocket finished.
And stacked, but, and they might not have to walk stuff backwards.
But at the same time, like you do have to, in this world, you do have to push really hard to make rapid iteration and rapid change in progress.
So it's interesting.
I don't know.
So lingering on that, another question I really should ask you because of you've seen, you've been in awe of the amazing development of space.
Travel technology over the past few years.
What do you think about Elon buying Twitter?
So in this perfect balance, optimized reallocation of tornadoes throughout the various efforts in human civilization.
Do you think, do you worry about his involvement with Twitter?
I mean, personally, I just, I see that as a lot less important than, and personally for me, inspirational than Starship and, you know, the work done at SpaceX and Tesla.
To me, those were two very impactful and really, really just generally like, you know, they're uniting like, you know, something to rally around, get excited about rally and just like a future look forward to.
You know, the idea of we're going to be building the world's most powerful, biggest rocket ever, and it's eventually going to be able to get humans on Mars for the first time.
And we're going to transition the world into fully sustainable, awesome, just totally badass cars that do all these cool things.
To me, those were like, that brought a sense of unity and a sense of like, we can do this.
Personally, I just don't think that a social media, no matter what it is, I don't see that in a social media.
And I don't, I don't see any sort of politicking as ever, anything that's really ever uniting thing.
I understand that I totally agree with you, especially with space how inspiring it is.
I have to push back.
I do think the impact of social media, the basic level of meaningful connections of this collective intelligence that we call human civilization through the medium of, you know, digital communication,
which is social media, I think that can have a huge impact.
It could be the very vehicle that increases the inspiration that SpaceX doesn't and are different.
The thing I've criticized them a bunch for is like, why bring politics into this?
So the political divisions that we see on Twitter feeding them is tricky.
It's tricky to sort of understand what is the value of that, what is the contribution of that to this whole effort with God going on.
So that's been a big challenge.
But that said, like, again, this tornado, the number of tornadoes in social media, I think is really important because social media has such a huge impact on us as a society.
And to have a transparent, have a bit of turmoil, you know, it's like Tom Wei says, I like my town with a bit of drop of poison with a little drop of poison.
So like a little bit of that, shake things up, I think might be really healthy.
I just worry about the long term impact on the whole Mars project through that.
But you know what, this life, one of the reasons it's fun is through the chaos, none of us know how it's going to turn out and hopefully we try to help each other to make sure it turns out well.
And this really isn't like anything about my personal like politics or anything like that, but really just generally, any of my friends that are like the first thing you hear about them in their day is something that happened in politics
or something that some world leaders doing or not doing or saying and not saying, I just don't find that to be the most important thing, really.
I know that obviously that can affect a lot of people that has big real world consequences, politics do.
Well, like, I just, and this is just me, I'm such a like, come together, you know, cheerio kind of guy that I just really think like you need something bigger than bickering about what, you know, what people said and did
and what they voted on and all this stuff to really push humanity forward.
Like I, you know, I know that politics and their and by extracting that social media can affect things like spaceflight and even our like planetary defense, like being able to defend ourselves against asteroids.
Like if politics has their way and everything goes to crap and we don't even get to, you know, yeah, we're not going to be able to continue spaceflight and things like that.
But like, I don't know, I just think there's better ways to do it and more uniting ways to do it than, than, you know, what feels like a mature name calling sometimes, you know.
Yeah, I think the political bickering that most people talk about that that's on top of most people's minds is the thing they'll be completely forgotten by history has actually very little impact.
Yes, politics matters, but like 1% of it, I think most of it is just political bickering, the push and pull of the red team and the blue team and the, and then the news media that feeds off the division for the attention.
And it's just like a fun, athletic event almost with the blue team and the red team.
So that you kind of have to have a historical perspective on it, like most things will not really have a significant impact.
And we should focus on development of science, technology, engineering, which is the thing that grows the pie.
100%.
This is, this is what the economists know well.
Yeah.
Just the innovation, the engineering, that's what actually makes everybody richer.
Yeah.
This kind of political bickering is just eating the pie.
And not just richer, but it improves their lives, you know, we can look at every modern technology that is bestowed upon us today, air conditioning, electricity, internet access, fresh clean water, running water, blah, blah, blah.
You know, 100 years ago, so many of the things that I listed either didn't exist or were only accessible by the ultra wealthy.
You know, and it's through the innovation of technology and engineering and education that we are able to have it be that even someone below the poverty line and the most of the developed world will have a good number of those things in their life.
And that's just continuing to increase and continue to get better.
So I think, yeah, that's to me, that's in the grand scheme more important, but to each their own.
Speaking of amazing technological development.
You have, you have a few videos on this, but how does a rocket engine work?
You've, you're wearing some of the instruction manuals, but for one, one type of it, like what's the fuel, what are the kind of types of different rockets that you can kind of give an overview.
Yeah.
Ultimately, a rocket engine converts high pressure and heat into kinetic energy.
That's the only real job of a rocket engine is to take high pressure gas, high pressure gas, very energized.
There's a lot of energy involved.
And then literally turning that into molecule shooting in one direction into kinetic energy.
So, yeah, what you do basically, you know, I mean, the simplest version of it is, of course, like famously a balloon, you take a balloon, fill it up with air, you've got a pressure, you let go of it.
Some of the air shoots out in a general direction ish.
You converted that pressure into kinetic energy.
Now, if you start scaling that up, you know, you can continue to do something like that.
Like cold gas thruster would be kind of the most simple and easiest rocket engine to make would be a cold gas thruster.
And all that is, you literally just take air or specifically nitrogen because it's a little bit more dense than all the others.
And it's the majority of our atmosphere.
You can, or sorry, it's more sparse.
You can condense that down, sort of really high pressure bottle, and then just literally shoot it through what's called a D-Level nozzle, which is some of that chokes the flow a little bit, gets it to be, takes it and gets it into supersonic speeds.
Once it's at supersonic speed, you actually can't choke it down anymore.
You'll just constrict the flow of mass flow.
You'll constrict the airflow.
So you actually go opposite.
You start making it wider.
And once it's already at supersonic speeds, if you expand it and make it wider, it actually gets faster and faster.
So at first, you know, when it's subsonic gas, you start shrinking, you can strict the flow.
You know, it's actually speeding up just like, you know, a highway.
If you go from, you know, or any of these examples, like a water hose, you know, if you pinch it down, you want to flow the same amount of water from point A to point B through a smaller pipe, you can, you can flow more water.
You're the same amount of water from point A to point B with a smaller pipe.
It just has to go faster.
So obviously you can constrict it, but at some point you actually get to a physical limitation and that happens to be the speed of sound.
Once it gets to the local speed of sound, you can then actually do the opposite.
You actually expand it back out and you're continuing to convert the pressure into velocity at that point, but it's now supersonic.
And what's interesting is while you're doing that, you're actually cooling it down to each bit of that pipe that you're making wider and wider and wider, you're cooling down.
So the more heat energy you have to work with, the more work you can actually do.
So at some point, a hot, high pressure rocket engine is the best source of like, that's the ultimate amount of work you can do.
And the nozzle, so as you're saying, there's a bunch of different design options, but it's a critical part of this.
Yeah.
How you do that conversion, which this is what the environment is.
It's basically like, how much can you convert is really like the ultimate game.
How much pressure and heat can we convert into thrust?
Like that's really at the end of the day, that's what a rocket engine is.
So you have to have a powerful enough rocket engine to actually lift the rocket and, well, a rocket is mostly just fuel.
It's like 90, 90 plus percent, just the weight of fuel.
So you just have to lift the fuel that's going to take it, you know, into orbit.
And that's the thing specifically for rockets.
You're saying generally rocket engines, but for the task of going to orbit, you're fighting gravity, Earth gravity, which is fundamentally different
than moon gravity or Mars gravity.
Or like you said, traveling out to space, Earth has a pretty intense gravity to overcome.
We're lucky because I think if it was 10% either way, like 10% harder, it'd be like, we could still do it.
You know, with our current technology, we'd still be able to get stuff into orbit.
Man, things like reusability and this commercialization, the success that we've seen in the last 10 years,
we'd just be on two thinner margins, I think.
10% easier and we would have been like, I mean, it's just like totally different.
It's so much easier.
It's like this big, you know, sliding scale and 10% in either direction, we'd be either screwed or really happy, you know,
as far as getting into space.
So it's just hard enough that things like fully reusable becomes very, very, very difficult.
I think it's completely achievable.
We have all the pieces to make it achievable.
It does not disobey any laws of physics.
It does not disobey any, there's no like hard stops.
It's just very, very, very hard.
And so ultimately, yeah, like on Earth for the first bit of launch,
again, when the rocket's pointing straight up and the engines are pointing straight down,
pointy end up flaming down, you're fighting gravity.
And so that's kind of your biggest enemy outside of the Earth's atmosphere too.
So what kind of sources of fuel is there?
So there's chemical rockets, liquid solid gas, hybrid, there's electric.
So what are the kinds of fuels we're talking about?
What are oxidizers?
Can you just explain your shirt, I guess?
Yeah.
The components of your shirt.
So really, I mean, fuels, there's kind of two terms.
You'll generally hear the word propellant being used.
Is anything that is used to propel a spacecraft or used in a rocket engine?
So you have to have, you know, you can have a fuel.
You have to have a fuel, you have to have an oxidizer,
and you have to have a spark to actually get those things burning.
And that's just a general law of, like, the universe.
You have to have a fuel and oxidizer and a spark.
Now, some fuels will, by themselves, spark, like hypergolic fuels,
but ultimately you're always left with some kind of fuel oxidizer and a spark.
So the general ones used most often in rockets, liquid oxygen is kind of the king of,
well, there's better oxidizers, but they're extremely, extremely hard to work with, like fluorine.
But generally liquid oxygen, so you just chill oxygen down to its liquid state minus 183 degrees Celsius.
So it can be dense enough to store in tanks.
You know, it's a thousand times more dense when it's in a liquid than it is as a gas.
RP1, which is basically kerosene, is a very common fuel.
Another common fuel nowadays is methane, liquid methane.
Liquid hydrogen is another, it's the most efficient potential for the most efficient since it's one of the lightest molecules.
So I think correct me if I'm wrong, but the Falcon now uses kerosene and then Starship uses methane, liquid methane.
Yup, for fuel, and they both use liquid oxygen for their oxidizer.
For their oxidizer, okay.
Yup.
But then, you know, if you get into hypergolics, you'll normally have nitrogen tetroxide,
which is your oxidizer and some form of hydrazine for your fuel.
There's solid rocket propellants, like solid rocket boosters, and those are actually premixed.
Your oxidizer is inherently like baked, literally like kind of baked into the sludge of fuel.
So like for SpaceX, it's all chemical liquid fuels.
Yup, yup.
So how many solid based fuels are there?
Are they still being used today as they're most rockets?
Yeah.
And the United States really is the only ones that, well, the only ones I guess early on,
because it was really just the Soviet Union versus the United States.
The United States started to use solids pretty early on.
They're simple and easy.
But these days, like, you know, you'll still see them kind of as traditionally like boosters,
like they're used to just help get something off the ground or help give it a little extra boost.
So the Space Shuttle famously had those two huge white solid rocket boosters attached to the orange fuel tank.
Those are solid rocket propellants.
Things like the Atlas V can have up to five smaller solid rocket boosters.
There's very few rockets that use a pure, at least these days, that use a pure solid rocket motor for its first stage.
There still are, especially in China.
There's a lot of startup rocket companies that kind of use just missile technology.
You know, they might use like a, they might just be a variant of an ICBM that just use solid rocket fuel,
because it is very relatively easy to develop, you know, model rockets, use solid rocket motors and stuff like that.
So they're still around, but they're just not as elegant and not as, yeah, not as used these days, I'd say.
So what are rocket engine cycles?
Getting, I think, getting more towards your short question.
You have a really good video called that, I mean, a lot of your videos that are technical are just exceptionally well done.
So I just, I think you deserve all the props you get.
I mean, thank you for doing this work.
Really, really, really well done.
So it's called rocket engine cycles.
How do you power a rocket engine?
And you go through all the different options.
Is there something you could say about open cycle, closed cycle, full flow, all the different variants that you can use words to explain?
Yeah, without all the pretty pictures.
Yeah, without the pretty pictures.
So ultimately, you know, like we said, your ultimate goals, you want to get heat and pressure into an engine.
So obviously at some point, you can either make really thick tanks of your rocket.
And like, get it so thick that you store the propellants and really, really high pressures.
But obviously, like that doesn't scale very well.
At some point, your rocket's so heavy, you can't even leave the ground or, you know, it's just so much of your mass is just literally the walls of the rocket.
So at some point, people realize, hey, we could actually just pump the fuels and the oxidizer into the engine at a high pressure and increase the pressure through a pump.
And obviously a pump is going to require energy.
You have to get that energy from somewhere.
And again, at some point, people were like, well, rockets are there's already rocket fuel here, you know, we'll just use some of the energy from the rocket fuel to spin these pumps.
So that that would be considered like open cycle, closed cycle, full flow stage combustion cycle is our ways to tap into the propellant.
Actually, and then there's tap off expanders.
I mean, all of them kind of do the same thing.
But you end up at some point spinning a turbine, you know, a turbine can take some of the heat energy and the and the and the pressure.
Of an engine, and then they can that can be connected to a shaft to pumps.
And those pumps can, you know, increase the pressure of the propellants and force it into the combustion chamber.
Now, the difference between open cycle, closed cycle, full flow, all those is what happens after the gas has flown through the turbine.
So after you've used the turbine and spun up the energy, you know, spun up the engine, what happens to that gas?
So in an open cycle engine, you basically have like a separate small rocket engine, in a sense, it's a gas generator, they call it.
And that will be used to create someone, you know, take a little, we'll say 10% of your the propellant flowing to the engine.
Instead, you reroute it to like a smaller rocket engine called the gas generator.
You point that at your turbine, and that will spin your turbine up to, you know, ridiculous speeds, 30,000 plus RPM.
And then after it spins, it's wasted most of its energy, you know, and it's just dumped overboard.
That would be open cycle. You're not worrying about it after that point, but you are left with a lot of unburnt, unused fuel.
A good amount of that fuel is just completely, especially because the turbine, you have to keep it from melting.
So you can't run it at like optimal ratios.
Not necessarily stoichiometric in a rocket engine, you actually don't want it to be near stoichiometric where you're releasing all the energy.
You actually want to release, you actually want to be throwing out the lighter molecules so it can be shot out faster generally in the engine.
So, but in order to have a turbine survive, you have to actually cool, you have to have the gas going through it.
It can't be stupid, stupid hotter.
Also, you're just going to melt your turbine.
So they normally, especially in the open cycle, you just run it really fuel rich.
So there's a lot of extra fuel being pumped into it that will keep the temperatures at a reasonable, you know, at a reasonable temperature.
So you end up with this like dark, sooty smoke pouring out of that gas generator.
That's just unburnt fuel. It's just wasted fuel.
It never got a chance to be used.
Oh, interesting.
You know, like in the combustion chambers, it's not being used to propel the rocket.
You know, it's just being used to cool down the propellant that's being used to spin the turbine.
That's being used to spin the pumps to push a lot of propellant into the engine.
So, you know, it doesn't take too long before, you know, you're a greedy rocket scientist being like, look at all this wasted propellant,
all this potential energy that's just literally being spewed out the side of the rocket.
So that's where the closed cycle comes in.
So now you have to get that propellant, take it from basically what was being wasted through the turbine,
and you're going to try pumping it back into the engine.
Now, you don't literally just pump that gas that's, you know, that hot, that gas into the engine because it's actually way too low of pressure
compared to the main combustion chamber.
And by that point, by the time it's gone through the turbine, it's lost most of its pressure and heat to the turbine.
So if you tried pumping it into the engine, you know, just taking that pipe and sticking it right into the combustion chamber,
that much higher pressure, hotter combustion chamber would just go backwards.
And it would stall out the engine and blow up the engine and whatever, what have you.
So what they actually do is they normally will send, there might be some variations of this,
but the general concept is you actually flow all of your fuel or all of your oxidizer through the turbine.
So that would be closed cycle.
So there's fuel rich closed cycle, which would be you're flowing all of the fuel through the turbine,
or there's oxidizer closed cycle, which is where you're flowing all of the oxidizer that's going into the engine through the turbine.
Now, the trick here is you have to have that turbine after it's done its work.
So after it's taken some of the potential energy, some of the heat energy from we're not calling it a pre burner,
by the way, instead of it being a gas generator, you now call that device that's that's creating pressure to spin the turbine.
You're now calling that a pre burner because it's just going to pre burn some of your fuel or some of your oxidizer.
The trick is that has to be by the time it's gone through the turbine, it has to be higher pressure than the combustion chamber.
Because otherwise, it's going to go backward still. So you really have to get that pre burner up to ridiculously high pressures,
like at least 20% higher than your main combustion chamber.
And these combustion chambers, you know, we're talking about engines that are at, you know, 200, 100 to 200,
even in SpaceX's Raptor engine up to 300 bar in the main combustion chamber.
So that's what is that 4500 psi, basically, insane amounts of pressure inside these combustion chambers.
So your turbine has to be even above that or your, your gas generator or your pre burner,
sorry, has to be higher pressure than that even in order to have the flow going the right direction through the engine.
So now you'll, you'll have those closed cycles, you'll have fuel rich, you have oxidizer rich.
The tricks now you start to get it's crazy. There's just so many compromises.
Every little decision you have of like, oh, I did this, now I know now crap, it's going to do this.
For instance, fuel rich, if you ran kerosene fuel rich, you know how I mentioned soot coming out of the gas generator.
Well, if you run soot through your, through your engine like that and how to go through your injectors,
like back into the engine, it'll clog the pores of the injectors and it will end up blowing up the engine.
The soot itself is so damaging that you can't really run a fuel rich kerosene engine.
What exactly is soot? So it's like fuel somehow mixed up with the smoke, like what?
I wonder what, what is it chemically? Is it some weird?
It's mostly just carbon. It's mostly just that carbon, solid, solid chunks of carbon.
And it can cake up and just literally like, you know, like, it's, it's, it's like ash almost, you know, like,
at some point, you know, especially under those high pressures and high temperatures,
it can physically build up and, you know, turn into like stalagmites and stalactites of, of carbon.
Really hard, you know, forged in a rocket engine carbon.
I wonder how you figure all that out too, is that to be experimented.
Some of that is chemically theoretical, but like, you're going to have to build the thing at scale and actually test it.
For trial and error.
For trial and error.
There is.
Many decades of trial and error.
And many pieces of engines that you're trying to piece back together going like, what the hell happened here?
Yeah, what happened?
Okay, so, so that's closed cycle.
So how do we get to full flow?
So in either of those situations, you're still actually just having the opposite.
So if you're fuel rich, you know, all the fuel is going through the turbine,
but only a tiny bit of oxygen is actually being put into that pre burner to spin the pumps.
And the rest of the, the rest of the oxygen is actually going through the pump,
the primary pump and straight into the combustion chamber.
Now, full flow, the idea is you're going to actually pre burn both your propellants.
Both of your propellants are going to go through a pre burner and they're both going to end up spinning one of the pumps.
So you'll have a gas, a fuel rich pre burner and you're going to have an oxygen rich pre burner.
Each one of those is going to get just, you know, they're going to heat it up just enough and get it up to just enough pressure
to spin up that turbine as fast as they need to do to get the pumps up to the right pressure
and still have enough pressure through the turbine to overcome the pressure inside the main combustion chamber.
And they're both going to arrive, both your fuel and your oxidizer are going to arrive
in the main combustion chamber as hot gas is already.
So what was liquid oxygen is now gaseous oxygen.
What was liquid methane is now gaseous methane and they're meeting this combustion chamber
at still ridiculously high pressures again for SpaceX's Raptor engine.
They're meeting at 300 bar, insane amounts of pressure.
And then they, then they combust from there on and because they're already a gas-gas interaction,
they're happy to burn. They're ready to, they're ready to burn.
They're ready to mingle as opposed to having a gas-liquid interaction, which is what's a lot more normal.
You know, you'll have two different states of matter and they just might not,
they might take a little more, you know, coaxing to, what's that word?
Coaxing, coaxing?
That doesn't sound like a, it doesn't sound correct, right?
Coaxing.
Coaxing, yeah, yeah.
All right.
I don't know. We'll cut that in post.
We'll have Morgan Freeman over double us.
Yeah.
Each of us coaxing.
The fascinating thing is they're coaxed as gases in the combustion chamber.
What do you think of that word?
But yeah, they just take a little bit more, it takes more time in the combustion chamber
to have a liquid-gas interaction like mixed together and unleash as much of their energy
as you can before it exits the system.
Some of the trade-offs here in terms of efficiency, which is most efficient and then also complexity
of the design and the engineering and the cost of the design and the engineering,
like what are the different trade-offs between open cycle, closed cycle and full flow?
Yeah, it's a pretty, it's kind of like a, what's the bears?
The Goldilocks, you know, like it's like, you kind of generally, the easiest is open cycle
because, you know, you're just expelling the exhaust gas, the gas generated exhaust,
you're not having to worry about it.
You just spin up that thing as much as you need and deal with it, right?
No big deal.
Um, closed cycles offers 10 to 15% greater performance generally because, you know,
you're not wasting that propellant.
And, but it's, it's complicated.
It's a lot more complicated, especially if you're doing oxygen-rich.
Now you're having hot, gaseous oxygen in your engine, which just generally wants to react
with everything.
It's just a recipe, like hot oxygen is just a recipe for things to catch on fire that shouldn't be on fire.
So metals, you know, under those conditions, last times we'll just spontaneously start burning.
You know, you'll actually turn your metal and it will now become fuel.
You'll be engine-rich before you know it because your hot oxygen is eating and using that engine
as fuel basically.
So, um, oxygen-rich is generally very hard, but that is what the Soviet Union ended up
doing with almost their entire line of engines was closed cycle oxygen-rich.
But, you know, so those two are kind of generally hard, but offer great performance benefits
over open cycle.
Uh, but at the end of the day, you know, full flow is by far the, it's the ultimate of all of them.
It's the most difficult, but it's also has the most potential to be the most efficient.
Starship, the raptor to the, the, why is that engine using full flow?
Because it's the best.
I mean, it's just physics wise.
If you're trying to extract as much energy out of your propellants, there, there just isn't
another cycle type that, that is, uh, better than it, but of course it's very, very hard
to develop.
You know, so far to date, the RD270 in the sixties was built.
Um, there is a powerhead demonstrator built in the United States in the, in the nineties
and early 2000s, I think, maybe just the early 2000s.
Um, that was just the, just the power, just the, the pumps and the turbines and the pre-burners,
no chamber, no nothing.
That was a big deal.
Only the United States took, you know, millions of dollars to just develop that.
And then there's SpaceX's raptor engine.
So you talked about, uh, the combustion chamber and how damn hot things get.
Uh, high pressure, a lot of heat.
Uh, how do you keep the thing cool?
You have a great video on this.
How do you get it from, uh, from, what do you call it?
Metal rich, engine rich, engine rich from like the, the metal from melting.
Well, one of the ways is to let it be engine rich.
There's actually, you can use a blade of cooling.
You can literally let, um, make the walls thicker than you normally make it,
make it out of a material that will a blade away,
that will kind of chip away and take some of the heat away with it.
It's very, again, primitive.
And it's actually what SpaceX first used on their first Merlin engines.
They used a blade of cooling.
Um, so it's basically a carbon nozzle and you just let it get the carbon,
the inner layer of the, of the engine was not, it was carbon.
And you just let it get chewed away and eaten away.
And that's just something you factor in.
Uh, it's not, uh, very elegant and it's definitely not reusable in that sense.
So there's probably really good models about like how it melts away,
the rate at which it melts away to know what thickness.
Yeah.
But boy, that's a dangerous.
Right.
This is part of the design.
It seems so silly.
So obviously you probably, you know, it's, again, it's not the most elegant.
And the problem to your, your geometry physically is changing too.
Cause as you're eroding the walls, now things like your expansion ratio,
or the ratio between your throat and the nozzle exit is changing.
Yeah.
Because the thickness, like the throat diameter is actually,
like everything's changing.
So it's, it's not great.
It might, might not be melting away uniformly.
There could be some like weird pockets for aerodynamics stuff.
A bunch of chaos just can, which I can't imagine having to like
figure all that stuff out.
Honestly.
Yeah.
Um, so the, uh, the more elegant thing to do, there's,
there's a couple of other things you can do, but the kind of the most common one,
especially when we're dealing with liquid fueled rockets is something called
regeneratively cooling.
And the, the idea is you basically just flow fuel or fuel or oxidizer through
the walls of the, of the nozzle on the chamber.
Um, before they go through like into the injector into the actual combustion chamber
by doing that, you're, you're taking heat out of the, you know,
you're, you're taking heat out of the metal of the walls and you're putting it
into the propellant.
So you're typically heating the propellant up, which is remember when I said there's
gas interaction versus a liquid, like liquid gas.
So lots of times, even if you pump them both at, you know, as, um, they, you know,
both being pumped as liquids, by the time it goes through the walls of the
chamber, lots of times one of them is phase changed into a gas.
So now you do have that gas, liquid interaction.
Um, that's because they're using that, the fuel or the oxidizer to, to cool
the walls of the, of the engine.
So when you look at a rocket engine, although it looks like, you know,
a nice, beautifully uniform cylinder, you know, smooth thing.
Um, there's either, there's oftentimes like, uh, channels actually like milled
into the walls that they run fuel through.
And even though they're tight, you know, they can be like two,
three millimeters thick, they'll actually still have a channel that goes down
and U turns and comes around and comes back all the way down to the tip of the
nozzle and everything.
So it's, it's just insane that, you know, that,
isn't that pre-designed and that that's, that's like, uh, so they design those channels.
Yeah.
There's probably some optimization there.
Like how the flow happens.
Well, especially cause you, you're thinking about a conical thing or like a
semi-conical thing where the, the area is getting smaller and smaller and smaller.
You're flowing the same amount of propellant through it as you are down.
You know what I mean?
Like the propellant has to, so they have all these unique things, like, you know,
sometimes, uh, different manifolds where they'll inject more, less fuel in certain
areas and there must be like propellant simulation software.
Cause they can't, surely can't like test this on actual physical.
Well, back in the day they had to just build it.
Well, you mean back in the day.
Back in the day.
Walked uphill in both ways.
It was like, I mean, like any, anything back in the day before computers.
Were you like, like, you just had to do it.
And like your simulation or modeling was like a sheet of paper where you're like
calculating stuff.
Well, but you can heat flux, you know, like you can literally see how much energy and
how much heat is inside the combustion chamber, how much, you know, and that is a
measurable thing even without a computer.
Now I'm not near smart enough to do any of this.
Like I've never tried measuring the heat flux of anything.
I barely even know what that means.
I'm just smart enough to agitate it.
You haven't lived, my friend.
You haven't lived.
But that is something that people would calculate and they find out, okay, copper,
you know, does a better job of transferring the heat between the walls of it and into
the propellant, blah, blah, blah, blah, compared to XYZ.
Um, so, you know.
You have materials, people.
Like I've met just all walks of life, especially just through MIT, through everywhere where
there's some people are just like a hundred X smarter than anyone you've ever met at a
particular thing.
Yes.
Like you mentioned copper.
They'll know the heat dissipation through different materials.
They'll understand that like more than it's like, holy shit, it's possible for human being
to deeply understand a thing.
Aerospace is full of that.
You'll have people that are so niche in some thing that no, like the average person has
never even remotely thought of yet this person has done it 40,000 different ways in a, you
know, in an environment being like, well, we found out that if we turn it four degrees
that way and add 4% niobium, you know, like just things you're like, what is your life?
And how do you know this?
And the funny thing about them, they usually don't think it's a big deal.
Yeah.
They're usually like, they're so nonchalant about it that if you don't actually, you
have to know enough, you actually have to know quite a lot to appreciate how much more
they know.
Yeah.
Because otherwise you won't even notice it because our popular culture doesn't celebrate
the intricacies of scientific or engineering mastery, which is interesting.
There's all these people that lurk in the shadows.
Oh, I know.
They're just geniuses.
Like you see, you'll have like the LeBron's who are like good at basketball, so we understand
that they're good at basketball.
They do this thing with the ball and the hoop, and they do like it really well, but then
a lot of other people under pressure, we're like, we celebrate and give them a big public
spectacle.
Yeah.
Look how great they are.
Yeah.
But like the people like, yeah, at these aerospace companies at NASA, at SpaceX, the kind of stuff
they're doing just, I mean, there's geniuses there and it's actually really inspiring.
I mean, I've interacted with a lot of brilliant people in the software world, and maybe because
I don't deeply understand a lot of hardware stuff, materials engineering, mechanical
engineering, those people seem like so much smarter.
I mean, it's always like the grass is green or whatever the expression is, but there's
a depth of understanding that engineers have that do like mechanical engineering that's
just awe inspiring to me.
Not to get too like, I don't know what the word would be, introverted or something, whatever,
but that's actually kind of the whole point of everyday astronaut.
That's almost the whole point of what I do.
Each year from the beginning, I did a thing called the Astro Awards, trying to be like
an award show, hoping to lift up and celebrate and shine a spotlight on the people that are
actually doing the hard work and try to treat them like the rock stars that they are that
we don't know about.
I think that's one of the things that for sure, I think Elon definitely helped make
spaceflight cool.
Helped make that a celebration thing where people are physically out cheering for rockets
and science and space exploration, but I think that's just the beginning.
I think this should be a thing where the general public looks to these people as the coolest
ones, as the coolest places to work, as the most important things.
Sports are great and everything.
I'm a big Formula One fan and things like that, but at the same time, we should be celebrating
that people doing this crazy work, clocking in countless hours, just trying to figure
out this one little thing that's going to help us further our understanding.
What's cooler than a giant thing with a really hot fire that goes boom and goes up into the
air?
To me, bridges are inspiring.
It's incredible architecture design and the humans are able to work against nature, build
these gigantic metal things, but rockets with a tiny little humans on top of them flying
out into space.
It's the coolest possible thing.
Everything comes together.
All the different disciplines come together for the high stakes drama of riding that super
powerful thing up away from the thing we call home, Earth.
It's so amazing.
Exactly.
So freaking amazing.
I think that's part of my story arc, because I just used to be a huge car and motorcycle
guy.
I just loved things that go fast and are loud and go fast and make lots of power.
At the end of the day, at some point, you realize nothing goes faster and it's louder
and makes more power than a rocket.
I think that's where I eventually just ended up, wound up there just because there is nothing
cooler than that.
Yeah, that's the ultimate level of reach as a car guy is to become a rocket guy.
Yeah, 100%.
And at some point, some car guys literally become rocket guys and strap rockets to cars
and try and break land speed records, like it's the same universe here.
So Elon, with your conversation with him on the Raptor 2, was talking about, you were
talking about, there's an excessive amount of cooling to be on the safe side as you're
developing the engine.
What kind of cooling was that?
So that would be film cooling.
So remember how a little bit ago, we were talking about keeping the turbine from melting.
You can just run it off nominal basically, off typically fuel rich, just run more fuel
through that.
So it's cool enough.
You can actually do that locally in your engine.
So you can keep it, so imagine a combustion chamber and the top of it's just a flat, imagine
a shower head and then you have the combustion chamber attached to it.
The outer perimeter there, the part where the flame front would be touching the walls,
you can actually have just more fuel injectors.
So you're injecting locally a more fuel rich zone along the entire nozzle.
And that would be called film cooling.
So it's less efficient though.
Again, you're kind of wasting fuel.
There's fuel that's running and your mixture ratio is off, but only for a little portion
of the big picture.
So that's one of those compromises, like you can do additional film cooling to make sure
you're not melting your engine, but at the cost of performance usually.
But you can also be smart and use film cooling.
There's fun little clever tricks.
For instance, you'll notice on the F1 engine that was on the Saturn V, the biggest rocket
that had been built to date prior now to Starship, the F1 has this huge, huge, huge engines.
There's five of them on the Saturn V. And you'll notice that the gas generator has a
pipe that comes down, and then it actually splits off in a manifold and wraps around
part of the nozzle.
And that manifold takes the hot gas from the turbine, which is actually, I mean, it's not
hot.
It's actually cold gas compared to the combustion chamber, but it's, you know, in human terms,
it's still, you wouldn't want to put your hand in it, you know, not live.
And it actually pipes that gas into the nozzle so that it creates a film cooling of an actual
boundary layer of cooler gas against the hotter combustion chamber gas.
They're basically repurposing that gas that was normally wasted, and they pump it back
into the engine, and then into the nozzle, like kind of further down.
So the trick there is it has to be far enough down that the pressure in the nozzle, because
remember, as the nozzle gets bigger and bigger and bigger, the pressure is getting lower
and lower, and the temperature is getting lower and lower.
So you have to find this trade-off point where the pressure is lower than that gas from the
turbine, and then you pump it in, and it's cooler than the gas still is in the nozzle,
and it can help not melt your nozzle.
So you'll notice that the F1 is actually a good example of regen cooling.
So the chamber walls, you can physically see the pipes actually on the F1, because it's
so big, and they just literally used pipes and bent them, and you can see the coolant
channels all the way up and down the engine until you get to that manifold.
Then from there on, it just has what's called a nozzle extension, and it keeps going and
going and going, and that section of nozzle is cooled by the film cooling of the gas generator.
They mean the aerodynamics of cooler gas and the hot gas, because you have to have this
kind of layer, right?
Yeah.
The protective layer of cooler gas, like understanding that, obviously probably has to do, in modern
times, there's probably really good simulation of aerodynamics, and to do that in terms of
the pressure too, to make sure it's in the right place that doesn't go back up.
Go backwards, exactly.
If they have that manifold even six inches too high on that nozzle, yeah, it's just
going to go upwards.
Pressure always wants to flow from high to low.
The number of options you have here that result in it going boom is very large.
Near infinity, yeah.
Especially because you can't do a small model of it.
Maybe you can?
No, you can't.
It's an early scale variable.
You have to do the full testing, and that's why you have all the kind of, that's why
you have with Starship, all the tests that you think, why would you need to do so many
static fires and so many tests, and why is it failing so many times?
Can't you get it right?
But it's very tough to get it right.
And when you're pushing the boundaries, you want to know where and how it's going to
fail.
That's right.
So you can engineer around them.
That's a luxury that SpaceX does have with the scale of Raptor.
They're building Raptor cheaper than probably almost any other engine, maybe beside some
of their own, at least at that scale.
Then before, they're testing, I think since last March or last April, they've tested
a thousand Raptor, a thousand engine fires, I guess, not just Raptors, but that's just
an insane amount of data and an insane amount of edge cases to learn, oh my God, we found
out that we're actually slightly overspinning our turbine at this degree and this frequency
is harmonic at this blah, blah, blah, and all of a sudden realize it's rattling and it
did this, and then you can engineer around that.
It's like, ultimately, I think Elon said something like high production rate solves
many ills or something along those lines, and it's just true.
If you have an insane amount of engines and an insane amount of data and an insane amount
of failures to learn from, you just know your system inside and out.
You know those margins, you know where the failure points are, you know how to engineer
around them.
That's how I approach dating, no, I'm just kidding, because we're talking about engines,
so most rockets, I think all rockets have multiple stages today, maybe they'll take
us into discussion of what ideas that could be for a single stage to orbit rockets, but
can you describe this whole thing that you've been mentioning here and there of multiple
stages of a rocket?
Yeah, no, that's a good question.
Ultimately, like I said, you're kind of pushing about 90%, the rockets basically just fuel
with some skin on it, you know what I mean?
And so that skin weighs a lot of, you know, skin and the engines do weigh a lot.
Like I said, the Falcon 990 is about 20 tons, just the booster is about 20 metric tons.
So it's not an insignificant amount of weight, so the idea is, with staging, is you ditch
anything you don't need more or less.
So, you know, Falcon 9 is a perfect rocket to think about this because you have an upper
stage and you have a booster, you know, our first stage.
And the first stage burns through all of its fuel.
Once it's out of fuel, you let go of the second stage and ta-da, you actually just basically
started and lit a brand new fresh rocket, you know, and this brand new fresh rocket
now doesn't have all that 20 tons attached to it, so it's a lot lighter.
It doesn't need, you know, as nearly as many engines to push it around, it needs just one
instead of nine.
Its engine can be optimized for the vacuum of space as opposed to having to operate at
sea level with all of our relatively, actually pretty thick atmosphere, you know, relatively.
So staging is basically the idea that you get rid of things you don't need.
On Earth, again, kind of that whole like 10%, harder 10% easier.
If it was 10% easier, single-stage orbit would be no big deal.
And it probably would have been like the way to get to orbit by choice, just because like
it's not that hard.
But with our Earth as it is, with physics as it is, it's just, it's doable.
And we've had, you know, we almost kind of actually the first rocket to take humans into
orbit from the United States, which was the Atlas rocket, was kind of a stage and a half.
It actually only had like one big fuel tank, and what that is, they actually dropped off
two of its three engines.
So it just ditched some of the engines.
But if it hadn't done that, you know, so kind of people were like, well, that was single-stage.
It's like, it still had a staging event, it still had a ditch mass in order to even make
it into orbit.
Had it not done that, it would have not been able to get into orbit.
So you pretty quickly look at your trade and say, okay, well, if I want to stick to single-stage
orbit, my payload mass becomes tiny, you know, like you might be able to put like, you know,
a Falcon 9 booster on its own.
Like if you just flew one of the side core boosters of a Falcon heavy with a nose cone
on it and everything to say, I'm just going to fly this on its own, you might be able
to put like, you know, 10 kilograms into space or something, you know, a very small amount.
We'll throw a second stage on that thing, and now you can put, you know, 17,000 kilograms
into space.
So it's just an order, you know, orders of magnitude more payload capacity because you
did staging because you ditched the residual weight.
So the other thing that's hard about that too is that the engines, again, that operate
at sea level are often not great in space and vice versa.
Like you physically can't, most optimized for space engines, you can't even operate
at sea level.
They'll destroy themselves due to something called flow separation.
So not only are you getting the benefit of ditching all the weight, but you're also able
to use a much more efficient and less typically, you know, much less powerful engine in space.
So you mentioned on the multi-stage rockets that maybe the dream would be if we weren't
living on Earth, but maybe we can on Earth to have a single stage to orbit rocket where
it's all one package reusable.
Reusable gets even harder.
It gets even harder.
So first of all, what is just the Lingana, what is the single stage to orbit rocket and
why is it so hard to achieve on Earth?
You already kind of explained it a little bit, but just if we were to say like, yeah,
that's your assignment, Tim, you're supposed to get together with Elon and other brilliant
people and like, you have to do this.
Yeah.
Why is it so hard?
Why is it so hard?
The payload fraction of a rocket is like three to five or six or seven percent would
be like, you know, that's the amount of payload compared to the total mass of the rocket.
Like you're lucky to get into beyond 5%.
So if you're now having to deal with the weight of the rocket by the time you're in orbit,
like your payload fraction, just you're talking about like margins that's such a small amount
of leftover if you have to take all of it with you.
So the sooner you can ditch weight, the better, the sooner you can ditch weight, the better,
the sooner you can, you know, and that's what you're doing.
A rocket the whole time is actually ditching weight.
All of that fuel, all that big giant flame you see is literally mass being thrown out
the back of the rocket.
But what typically isn't expended, you know, at least during nominal operations, you're
not seeing the engines being, you know, expelled out the thing until you get to staging, of
course.
And that's where, you know, you're ditching all that dead weight.
So single-stage orbit, your margins just become so small that it's border, it's not impossible,
but it's just at the end of the day, like almost no matter who you are, you end up saying
it's just simply not worth it.
Like it'd be, if you have two rockets that are using the same amount of propellant, you
know, they're the same physical sizes and one of them is cutting, you know, on a third
and has another little engine, it'll have a hundred or a thousand times more payload
capacity than the one sitting right next to it.
And now, so there's tricks you can do to like try to offset that, things like aerospike
engines which operate as efficiently at sea level, kind of optimized efficiency at sea
level.
And just by their, by the way, they're designed, the physics of them, they're also efficient
in a vacuum too.
You can do the things like that.
And at the end of the day, though, you just end up with a worse rocket than if you had
just done stage, like no matter what, and people say like, well, what if you develop
the new technologies?
Okay, apply that technology to a multi-stage rocket and it's going to do better, you know,
like, no matter where you end up, it's just always better to ditch that weight, you know.
Is there a cost to having multi-stage because you can still reuse the different stages?
That's the dream is, you know, it becomes easier to reuse multiple stages because now, you
know, like the booster doesn't have to survive orbital reentry temperatures and extreme environments.
And you only have to, you know, make survivable the upper stage, so you only have to put a
big heat shield.
The starship's the perfect thing of this.
The upper stage has a big giant heat shield.
The booster doesn't need it because it's not going, the booster's not going to orbit.
It's only going a fifth or a quarter of orbital velocity.
So it's heat that it experiences is survivable just by the stainless steel.
You don't need an additional heat shield.
So all of a sudden, if you're trying to reuse, pretend that you just welded the two stages
of starship together, remove those engines on starship, that whole vehicle, if you're
trying to reuse it, the whole vehicle now has to have a heat shield on one side of it.
The whole thing has to have these big, heavy wings.
By the time you come down to it, there's probably just zero payload capacity.
You basically put your fuel tank in space, you know, good job.
So the dream of a single-stage orbit rocket, is that just even the wrong dream on Earth?
That's what most convention tells you, you know, by the time, if your goal is cheap,
then you're going to spend, you're going to have a physically larger rocket that has
more engines, that has more propellant, blah, blah, blah, to put the same amount of mass
into orbit compared to something else.
You know, we're talking like Rocket Lab's Electron, a really small rocket.
It's like, I think 1.3 meters wide and something like, you know, 18 meters tall or something.
It's a small rocket.
If you were to, you know, and it can put something like 300 or so kilograms into orbit, you could
either launch something that size or again, like a full, like big old Falcon 9 booster,
the huge, huge thing, and that would be lucky to put 300 kilograms into orbit.
You know, so it's like, which one's going to be cheaper to build, you know, ship around
all the stuff.
And then you also look at, you have fixed costs, like the idea of flying a, this, again, everything
in rocket science is a compromise, because now you have things like people on console
time, all the people that are, you know, on comms and working on the rocket, going down
to the pad, you know, filing paperwork, doing range control, making sure there's not planes
and boats in the way, flight termination, you have all these fixed costs for any launch.
I don't care how big the rocket is, there's a relatively fixed cost.
So now you say like, okay, I'm going to be paying, well, let's just make a winner.
I'm going to pay $5 million to fly a rocket between all the people going on site, all
the propellant, all the licenses, blah, blah, blah.
If your fixed cost is $5 million, you can put 300 kilograms in space versus you have
a $5 million cost of operation, and you can put 5,000 kilograms into space, like it's,
the business case is going to send you in one direction pretty quickly.
So you mentioned aerospace bike engines.
I think the internet informed me of your love affair with aerospace bike engines.
And somebody that looks at you the way Tim now looks at aerospace bike engines.
Can you explain what these are?
How do they work?
What's beautiful to them?
How practical are they?
Why don't we use them?
Does it just boil down to the design of the nozzle?
So maybe can you explain how is it possible to achieve this thing for an engine to be
as efficient in a vacuum and sea level in all different conditions?
You know what I love about this is that every question you've asked me is like a one hour
video.
Exactly.
I was like, now boil it down to 45 seconds.
So the aerospace bike engine basically is an inside out engine, more or less.
So with a traditional engine, you know, we've talked about the combustion chamber and the
throat and then it expands out into the nozzle.
Those walls are containing the pressure, right?
Aerospace bike is the opposite.
It's basically the pressure of the engine is on the outside of it and it's pushing
inward against a spike.
So it's almost like the difference of if you were, let me think about this, if you were
standing in like a tent or a teepee, right, and you put your arms at the top and you pushed
your arms out like into an iron cross or something, you know, you can physically lift the tent
just by pushing outwards on the tent walls, right?
Well that would be like a traditional nozzle.
Now aerospace bike would be almost like squeezing an ice cube.
You know, if you squeeze an ice cube, you can push in on it and kind of that wedge force
will shoot that ice cube.
So that's kind of what has happened.
We have the high pressure gases on the outside of the spike squeezing in on that spike and
that's, and then it's pushing up against the, you know, because it's equal on both sides
against the kind of the ramp is pushing up against the rocket.
So that's where that force comes in is against the nozzle and against the chambers.
The hard part with an aerospace bike.
So the cool, okay, I guess the cool thing about an aerospace bike is that it can operate
in space, you can have what's known as a really big expansion ratio.
So that's your ratio between the throat, the area of the throat versus the area of the
nozzle exit.
And remember how the bigger the nozzle is, the, it's continually just converting more
and more is converting that high energy, hot, high pressure gas into cooler and cooler,
lower pressure and faster gas.
So each little millimeter along that nozzle is just getting it lower pressure and cooler
but faster.
Now if you take a big nozzle on earth and you at sea level and you fire it, you can
actually get, even though we're going from say 300 bar of the Raptor engine, you know,
our atmosphere at sea level is about one bar is pretty much exactly one bar, depending
on conditions, but you can actually get a nozzle to get way below one bar of pressure.
So every little, you know, you can go from 300 bar in just two meters down to one bar
or below one bar.
There's actually a limit.
You can actually only expand it below, you know, we'll say something like 70% so you
can get down to like 0.7 bar at nozzle exit before the pressure of the atmosphere is actually
squeezing in on that exhaust and tearing it away from the walls of the engine, the walls
of the nozzle exit.
And what happens is it's, it's kind of unpredictable, you get these pockets, these oscillations
and they'll be so extreme that they'll end up just destroying the nozzle.
So you can't lower, you can't have a bigger expansion ratio than again, relatively speaking,
something like 0.7, like you can't go below, you can't get that pressure exit too much
below ambient air pressure before flow separation can destroy the engine.
So how come this engine can do so well in different pressure conditions?
So because it's inside out, the ambient pressure is pushing the exhaust gas into the wall as
opposed to a conventional engine that exhaust or the ambient air is actually squeezing the
exhaust gas away from the walls of the engine.
And that squeezing away from is what can be destructive.
So that since it's kind of inside out, the ambient air is pushing the exhaust gas into
the engine walls so you can't have flow separation, you won't have flow separation.
Now what happens is so you can have this huge, amazingly like efficient vacuum engine that's
that has a, we'll say a 200 to one expansion ratio, which is really big, like a lot of
sea level engines are like 35, 40, 50 to one expansion ratios.
And then in space, you know, it's common to use like 150, 180, 200 to one expansion ratios.
So an aerospace can have something like 200 to one.
It's just that the at sea level is kind of just getting pushed and it's kind of getting
cut off early almost, but it doesn't matter.
It's not like destructive.
It's just not running at its maximum efficiency as it climbs an altitude as the ambient air
gets thinner and thinner and thinner.
It just inherently is pushing less and less and less against the walls of that aerospike
engine.
So it actually continually gets more efficient at, you know, as it climbs an altitude as as
does a normal engine, but the difference is that you can use that huge expansion ratio
at sea level and you can't use a huge expansion ratio at sea level with a traditional nozzle.
Has anyone actually flown an aerospike engine?
No aerospike engine to date has ever been flown on an orbital rocket.
Why not?
I'd like to see a future where they're used purely, purely because I think they're cool.
Yeah.
You know, in the same way, that's the core of your love affair with aerospike engines
is just this in my video, actually, they're outside before I came in here.
I saw an arc seven on industries that I just love and that uses a rotary engine on paper.
The rotary engine is like more efficient, does all, you know, smaller, more efficient,
all these things.
It's like, the thing is actually just like unreliable, hot, and it, you know, it blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah burns oil.
It's kind of the same thing with the aerospike engine.
Like yes, on paper, it's more efficient.
But now you have a lot more surface area of your, your, your throat area, no matter what
is going to have the throat of the rocket engine is always where it's the hottest.
You know, it's the hardest thing to cool.
And with an aerospike, if, you know, if it's inside out, now your throat is no matter what,
like way bigger, you know, it's almost like the size of the nozzle exit normally, but
now it's your hardest thing to cool and you have a ton of it and you also have two edges
of it no matter what.
So even if you have like a, you know, a circle inside a circle, you have like a just insane
amount more surface area to cool with a limited amount of fuel.
Don't forget using your fuel as your, as your coolant.
So if you all of a sudden now take your throat area and you have X amount of space that you
need to cool, you only have, you have a limited supply.
It's like, oh, it's sorry.
This is the stuff that just.
Are there other ideas of for cooling, of for cooling air spike engines?
It's the same physics supply for an aerospike as they would.
So you just run into, you just run into a limitation, like at some point I'm not flowing
enough propellant.
My scales is scarce, scales kind of poorly.
You know what I mean?
Like you can increase the thrust of an aerospike by making it bigger and increase the mass
flow and the fuel going through the throats or the throat, but at the same time, like
it just, it's at the end of the day, it's physically possible.
It's a lot more complex.
You have a lot of issues with cooling and it just, you end up kind of right back where
you started.
So it's like, is it worth it to just keep going down this rabbit hole?
You're trying to engineer this thing to work when like you could have probably spent a
tenth the amount of time, just slightly increasing the performance of your normal engine in the
first place, you know?
Again, I'm going to anthropomorphize that lesson and apply it to my dating life.
Once again, just kidding.
Okay.
Actually, just on a small tangent, since you are also a car guy, what's the greatest combustion
engine car ever made to you if you had to pick something?
What's the coolest, the sexiest, the most powerful, the classiest, the most elegant,
well designed, I don't know what category.
But a lot of those things are different for me, but I'd say, I still, it's funny because
now maybe it's just because it's fresh on mind, but I love that mid 90s RX7, which,
you know, especially in Japan, they had the 20B, a tri-rotor that is like the coolest
engine ever to me.
The FD RX7.
It's just too darn cool, honestly.
Well, what about the mid 90s that makes it special?
Just that's the only time.
Everything was perfect.
It's more that I love the engine and I like the car it's attached to, and I'm not actually
a big fan of like 90s styling, you know, personally.
But just that, the 20B is just such a cool, cool engine.
And it's twin turbo, sequential turbos, so they used, they, a bigger turbo, it takes
longer to spool up.
You know, it takes more, it's using that same like a turbine and a compressor.
And it just, if it's a large turbine, it takes more exhaust gas to get it spooled up.
So if you have an engine that revs to 9000 RPM and you want to get a lot of pressure
out of that turbo, you have a big turbo it's going to take forever.
Like you're going to have, you know, your floor and then like, right, it's going to
take a long time for that turbo to get spooled up.
So they actually did a small turbo on it and a big turbo.
So the small turbo would spool up first, get some boost going through the engine, get that
engine operating, get it up to speed, get it, you know, get some power to the wheels.
And then once that kind of reaches its limit, you'd flow it into the, divert the exhaust
gas into the bigger turbo, this is sequential turbo.
And then that now can supplement and actually increase the, you know, overall performance
of the vehicle by a lot.
And I just, I think that's just so cool.
It's just like the ultimate like brute force out of the box thinking and it actually made
it into production.
You know what I mean?
Can you, what's the sound like?
Can you tell an engine by its sound?
It sounds like a really, really, really angry lawnmower.
It sounds horrible.
It's actually a terrible sounding car.
In my opinion, like it sounds just raspy and like the opposite of like a big muscle car,
you know, like a big muscle car has this deep gutta roll, like, oh, it just hits you.
This is like, it's just going to annoy the hell out of you and all your neighbors.
Like it's-
But you love the engineering.
I love the engineering of it.
So to you, the car is the engine.
It's not all the surface stuff, all the design stuff, all the, you know, yeah, the elegance,
the curves, whatever it is.
Well, those come and go, you know, to me, styles change.
It's forever.
Yeah.
I'm going to apply that to my daily life once again, the metaphors.
Just keep on coming.
Well, if you think about it, like, my taste has changed throughout the years.
When I first saw a Model 3 Tesla, I thought it was the most hideous car I've ever-
Out the grill, I was like, this is so stupid, it took me all but two months to think that
it was one of the coolest looking cars.
Same with Cybertruck.
I mourned Cybertruck.
When I first saw that thing, I was at that thing with, and I went with, we used to do
a podcast called Our Literatures Future.
So we talked a lot about, like, you know, cars and EVs and stuff.
We went to that unveiling and literally, like, we had, like, almost a non-alcohol-induced
hangover the next morning of, like, mourning the hideousness of Cybertruck.
Some six months later, a year later, and I'm like, dammit, that thing's actually kind
of cool.
Yeah.
That also teaches you something about, again, it's the thing you said earlier, sort of going
against the current or the experts of the beliefs or whatever, and making a decision
from first principles.
Some of that also applies to design and styling and fashion and culture and all that.
Big time.
Some of that, you know, fashion especially, it's so interesting.
So subjective.
Some rebellious against the current fads actually is the way to pave the new fads.
Well, it didn't take long for others to follow.
You look at, like, currently, like what Hyundai's doing with their, I forget which one, like,
the Ionic or something like that.
It's square.
It's boxy.
You know, it's a throwback.
It's 80s.
It's got these beautiful retro tail lights.
It's got these square headlights.
It's very inspired by Cybertruck, in my opinion, and it might not be.
It might be coincidental that we're all kind of getting this retro future vibe, but.
I personally like the boxy.
So I never, I still haven't understood Porsches.
I still can't quite understand the small size, the curves.
I don't quite get it.
See, like I said, I don't love the look of the RX7.
I don't love it, but I love it because of the engineering, I guess, that it represents.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
It's not the surface stuff.
It's the deep down stuff.
It's that 50-50 weight distribution that matters.
All right.
Let's talk about Starship.
We've been sneaking up to it from a bunch of different directions.
Can you just say what is Starship and what is the most impressive thing to you about
it?
What are the engines involved?
Maybe you haven't really kind of dancing around it, but because this is such a crucial thing
in terms of the next few years, in terms of your own life personally, and also just human
civilization reaching out to the stars, it seems like Starship is a really important
vehicle to making that happen.
So what is this thing that we're talking about?
Yeah.
Starship is currently in development, the world's largest, most powerful rocket ever
built, fully reusable rocket, two-stage rocket.
So the booster is landed, and all this is currently aspirational until it's working.
So I'll say what it's aspirationally going to be, and obviously I have faith that that
will happen, but just factually.
So the booster will be reused, landed and refueled and reused.
The upper stage will be landed, refueled and reused, and ideally rapidly, in the sense
not talking about months or weeks of refurbishment, but literally talking about mild inspections,
and ideally under 24-hour reuse, where you literally land it and fly it like an airplane.
So it utilizes liquid methane and liquid oxygen as its propellants.
It utilizes, the current iterations of it are 33 Raptor engines on the booster engine,
around the booster, and six Raptors on the second stage.
So there'll be three that are vacuum optimized, and three that are sea level optimized on
the upper stage that are primarily, they'll be used, I think, at stage separation anyway
in space, but their main reason that they use them is so they can use them for landing
too, the three sea level engines, to be able to propulsively land the upper stage as well.
So the three Raptor engines are the ones that generate the thrust that makes it the most
powerful rocket ever built.
It's almost double compared to the Saturn 5, really?
The N1 had 45 meganeutons of thrust, the Saturn 5 had, I think, 35 or 40 meganeutons of thrust,
and this has 75 meganeutons, so we're talking almost double.
It's a lot of power.
That could be the sexiest thing I've ever heard, okay.
So what are the different testing that's happening?
So what's the static fire what some of these Raptors look like, and where do we stand?
You were just talking about offline, the thing that happened yesterday was impressive.
Everything in this is iterations, and so the milestones that we're seeing, we actually
have on everydayastronaut.com, we have a milestone checklist of all the things we're hoping to
see that we need to see before the first orbital flight of this rocket.
So a big milestone that got checked off yesterday was a wet dress rehearsal.
So it's literally like fueling the rocket up, getting ready to do everything but lighting
the engines, basically.
So we're talking about loading it with propellant all the way, and this is the first time, yeah,
right there.
Where's the milestones?
Right there at the top.
Click that big picture.
Yep, just anywhere, that big picture, yeah.
So there's the wet dress rehearsal, so what's the wet dress rehearsal?
So that's where, for the first time, they filled it completely to the brim with both
liquid oxygen and liquid methane.
Now they had done component level testing where they filled it with liquid nitrogen,
which is, you know, it's an inert gas, so it's not, like, say it leaks out, it's not
going to explode.
You could just have a big giant pool of liquid nitrogen, like, flooding the area, but it's
not going to be an explosion, so they've done that for cryo testing to make sure all the
components and stuff can handle, you know, being at cryogenic temperatures.
It's kind of a good analog before you start putting your fuel and your oxidizer in there.
But now, as of yesterday, they fully fueled the rocket with propellant.
Both stages, the first stage and the second stage, all fully stacked on the pad.
Like, basically, I mean, there's the first sense we really got of, like, this is what
it's going to look like right before it takes off, you know, kind of breathing, coming
to life for the first time.
What does the pad look like?
So there's a few interesting aspects to this.
What's up with the chopsticks and all of that?
Yeah, so the launch pad is unique.
I've never seen anything like it in the prior history of spaceflight, but it's a really
simple launch stand.
They basically have, like, this almost looks like a stool, like a, you know, like a milking
a cow stool thing with a hole, a big giant thing.
Now I know you're from Iowa, but yeah.
Yes, we all know what that stool looks like.
Oh, yeah, we all have been sitting on that stool milking cat.
Yeah.
With a giant hole in the middle, and that hole in the middle of that stool is where
the rocket sits, and it sits on these, you know, launch clamps.
And then next to it is the, so that's the orbital launch mount.
And then next to it, there are the OLM, some people will say.
Next to it is the orbital launch tower, the OLT.
And that is not only integral to fueling up the upper stage, you know, the upper stage
has to have propellant lines run to it so that they can fill it with propellant and
you know, all that, but it also, they ended up making it so instead of having a big crane
on site to stack the two on top of each other, they literally just use that tower as a crane.
So the crane has these giant arms, lovingly called the chopsticks, or the whole system
can be called mechazilla.
And that will grab onto, first it'll grab onto the booster, pick it up off of its, off
of its transporter that transports it from the production site, lifts it up, puts it
down onto the launch mount, and then it will pick up the second stage or the upper stage
Starship and plop it down on top of the booster.
And they did that for the first time last year, actually, I think it was like Valentine's
last year was the first time they used the chopsticks to stack it.
And now they're doing it quite frequently, you know, but ultimately those chopsticks
have to serve a second purpose, they're actually going to utilize, if you say catch, it's not
so much they're going to catch the booster with these chopsticks, it's not like it's,
you know, a dad trying to catch a falling child, you know, it's more that the booster
and the Starship will someday land on those arms.
Yeah.
So they're more or less stationary, I'm sure there's some bit of, you know, adjustment
that the arms will do, but more or less the rocket's going to propulsively land and get
picked up by like, what's essentially like two, like relatively small ball joints that
hold the entire thing.
And so it has to land very precisely on these, these mounts, then onto the launch mount.
And that's what's going to just place it back onto the stand and allow it to be refueled
and fly again.
What's the idea of using the arms versus having a launch pad to land on?
What's the benefit?
You are basically removing the mass of what would be heavy landing legs, and you're putting
kind of that landing infrastructure onto a ground system, so you're not having to carry
those landing legs into orbit.
But it's also elevated off the ground.
Is there some aspect to that where you don't have to balance the thrust and all the...
You can negate some of those like, there's like plume-plume interactions, there's like,
you know, the exhaust hitting concrete, and especially with the rocket this big, it's
going to, you know, use like three Raptor engines firing.
You know, if you have them firing really close to the ground, you're just going to absolutely
destroy and crater the ground, and you're going to refurbish the ground and the landing
pad every time, and, you know, or have huge landing legs that are super long and tall,
you know, to make it so it's elevated enough to not do that.
So yeah, you're kind of, you're avoiding that whole mess by catching it high enough off
the ground that you don't have to factor that in.
And that's how many engines are involved in the landing part?
Is there three Raptor engines?
Well, we haven't actually, you know, we haven't to date seen the exact landing sequence, so
it might be something like at first they might light up, you know, seven or something, or
nine or something, some number to accelerate quickly, or decelerate quickly, same thing.
And then shut it down to three or something for a little bit more granular control, because
unlike Falcon 9, Starship has enough engines and variability to actually, if it needed
to hover, you know, to maybe more precisely align itself with the pad, it would have that
capability.
And especially having multiple engines, you know, if you only have a single engine running,
you can't really roll, you know, your roll axis, you can do pitch and yaw because the
engine is kind of like a rudder, it can move in two axes, so you can easily pitch and yaw
the vehicle, but to actually induce roll along its vertical axis, you would either need like
auxiliary engines to roll it, or you'd need a pair of engines so they can be opposed and
induce roll.
So by having two or three running, they have all three axes of control that they would
need, kind of like a broomstick, you know, and balancing a broomstick on your hand, they
can just move it over.
And if they need to align it to those landing nubs, you know, on the landing arms and stuff
like that, then they can do that.
Having a pitch and yaw, the thing, so Starship flips on its belly flops, there's an interesting
kind of maneuver on the way down to land.
Can you describe that maneuver?
What's involved with that?
Yeah.
So this is definitely a first.
I don't think anything's tried landing like this before, but the idea is when you're falling
through the atmosphere, the atmosphere could actually do a lot of work for you, you know,
you're moving quickly, something is falling from space, there's a lot of energy involved.
You have a really good video on this as well.
And thank you.
As it's falling, you know, you can let the atmosphere do as much work as it can.
And so if you have an unsymmetric, you know, it's not a ball that's falling, this is some
kind of object with shape, some, you know, one face of it is going to have more surface
area than the other face.
So, you know, in the shape of like a cylinder, if you're falling, you know, like a soda can
if you're falling top or bottom, first, it's a certain amount of surface area.
If you flip that on its side, you actually have a lot more surface area.
So with the same exact vehicle, you can actually have a lot more drag, you can actually slow
it down a lot more using the exact same like same atmosphere, same, same vehicle.
Just by turning it 90 degrees, you can slow it down substantially, like three or four
times slower.
So that's energy that you don't have to use anywhere else and you don't have to use an
engine to slow you down.
You don't have to do anything else.
So SpaceX realized, okay, if we flip this thing on its side and let it fall like a skydiver
almost, you know, instead of like pencil diving into the pool, your belly flopping, you're
maximizing the amount of surface area that's in the windstream that's being slowed down.
But obviously like in order to land, especially if you're SpaceX and, you know, Elon's obsessed
with like not having different parts, you know, he wants the best part is no part.
So if you're going to land with the engines, you might as well use engines that you've
already have the engines that are, you know, used for the other portions of flight.
So you kick those on and you use those engines to actually turn it 90 degrees from belly
flopping to feet first.
And that way you can use those same engines to land and you don't have to have like auxiliary
landing engines.
You don't have to have forces, you know, even if you were to land like on its belly with
a separate set of engines, not only would those engines weigh a lot, you know, and be
extra complexity, et cetera, et cetera, but you also don't have to make the ship be able
to handle landing, you know, like on its belly, as opposed to having the forces be vertical
through it.
But it's a giant thing that you have to rotate in the air.
Huge.
And as you also highlight, you know, there's liquid fuel slushing around in the tank.
So like you can't, I guess, use that fuel directly to have another kind of fuel.
Like, there's just complexities there that involve plus the actual maneuver is difficult
from that.
Like, what are the thrusters that actually make all that happen?
You're adding a lot of complexity, not a lot, but you're complexity to the maneuver and
possibility where failure could happen in order to sort of save, in order for the air
to do some of the work.
So what is some of that complexity?
Just you can linger on it.
You know, if you think about what it's going to take to go from horizontal to vertical,
this rocket in particular, the Starship has these big flaps.
So it has kind of two nose flaps and two rearward flaps.
The rearward flaps are a lot bigger because the majority of the mass, the engines and
stuff are in the back of the vehicle, so in order to kind of be stable.
And they just fold themselves inwards, like on their dihedral angle, at a dihedral angle
in order to increase or decrease the drag.
So you can control all three axes of control while it's falling on its belly.
You can control it that way using these four different fins.
So you have these giant moving surfaces that take thousands of horsepower, just insane
amount of torque in order to move these quickly enough to be a valid control surface.
So that's a huge complication, is moving these fins and developing that landing algorithm
and the control for a huge vehicle with flaps going in and out, in and out, in and out to
stay stable.
Then right as you light the engines, now all of a sudden you want the top, you know, you
want to flip the rocket 90 degrees to the rearward flaps, the bottom flaps fold in.
They tuck all the way in to minimize drag.
That's going to make it want to, you know, swing down.
You extend the upper flaps.
That makes it so the nose wants to pitch up.
You kick on the engines.
They're now lighting all three engines, at least as of the last, like, successful attempts.
They light all three of the sea level Raptor engines and they're pitched all the way, like,
you know, 10 or 15 degrees or whatever the maximum pitch is on them and that induces,
you know, it does that kick maneuver to kick it over from horizontal to vertical.
Now the problem is you lit your engines while you're horizontal.
So they put some horizontal velocity into the rocket.
They push the rocket, you know, at the time the nose is, at the time of lighting those
engines, the nose is facing the horizon and the engines are facing the opposite horizon.
So you now shot at a decent amount in the direction that you're not falling, you know.
So you have to factor that in to where you're landing because you're going to land on this
precise.
In this case, you're going to land on the inside the arm, the loving arms of the chopsticks,
you know, the creed arms wide open, you know, try to land inside this.
Exactly.
The song that you're playing through my head as I watch this now.
Thank you.
Thank you for forever joining those two.
I appreciate this.
And you have to very precisely control.
So what you have to do is now that it's done that kick, you also have to cancel out that
horizontal velocity.
So it's actually going to rotate beyond 90 degrees to cancel out that horizontal velocity
and then modulate the engines to make it so the thrust, you know, is perfect so that it
can control itself into a controlled landing.
And all this is done in like 500 meters, like 1500 feet, you know, you're doing all of those
things stupidly close to the ground.
It looks absurd.
So far, they've done five of these tests, all the first four all blew up, you know,
they're all coming in from about 10 kilometers or 33,000 feet, falling, flipping, you know,
and again, this thing is huge that just the booster or just the upper stage of this is
like 50 meters tall, you know, so it's 150, it's like 45 meters, about 50 meters tall,
about 165 feet tall, nine meters wide, so 30 feet wide, it weighs, you know, something
like, God, I don't remember, it's something like 120 metric tons, so 120,000 kilograms,
you know, two quarter of a million pounds empty, and it's doing this flip maneuver.
And it has to do all this perfectly.
So the first four attempts of this were pretty spectacular failures.
So just to clarify, which stage is doing this maneuver?
It's the upper stage is doing this belly flop maneuver.
Yep.
So this is the stage that would presumably have humans on board if we were to use.
And if things continue to play now, here's, here's something I would love to see.
Just saying this.
Yeah.
If you already have these big aero surfaces, the flaps, they also have to move.
They're on heavy motors and hinges and flaps and all that stuff.
I'm actually surprised that for Earth, they aren't just looking at landing it horizontally
on a runway like space shuttle.
Oh, I mean, that worked.
The bronze did it, you know, the Soviet Union's bronze.
I rolled my heart real hard there, so.
Thank you.
Wow.
Wow.
I'm very impressed.
I'm very impressed.
And, you know, the bronze did it.
We have other space planes like the X-37B.
We have the upcoming Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser.
It's, yeah, you have some extra mass in the wings, but so does Starship.
Starship has the extra mass of those flaps and, you know, the motors and the hinges and
all that stuff.
I would like to see the trade on, like, is it actually lighter weight to do that versus
doing what SpaceX is doing?
So yeah, I mean, that's the funny thing.
I think realistically, if Elon walks in the door tomorrow and says, guys, we did some
simulations and actually it's like we can get another 5,000 kilograms in the space if
we just land it horizontally.
If we kind of give up on our ego and land horizontally, at least on Earth, then, you
know, I think they could be doing that pretty quickly because that's the thing is, that's
ultimate thing has been to land on Mars and, you know, other planets and Mars doesn't have
a runway, doesn't have a, you know, a thick enough atmosphere to utilize aerodynamic flight
like that.
So you have to do propulsive landing for Mars.
You're going to land on an unprepared surface, you know, so it has to be able to do this
at some point.
The ultimate, it sounds ridiculous and it is, but the ultimate goal of it is to land
on Mars.
There's not much of an atmosphere to, like, to help you with the, for the belly fought
to be useful.
There's not only 1% the atmosphere on Mars as there is on Earth, but you still want to
utilize as much of that atmosphere as possible.
So in the upper atmosphere, it's still going to be coming in more or less kind of perpendicular
to the airstream.
I guess it's probably more like, you know, 60 degrees, 70 degrees to the airstream like
where it's belly flopping and it's going to especially do that on Mars.
It's going to need to, you know, use up as, let the little bit of atmosphere there is,
you know, you're coming in an insane velocities.
And so even that 1% thin atmosphere is still going to do a lot of work.
Now on Mars, there's only 38% of Earth's gravity on Mars.
So the belly flop maneuver is a lot, it could be a lot more conservative.
You could do that at like 5,000 feet up and it just wouldn't matter as much because there's
not as much gravity loss or gravity drag.
So you can kind of just more slowly, gently, you know, you don't have to do this crazy,
extravagant, like belly flop, you know, flip maneuver, but it would still something at
some point you would transition from more or less perpendicular to the airstream to,
you know, an horizontal to landing vertically.
I like how we're having this old boring conversation about the differences of landing
on Earth versus on Mars.
This is surreal that this is actually a real conversation that this is something that we're
discussing because it has to do both.
Yeah.
Well, in my opinion, I think we'll pretty quickly see an evolution of Starship that's
like dedicated versions for certain tasks.
Sure.
And at the end of the day, again, if someone runs the simulation says it's actually more
efficient and it's better just to land horizontally on a runway, then that's what's going to happen.
You know, it doesn't matter, but they still will develop, you know, if the ultimate goal
is to land on Mars, then they'll have a dedicated Mars variant, you know, which will likely
look different than the Earth variant, you know, and they'll still probably be launched
on the same booster.
You know what I mean?
So there's, oh, you mean like that particular vehicle will not be returning back to Earth.
It'll need to be modified because the ultimate is to have one Starship that goes to Mars,
lands on Mars and takes off of Mars, lands back on Earth and is reused again over and
over and over.
And there's a chance that you, you know, you have just a, a cycler, just a, you know,
if you're, if you, at the end of the day, you're just really trying to see what is most feasible,
what's the most efficient.
You literally have a vehicle dedicated to Mars.
Mars is easy to do a single-stage orbit.
It's a lot lower gravity, a lot thinner atmosphere.
You can easily do a single-stage orbit.
You get into orbit, you'd park to a dedicated, you know, transfer vehicle that goes between
Earth and Mars.
It only stays in space.
You don't have heat shields.
You don't have landing legs.
You don't have all these things that you need.
And ideally it's nuclear powered, so it's super efficient.
That gets you back to Earth.
Once you're at Earth, you rendezvous again with another landing Starship.
And that Starship might be a horizontal runway Starship, you know, like there's no, I don't
see the, and I think ultimately it'll win out where we don't have a one-size-fits-all.
I think that's the, that's the flaw of the space shuttle really is that it was trying
to do everything and ended up kind of doing nothing well.
But that's, I think what SpaceX has proven, I mean, SpaceX already has variants coming.
There's already going to be a dedicated lunar lander for NASA, for the Artemis program.
There's already going to be a tanker variant.
There's already going to be likely just a pure cargo version.
There's likely going to be a human version.
We'll likely see evolutions of this thing happen, you know, relatively quickly.
And once it's all working, it's only a matter of weeks before people riding on it will be
complaining about the speed of the Wi-Fi.
As the old like Lucy K joke with like, you're flying on a chair through the air.
You didn't even know this existed and now you're complaining about it.
It's great.
Exactly.
So you, you tweeted fun fact about Starship by doing the flip around 500 meters versus
higher up like 2,000 meters.
The difference in Delta V is 500 meters per second.
That's a 20 ton fuel saving, which means basically 20 tons more you can put into orbit.
That's more than Falcon 9 has ever launched just by flipping later.
That's really interesting.
So there, that was the decision to flip close to the ground.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The closer to the ground, the better.
The more, again, the more the atmosphere is doing work and you know, we get into that
video really dives into like gravity losses and gravity drag.
The more time you're spent, every second that your rocket engine is running, Earth is stealing
9.8 meters per second of acceleration against you.
There's just inherently 9.8 meters per second squared of acceleration.
So every second that engine is running, the first, a big majority of your thrust is actually
being just stolen by Earth's gravity well.
So if you're, the longer you're fighting that, the more inefficient it is.
So ID, I mean, the best thing would be you flip at, you know, 100 meters off the ground,
you light all your engines to maximum thrust and you pull 50 Gs, you know, you land on
a dime basically.
Obviously, there's no margin there and there's, you know, and there's diminishing returns
on that, that gravity loss thing and your high thrust weight ratios.
So that's a pretty good compromise.
Like yes, it looks scary, but they could be a lot more aggressive with that yet and squeeze
out even a little bit better performance, but there are diminishing returns.
So that's kind of the magic number we've seen so far today, but we'll likely see that, you
know, be played with.
You've attended some of these, what does it feel like to see Starship in person?
First of all, when it's just sitting there stacked and second of all, when it's doing
some of these tests, some of these maneuvers.
Well, first off, if you have the freedom of traveling and happen to live within a reasonable,
either by plane or car, it's worth going down to South Texas.
So Starbase is right on the border of Mexico and the United States and the very southern
tip of Texas, right along the Rio Grande.
And it's insane because it's right along a public highway.
You can literally, anyone can drive down this, assuming it's not closed for testing because
they do close the highways during the week, a decent amount while they're doing tests.
But sans any of those days, anyone can just drive down and see these things up close and
personal with their own eyes.
Like we're talking, you know, from a hundred, 200 meters away, you know, so two football
fields away from the world's biggest, most powerful rocket.
Imagine being able to do that during the, you know, Soviet Union and, you know, during
the N1 and the Saturn V, you know, imagine just being able to drive up right next to
the launch pad.
There's no way, you know, and so to have this kind of access to this program is so incredible.
The craziest thing is when you, when you're driving out on this, on highway four, it's
bumpy.
It's, you know, riddled with potholes now because of all the insane amount of trucks
having to go out there and traffic and you're going through this, it's just this weird, you're
like, where am I?
You occasionally are seeing like, you can kind of see the, I mean, you can see Mexico
out your right window as you're driving down this highway, you know, and you're just sitting
there like, where am I?
And then all of a sudden you kind of turn this corner and the trees and the brush kind
of clear out.
And all of a sudden you get a sense of everything on the horizon and at that point you're pretty
much five miles on the nose or eight kilometers away.
And from there, you can just see through the, the heat haze, through the, you know, the
atmospheric distortion and you just see this weird, like it looks like a city almost on
the horizon.
You know, there's tons of these tall buildings, there's a weird ominous launch tower thing
with arms wide open and sometimes add, you know, a giant metal rocket.
And it just looks so, so weird.
I mean, it's the word surreal, I think by definition, I think if you are expecting it,
it's not surreal.
I think surreal kind of means like unexpected surprise or whatever, you know, even if you're
expecting it, even if you've seen pictures, even if everything, it is surreal.
You stand there and you just go, what is this?
And also, I mean, there is a, there's a kind of magical aspect to the, this is the place
where over the next few years we'll start as a human species reaching out there, traveling
out there.
Well, for sure, see the development of the rockets that I think will take us further
than ever before, be born right there.
What's it like to witness the actual testing of starship?
So far it's been high stakes, like it's, it's been insane because those, the, the first
I kind of mentioned earlier, there's been SN8, 9, 10, 11 and 15 that have all done these
suborbital hops.
The highest one went 12.5 kilometers and the rest of the four went 10 kilometers in altitude
and then turned off the engines and just fell.
Now, the cool thing about that is the general public could be about five, five miles away.
So again, like eight kilometers away.
And the weird thing is this rocket's slowly accelerating.
They didn't want to exceed a certain speed.
So they didn't have to worry about the aerodynamics of it.
They just slowly climbed and it probably also to appease the FAA.
Like here, we'll just limit the thrust to weight ratio and just, you know, make, make
it so it's slow and controlled.
No big deal.
So it's basically more or less like slightly above a hover, just climbing for, for minutes,
for like four or five minutes, you just hear and feel the roar of this thing.
Normal rockets, like after the first 30 seconds or minute, you know, they're so far away that
you, it's just diminishing, you know, it's just, it's just fading, fading, fading, fading.
You still get that rumble, that, that sense, but, but those first five flights, the suborbital
hops were just, I'll cherish them forever because you just, you're watching this thing that
you've driven up next to.
You've seen it with your own eyes.
That's bigger than most buildings in a, you know, fairly dense urban area.
You know, it's this massive thing.
You've stayed in that, you stood there, you look at it, you're like, wow, that's crazy.
You've seen people working on it.
They're little ants compared to it.
Then you drive away and you see it on the horizon and all of a sudden that thing leaves.
It starts moving.
Hovering.
Hovering.
Essentially.
I mean, you know, you put, for me at least, I put my hands on my head when I, I just,
I can't help it.
I'm not, it's not, I don't know what it is.
It's surreal, like you said.
I don't know what in human nature decides this is what to do when you can't believe
something, but that's what happens.
And when that thing first took off, it was just like, my brain couldn't process seeing,
you know, cause I had spent so much time driving around and seeing it and all of a sudden you're
watching it just take off and you're like, it's moving and all these, you know, the most
complicated rocket engines ever made are all firing simultaneously and it didn't blow
up on the launch pad and it's slowly increasing and it's just crazy and the sound, the, everything
about it.
And so by the time the first one is specifically, it was December, 2020 was the first SN8.
It went up and I actually, we all lost it in the sky.
We couldn't quite see it, but our, we had telescopes and, and you know, high telephoto
lenses tracking it.
And what's funny is there is a pretty strong wind up there at altitude and it was moving.
There's a lot of gaseous oxygen being vented out of the rocket and it's, you know, being
blown by this air.
So it looks like it's moving actually quite quickly, like away from us, like it was strafing
to one side.
So I'm watching the monitor.
I'm going, Oh my God, they're moving it like over Brownsville and we're all, all of us,
everyone on this, this hotel balcony is looking out down like way out over, you know, and
we can't find it.
And we're like, where do they lose it?
Like we're thinking like, Oh my God, this is going to crash down in Brownsville.
And, and finally they shut the engines off and we're watching it fall and again, we're
tracking it.
We know it's falling and it's falling, falling, falling, it's falling super controlled and
like, Oh my God, this is perfect and all of a sudden it clicked and I see it with my,
you know, my eyes.
I finally like tracking it.
It's straight out like straight in front of us and it looks like it looks like it was
a blimp just barely moving now because it is falling slowly thanks to all of its drag.
And again, that's one of those moments I'm like, it's falling so slow, you know, because
it's so big.
It's so massive.
It's falling sideways.
You know, I've seen Falcon 9 boosters and Falcon heavy boosters and they scream.
They come in so fast and you can barely even see them.
You can just barely track them all of a sudden they light their engines and they decelerate
so quickly.
This was like the opposite.
It was like, is that thing ever coming down?
It was just falling so slowly and so right there, just felt like it was so close.
And so when it finally lit its engine and it flipped, I was losing my mind because I'm
like, it's working.
You know, this crazy plan, this huge massive thing is doing this absurd feat.
And the first one, well, the first four again, didn't work out as planned, but getting to
that point already, getting to that flip maneuver was a huge milestone and it was so exciting
just going through those firsts were amazing.
And I think, you know, we're coming up now on them doing the full stacks of the booster
and the upper stage.
I think when we see that fly, when that leaves Earth for the first time, it'll be like I
said almost twice the amount of thrust as anything else.
It'll be the biggest, heaviest, largest thing to ever fly.
It's going to shake everything.
I can't wait to have all 33 Raptor engines been active at once.
Have they tested that?
No, that's coming up.
That's kind of the next milestone.
I don't know, you know, when this will come out, but we're, that's like the next.
Just a few days very quickly here, then, but if people listening to this, if they're listening
to it early on, they'll likely be able to catch, you know, I think at this point it
seems like next week.
So step one would be static fire.
I'm holding onto the rocket and lighting up the engines.
And so so far they've lit at most, they kind of, they went for like a more than 14 engines
static fire.
I don't recall if it was like, you know, 16 or something engines lit at once and they
ended up going down to 14 engines.
That's the most engines they've ever lit.
So the next step and the final kind of step before they fly this thing is they're actually
going to light all 33 engines simultaneously.
And although that sounds scary, let's not forget the Falcon Heavy that's now flown five times
completely flawlessly has, has 27 engines running simultaneously.
So they definitely have, you know, SpaceX has experience with a high number of engines
running at the same time, but it is still like this is going to be a lot of moving parts
and a lot of potential and a lot, just a lot of everything.
What are the upcoming milestones, expected milestones?
And I think there's one in particular I'd like to talk to you more about, but leading
up to that, of course, is like, what are some of the tests here on the way?
So is this the static fire, the fully stacked with the two stages?
Will there be, and then all that leading to an orbital launch test?
So what are the things we should know about?
And what do you think, like, what do you think the timeline will be with like the orbital
test timeline?
The reason that we have this website, the expected milestones is because I always tell
people to ignore any time you ever hear for any of this stuff, just pay attention to milestones
because when you're doing stuff for the first time, you know, you just have no idea.
So just to understand the expected milestones here, the first column is the event, the second
column is the date and status, TBD, complete green means what?
Green means it's been completed and it shows the completion date there.
And the completion date.
Yeah.
And then the others, maybe more, maybe not for the full stack testing, the D stack and
the, there's a 33 engine.
So realistic, we're expecting them to D stack and SpaceX, I think, just tweeted that actually
that they're going to be D stacking the second stage from the first stage, kind of get the
ship safe while they test because they don't want to, you know, 33 engines is a pretty
high risk if they do blow up the rocket.
And when they test it for the first time, it's not going to be fully fueled.
I don't think at least, but there is a limit to how they do have it weighed down enough
that the launch clamps can hold onto it.
Cause if you think about it like normally the launch clamps are holding onto an entire
rocket weighing 5 million kilograms, 5 million, you know, it's weighing an insane amount.
So those clamps don't actually have to hold 75 mega Newtons of thrust.
They really want to have to hold on 25 mega Newtons of thrust, you know what I mean?
They're not designed to hold down all 75, they do have to have enough weight on the
rocket.
So that, so even when they do these, the testing of the 33 engines, it'll have to have enough
propellant in there that they don't exceed the clamping and the holding force of the
stand.
Otherwise it'll break free from the launch stand and that booster will go flying off
on controlled.
So it's a difficult thing to figure out in the test how many simultaneous things you
test.
Right.
So they're kind of mitigating risks, which is why like they're D stack, you know, they
don't want to have, although the ship could be on top of it to help weigh it down and
simulate the, you know, the launch environment better.
At some point they, that's a risk they're just going to take when they go for launch.
And so for now they're taking the ship off in case something goes wrong during the 33
engine test.
And then once we see if the 33 engine test goes well, hopefully we see the second stage
get stacked back on it.
We'll see them get closer, like closing out all the items and hope the big one too is
the FAA launch license.
There, that's a little bit publicly filed.
We'll see that, you know, in the system, having a launch license and I have no sense of that
type of thing.
You know, that's outside of, but that's, but that is a big milestone and it might be something
that could potentially hinder, you know, hold up the launch date, would just be waiting
for a launch license.
Yeah.
I'm sure there's a lot of fascinating bureaucracy and politics and legal stuff and all of that
kind of beautiful magical thing when you live in reality because it is, I mean, it is a
big rocket.
Yeah.
Well, and the biggest thing is not so much, the FAA doesn't necessarily care about the
success of the rocket.
They did really just care about the safety of public and public property, you know.
So it's a matter of being convinced and having the data to prove, okay, if this thing blows
up, we have a control of how and when it blows up.
We have control of, you know, X, Y, and Z.
Here's the potential damage.
Here's the blast radius.
You know, this, again, is over twice as powerful and twice as much potential.
Actually, it's a lot more potential for an explosive energy if it, you know, where it
happened to, well, let me walk back a little bit because in order to have a real detonation,
you have to have a perfect mixture ratio of your fuel and oxidizer.
If when a rocket blows up, typically, you know, it kind of unzips and some of the fuel
will mix into some of the oxidizer and you could have some explosive energy, but a lot
of it's actually just a deflagration, it's just, you know, flames and there will, there
would be explosive energy, but it's not like at your lighting, all of its simultaneous
things is a giant bomb.
It's just really not.
So that's good.
But at the same time, even in those circumstances, the amount of energy is still absurd enough
to likely blow out windows, you know, for miles and miles and miles, including my studio
space.
Well, if the cameras hold up, it will be one heck of a show, hopefully, of course, would
not, would not happen.
So how does that take us to an orbital launch?
When do you think that would happen?
In my opinion, this is a very fluid and this will change literally by the hour.
So you really think that it's very difficult to really say like, even, even for something
that could very well happen this year, even just a few months away, you should make it
a prediction.
By the way, are you like superstitious on this kind of stuff a little bit?
Like you don't, you're worried about jinxing it and that kind of stuff?
No, not at all.
No.
Because I would imagine you would be like waiting for all of these launches that keep
getting delayed, or you start thinking that there's certain things you do will control
the weather.
My socks.
I am aware of these socks just scrubbed again, you know, like, yeah.
You're lucky.
You have to wear the same lucky socks, otherwise it's going to, there's going to be bad weather.
So the reason that I say this and why it's so difficult is they did a first full stack
test in July of 2021 and the expectation was we're a month or two away from a launch.
So like, realistically for 18 months have been in a purgatory thinking that we're a
month or two away of an orbital launch.
Now I did say for the record, when that thing stacked and when a lot of speculation was
saying, you know, a month or two, I was saying, I don't expect it to fly in 2021.
You know, and I've been just, I just saw the amount of work that still needed to be done
like on the ground systems, the tanks, the launch mount, all the stuff and they're like,
there's still a lot of stuff and they're going to have to validate it.
They're going to have to test everything, every component.
And you know, people were like, how dare you say that even Gwen shot?
Well, the president of SpaceX is saying Q3 of 2020 and I'm like, okay, but like, I'm
just, I'm not going to be surprised if it slips into 2022.
And here we are at the beginning of 2023.
And I think we're finally within like two months.
I, I'm expecting like I'm trying to keep my March and April as free as I can.
We'll put it that way.
I love it.
Actually, just in a small tangent on Gwen shot, like what, what do you, from everything
I know she's an instrumental, a really crucial person to the success of SpaceX in running
the show.
She's the president, the COO.
What do you know about her that sort of the genius of Gwen shot well?
Man, my understanding is she's really the glue.
You know, she's the glue to the tornado tornado comes in and then she comes around and just
really executes on, on, and, and helps, you know, a famous story is that at some point
Elon walked in or she's sprinted into a meeting because Elon was actively trying to cancel
Falcon Heavy.
Saying it's too far, like it's too much development, it's still too far away.
And this is like, you know, this might have been like end of 2017 or something and it
flew for the first time in 2018.
So we're, we're talking like it's close to the end of development, you know, there's
hardware being built, all this stuff and Elon's literally in a meeting telling people
they're going to cancel it and we're going to move on to BFR or now Starship and just
go full steam ahead on that.
And she runs into the meeting and reminds Elon, we have X amount of customers that have
already purchased a ride on Falcon Heavy.
We can't delay that, you know, so it's, it's that business sense of like we, yes, it's
great to innovate, but we also have to pay our dues and, and, and make the money to continue
our operations.
And I think she's just a lot better at, she has, I think she has such a great perspective
on everything.
It really seems like everything, she, she doesn't, I wish she did more interviews because
I would love to hear more from her.
But man, like it just seems.
Hear that Gwen.
Are we?
For both of us.
Yeah.
She hasn't actually done that many interviews, right?
I don't really know.
She's done like a TED talk, a couple of little things here and there, but not really many
interviews.
And I would just love to hear like what, you know, what on a daily basis, like what is
she doing to keep her head on and keep everything so organized, you know, it's, you know, yeah.
My understanding is that she, she is absolutely integral and does just an insane amount of
work at SpaceX.
Yeah.
I mean, so it's the, the project planning, but also the, how the teams integrate together
and the, and the hiring and this is just the management.
I think it's a lot of it.
Honestly, even just the business, making sure the money's flowing in a positive trend more
or less.
You know, that yes, Elon's obviously a money guy, but he thinks he's so, I think Elon
is so risky.
You know, he just loves to throw it all in that he leaves little margin for error.
You know, he's, he's been really lucky with rolling his dice, you know, especially like
when he started SpaceX and Tesla, that was the ultimate roll of the dice.
And I think she's a healthy balance to be like, well, here's our, you know, operations
and how we continue to do this without risking everything, you know, and Starship's close.
Let me be clear, Starship is close to risking everything already.
It's just such a big, fast-moving, high-risk developmental program that like, I personally
think, you know, SpaceX would probably be fine if they shut the doors on Starship and
just flew Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy for the next 10 years, they would still be commercially
valid.
They would spend another dollar on research and development.
They could fire, I don't want them to, fire everyone involved in anything research and
development and just ran operations on Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, and they would still be
dominant for 10 years.
And they would still have a business case and they'd still be fine.
But they're all in, like all chips are pretty much as many chips as possible are in for
Starship.
I mean, this, I don't know what else I could say is there's not, I've talked to a lot
of great leaders, there's just not many people like Elon that would push for Starship.
When they're already as far ahead.
When they're already a very successful company, sort of everyone doubted that it could be a
successful company.
It was so close to bankruptcy and failing, and then to take it into a financially viable
successful company, and just when you do, you take on a project that again risks everything.
Well, he already did this with Falcon 1 to Falcon 9, like literally people were like,
what are you doing?
They basically signed over and were fully ramping up Falcon 9 by the time they finally
had their first Falcon 1 success.
They had one more flight.
They only flew Falcon 1 successfully twice.
They flew it five times altogether.
The fourth one was successful and they flew one more time.
And anyone else out there would have been like, let's keep flying the Falcon 1.
We have a working rocket.
We can start making money and profiting, and already he was risking it all and saying,
nope, we're going from Falcon 1 to Falcon 9, it was a huge, huge leap.
I think it's at least as big as a leap from Falcon 1 to 9 as it is from Falcon 9 to Starship
or around relatively a similar leap.
So it's just that same thing again.
People are going, why are you leaping into this insane program and system and risk when
you finally have this workhorse of a rocket that's so dominant in the industry, yet they're
going 10X, you know?
It so happens that you've been selected for the Dear Moon mission that will fly Starship
once around the moon with nine people on board.
You are one of those people, so just pause to take that in.
Anything that we've been talking about, you will not just be reporting on, you will be
a part of it.
So tell me about the objective of this mission and how does it feel to be a part of it?
Well, man.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Basically, it's the Willy Wonka of space, like a generous individual purchased a ride
from SpaceX as early, at least as far as I know, the earliest I knew about it was February
27th, 2017.
Who is the individual?
Yusaku Mayazao, but at the time, I'm telling a story, at the time we didn't know.
Okay, great.
Great.
So on February 27th, 2017, a press release comes out from SpaceX saying someone purchased
a ride through us around the moon.
We're going to fly someone around the moon, and at the time it was on a Crew Dragon capsule
and a Falcon Heavy.
It's like, wow, and that was enough.
That little moment right there, that's press release.
It's the first time I'm like, I'm going to make a YouTube video about this.
I stood up, turned on my camera, put on my, at the time, space suit, and I basically yelled
at the camera for three minutes about someone's going around the moon, you know, fast forward
to 2018, end of 2018, and at the end they introduced, there's a SpaceX press conference.
I'm there as a member of the press.
I'm reporting on, we're going to meet this person that's going around the moon and come
to find out, boom, they're going to be riding on Starship now.
They changed from Falcon Heavy and Dragon, SpaceX is no longer going to do that.
They're going to upgrade them basically to Starship, so instead of being in like a small
tin can, they're in this giant luxurious mega rocket around the moon.
It comes out that this individual named Yusaku Mayazao, who is a Japanese billionaire, purchased
this ride and instead of inviting his friends and colleagues and whatever, whoever is family
members or whatever, he decided that the most impactful thing he could do with this opportunity
is invite more or less artists.
The original thing was like artists, journalists, a painter, an athlete, a photographer, a videographer,
all walks of life-facing.
When they said athlete, they thought of you, like, I know a guy.
This guy rode ragged by once.
At the time, he was like, this is crazy.
I can't believe this is going to happen.
He had this vision of we're going to find people from all around the world.
I'm going to invite people from all around the world from different walks of life, different
trades, and I'm going to share this experience so that they can share it with the world and
really have an impact much greater than any one country or any one individual or any set
of military-trained astronauts could do, offer up a new perspective.
Beautiful.
I literally, I mean, at the press conference, I cried.
I had a couple tears in my eyes.
I was like, this is so cool.
If you could just pause on that, so he goes by MZ?
MZ, yep.
How incredible is that?
I think you often don't realize the importance of individuals in human history.
They define it because this could be, we talked about the importance of Elon in particular.
Most of the work is done by large groups of people that are collective intelligence that
we band together, but these individuals can be the spark of the catalyst of that progress.
I mean, just this idea of getting not just civilians, which is already incredible, but
civilians with an artistic flame that burns inside them, they're able to communicate whatever
they do, are able to communicate something about that experience.
It's just a genius idea to spend quite probably a very large amount of money for that.
That will be part of history.
It's easy these days for people to be cynical, especially about spaceflight and wealthy individuals,
but really, in my opinion, and maybe just the time I was just so couldn't believe this idea,
I'm someone that has studied a lot about the Apollo program, the people that have been
to the moon.
They're incredible individuals, incredible individuals, but they're so saturated with
tasks and they're military trained and often that they didn't really have the luxury of
just being able to soak in the experience of going around or to the moon and seeing the
moon up close with your own eyes.
That just psychologically has to be insane.
To have this opportunity to be able to observe our closest celestial neighbor with your own
eyes and your sole purpose is to soak it in and share it and communicate and create with
the rest of our planet, that to me is just beautiful.
That is the objective of the mission.
That right there is the objective of the mission.
How does it feel to be selected as one of the nine to do it?
It's a gradient.
It's slowly, it's doing a few things.
Since I've known it's become, I think the closer it gets, the more excited and the more
nervous I get, the more real it becomes.
The announcement was a big, it just got announced at the end of 2022 publicly, who's involved.
Prior to that, I had each step of the selection process, there's a pretty comprehensive selection
process with interviews and stuff.
Each step, I'd try not to get my hopes up and frankly, let me be clear, this was not
something that I've always wanted to do.
It's not like I'm out there, I didn't start doing YouTube videos because I wanted to even
go to space.
None of that.
I've said, hilariously, I've probably said dozens or hundreds of times on air, I don't
ever want to go to space because it's not a driving force.
It's not really a thing I even really, truly pictured or let myself fantasize about, frankly.
Each step of the selection process, I didn't really let myself dream about it too much
or it would chip away like, oh my God, this is actually becoming more real, this is actually
more and more of an opportunity and I get equally more nervous too.
Frankly, I've seen spaceflight stuff go wrong.
I've think about this stuff a lot, so yeah, I get more nervous, but I also get more excited
about that opportunity.
It's an opportunity that how can you pass?
I still have to actually stop, pause, think, and actually realize the reality that I am
going to the moon, I'm going to see the moon up close, flying around the moon, I'm sorry,
some people get mad when I say going to the moon since I'm not landing on it, but flying
around the moon, seeing the far side of the moon with my own eyes and seeing the earth
rise behind it.
I can't tell you what it's going to be like and feel like, but it's insane to me that
we're having this conversation and that that is my reality and that someone was generous
enough to consider the option of sharing this with frankly strangers.
The process that they had for selecting, how much thought and time went into the selection
process is incredible.
They did a public call at the beginning of 2021.
The team's involved in whittling it down from a million applicants.
There's a million applicants that whittled it and they got it down to eight crew members
and two backups.
Amazing people.
I don't know how they wound up where they did, but it's incredible.
I feel a very deep connection to everyone that's already involved in.
What can you say about the crew?
You've gotten a chance to meet them and talk to them and Steve Iocchi's on the crew.
Who else is there?
You are obviously the star athlete on the crew, who else in terms of the artists that
are there?
Oh, man.
We might just want to pull up just so I don't totally butcher and forget anybody, but because
so far I haven't actually had the chance to meet everyone in person.
So far a lot of this was done during the pandemic, but we've met through a couple different things.
We've had a couple different times to get together, but so far I have not met Steve
Iocchi yet or Top.
We've been on calls and stuff.
I also have not yet met Dev Joshi, who is an actor from India.
So yeah, Steve Iocchi, American DJ and producer and musician.
Top from South Korea is also a musician and a producer.
So this is all across the world.
It's truly global, all different kinds of walks of life, all artists of different forms.
And Steve is Japanese.
His parents are Japanese, but he was born and raised in the United States.
Naomi is a dancer and choreographer from the Czech Republic.
Rhiannon is a fine art photographer from England in Ireland.
I guess she lives in both and kind of a bit of a, she's all over the place.
Technically she's Irish, I guess.
I, Tim Dodd, yeah, that's me from the United States.
Then you have Kareem, who is from England and does also as a photographer and documentarian.
He does a lot of work with oceanography and volcanoes.
So he does really incredible work.
Brendan Hall is a documentarian and filmmaker.
Dev Joshi, sorry, Brendan is also from the United States.
Dev Joshi is an Indian actor.
I believe also, I believe he's also already been producing and things.
He's very young.
I think he's only like 19 or 20.
And he's, I mean, he's been acting since he was like five years old or something.
He's a Bollywood star.
He is a star in India, which is really cool.
All right.
Caitlin Farrington from the United States is an Olympic gold medalist snowboarder.
So she, believe it or not, is the athlete, not me.
All right.
And then, and she's one of the backup crew members as so is Miu from Japan who's a dancer.
Oh, that's amazing.
I mean, it's such an interesting group.
I mean, is there something else you could say about MZ, about Yusaka Maezawa?
Yeah, Yusaka Maezawa.
So he, he's also a musician.
So he was actually in like some kind of punk hardcore Japanese bands in the early, in the
90s and stuff and early 2000s.
He started a record company and distribution and sales ended up in fashion and owns one
of the biggest fashion companies in Japan.
And I was become a fine art collector and just kind of a philanthropist.
And he's been out to space already.
He's already not only been to space, like, you know, he's been to the international
space station.
He's been on orbit and on the ISS.
And so he, what's cool is like, you know, there's talks of, frankly, to be, to be honest,
like we still don't, I sort of know all of the details about this, you know, we're not
yet into training.
I kind of always assumed prior that there'd be some professional astronaut, you know,
when they talked about it in 2018, there's talks of, we'll have a professional astronaut
on board, but realistically now, like MZ is a trained astronaut, you know, he has trained
a lot, like six months, you know, plus to be able to fly on Soyuz.
So as far as like, it's good to know for me that I have someone on the crew that has
experienced with spaceflight has trained and has some knowledge on spaceflight as well.
You know, that's, that is an important aspect for sure.
So you made an excellent video about flying in the fighter jet that I think you mentioned
may be relevant to the training.
Is there some high level aspects to training that you anticipate that you might be able
to speak to?
Yeah, so, you know, so far, I think we can really lean on what has happened with the
other, you know, commercial crew missions and in private missions, like the inspiration
for mission or axiom, where SpaceX flew individuals, they trained for about six months, a lot
of like reading manuals and learning the spacecraft.
Yeah, you're going to do like a rocky for montage or
I hope I just get shredded.
I hope it's physical, a lot of physical training.
And they're like, we didn't tell them to do it.
He just seems to want to fill himself shirtless in the snow.
Doesn't make any, how is this relevant?
Why is he always doing this?
I can't get him to stop punching me.
So yeah, hopefully, realistically, I, that's a manual, but there's a physical component
to all of this.
And that's, that's really, I mean, that's fascinating.
It's also inspiring the sort of civilians can do this.
That's really interesting.
Yeah, I mean, this is, and to me, this represents this and the other commercial space, you know,
private space like missions like this represent really a turning point, like truly an inflection.
And again, it's easy for people to be cynical that, oh, you know, why are people wasting
all this money doing spaceflight stuff?
It's like, well, I'm sure some people were saying that same thing about, you know, airplanes
and early aviation going like, why are we can't believe those people are wasting the
governments, you know, funding these stupid planes and stuff.
How's this ever going to benefit me?
And nowadays, like imagine if all the planes just stopped working, like we'd freak out,
like our economy would collapse, it would suck, you know, and I, you know, it might
be a long time before we get to that reality with spaceflight.
Well, no, if, if spaceflight halted today, you know, space assets, all of our, you know,
on orbit assets, our life would be crippled.
And I don't think people realize that.
So it's already, we're already reliant on it, but now we're getting to the point where
it's, we're really turning that corner where it's the average person alive today, you know,
if you're born, you know, now, from now on, I think there's a real decent chance that
by the time you pass, there's an opportunity to have flown in space.
Yeah.
I mean, I, if I'm being honest, I still haven't lost the, the feeling of magic of flying an
airplane.
I often catch myself thinking like, how is this real?
How is, and like the contrast of this incredible thing that's incredibly safe flying through
the air, taking off and landing while everyone else just looks bored, watching like, I don't
know, some romantic comedy on their phone with wifi.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
It's just, it's like the contrast of that is like, wow, we're, we're incredible.
We're incredible as a society and it's like, we, we develop some amazing technology that
improves almost immeasurably our quality of life and then we take it for granted and now
still reach for the next thing and the next thing in life becomes more beautiful and complex
and interesting.
And yeah, it's just the same stuff will be happening with space travel.
Oh, it'll become mundane and boring at some point.
The tough thing about space travel, of course, you know, I don't even know if it's such
a giant leap over airplanes because airplanes are already incredible, but the tough thing
with space travel is the destination, right, is the, is the, is the landing on a whole
lot of the worlds where there's docking with, with different transport vehicles or the space
station or it's landing elsewhere.
I mean, it's, it's really, really incredible.
I think you mentioned, since there's a, there's artists, there's filmmakers and so on and
you're all of those on top of being a great athlete and I don't know, I'll just stop the
running joke at this point, but is there, have you thought about just, just in general,
like we've offline talked about microphones and like all the different ways to film space
launch for the rocket launches.
Have you thought about the different options of like how to capture, how to capture this?
Have you, have the team have been like brainstorming and thinking about this?
Do you anticipate it being super challenging?
Cause there's so many opportunities to sort of think of how to do this.
So one of the, the fun things to remember is that Starship is huge, like it's internal
volume is the pressurized volume on Starship is, is bigger than a 747 pressurized volume
and it can take a hundred metric tons to anywhere with enough refueling hundred.
So we have, in theory, very little mass and volume constraints, unlike prior, all other
spaceflight missions ever, you, you're counting, you know, grams down to, you know, and just
really can't risk, you know, you have very defined parameters on, on what you can and
cannot do.
We're going to likely have the luxury of being able to film and capture this in a way that's
just never been done before.
You know, we won't be inhibited by mass and volume constraints like prior.
So all that said and done, I'm hoping that we'll be able to just arm ourselves to the
teeth with the absolute best cameras and equipment possible backups on backups and, you know,
on pre wire, you know, like pre rig things, Starship is going to be a transportation system
and it has, you know, it's being built from the ground up.
There's no reason why they can't put infrastructure in for cameras that are just housed in the
vehicle.
You know, these are talks that I'm excited to have because I, I really ideally, one of
the things I'd love to do, I'm going to be pushing really hard to actually try live streaming
from inside during the launch during the launch last stream from the inside.
That would be incredible.
Wouldn't that be, it's possible to pull off.
That's really, really incredible.
There is the magic to the last stream because like that's real.
That's right there.
That would, the world would tune in and that would be truly inspiring.
Yes.
To me, that's one of those things a lot of people ask why they aren't doing it.
Of course, NASA and other individuals have their reasons of why not, you know, there's
obviously some technical hurdles, but now with Starlink and other capabilities, there's
less hurdles.
There's obviously some transparency reasons why, you know, and safety reasons why it might
not be a great idea to live stream a risky rocket launch, you know, the Challenger I
think put a pretty bad taste in our mouth as far as publicizing an event and having
every student in the United States tune in to, you know, tragedy.
But that's something I'm pushing for really hard just because I think it could be magical.
I think it could really connect with people in a way that hasn't been done before.
Speaking of Challenger, have you thought about the fact that you're riding a thing as we've
been talking about that's, that's a giant explosive powerful rocket?
Have you, have you thought about the risk of that, the danger of that?
Have you contemplated your own mortality?
How could I not?
You know, I've seen, with my, I've seen and felt four of these prototype vehicles blow
up, you know, with my own eyes.
I don't know if there's anyone else, you know, early days, some of the, you know, Mercury
and Gemini astronauts watched failures of rockets and then got on them.
I don't know of too many people that are dumb enough to do that though, the stain age.
It's obviously, I will have to see a lot of successful launches and have to have a lot
of confidence and in the engineering, the data that they have developed a safe system
because currently the current iteration of Starship has no abort system, has no escape
tower.
So, you know, Dragon capsule, which is currently flying people has a launch abort system.
It has super Draco engines that either by the push of a button or by the automatic triggering
of the flight computer can shoot the capsule off of the rocket in milliseconds and pull
it safely away, get it far enough away that it can pull the parachutes and safely splash
down Starship by all iterations I've ever seen does not have that the space shuttle
also did not have that.
So, it's not absurd to not have an abort system like it is there is, you know, certain engineering
principles that that prove that that could be a completely valid thing of the space shuttle
through 100, flew 133 times fully successfully, it did have two failures resulting in the
loss of 14 lives, 85 or sorry, 98.5% success rate, pretty, I mean, yeah, there's other
I've probably done things that are a lot riskier.
I have race motorcycles, drag race motorcycles and, you know, written like an absolute jerk
on the streets on a motorcycle, I'm sure I've had a higher than a 98.5% survival rate or
lower than that, I mean, at some point.
So it's a, you know, yes, it's, it's risky, it's scary.
And I think about it a lot, a lot, it definitely is one of those things that I, you know, I
will have to see and I'm, I'm in no hurry for this to happen either, you know, personally,
I'm in no hurry because it's like I would rather see this thing be developed and iterated
and see 10, you know, or I was gonna say 10 dozen, but I'd be happy with a dozen fully
successful like, oh, we've got this thing totally nailed down, you know, before I get
on it.
But, and that likely is the reality, there will likely be a dozen or two or three launches
because just even to get to the moon on Starship, they have to refuel it in orbit.
So it will get to Earth orbit, basically empty and out of fuel.
So I'll have to dock with a fuel depot, fill up and then go to the moon.
So just even get that full, you know, we're already talking about, you know, a handful
of launches.
So there will be a lot of launches before we fly.
Would they do a test flight without humans on board that goes to the moon or no?
I'm not sure.
I'm not sure if they'll do that exact flight profile, but by then they will have already
flown most likely the Artemis III program will have flown a Starship variant to the
moon that lands on the moon.
So doing at that point, you're pretty much, I would like them to test the heat shield
at that entry velocity, though, because it is, you know, it takes another, it's about
30% faster to get like it to go 30% faster than the low Earth orbit to get out to a trans
lunar injection.
And although that only sounds like, oh, it's 30% faster.
It's, you know, the reentry heating experienced by a vehicle goes up by velocity cubed, not
squared.
So not even not linear.
So it's not like if you go twice as fast to get, you see twice as much heat, you know,
30% faster, 30% more heat.
And it's not squared.
It's not go twice as fast to get four times as much heat.
Let's go twice as fast, get eight times as much heat on reentry.
So 30% faster on reentry is actually a really, really big deal.
So I would love to see that, because, you know, there's certain things that I would
love to see milestones that I would love to see tested out and proven before I get on
board.
But at the end of the day, I really do believe that just like Falcon 9 and the success of
that, that they're going to push it and get all the kinks out well before anyone's on
top of it.
And nowadays Falcon 9 and Dragon is, you know, arguably the, one of the safest, most reliable
and best rides you could take to space.
Are you afraid of dying?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Is this one of the first times you get to your young, have you gotten a chance to think
about death as one of the first times you've really contemplated it?
I mean, yeah, I mean, like I said, I've had, I've had dumb moments on motorcycles where
I kind of saw, you know, like, I'm going to smash into this thing at 120 mile an hour
an hour.
So you've had moments when you realized it could end just like this.
Yes.
And I've, I have, for most of my adult life had dreams of falling and hitting the ground
and it just all, you get a ring in your ears, it all goes black and in my head I go, oh,
shit, that was it.
Have you seen a therapist about this or?
Uh-uh.
Sure.
I wonder what it means.
I'm sure there's a Freudian interpretation somewhere in there that I'm going to also apply
to my dating life.
No.
The joke is, the running joke continues.
Okay, so, I mean, it's, it's, it's fascinating in general, as I hope we'll talk about in
the early days of spaceflight, that there is, there is a, the task of reaching out to
the stars is a fundamentally risky one.
You have to take risks.
And of course, there's really rigorous safety precautions and so on, but it's still, it's
still a risk.
Well, and I think like most people, the, the, for me, the idea of dying isn't so much about
myself, it's about those affected by, you know, my, my loved ones, my family, you know,
my girlfriend, my, my friends, you know, obviously I don't want to have this be a traumatic experience
for anybody, you know, it's already going to be hard.
Like it's already, I know, uh, my mom gets, my parents and family and friends are very
supportive.
Um, and you know, my parents are, you know, all about it, of course, but my mom is also
very emotional too.
So, you know, she's, so my speaking of athletes, my brother-in-law has actually been on a
American Ninja Warrior two seasons, um, phenomenal athlete.
And even just when he competes, my mom gets so emotional, like she can't even hold it
together seeing that.
So what's it going to be like when she sees her son get on top of a skyscraper and, and
ascend on a column of flames into the heavens?
Like that's going to be very difficult, you know.
And I've, you know, I've taken them out.
They've seen, they've seen Starbase and they've seen Starship.
They've seen a couple of launches.
I don't know if that's going to make him feel better exposure therapy, I guess exposure
therapy.
Okay.
Uh, have you had that conversation with them about this, like before agreeing, uh, to
join?
I mean, was, was that, was that, or is it one of those things like, uh, you just, you don't
have that conversation.
I didn't have that conversation that there's a love, there's a passion here.
And, and realistically, I'm not, uh, I'm going to be convinced and statistically convinced
that this is relatively safe, you know, like again, in the, in the 99s percent safe again,
there's things that people do every day that are less safe than this, you know, like you
ride in the motorcycle again, yeah, riding a motorcycle doing wheelies at a over a hundred
mile an hour, not you did wheelies over a hundred.
What, what, all right, I'm not a smart guy always.
Okay.
Well, you know, formation flying in the fighter jets was likely a more dangerous thing.
Yes.
Than what I'll be doing in spaceflight.
So as surreal as it is, we're talking about you, um, flying around the moon.
Let's rewind and talk about the origin story.
What's the origin story of everyday astronaut?
I used to be a professional photographer.
So from 2008 until the end of 2016, that was my income was photography, full time.
Like you were an Instagram model and took pictures of yourself.
Instagram fitness model, obviously, um, now the, uh, I did, I did a lot of weddings.
I shot 150 weddings, um, all around the world.
So subjects, all kinds of material, like, uh, like, uh, did you portrait also?
A lot of portrait work and then just, you know, random, like commercial things, like,
you know, food and beverages for businesses or like, you know, uh, wheelchair ramp company
I shot there, product, you know, random, whatever a professional photographer does in Cedar
Falls, Iowa, you know, when did you, uh, Von Lowe photography with a visual medium?
Do you remember?
Yeah.
I do actually remember.
I, so I, I drew up, uh, I grew up drawing constantly.
I, I was the weird kid that might, I would bring a sketch pad to the restaurants, like
every restaurant when I was growing up until I was like 18, 19, I literally would just
sit there and draw or waiting for food.
And my parents just like fostered that they would, you know, and I, I'd be the weird kid,
but I'd be engaging and talking, but I'd be sitting there drawing and I was always obsessed
with realism and like recreating and, you know, visualizing things.
And so when I got my hands on the cameras, actually my dad's old Pentax that I first
shot a, uh, on a film camera and developing the film.
I didn't personally develop, but like, you know, getting the film back, back in those
days, um, you know, I just was like so excited about the idea that I had this visual thing
that I saw with my own eyes and now I can stop time and capture it and, and show it
to other people.
Just kind of like, to me, that was like the ultimate form of, of realism was like literally
showing you the photons basically that affected this film.
And so I, I mean, I was, I was 19 when I got my first digital SLR at Canon 20D and started
shooting.
Um, and yeah, I just, I fell in love with it.
It became like, I got a job at a camera store and, you know, basically all my extra money
went into buying everything that I could at the time.
And I only worked there for about exactly a year before I went into pursuing photography
full time.
And I basically was shooting weddings so that I could travel and pay like, you know, afford
to be able to do some big trips every year and, and develop some kind of, you know, portfolio
of traveling and not necessarily like, not for, you know, I guess Instagram wasn't much
of a thing at the time.
It's really just, I liked making big prints and having them displayed and that kind of
stuff.
And pretty.
Are you still a Canon guy?
You still a Canon elitist?
No, no, I, I, I moved around.
I did Sony for a bit.
I still kind of shoot mostly Canon glass, but adapted to either Sony, like lenses, sorry,
like Canon lenses.
Look at you.
What do you think about the, these things that I'm using Sony a seven four?
Great.
It's great.
So yeah, it's, I've, I've been, you know, I Googled around just trying to find a camera
that can do video and photography pretty well.
And obviously going with just like generic lens, prime lens, I resisted everything.
My whole journey with these camera thing, I'm trying to figure stuff out is like prime
lens.
It seems so stupid.
So for prime lens, it's like a fixed zoom thing.
It's like, why?
Cause I remember I was going to like Ukraine and thinking it's similar, like, uh, um, yeah,
very similar to spaceflight, but you're very constrained because you're going into an unknown
environment.
You go into a war zone, you go into a front, you don't know what, like you don't know anything.
And there's like a little suitcase.
You have to like see, figure out like, how do you film this?
What's, what's robust, um, what gives you like a good image versus a flexibility versus
the weight.
Cause weight is important there.
You have to think about like, can you really bring like a bunch of zoom lenses and all
that kind of stuff.
So I had to learn really quickly, but yeah, I've, um, it's a whole journey that you've
already been on, but it's, it's nice to have a beginner like me, like to explore that.
I think there is, um, uh, there's a nice thing, just like, as we've been talking about with
the beginner's mind to, um, not let equipment get in the way of like what your vision is
of what a thing should look like.
Yeah.
Sometimes like, especially if you're a professional videographer, photographer, a cinema, cinematographer,
whatever you call it, you can like fetishize equipment too much.
You can get so much equipment and I've interacted with it cause I've been trying to learn from
other people that have so much more experience than me.
I think their advice is often like, um, very pushing a lot of equipment versus like the
final thing, like how do you create the art of it?
Like, cause to me, even photography is just like storytelling.
And so like a lot of the discussion to me that I enjoy, uh, especially talking to creative
people is like the, the, the final story, like how, and I've learned, you know, like
light, light, light is a weird thing.
Like it's so interesting.
It's so interesting how you can create emotion with light, like with a little, you could
take a, like a phone and like you light your face in different ways and like it changes
the emotion.
Oh yeah.
It's so weird.
I'm like, holy shit, cause like that's the conversation I want to have because people
give me advice how to light a scene and all that kind of stuff is great.
But the reality is that a little bit of light in a different direction, you have to understand
how that changes the contour on your face and everything.
And the expression that your face can, like the, the expression that could be effectively
communicate under, under different lighting conditions.
And then like the mystery of like having some of your face, uh, in darkness and some not,
uh, when you can only see the eyes and not the face when the background is visible or
not.
I mean, there's the, the, the, yeah, it's, it's all just like this interesting art form
that's can be so powerful when you're telling a story.
Well, and what's fun for, with me with photography and rockets, they're both like the ultimate
story of compromise.
Cause when you start learning about photography, you learn about, you know, how the aperture
affects both your exposure, but also your depth of field, higher shutter speed affects
both your exposure, your depth of field, how the, you know, a medium format camera versus
a crop camera affects, you know, everything is a compromise in price versus performance.
You're like, there's always a compromise.
You're always literally doing like a trade study of what can I afford?
What's my outcome?
Like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
How fast is he?
How to focus or whatever.
Same with rockets, like there's a million choices and every single one of them affects
every single thing.
So there's always all these trades and it's so cool that you can see the same, totally
different outcomes based on the same like requirements, you know, like do X, then here's
how we're going to do it.
And, you know, two teams of people will come up with wildly different things.
When did you fall in love with rockets?
So yeah.
So the, the story kind of keeps going for me, so I was doing.
Can't talk for tired of me, man, we'll get, we'll go on a deep rabble hole there.
So, so it ended, you know, I'm through all this doing a lot of weddings.
I was already getting saturated and feeling like I'm not being as creative, you know,
you can only shoot them so many weddings before you're like, well, now we do this pose, this
pose, this pose, you know, even if like they're amazing places, like, you know, in front
of a castle in Germany or something, I'm still like, well, I need to the day I'm not being
very creative, you know.
So I remember craving like some, some projects.
And so I was sitting at my friend's coffee shop in my hometown in Cedar Falls, a side
car coffee.
And I'm sitting on this red couch and I see this article from I think Gizmodo and I said,
you could own the flight stick of an Apollo command module.
And I knew enough to know what that meant, but that's really about the end of my space
knowledge.
And so I clicked on it.
The click bait got me.
Like I'm like, oh yeah.
And I was like, see if, you know, and I see that the minimum bid was like $250,000.
And I'm like, okay, no, I can't own the Apollo joystick, you know, but I got me on this website
called our auction.
And so I started scrolling through that looking for things that hadn't been bid on.
And they had that, you know, at the time, they're doing a huge space auction.
And so I'm looking for things just out of curiosity, fun.
These are cool.
Like starting to really, you know, like I said, I like space, but I wasn't like in
love with it or anything.
But I'm very just seeing all this stuff.
I'm like, it's so cool, look at all this old history stuff.
I ended up seeing a, there's an article for a VMSTK 44 flight suit, high altitude flight
suit that came from the Soviet Union and looks, you know, it's like a MiG fighter jet, fighter
pilot suit, very similar to like the SR 71, like kind of pumpkin suit, semi pressure suit
with a, you know, full helmet, I mean, it looks like a space suit, you know, for all
intents and purposes, it's kind of like a space suit.
And I just bid on it, you know, I've been like, I think $325.
And next thing you know, like it arrives at my door.
And from that point on, like literally I got it out, I immediately try to put it on.
And the first thing that I do is almost die in it because I closed the helmet down on myself
and locked it and didn't know how to unlock it.
Oh, I'm literally, and so as soon as I seal it up, I'm realizing I can't breathe, I'm
going to run out of air.
So luckily, like there's a hose, you know, that kind of that long hose thing that would
normally plug into an air supply, had a little plug on the end of it, so I just unplugged
it and was able to temporarily breathe through the hose until I figured out the locking mechanism.
So there was my almost, that was my mortality rate thing right there.
So that was probably above 98 or below 90.
So you're there panicking inside for a few seconds.
Probably reading like my premature obituary, like idiot dies alone in space suit in his
living room.
You know, like just imagine that would be like Darwin Award for sure, for sure.
So I get the space suit and it kind of literally take my breath away.
You should feel bad for that one.
You introduced Creed to me, so you should feel bad about that one.
So I ended up like the space suit kind of like more or less haunted me because it kind
of just, it sat in like my living room for a long time and I didn't know what to do with
it.
And actually had a friend who is also a photographer wanted to do like a photo, he was just kind
of taking pictures randomly.
He's like, Hey, bring your space suit over.
We'll do a picture.
He's like, All right.
You know, I walk across the street, literally lived across the street, Taylor.
And I put the space suit on, I took this funny picture and be like, This is awesome.
And I got a lot of like fun out of like creating a character, you know, of everyday astronaut
or at the time, I guess I didn't know an astronaut.
And then that kind of just continued.
I was like thinking of more and more funny situations where I could have this astronaut
on earth doing mundane everyday things and came up with the name Everyday Astronaut.
And originally it was just literally a photo project like this whole art series of an astronaut
doing these things, these funny whimsical, you know, silly mundane things.
But I was researching a lot about like, you know, I was trying to hide Easter eggs, like
I was going to hide in like the, you know, the echocardiogram of Alan Shepard, you know,
like his first flight into space and photoshopping that into pictures and like, you know, doing
all these little like facts about spaceflight, but they're just hidden little elements in
these photos.
And man, doing that, I just fell in love with it.
I just was going over every little detail that I could learning is I just couldn't stop
learning.
And I was, I was getting excited because I was like, I could be teaching people about
all this exciting stuff and all the cool things.
People figured out, you know, 40 years ago, 50 years ago, and was trying to portray that
through images on Instagram.
And, you know, it, it took me a little while, but eventually I realized, you know, on Instagram,
your retention rate, you're lucky if you get like two seconds of someone looking at an
image, you know, or maybe nowadays 60 seconds of a quick little Instagram short or something.
But yeah, it doesn't give you a chance to really teach to explore a little topic that
you felt like you felt the curiosity about the thing.
There's so much to learn here.
This is so beautiful.
There's so many opportunities to have a light bulb go off for someone and be like, this
is awesome.
And so, uh, yeah, I think I started so at the, by the end of 2016, like throughout 2016,
I realized I want to be done doing photography as a profession and I want to pursue everyday
astronaut.
But I didn't know what it meant yet.
I just knew like I had this thing, you know, and at that time I'd been doing it for roughly
two years and had, you know, seen, I don't know, like 50,000 Instagram followers or
something.
And I thought like I could just be a full-time influencer now, you know, like just go around
taking pictures of myself in a space suit and doing public appearances and write a children's
book or something.
I don't know.
I don't know what this thing is.
I'll figure it out.
You know.
And so, um, it basically, I gave myself like a runway of one year of 2017 of like, I'm
going to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks.
Um, so I was doing like Twitch streams.
I was playing Kerbal Space Program, uh, which is like a video game, like a physics based
rocket building simulation game, but it's also like it's fun and silly because you're
not playing with like humans.
You're playing with these little Kerbal, like little alien guys and it's fun and silly.
Um, you know, streaming that on Twitch and doing things and doing, posting some of those
things onto YouTube.
But finally, like I said, it actually happened to be February 27th, 2017 when SpaceX had
that announcement that they're flying somewhere on the moon, that I'm, I gotta tell people
about this and stood there and made my first like produced YouTube video.
And I didn't want it to be over three minutes.
I was afraid that'd be way too long for YouTube.
And I got it down to like, I don't know, two minutes and 40 seconds or something.
And that video, uh, wearing the, I was wearing the, the space suit.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And very like horrible audio.
It looks like it was color graded by a seven year old with a tan marker or something like
it just looks terrible.
Sounds horrible.
I'm yelling.
No one's happy.
But, but the video, you know, did relatively well.
Like I had no followers on YouTube.
Like I hadn't, you know, maybe 102 or something.
Is the video still up?
Yeah.
That's great.
That's a watch.
It's so cringy.
And as it should be, you know, your first video should be terrible if it's not terrible
and you spent too long trying to make it.
So, um, the thing that clicked for me is I had very little audience and all of a sudden
that video kind of took off, you know, relatively, I think it got like 10,000 or 12,000 views
and I was like, holy crap.
That's way more engagement than I'm having.
Famous.
I'm famous.
Now 10,000 people, that's almost my whole town.
First of all, that is kind of crazy.
Like 10,000 people is crazy.
Yeah.
It's crazy.
Like if you, if you had 500 people attend a thing that you do, that would be like you're
like a rock star.
It's crazy.
Exactly.
We lose perspective.
Yeah.
We lose perspective very quickly.
Very quickly.
So I made another video.
Um, this one I spent more time on.
And I, I had, before photography, actually I used to do like wedding videography too.
So I had done my woes with videography and weddings and stuff.
I hated video.
Like I thought video was the worst, took so long to edit.
You know, I love photography because it's like, boom, you snap it, boom, post, you're
done in an hour, you know, and video, it's like this whole cumbersome thing.
So I thought I'll never do video.
And here I was making this long, what it's the time seemed like a long seven minute long
YouTube video about how the Falcon 9 lands.
And again, like that one I posted and actually it did really bad and I was really upset.
I'm like, I spent two weeks on this stupid video, you know, worked really hard scripting
and blah, blah, blah.
And then it, you know, I had like a thousand views or something.
It did much worse than the first video.
And I was so upset and I kind of like was ready to keep throwing more spaghetti at the wall
to see what's going to stick for everyday astronaut.
And I think it was like a month or two later, I happened to like, you know, check the analytics
on YouTube and also that video, like kind of took off and I got like 40 or 50 or 60,000
views or something.
I was like, no way.
And it just kept, you know, that just honed it in more like, okay, YouTube will bring
a bigger, like bring an audience to me as opposed to like Instagram, I had to find and, you
know, try to get the audience to come to me.
And this was like, they were going to do the legwork.
So if I make decent videos, and I realized like really the fun thing for me was explaining
a topic that was scary and intimidating and try to make it, you know, fun and engaging.
What were some of the struggles of building up a YouTube channel?
But for people who don't know, once again, you have a YouTube channel called Everyday
Astronaut and there's some incredible videos on it.
So what was the, what was the some of the challenges and the struggles in the early days?
Definitely like at first you're not going to find your own voice.
And I know like even, you know, Jimmy talked to you about that, like how your first videos
are going to suck.
You don't, you're not going to be yourself.
You're going to be nervous.
You're going to be not going to know the tone, the pace, the things that are interesting.
And actually originally I had constraints.
It was really worried about making a short video because I thought there's no way anyone's
going to watch a three minute video and then a seven minute video.
And pretty quickly I realized like YouTube as a whole was kind of changing, but also
there's always that historic backbone of like 22 minutes of programming for a 30 minute
spot on TV, like no one goes over 22 or 44 minutes, you know, if you have the full hour
special or whatever.
Like that is the absolute limit of what a human being can watch, you know, basically
is what I thought.
And slowly I just kept playing and getting longer and actually more and more in depth
into the topics.
And instead of getting like pushback, you know, and being like, this is so boring.
I realized as long as it's like, as I was walking people through the whole step, you
know, giving them all the context they need, they're happy to get as deep into the weeds
as I can get them.
And so that just kind of fed the snowball that's kept rolling.
And I'm like, all right.
And you know, before you know what I'm making hour long videos, like an hour long is more
or less a normal length on my channel for a produced video.
And they're really, really in depth, but I love like that process of trying to preemptively
kind of guess what the questions might be.
And you know, part of that is like, we do like script read throughs with like our supporters
and do like cuts of videos and people, a decent amount of people see it before it goes public.
And we get those questions out of the way, you know, we get those people asking the questions
and then I love nothing more than trying to, you know, get all those questions answered
by the end of the video.
A question about being a creator on YouTube, there could be a challenging psychological
aspect to it, which is like, you might invest a huge amount of your effort into a thing
and it doesn't receive much attention at all.
And, you know, there's something about YouTube and in general social media that makes you
feel really crappy about that.
If you let it, if you really look at the numbers, it's very, very difficult not to pay attention
to that.
I mean, that's the reason why I turn off numbers on my interface for stuff that I've created
because I just see it having a negative effect on your mind.
But even then you still, it still has an effect.
That mean your epic video on the history of Soviet rockets comes to mind and we'll talk
about that in a second, but it's called, people should check it out, the entire Soviet rocket
engine family tree.
So that's something you've researched for two years.
Yeah.
Right.
You put your heart and soul into it.
There's a lot of passion.
There's a long journey and I think about like an hour and a half video.
Is there like, is there challenges?
Is there like, how difficult is that to put so much of yourself into a video and it maybe
not do so well?
Yeah.
That's the struggle for sure, honestly, especially as we grow, I try to make better and better
videos, which means hiring more and more people to do higher end animations and spend more
time editing and shooting and scripting and just, but at the end of the day, like it still
can't be just losing money.
And I have videos that definitely lose a lot of money because I hire 3D artists and stuff
and I was so certain, the Soviet rocket engine video, I thought was just purely going to be
a passion project.
I honestly was like, if it ever crosses a million, it's a home run because it's such-
And does it cross like a couple million now?
I think it's a little over two, which is insane to me.
Like I just really thought this was more something just to put on the shelf as a resource almost
for myself, you know, like just to kind of have that knowledge bank and something I've
always wanted to straighten out in my own head and kind of know the history a little
bit better, but come to find out, like it took a while, you know, as a slow turn.
Well, I remember when you first released it and that's when I watched it, I remember
like this has so few views.
Yeah.
I remember being just sad, like I was like sad about the state of the world because I
know how much love you put into it, how like, how much, I don't know, to me for some reason
that somehow would directly connect to huge views.
But see, you know what made me sad is like, if you use a different thumbnail or a different
title that could affect the popularity, and then I just could imagine the torment you're
going through.
What if I use the different thumbnail?
It's that Jimmy, the MrBeast torment, like just a slightly different title or a slightly
different, could change everything.
I have videos, ironically, the last, I don't know, five videos I've produced are horribly
flopping, like some of my worst videos I've ever made statistically.
The interesting one is like, you summarize incredible video, you summarizing that people
should go watch about all the awards video for 2022, like all the cool stuff that happened
in 2022.
I remember that not being that popular.
There's a few ones recently that are not that popular, like writing, it's a fighter jet.
I thought that was going to be easy, like one or two million.
I don't know if I've paid the flights off to go there, you know what I mean?
In that video.
It makes no sense.
And frankly, here's at the end of the day.
I realized I have, lately, especially the last like a year or two, kind of disconnected
from that aspect of it, I'm super fortunate I have very generous like Patreon support
and people that can help me sustain to produce.
People go support Tim on Patreon.
Well, it's that, but as you know, as a creator, like that is what keeps the lights on it and
makes it so it, you know, I can go this deep.
Like if I didn't have that, if I had to rely solely on like YouTube ad revenue, I mean,
I would just, they'd be super different videos.
I wouldn't spend as much time researching because I just, you know, they just be more
glossed over.
It's like a hurry to turn them out so I can keep the machine going.
And I have this incredible freedom to really dive into a topic like a video that I've been
working on now for almost three months is how to start a rocket engine.
And let me tell you, it's not as easy as one might think, or I guess as it is as difficult
as you might think.
I mean, it's, it's an insane topic.
And what do you mean by starting, I mean, like the ignition?
Yeah, like how do you physically get them running?
You know, like there's all these, you know, the valves and the turbine, the turbine, you
know, that we were talking about earlier, like that has to run on the pumps, but it
itself is powering the pumps.
So how do you get that like chicken and egg?
How do you get that thing started?
You know, there's tons of, it's so cool.
There's so many ways.
And so for me, you know, that required reading a lot and talking to people that know a lot
more than me.
And just really trying to make sure I understand enough of it to explain it and try to weave
a narrative, you know.
And so that video is three months in the making, we're still probably another two or three
weeks out.
And it's, I don't expect, I mean, I think this one will do relatively well, you know,
but in the grand scheme of YouTube, like still child's play, you know.
But I'm okay.
And I'm okay with that.
I'm at that point, actually, where I am okay with that.
It still stings.
And I'm more worried about just like, can I continue to do it at this quality and at
this level if it's losing money?
You know what I mean?
So it's, there is a trade-off and I am kind of having to navigate that, but you have sort
of the depth of the impact you have is a thing that YouTube can't give you numbers on, but
it's a really important thing to sort of remember that it's really not just about the YouTube
numbers or it's, for people like you, they're basically educating and revealing the brilliance
in a technology that will make humans a multi-planetary species and give hope to millions of young
minds that will build that future.
I mean, that's immeasurable.
That's not just the views, but you know, that's really important to sort of remember as you're
creating it.
That's something I try to think about as well.
So like views.
Yeah.
And that, and that becomes more, don't matter.
I realize that more and more like every day, you know, the more the channel matures, the
more I realized the importance of it as an overall mission, as opposed to like, you know,
on the first year or two, it's a rat race of growth and popularity and all that kind
of stuff, you know, and you feel that, you feel that it's a driving force these days,
not so much just because that will wear you out very quickly.
So back to the Soviet rocket video, the epic video, probably the most epically researched
video you've done.
I mean, it's like, it's truly an epic video.
So what, again, called the entire Soviet rocket engine family tree took you two years
through research.
What are some fascinating things you've learned about the history of rocket engines in the
Soviet Union and in general, through a process of making that video?
The coolest thing to me is how it's this weird blend for the Soviet Union went through an
insane iteration process and made so many engines.
Like I didn't even touch, you know, any like maneuvering thrusters or missile engines.
Like I only really dealt with main propulsion engines on orbital rockets and there's still
way too many to talk about.
I mean, it's still dozens and dozens of engines.
And I could have gone deeper into this, which is hilarious.
They iterated so much, made a new engine for just at the drop of a hat, yet they still
also like did super primitive things, you know, they physically are still today lighting
the main combustion chambers of the Soyuz engines of the RD-107 and RD-108 with essentially
matchsticks.
Like they literally stick a T shaped thing up into the chamber and have a pyrotechnic
in it that ignites the actual propellants in the combustion chamber.
It's not the most elegant solution in the world.
They're still using that.
So they went from like the whole spectrum of like it's a mixture of like make it better,
faster, harder, stronger, gooder all the way around to also if it ain't broke, don't fix
it.
It's like it employs all of the above.
So it's like it's a lot of innovation, but also they use duct tape, so it's like all
of it together.
Yes.
That's exactly like, that's exactly the way to put it.
And they did things that are insane.
They developed a full flow stage combustion cycle engine.
This engine had it been used, I mean, it would have put the F, it was the same relative size
as the F1 engine on the Saturn V, like in that same category way up there of like, you
know, 6.7 like mega newtons of thrust or something around and then the F1 is like seven or something.
It's huge, yet way more complicated, way more efficient, way just better engine in that sense.
As far as performance goes, yet it never flew.
It never left the stand, you know, they never built the rocket around it.
The N1, which was the most powerful rocket to have flown so far to date, like it never
made it through its first stage burn.
All four attempts failed spectacularly.
And yet it had so much technology on it that was still unrivaled today almost, like finally
now we're beating it, the NK33s that they developed for that rocket.
Like finally today, we're to the point of like having better engines than they built
in the 60s.
Yeah, what stands out to you from the N1 family of rocket engines?
Well, it's interesting because the N1 was the Kutsnetsov design bureau and he was actually
an aircraft manufacturer.
So he was one of the first people outside of kind of the missile and rocket program,
you know, he had all these other big wigs kind of in the other OKBs that were developing
missiles and rockets.
And then all of a sudden here comes Nikolai Kutsnetsov who had never developed a rocket
engine.
The first attempt at a rocket engines was the NK series, the NK15, NK33.
And they were amazing.
They were brilliant.
There were these wonderful closed cycle oxygen rich engines that were awesome.
They were awesome engines and that were, you know, because I love that because he has
direct boss, since he wasn't necessarily in the aerospace, you know, in the, I guess,
the rocket missile defense world, he didn't have to, at the fall of the Soviet Union,
he didn't have to give away all of his things to the same people as the other people.
So he hid, you know, like 80 of his engines in a hangar.
And then we still literally use them in the United States.
We used all together.
I think it was like eight or 10 of them repurposed them as they're called AJ26s in the United
States.
But like we still were flying Soviet rocket engines in the 2000s because they were better
than engines we are building today.
Like that's, to me, that's my favorite fact about the N1 rocket engines that they're still
that good that there were the best choice for at the time, orbital science.
Some of the culture that engineering has led to these things that still work is incredible.
You said that the RD-171 is one of the coolest engines ever made.
Why is that?
Yeah.
Oh, so one of the fun things about the Soviet engines is it'll look like a lot of their
engines look like multiple engines because you see multiple nozzles, you see multiple
combustion chambers and you'd think, well, obviously, you know, the nozzle is the engine,
right?
But what they actually would do, the real heart and the real power of the rocket engine
actually comes from the turbo pumps, comes from the pumps themselves.
And you know, as we talked about earlier, that includes the turbine and the actual pumps
that flow the propellant into the chambers.
And so the Soviet Union was incredible at developing these closed cycle high-powered
turbo pumps.
But if you try to scale the combustion chamber too big, you end up with what's called combustion
instability.
You're having, you have such a large surface area of crazy flames, you know, and combustion
happening.
They can get these weird pockets and oscillations and frequencies and they just couldn't make
big combustion chambers.
They never figured it out.
They never quite, well, they did actually kind of figure it out, but they didn't like
it.
So they ended up just shrinking down and having small combustion chambers and just splitting
the pipes, basically.
Instead of one fuel pump going into, or one pipe going into one combustion chamber and
one oxidizer pipe going into one combustion chamber, they'd split it off into two or
four combustion chambers and kind of spread that work around so that they didn't experience
this combustion instability.
So the RD171 is like still to date the most powerful rocket engine ever built.
The turbo pump is insane.
I don't even remember how many, you know, like 200,000 horsepower or something comes
out of that turbo pump in order to flow the amount of propellant necessary at those rates
and at those pressures into the combustion chamber.
So it has four chambers and it's just, it's just an absolute marvel of engineering.
And yeah, and then the cool thing too is specifically with the RD171, its engine, all four of those
nozzles can actually pivot and rotate.
I just, now as I'm explaining this realized, that has to mean that they have joints, like
flexible joints in the high pressure pump lines in order to, like I never, this is the
realization I'm having right now, because normally you put the gimbal above the turbo
pump, like the mount where the engine swivels, so that you have low pressure coming from
the tanks into the pumps and then you just have a straight, you know, fixed pipe flowing
into the engine.
So you don't have to bend that pipe and have it be dynamic.
If they had the four chambers moving independently from each other, that means those four chambers
all had to have a flexible high pressure pipe going, which I don't even, I don't know if
that's, why am I just now realizing this?
Yeah.
So there's engineering challenges with that.
Insane.
I never even thought that was a thing you would ever could do, honestly.
I would, I got to look into why and how and what.
Yeah, I wonder why that design decision was made.
So the easier thing to do normally is you would keep those nozzles fixed and then a
fixed, like say the Soyuz engine, the RD107 and 108, they have a fixed main combustion
chambers and they use these little vernier or some people got mad at me for saying vernier
and verner engines that swivel themselves and those provide your control authority.
So the main chambers stay fixed and then you get your roll and your pitch and your yaw
out of auxiliary thrusters.
By the way, did you get anything wrong in that video that people told you about?
Yeah, I had a few things.
Yep.
First off, we had a graphic error where we actually were, you know, we copied and pasted
a lot of our like After Effects projects, so our nuclear engines, one of them on screen
says that it runs on RP1, it does not, it has basically all the wrong stats.
We just didn't catch it in the edit, you know, that we literally copy and pasted and I say
it right on screen, but the, like in the voiceover, but on screen it's wrong.
The other thing, and I'm excited to ask you about this.
I watched and I spoke with a lot of Russian speaking individuals, we had a lot of research
assistants that were reading and blah, blah, blah.
I tried really hard to learn how to pronounce Sergei Korolev's name and I'm still gonna
say it wrong no matter what, but my understanding and from listening to native speakers is closer
to Korolev than it is Korolev.
Yeah, definitely.
Sergei Pavlovich Korolev.
See, I will never say it that perfectly, but I know it's not just Korolev.
I mean, again, the English translation of it likely, I should have just said Korolev
and said, I'm saying it, the dumb America way, but.
But you rolled your R, Comrade.
Excellent.
So, let me just ask you in a difference in culture because you've reached so many rockets
from so many different eras, the Saturn V and just everything you're seeing now.
Are there some interesting differences, especially when you look at the space race between the
Soviet rocket engineers and efforts versus the American?
The others, I mean, there's definitely huge, huge cultural changes and the fun thing is
that they kind of spawned from the same, they have the same starting place.
Both Soviet rocket engines and Americans all came from the Nazi V2 rocket and the A4 engine.
Literally physically spawned from that because at the end of World War II, we took a handful
of German scientists and the Soviets took a handful of German scientists and they both
got their own a little bit, some blueprints here and there and the others got some blueprints.
So we literally have the same, it's a weird thing where we're starting from the same thing
and letting two divergent paths go crazy on their own development.
So it's really fun to see the cultural differences.
One of the things the United States did is they really would kind of take an engine and
just perfect it more or less and then not really evolve that much.
I don't know why, I actually need to do a history lesson on all of the US engines but
it's literally as far as orbital class engines before now, it's like a dozen or two, it's
a tenth the amount of the Soviets and the Soviets just literally made up a new engine
every time they had a new, they wouldn't, and it was like a completely different engine.
I wonder if there's some aspect to the culture, I don't want to overstate it but there is
more of a safety culture I think in the United States and I think if you care about safety
or rather like you have, you're more risk averse, so you care about safety more about the value
of human life and the risk taken there that you will iterate less.
So I think the Soviets, especially in the early aspect of the program, I don't want
to overstate this, some of it is just through stories, you just, hey your anecdotes, there
are more willing to take risks, risks with human life, risks with spacecraft.
For example, the first orbital space flights from the Soviet Union, the cosmonaut had to
eject out of the capsule and parachute to a landing.
That's not very well known and it wasn't, they hid that even from history as best they
could at first because they were slightly ashamed that they couldn't have a full recovery
system with their spacecraft, they could physically recover it but they wouldn't have been able
to recover the cosmonaut in one piece.
So instead they had them just eject out of the thing and parachute to safety.
That's insane and so there definitely was some extra risks and but also a freedom to
just like push things to the limits and try everything, they threw all the spaghetti on
the wall.
It's funny that most people probably don't even know the first person in the space in
America and obviously everybody knows that, it's kind of interesting how the space race
and even World War II, even like the history books, you ask most Americans, they think
that America won World War II, like without America, the real heroes of World War II is
America.
British people, they say and everybody has a pretty good justification, like without
Britain, without Churchill, Hitler would have taken over the world and I think probably
the strongest case is the Soviet Union case, that they're the ones that won the war.
The reason it's the strongest case is where most of the fighting happened, most of the
death happened, most of the destruction but everyone has their perspective and certainly
in the space race, the great accomplishment is the first man on the moon from the U.S.
perspective.
Yeah, I was going to say.
And then Yuri Gagarin from the Russian perspective, first man in space and that I think still
persists and some of that in healthy forms is probably constructive to a little bit of
competition is pushes all the great scientists on each side but anyway, what do you think
about this Yuri Gagarin mission of the first human in space and the Vostok mission in 1961?
Just in general, when you look back at that time, leading to the first man on the moon.
Yeah, April 12th, 1961, Yuri's night, baby, what's insane to me is the first person in
space didn't just go to space, he went into orbit, Yuri Gagarin flew around the earth
in orbit and re-entered.
That's a monumental task compared to suborbital.
So the United States did two suborbital flights in that same year, I believe in that same
year at least, I'm pretty sure in 1961.
They flew for the first time orbitally in 1962.
They weren't terribly far behind to get a human into orbit, like in the grand scheme
of things, 10 months difference but at the same time, the fact that Soviet Union just
went straight to flying someone into orbit is monumental.
And I'm sure they did not do excessive rigorous testing here because there is a space race
and you have the first is important.
Just imagine being Yuri, what do you say when they're launching him like let's go or something?
You're taking, we're talking about you being a starship, you're taking a pretty big risk
being launched out into orbit.
Hopefully a lot less risk than what Yuri went through.
So Yuri, the crazy thing, remember those matchsticks we talked about, there's 20 main combustion
chambers on Soyuz and there's four and hit 12 more Vernier engines that all need to
be lit.
So you're sitting on top of this booster and they light all of those 32 combustion chambers
on the ground and then it has this insane separation process between what the Soviet
Union would call the first stage and the second stages, but we would call it the core stage
and the boosters.
They all, four of these boosters have to peel away perfectly from the core stage simultaneously.
If one of them sticks on, mission failed.
If one of them doesn't eject properly and drags into the other tank, it's a goner.
So the staging process of the Soyuz is insane to me that that ended up working out as just
the technology in Soyuz and more or less that same rocket is what's still flying humans
that are cosmonauts from Roscosmos and going to the International Space Station are flying
on a variant of that Soyuz rocket still today.
It's still like that big of a workhorse.
What do you think about Roscosmos as it stands today?
Its history and its future in comparison to NASA and other national efforts and in comparison
to commercial space life.
I mean, utmost respect for the engineers involved and everything that's happened.
I think a Nurgle Mosh is like still some of the, one of the greatest engine manufacturers
when they have the funding to do so, but man, it seems like they're falling from grace as
far as space prowess, you know, that Roscosmos went from having, I think they got very comfortable
at the top of, you know, from 2011 until 2022 or until 2020, they were the only ride of
the International Space Station since then, like in sort of, I feel like in 2018, honestly,
I think that's kind of when things, that's the first time I specifically remember a pretty
nasty like thing happened in 2018.
I think it was a Soyuz mission to the International Space Station had one of the boosters not
the Tatch and had to have an abort, but, you know, that happened, then all of a sudden
next thing you know, there's a progress being docked to the ISS a couple of years ago that
spun the ISS, cartwheeled the ISS out of control, followed a few months later, the Pierce module
docked to the International Space Station, spirals the International Space Station out
of control again with like a thruster getting fixed on, there's a hole in a Russian segment.
There's, well, I think the most recent one right now, there's a Soyuz docked to the
ISS that has a puncture in it and it's leaking coolant and will not be returning humans on
it.
So they're actually having to fly up and uncrewed Soyuz.
And that one likely wasn't a manufacturing error.
It probably was like a micrometeorite puncture rendering spacecraft unusable.
We don't know for sure yet, but it's just really been like this fall from grace where
they have all the potential, they have some of the best engines, some of the best rockets
and especially like right before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Bron shuttle and
the Energia rocket were incredible.
Had they been able to evolve that into Bron too and the reusable Energia, they had a fully
reusable Energia on the drawing board and like I honestly fully think they could have
done it.
There's a possible to return to a place where there is friendly competition between nations
that ultimately unites and inspires the peoples of these different worlds, these very different
worlds that have especially recently come to conflict over the war in Ukraine.
The tension builds, the war, the conflict, the suffering is actually creating more and
more division, creating more and more hate.
I think as we've talked about I think science and engineering and especially the most epic
version of engineering which is rocketry and space travel unites people, unites people
even in a time of tension, conflict and war.
Do you have a hope that we can return to that place?
I think historically spaceflight has been one of the most bonding things.
We look at, we have countless examples of cold war enemies coming together and working
together lending a hand, Apollo 13 for example of course, there is the potential that who
knew where it was going to reenter since it was not in the plane trajectory at all for
reentry and the Soviet Union said, hey, wherever they land, we'll help you guys out basically.
That was a pretty big thing at the time obviously.
We also in 1975 saw the Apollo Soyuz mission which was an Apollo spacecraft docking with
the Soyuz spacecraft, first time there's international collaboration.
Again, 1975 still very amidst the cold war yet we have this collaboration that I don't
know what else could have done that and think about what it actually takes to do that.
You have to come up with a docking module that takes the two different air environments
and the two different docking systems and talk to the engineers and mission planners
and figure out, train together, the cosmonauts and the astronauts train together and got
to know each other, they were crossing boundaries and borders and coming together for this mission
and even if it was totally a fluff piece, even if it was totally this cynical just trying
to make a pretty face for everybody even for the cameras or something, obviously it still
had an impact.
Yeah, the symbolic impact but there's also the practical impact, I mean a lot of people
have to work together and that has a ripple effect on the culture, on the different engineers
100%.
And even just the astronauts and the cosmonauts involved think about what probably went through
their heads during this process of going from, oh my god, I'm going to have to work
with them to getting to know them and then sharing meals in space.
That's a crazy transformation of timelines and I do think that spaceflight has the ability
to bond us in the United States because it is ultimately this little tiny little planet
we're floating around on, it is the boundary that we all share, it only takes you getting
off this planet to realize, oh my god, we're all neighbors, we're all living in the same
house together and I do think ultimately as we continue to expand our horizons and expand
our exploration that it has the potential to unite us more than it has the potential
to divide us.
So one of the potential conflicts of the 21st century that I think everyone wants to avoid
both in the cyberspace and in the hot war space, cold war, hot war, all kinds of war,
all kinds of economic conflict, this was between the United States and China.
So China is going full steam ahead in developing a space program, doing a lot of incredible
work.
We had mentioned 64 launches in 2022 with two failures, but moving straight ahead.
And by the way, the failures, we had a lot of startups, a lot of the launches were from
brand new companies.
So to have two failures out of 64, I mean, that's still an impressive, if you look at
operational launches, it was flawless.
Do you see a pathway where there's, again, in that same way, collaboration or friendly
competition between all the different companies and nations of the United States and China
in the next, as we push towards the moon, Mars and beyond?
I held a dumb hope that China would actually be allowed to sign onto the Artemis Accord
to be able to take part in this next step towards the moon.
I'm just imagining if they provided a propulsion module or a land or something and we actually
came together to land on the moon instead of having another space race, it's like it
would have been so cool.
And yeah, I still am hopeful that similar to back in the Cold War, that we might have
something like that someday where we actually are collaborating and it feels like sometimes
we're really close to that.
And then other times it feels like we're really far from that.
And it just sucks because I know, and I try really hard on my channel to always separate
and celebrate the work being done because at the end of the day, there's someone that's
just going home to their family, clocking an hour is working really hard on pushing
their program and doing engineering work.
And we don't get to choose where we're born and what we're born into.
So I really like to avoid the political aspects of things and the geopolitical aspects and
just appreciate the science.
And the science we're seeing and the progress that China is doing in the last 10 years is
very akin to the early spaceflight programs.
And with the runway of just keep on going, I see no reason for them to be slowing down.
So it's definitely something to watch and be interested in.
And who knows?
I mean, there really genuinely might be a race to the moon again, and there really genuinely
might be a race to Mars.
The part of me is excited about that because a race is pretty cool.
But hopefully it's friendly competition and some collaboration.
It is true that maybe I'm being a bit cynical, but nations sometimes, the governments and
leaders of those governments sometimes ruin things.
Like you don't often have, statistically speaking, it's harder to have a leader of a nation that
looks beyond the particular political bickering of that nation.
And you have like a JFK type character that really steps up and inspires.
I think statistically speaking, it's better to have somebody like Elon, who's the leader
of a company, a commercial effort that is able to look beyond the borders of nations.
And certainly inspiring educators like yourself to look beyond the borders of those nations
and the geopolitical conflicts and so on to inspire people.
I think that's just made so much easier.
Like you can have more reach, Tim God can have more reach than NASA in terms of inspiring
the world.
And that's fascinating.
That gives power to the individuals that see past the silly short-term geopolitical conflicts.
That's the whole police.
Do you worry that there might be a war in space?
Let's look out into the future.
So the interesting thing about these rockets, right, let's not forget rockets do what rockets
do, that they can carry payloads that can be weapons.
Do you worry about this?
I worry most about space wars as leading to the Kessler syndrome of having a cascading
effect of like a spacecraft blowing up and then affecting another spacecraft and that
blows up.
And then all of a sudden you're trapped and have this debris cloud that we can't go into
space anymore.
Like that's my biggest...
Because frankly, at this point, we can annihilate ourselves with terrestrial stuff anyway.
You know what I mean?
We don't need space to end society as we know it, you know what I mean?
But we do...
We could really...
And the good thing is I think everyone, well, mostly everyone seems to understand this for
the most part, that we really can't be risking blowing up stuff in space in low-earth orbit
because it could easily...
We could strain ourselves from space assets for 50 years.
Oh, can you elaborate on that?
So what is the danger of the debris there that could jeopardize the space?
So for instance, and there was only a couple of years ago, Russia did an anti-satellite
test on an orbital.
We've done this to the US has done this.
I'm not pinning it on them, but we know nowadays, don't do anti-satellite tests on orbital things
because those things stay in orbit.
When you blow something up in space, it's not like...
People think in space, oh, you throw something, it's just going to keep going forever and
ever and ever.
I mean, that's in the sense that it's not going to be slowed down due to air resistance.
It's going to continue to do that, but it's staying in orbit around the Earth.
You just slightly change the orbit of it around Earth when you throw a ball or something.
So the scary thing is, when you blow up a satellite, all those pieces of that satellite
are now millions of bullets in a halo around the Earth, in a very specific halo.
So some things get blown up faster, according to its orbit, faster, so they'll go a little
bit higher elliptically.
Some things will get slowed down in that explosion and actually re-enter.
Some things will go sideways and change its inclination of that orbit.
So you have this debris field, but it more or less becomes a band of like, no, no, like
a big, scary, sharp, scary bullets that can destroy another spacecraft.
And so then all of a sudden, especially now Starlink, we're talking about thousands and
thousands and thousands of satellites in space.
If all of a sudden one, a couple of them crash and blow up and obviously you have all the
shrapnel going everywhere, then that hits another satellite, that creates shrapnel.
You can literally blanket our entire low Earth orbit in 17,500 mile an hour bullets.
We're talking, the kinetic energy in this is so hard for people to fathom because that's
over 10 times faster than most like rifle bullets and even like a big 50 cal is not
going to be, we're still talking about about 10% that.
So when you think about the kinetic energy, it's insane.
So a fleck of paint can go through panes of glass at that velocity, you know, a little
piece of metal can puncture, you know, blow straight through.
So like, so our actions that seem small, so small scale military actions can have can
have dire detrimental effects to the whole space program, like global space program.
Oh, yeah, it can affect everything and everyone, including the like, including satellites.
Oh, yeah, especially satellites, like that's the one that the good and the bad thing is
the good thing is a lot of satellites don't operate in low Earth orbit.
Like a lot of the ones that we use day to day, a lot of them are in medium Earth orbit,
like their GPS or their geostationary, which are way, way, way out there.
And because of that, they won't really ever deorbit or like it'll take, you know, millennia
to deorbit because, you know, just because something's in space doesn't mean it's there
forever, especially like in low Earth orbit.
The atmosphere doesn't just suddenly stop.
It's not like you hit the karmic line 100 kilometers and also there's zero atmosphere.
The atmosphere just slowly tapers, you know, you can experience that yourself as you climb
a mountain, you slowly realize there's less and less air, you just keep going.
And just because you're in space 200, 300 kilometers up, there's still trace molecules,
you know, there's the occasional oxygen molecule, there's the occasional nitrogen molecule.
And so that is actually drag.
So as a spacecraft in low Earth orbit, depending on its altitude will take anywhere from five
years to five months to deorbit, you know, or two months or one month, like depending
on its orbit or its altitude, we'll have some parasitic drag still and slowly throughout
time slow down, which lowers its orbit, which drags it down more, lowers its orbit and
et cetera, et cetera, until it reenters.
So if we end up with some kind of catastrophic event where the entire low Earth orbit is,
you know, has been inundated and blown up, it'll take months for the first band, you
know, to clear up.
It'll take years for something like beyond.
There's charts, you know, people have all this stuff available.
You shouldn't look it up.
This is terrifying, by the way.
But again, the caveat is for the most part, the low Earth orbit stuff would clear up within
years, so we could get back to doing some lower Earth, like Starlink stuff would probably
be able to be re, and, you know, we could kind of redo it and build up from the ground
up again.
GPS wouldn't be wiped out and our geostationary satellites wouldn't be wiped out, but the
scary thing is we wouldn't be able to relaunch and replace new things because we're stuck.
We're not going to fly through that debris field, you know.
And we avoid that by avoiding military actions in space.
But these days, there's more and more requirements and legislation and especially trying to get
international collaboration on having end-of-life plans for satellites, so that satellites,
especially those in the low Earth orbit, have like drag devices to increase them.
Once they're done, they literally pull like even just a ribbon, like a silly little like,
you know, 40-foot-long ribbon will sit there and it'll slowly, or it can speed up its reentry
process by months or years or whatever.
So we're starting to see that this is now an importance.
There's a really cool company called Stoke Aerospace out in Washington is one of these
launch providers that's really looking not into just trying to be the next, you know,
SpaceX launch company.
They're really seeing satellite bringing stuff down from space as actually being, especially
right now, we have all of these hundreds and thousands of satellites being launched every
year.
Someone at some point is probably going to have to do some cleanup.
And so they're looking at being one of those companies to do that.
Well, what do you think about Starlink and the efforts of Starlink to put a very large
number of satellites out there and provide internet access to, to, or anyone, to anyone?
Generally, I think Starlink is phenomenal.
And I would be saying this, if it was any company, I want to make that clear that people
think I'm just some, you know, SpaceX fanboy or something and anything they do is perfect.
I think, I think as your fan, I could say you're basically a fan, a fan boy or just
a fan of everybody that's doing space stuff.
And I don't like, there's no, even in this whole conversation, there's no way we cover
like 10% of what I wanted to talk to you about.
So we're jumping around.
I mean, there's, we could talk probably for now an hour about Artemis.
We could talk about anything with ULA, obviously the, all the other, all the other commercial
efforts.
We could talk about the NASA efforts that, you know, the, I mean, and Saturn fight, like
are we going to really go with this conversation?
I've talked about Saturn fight and we might.
Okay.
So like, anyway, Starlink fan of everything Starlink is in general exciting to you.
And not for the space assets, but just the potential for humanity.
Like I really think even as a consumer of the internet, personally, our studio space
down in Texas, we're stuck with, with media comm, which has like the least reliable internet
service period.
That's the only option.
Either that or they're trying to charge me like $20,000 to run a fiber optic cable, like
a thousand meters or something like it's, it's insane.
I'm not going to do that.
I bought Starlink.
It helps, but it's still not, you know, amazing, but it has, you can see where this is going
in a year or two, three, five years, like, Oh, I can totally screw this other internet
provider and this is now by far the best option and it's available literally anywhere.
You don't have to be limited to your internet, local internet service provider.
And on the global scale, of course, you have, you know, people being able to learn and learn
about rockets and learn about water management and architecture and city planning and fitness
and health, all of the, all of the modern conveniences that we Google every single day.
There's people that don't have access to that right now.
You know, I, I'm a self-taught rocket nerd.
I would not be who I am if it wasn't for the internet in the last seven years, you know,
six, seven years.
So unlocking the intellectual potential of places like Africa of rural areas that don't
currently have internet access.
That's a genuine, that's a huge thing.
That's like humanitarian 101 is give people access to information and like, you know,
I think we have this potential to try to step in and fix other people's problems, but
the reality is like, people are smart, no matter where you are, you give them the resources
to learn.
They're going to solve problems.
They're going to problem solve.
They're going to engineer.
They're going to, but if you don't give them access to that information, they're going
to be stuck in their, in their cycles, you know, and so I, I think the potential for
Starlink is incredible.
I think it's already impactful.
It's already affecting people in, you know, in rural and indigenous areas and it's already
affecting businesses and all that stuff.
I think it's great.
I think it is, you know, there's some downsides with astronomy, with, with ground based astronomy
that it can hinder observations from the ground.
There's already a lot of communications between SpaceX and astronomical societies and things
like that because it is a real concern, you know, it's, it can ruin observations, it can
ruin data, but like one of the big ones, for instance, recently, I think a new thing they're
going to be working into is that currently, if a Starlink is flying over, over a ground
based asset, a lot of, a lot of ground telescopes actually have a laser that goes up and it measures
the atmospheric distortion and the telescopes literally sit there and like by the millisecond
fixes, like changes the focus and fixes those atmospheric distortions and that laser can
interfere with satellites.
So, previously, I'm pretty sure that SpaceX actually had to, you know, request that as
they're flying over these satellites or these telescopes, they turn off the laser.
And when you have tens of thousands of these things flying, it's, you're going to be turning
off the laser more than it's on, you know, and just being this insanely inconvenient
thing because you're going to have these junctions happen often.
And I think one of the things that SpaceX is like, okay, no, no, no, you guys keep the
laser on, we'll deal with your laser, good, good step, you know, things like that, mitigating
the brightness of them so they're not visible under most conditions, of course, like they're
still always going to be visible in some.
But then ultimately for me, it's like this, you have this weird, like almost like a puberty
of spaceflight and astronomy where currently it's not cheap enough to really do a ton
of incredible science or space based telescopes, you know, we have web, we have Hubble, we
have, you know, all these other, you know, awesome space based telescopes, Chandra, you
know, all, et cetera, et cetera, whatever.
And you, but it's still so expensive to launch them.
Yeah.
That we're still so reliant on our ground telescopes.
But in the future, you can see a world where, oh, this is so cheap, we'll just launch like,
we can launch 50 James Webb Space Telescope size telescopes this year for half the price
of doing it on Earth, you know, and get way better data.
So in the future, I think in 20, 30 years, we'll look at it and be like, oh man, that
was an awkward time where space assets were interfering with astronomy.
But I think in the future, it's like, can you imagine doing space, you know, astronomy
from the ground?
That's insane.
The could be complexities to just having them any, just another topic.
So complexities associated with having so many satellites, especially with competing
companies and competing nations.
Do you see that as an issue?
Having tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of satellites.
Yeah.
It becomes a very interesting robotics collision avoidance problem.
The one thing to keep in mind is perspective.
Like I know 10,000 satellites and 20,000 and 100,000 satellites sounds insane.
And it sounds really scary.
But I mean, just even look at how many planes are in the air at any given time.
And the planes are bigger, they're flying slower, which actually means there's a greater
chance of collision.
If you think about, you know, two objects occupying space, if they're, one's moving really
fast, like imagine trying to, you know, throw two basketballs at each other relatively easy.
Now try shooting two bullets at each other and having like, you know, at 90 degrees
from each other.
You have to have your timing down like really perfect to do that.
Now take that times 10, you know, and these objects are taking up physical space very
small amount of time.
They're relatively small.
Like most satellites are not very big and they have limitless altitudes to deal with.
So even though you can have what look like convergences, you know, they can be 10, 20,
50, 100 kilometers difference often.
And you know, they're dealing with this, like all the space assets know, hey, I'm at this
orbital plane and this blah, blah, blah, and they know their altitudes and know their
safe distances and have these margins built in.
And it's space.
So there's like an insane amount of room, you know.
So there's a lot of margin, there's a lot of margin, but of course you can't excuse
that all the way.
Like you have to still have plans and be considering that and considering collisions and considering
all of the above.
When do you think the first human being will step foot on Mars?
You don't like timelines, but is this something, and you're very much focused on kind of the
short term of incredible progress that's happening and that makes total sense.
But there is the Mars plan that was at the origin of the commercial spaceflight efforts.
Do you still see and dream about that day?
Let me be clear that I don't want to go to Mars.
But I do think if you're making me guess a timeline for when humans will walk on Mars.
Even a year ago, I still would have said by the end of 2020, like the 2020s decade, you
know.
So by December 31st, 2029, I thought humans would have walked on Mars.
I'm starting to think that's still too optimistic, but I definitely think by 2040.
I for sure think that, and I really think it's just hard to predict that curve, that
project out that curve.
We're going to go from feeling like it's impossible, like it's feeling like it's inevitable.
It could be another by the end of this decade JFK type moment, especially if China steps
up with the space race.
It could be like, all right, NASA kind of says, all right, this Elon fella, like really
make this a gigantic effort.
Well, and if Starship works out as planned, and as NASA has invested in human landing
system, they're relying on SpaceX to land on the moon.
SpaceX can land on the moon, they can land on Mars.
Now whether or not the life support and the human considerations of long term spaceflight
missions and high radiation and blah, blah, blah, blah, refueling on Mars is a huge, huge,
huge deal.
They definitely could send a Starship to Mars and land, ideally land in one piece on Mars.
As soon as they can land on the moon, they can land on Mars, basically.
Those two things are very, in some ways, Mars is almost easier because you can use the atmosphere
to slow down.
It actually doesn't take that much more Delta V to actually land on Mars than it does.
On the moon, you don't have any, you have to first get out to the moon, then orbit the
moon.
When every one of those is a maneuver change, then you have to slow re-orbit until it coincides,
you know, hits the moon, and then if it's slow down enough to not explode when you hit
the moon.
So there's a lot of Delta V there, a lot of change in velocity.
Mars is actually, by the time we kind of crunched the numbers, it's relatively similar.
It's just a lot more difficult, like timeline wise and, you know, accuracy and all of these
other communication, you know, there's a lot of other things obviously involved.
I'm glossing over, making it sound easy, it's not.
But, you know, I think there's a real decent chance we could see a Starship vehicle land
on Mars, uncrewed by the end of the decade though.
End of the decade.
I mean, there's also a sociological element, maybe a political one, where I think you're
allowed to take more risks with Mars than you are with the moon, because we've done
the moon, 1969, it's been a while, so PR-wise, you have to be much safer with Mars, like
everyone's like, it's super dangerous, like super, like, so you could take a little more
risk.
100%.
Especially with manned missions, but actually just going back to the moon landing, Apollo
11 mission.
I haven't talked about this yet.
The amazing engine there, but again, the romantic question, and you look back at that
moon landing, one small step for man, one giant step for mankind, what do you think about
that moment in human history?
Do you go back to that often, or are you focused just like with the cars on the engines?
No, no, no, I still, when I need inspiration, I rewatched this documentary called When We
Left Earth, I think it was Discovery Channel did it, six-part episode, it was narrated
by Gary Sinise, phenomenal overview of the space race, and that will get my juices flowing
every time, every time, just, it's so well done, and it really just summarizes that program
so well, and beyond, it goes all the way to the space shuttle, but yeah, when I watch
footage of humans walking on the moon, it's just, I can't believe we're done enough to
do it with the technology we had, and the risks they took to do it, and the insane engineering
that it took to do that, is just absolutely astonishing, the amount of, the sheer logistics
of what it took to do it with the technology we had back then, is like, how did we have
so much money, and effort, and energy, and time, and resources, human resources to do
this, like it's just, it's insane.
Just the weakness of the computers they had back then, they had to do so much, I mean,
yeah, it's so much was so little.
It's insane.
I mean, but at the same time, I don't know if we want to talk about conspiracy theories
or anything, but it is all of, we have the proof and the pudding of the 400,000 people
on payroll, all of the paperwork, all of the, you know-
Oh, you mean the question, the conspiracy, if we land on the moon?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I think the receipts are there, literally.
But it's a lot of things like that, I mean, we actually generally live in a pretty cynical
time where people distrust institutions, part of the thing was the space program is
one of the things that can help reinvigorate the trust in institutions.
By institutions, even that word is a bad word now, but institutions means a bunch of humans
get together and do big thing together.
Yeah.
Yeah, but, you know, like, if I was conspiratorily minded, it's like, how the hell did humans
do that?
Yeah.
So, I think that's a very cynical take, unfortunately, but it's still an incredible one.
And also, you know, there's, until you look at the receipts, there's a kind of, like,
a rationale to that kind of conspiracy theory because so much pressure was put on the space
race, the PR of it, to be the winner, so it makes sense that you might want to try to
take shortcuts and fake things and, you know, propaganda, you know, different kinds of messaging
and I'm sure stuff like that was happening, some kind of, like, little, you know, adjustment
here and there to present things better and so on, but ultimately the actual engineering
project of landing on the moon, the fact that humans did that, I mean, it is sad that we
didn't have better, like, ways to record it.
And as I watch, like, SpaceX efforts and Blue Origin and these efforts, it's still not
trivial to record the, how just amazing awe-inspiring space is, because it, like, you know, it's
like Elon jokes about, like, space does look fake, like, I think there is some element
of it where you have to be there to experience it, really, and I don't, like, I think it's
currently is still a non-solve problem of how do you capture the awe of that?
I mean, you're one of the early people that are part of the crew that is exploring that
very question.
I'm sure you won't find all the answers, but you'll start to say, like, how do we convert
this into a visual format, just some kind of format that captures the magic of it?
A hundred percent.
And that's a perspective thing that I think about all the time, you know, and I'll do
a lot of thinking about, like, what is the thing that's reacting to people?
Is it the sound?
Is it the perspective?
Is it, like, seeing a little tiny human next to a landing leg that makes people go, oh,
my God, this thing is huge, you know, just reading, you know, and digesting that and
trying to help to convey that as best as possible, because the stuff that we are and have worked
on is so cool.
It's so exciting.
And it's so, it's so important.
And, like, actually, you know, so much bigger than any one of us physically and metaphorically.
It's just so, it's just, I wish everyone had that experience and had that light bulb
go off.
And that's the cool thing that you're, like, smack in the middle of solving that really
difficult and fascinating problem of how do you capture the magic?
How do you inspire?
That's not just an engineer problem, that's a communication problem, education problem.
I find, specifically for myself, that I get most excited about something when I learn
a lot about it.
Like, when I learn the ins and the outs, and I learn all the little problem solving and
the, you know, the cool, like, oh, my God, they had to do what to make it work?
Wow, that's amazing.
And that's, I try to just always go back to that root thing of, like, what can I teach
myself?
Like, if I'm every video, I expect that I learn something, making it, no matter what.
Like, no matter how much I think I know about something at the end of the day, if I'm not
learning something, it's not a good video, you know?
And I always think that people get excited when they learn and when they have some questions
answered for them.
Let me ask you a couple of quick, out there, futuristic questions.
I have to.
Sure.
I'd hate myself if I don't ask you.
So first let's talk about nuclear propulsion.
So out there, interesting propulsion ideas.
So what do you think, beyond the chemical engines that we talked about, what do you
think about using nuclear fission and maybe nuclear fission for propulsion?
We already have thermal nuclear reactors that are nuclear engines that have been tested
both by the United States and Soviet Union that were 100% valid, like, totally ready
to go, efficient, super awesome, yes, yes, yes, hardcore, yes.
And what they're using is, yeah, basically a fusion reactor, you're flowing hydrogen
through it and heating up the hydrogen, taking it from liquid to gas, you know, and by heating
it up, you're adding energy to the propellant, and then you're literally just using that
now steam hot hydrogen and flowing it through a deal of L nozzle.
And you also have to use that energy to spin the pumps to still pump the thing.
So you're still kind of using like a lot of the tricks that you're using, but instead
of a chemical reaction, you're literally just using nuclear fission to heat up propellant
and do the same thing.
And at the end of the day, you end up with like eight to 900 seconds of specific impulse,
which is double that of chemical propulsion.
Most of that comes just because hydrogen is so light, you're only emitting, you're only
ejecting hydrogen out of the nozzle.
So the lighter molecule is the faster, you know, just like if you had a golf ball versus
like a bowling ball, you can only physically throw one so fast and the other one as a human
you're not going to do very well with.
So you can just, you get, you have the more potential for a higher exit velocity.
So nuclear thermal, amazing.
You can just shoot these little hydrogen molecules out crazy fast, crazy efficiently.
We already have it.
Like we can do it.
Yes, yes, yes.
And actually we're already reinvesting in that again as the United States is looking
into basically ramping back up our nuclear propulsion.
Why haven't we done it yet?
And what do you think the challenges are there?
And do you think that's an obvious future?
Like would you see in 50 years, we're not using, like we're not, for major projects
like a starship type of project, we're not using chemical propulsion anymore.
For getting off earth, you'll always want to use chemical propulsion because the gas
would come irradiated, like you don't want to, and actually the thrust to weight ratio
of these engines are relatively poor.
They're very heavy.
They have a nuclear reactor, like they're not, they're really, the reason we kind of
give up on them is they're really most useful for like interplanetary.
If you're trying to get a big, like if you're trying to send a huge payload off to Mars,
nuclear thermal is amazing.
It still could be beneficial even going to the moon, you know, like in an earth moon
system you could use nuclear thermal very effectively and it could be a great choice.
But it also, that starts to get into that trade of like, we can just kind of use a little
bit bigger rocket and fly a normal, you know, it's that whole trade thing.
But another reason why we kind of stopped using them, the one that the United States
developed, NERVA was so heavy, only a Saturn V could actually lift the stage of it, like
the upper stage.
So it replaced the S4B with a nuclear thermal with the NERVA engine.
The Soviet Union developed one about one tenth the size and thrust that was small enough
to fly on a proton rocket.
But neither of them ever flew, both of them have been tested and like thumbs up ready to
go, which is just a huge shame to me because they could unlock a lot of interplanetary potential
and just all around us.
Which potentially interstellar as well.
Not, I don't think nuclear thermal, we're not quite getting there, but then you get
into like nuclear pulse drives and things where you're literally like basically ejecting
a bomb out the back of your rocket and exploding and having like a shock absorber and Pogo sticking
your way out of the solar system.
That's, I mean by all physics, sure, there's nothing wrong with that, it's not breaking
any laws of physics, but I just don't see us getting to that need anytime soon.
I don't think we're going to be.
Interest all travel.
Yeah, I think we're going to want a better understanding of physics and physics itself.
Yeah, do you have a hope that maybe theoretical physics will open the door to some exciting
propulsion systems?
Yeah, I do.
I think we're still at the very infancy of our understanding of everything and how things
work and a hundred years ago it would be stupid to try to predict the things we know
today and who knows, even I think about things like James Webb looking deeper into our solar
system than ever before and physically being able to see objects that we just have not
even been able to physically see before.
On being able to study black holes, for example, a better, better the stuff that's happening
outside of black holes, at the edges of black holes and how the information is stored, the
100% holographic principles.
There's so much weirdness around black holes.
Around where gravity starts bending light, it's like, all right, we'll get to look at
that now and start to wonder what is going on and how can we use that somehow for propulsion?
I mean, it seems like awfully crazy and futuristic at this moment, but I think that's because
we know almost nothing about those kinds of objects where, again, where the general relativity
and quantum mechanics start to have to be both considered to describe those kinds of
objects.
As we study those objects, we might figure out some kind of unification thing that will
allow us to understand maybe how to use black holes for propulsion to say a lot of crazy
things.
But the point is it'd be stupid for us to even guess about things we don't even know
about yet.
You know what I mean?
Therefore, I'm not going to say that the best option for interstellar travel is nuclear
drives.
That could be someone saying, in 1600, the only way to fly is by strapping 1,000 birds
to your head.
But that said, everything you're saying is right, but human history is such that at the
beginning of the 20th century, physicists, Rutherford, everybody, there's brilliant
people that said we've basically solved all of it.
If you talk to most physicists, I think they're going to say we've pretty much solved.
The standard model describes physics extremely accurately.
Human relativity explains the cosmos as we observe them extremely accurately.
Yeah, there's a whole dark matter, dark energy thing, whatever.
But outside of that, we basically solved where you're going to find gaps in knowledge that
are going to somehow create warp drives or something like this, or wormholes.
But it seems like throughout history, we prove ourselves wrong time and time again.
Yes.
No, and this is well outside of any of my knowledge base, so I want to make sure that
if I say anything stupid, it's because I'm just a peasant here in physics land.
Yes.
We're all peasants in physics land.
But I really just think it's very humbling that we're still using chemical propulsion
and variant cell, like injecting mass to propel ourselves.
And no matter how you get at it, and I think someday I would expect that our species has
figured out a way to get beyond that.
Got to ask you another wild question.
What do you think of Bob Lazar, who claimed that he worked at and saw in Area 51, a propulsion
system fueled by, I'm quoting here, maybe from Wikipedia, I don't know where I got
this from, fueled by an antimatter reactor, which used as fuel the chemical element with
atomic number 115.
At the time it wasn't synthesized, it was later in 2003 synthesized, named Muscovium.
He said that the propulsion system relied on a stable isotope of element 115, which allegedly
generates a gravity wave that allowed the vehicle to fly into evade visual detection
by bending light around it.
No stable isotopes of Muscovium have yet been synthesized.
All have proven extremely radioactive decaying in a few hundred milliseconds.
One do you believe him, which I find him fascinating because it's, I find the human mind even more
fascinating than something like an antimatter drive, because I think it's such a giant mystery
that we haven't even begun to explore deeply.
Anyway, in that sense, whether he's lying or not are both interesting things to explore
from a psychology perspective, but to, I mean, it's basically saying that I guess it's an
alien extraterrestrial engine thing.
What do you think?
I mean, I'm happy to change my opinion based on new evidence at any point.
I have like the biggest part of me wants to just be like, this is obviously just stupid
and a hoax and just total, you know, quack.
And then another part of me still is like, this is exciting and fun to think that this
is all real.
And then another part of me goes, why, how, how good is this guy at lying and making
stuff up?
Cause it's all really good, like good storytelling, good, like, I don't know what to think, honestly.
I don't know, I'm really very skeptical about anyone explaining anything like this.
Like, I mean, my, my radar is like screaming at me, like, this is all at full crap, you
know, but I'd say like, there's still a little part of me that's just like, man, that is kind
of cool.
How does he know that?
And like, you know what I mean?
It's, I'm conflicted.
I think you're actually in the best kind of place because it's, I'm afraid of being the
kind of person that hears something like that and says it's definitely, um, he's definitely
full of crap and basically close my mind off to all that stuff.
I'm afraid of being somebody who closes my mind off to a thing that's actually a, a
early thread to a brilliant to a, to a future, to a fascinating solution to a mystery.
So, uh, but in this case, I mean, I have so many red flags from a psychological perspective
that, um, that, uh, but again, uh, outside of this particular individual, I do wonder
if aliens have visited us.
I think aliens are everywhere.
I think the universe is teeming with alien life.
I mean, there's, it's very difficult for me to statistically understand given how life
finds a way here on earth just everywhere, the entire history of life on earth from
the very origin of life, it seems to be damn good at doing its thing, uh, evolving to get
better and better and better at doing its thing.
Now, there could be some special aspects to the origin of life itself, which is completely
not understood.
So maybe the true magic is in the origin of life or it could be that there is some magical
leaps, uh, to, uh, eukaryotic cells, for example, that the universe, our galaxy is teeming
with alien life, but it's all bacteria.
They're all boring bacteria or exciting bacteria, no offense to bacteria, the, but the no intelligence
space fairing civilizations, I don't know, but I just, if I were to guess, I had to bet
all my money, there is space fairing civilizations everywhere in the universe.
And the fact that they're not, they have not been directly definitively observed confuses
me and I think it's a mystery.
And if I were to suggest what the solution to that mystery is, is they might look extremely
different from us and we might be too dumb to detect them.
And like, and so there I think you have to be extremely open-minded at what would we
be looking for, right?
And that, and that, that's a very practical thing to be open-minded about.
And practically speaking, if we were to be able to even detect them from a distance,
get a tech, uh, a technical signature of a distant planet, uh, of a distant star system
that has alien life, honestly, the number one thing I kind of want to know is like, what's
your propulsion systems?
Like, how do we travel faster, right?
Like there's a bunch of details probably, but first let's get together and teach me
how to go fast.
Go fast.
I like motorcycles.
I like rockets.
Tell me what you got.
Yeah.
Uh, yeah.
Like how, like, I'll show you mine if you show me yours kind of thing at the inter, interstellar
intergalactic level.
Um, yeah, anyway, I just wonder maybe it's a cheat code in this video game we call life,
but I want to, I want to use the cheat code to figure out what kind of propulsion systems
are possible.
And it feels like other alien civilizations might help us give us, um, give us a guidance
on that.
Of course, I think even just discovering, boy, one of the things with the space program,
like everything we're doing with Mars, like the secret thing I'm really excited about,
the romantic thing is humans on Mars, but the secret thing is building giant stations
on Mars that allow us to definitively, hopefully find the traces of life that either currently
doesn't live or has once lived on Mars, because if that's the case, that means for sure life
is everywhere.
Oh, a hundred percent.
And then you're like, and once you know that, sorry to keep interrupting and not shouting
the hell out.
Is this supposed to be an interview?
God damn it.
All right.
Uh, that, uh, like that, just the knowledge of that, just the knowledge that a form of
minute mile can be run, I think will open our minds completely to really, really hardcore
push to interstellar travel or colonizing Mars, becoming a multi-planet and terry species.
It'd be truly inspiring.
You think that, do you, do you get nervous though?
Like I'm going to, I'm the interviewer now, um, don't you get nervous that we could make
spectacular discovery on Mars that not only has there been life, there's actually like
pretty advanced micro, you know, multi-cellular life, totally thriving in certain regions.
We just hadn't visited the man on Mars and we make this big discovery that, um, relatively
large percentage of people just simply wouldn't believe it.
Do you think it's all 100% fake and that they're just doing this to control us and
that blah, blah, blah.
Like we could make the most important discovery in human life, like in all of human existence
that, that we're not alone in this universe by, you know, cellular at least.
And a good percentage of people, I'm thinking 20, 30, in today's world, 40 plus percent
of people wouldn't even believe it existed.
Interesting.
I, I'd be, it's just a very important thing to think about, especially as an educator
like yourself.
I think the, the current cynicism towards institutions and science is temporary.
I think it's, they're basically the internet woke up.
The internet smells bullshit and it looked at, uh, I'm sorry, I'm not being ages, but
saying older scientists and, and they looked at them and they kind of said, you're kind
of full of shit.
You got a lot of ego, uh, you're, you speak down to everybody.
You're not very good at communicating.
I think there's a lot of truth to what they're saying.
And I think the young scientists that are coming up will be much better at not being
full of shit, being authentic, being real, not treating, uh, people like their children
that can't possibly understand, like taking it very seriously, that there's a lot of
intelligent people out there that are curious, that are full of desire for knowledge, like
being transparent about all the uncertainties, uh, of the scientific process, all the tensions,
the conflicts, all of that.
And I think, I think once we fix the commute science communication system, adapt it to
the internet, um, I think that won't be an issue.
I hope, I hope, I mean, that's why people like you are really important is, is like communicate
with authenticity.
Um, but yeah, that's definitely something to think about.
I mean, yes, the early, uh, I mean, listen, scientists too, like the phosphine discovered
on, on Venus is like, they're extremely skeptical always.
So definitely there will, there'll be a lot of skepticism, uh, and it depends what it
looks like.
If it kind of looks like, this thing kind of looks like bacteria back on earth.
Uh, yes.
Uh, so it means contamination is very difficult to avoid in general.
But if the thing looks like fundamentally different, then you're like, all right.
Yeah.
Totally different DNA, RNA, like this is not, we've never observed this ever.
Yeah.
Then, uh, then you're like, all right, cool.
Of course.
Uh, so that, uh, what, another promising thing that difficult to be definitive about, but
is get better and better direct imaging systems.
There's now, uh, like, I don't know how many, but thousands of planets are being discovered
outside of our solar system.
There's moons being discovered now.
Earth like planets being discovered.
So like all of that, if you could do direct imaging of those planets more and more and
more, uh, there could be some gigantic, listen, if there is like a, uh, Kardashev, like type
two civilization, we're going to see the damn thing.
It's going to be producing a lot of, uh, it's going to be, uh, radiating a lot of energy.
So the possibility of detecting someone that that's also a real possibility with something
like James Webb telescopes, like those kinds of efforts that starts becoming a reality.
Uh, have you read Andy Weir's project Hail Mary?
I have not.
No.
You're going to love it.
Like it is basically, uh, almost answering that like, how could they not see us type of
thing almost where he creates this, this incredible, I don't want to spoil anything, but you know,
um, it's just the, the sense that like we could have totally different perspectives
with, with an alien race and not even like consider that, you know, the two of us are
coexisting almost.
Yeah.
I don't want to spoil anything.
It's really, really, really worth the read.
Oh, you mean a different perspective, like the aliens have a different perspective than
humans?
Yeah.
Like both, we just like, we see with this visual light, someone could see an x-ray, et
cetera, you know, like, and just the way we even come to the same perspective and like
looking and observing is just so different fundamentally that like we could, I mean,
it's not quite like that.
It's not like it's like, oh, they were actually on the moon and we're, you know, it's nothing
like that.
But, uh, but it's such a unique and incredible story.
I think Andy Weir is one of the best science fiction writers at all.
I can't say that with much authority because I don't listen to much science fiction, so
zero authority.
I really like Andy Weir's books and that book is, is no different.
But that sounds like, I'm really worried about that and it sounds like, uh, I would really
love it.
I've, uh, definitely, I've been very, uh, I've, I've done a lot of reading in my life,
but like the science fiction is one of the things I've been really, really weak on.
I haven't really read much and I just made more and more friends over the years recently,
um, that say that I absolutely must read some of these things.
Are you, do you physically read or do you do audiobooks while you run and stuff?
I do both.
I do both.
Yeah.
Well, physically I sadly don't.
It's a Kindle, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I run.
I also do, uh, so I do both.
I do about, uh, on a normal day, especially not that I've been really focused on, on
reading.
It's about 60 minutes of reading on a Kindle and I wanted two hours, uh, because I run
about two hours when I don't have like other stuff like today I won't run, uh, so it's
about three hours.
So on average, I would say it's like two, two and a half hours a day that I read and
audiobooks suggest the same, they're a little slower, but they're, they can, uh, especially
for the classics, they can capture some of the magic with the deep voice, usually with
the British accent.
I love it.
I also read that, uh, listen to, sorry, that, uh, a book on propulsion like two years ago,
I remember, but I remember that was extremely difficult.
Ignition, but yeah.
It was ignition.
By Don D. Clark.
Yep.
It was very difficult to listen.
Oh, I, yeah, I see.
I don't read.
I listened to while I'm on road trips or running or stuff like that too.
So I swear there's probably 40 or like, not 40, but there's like eight minutes of, we
tried BMZ 15, 13, BM412, RMNL, mitral, muscle, high-threatening for like, I swear it's multiple
minutes of explaining one trial on something because there's just so many different chemicals
they try.
I don't know.
It's, it's, it's almost a joke.
Like I literally audibly laughed out loud listening to it because I'm like, this is so ridiculous.
I'm sure it makes sense reading it, but like listening to it is just hilarious.
But it's great though.
What do you think are some of the challenges for long-term space travel?
Do you think about this kind of stuff?
The biological stuff?
Yeah.
Do you, do you worry?
Do you think about radiation on Mars and out in space over periods of, actually the effects
on the human body forget to even their radiation over periods of months and years.
Yeah.
I think realistically, we have a really good handle on what the effects are.
And we actually have the solution to like everything.
It's just whether or not we can like, you know, for instance, one of the, you know,
low earth orbit, one of the biggest challenges eventually after your long-term space travel
is bone density loss and not having gravity.
You know, you actually have issues with a handful of things and artificial gravity is
easy in terms of, relatively easy as in terms of space flight.
You know, you can, you have two vehicles just tethered together and, you know, just spinning
as given enough distance and a decent enough spin velocity and you can, you can get one
gene like relatively easy.
We're talking again, relatively easy, especially after talking about theoretical physics like
this is, that's easy stuff.
We haven't done that yet, but like there's, there's no reason why we can't produce artificial
gravity if we say that that's, you know, a big enough hurdle that we absolutely have
to overcome this.
Okay.
Cool.
We'll just spin up two vehicles that are going to Mars and people will have, but you
know, that's the thing is Mars is only about, we'll say six months there.
Then you're hanging out in Mars, you have 38% of gravity and then six months ish back.
People live on, you know, the international space station at six months stints.
We've had people for basically a year up on the international space station.
It's not like it's, it's not life altering.
Yeah.
You have a couple of days of not being able to walk very well and you do have some bone
density loss and some other concerns, but like, again, that's, it's solvable.
And I think, you know, the first mission is to Mars.
I think it might, we might, we'll probably do the trade.
Is it worth it to like land on Mars and have a crippled crew that can't even physically
stand yet, you know, for a day or two before they get their, you know, feet from underneath
them?
Or is it, do we need to spin up two spacecraft?
Do, you know, a tether and have like, you can't do it like starship, you know, even
though it's 30 feet wide or nine meters wide.
If you spin it on that one axis, that's not enough space to get one G without your feet
and your head being at two different velocities, so you get really sick.
It always feel like you're falling.
Your brain will tell you that you're falling constantly.
But then again, okay, so this is, this is a whole thing is, you know, and I don't know
if there's, we don't really have the data yet on like going from zero G, we know the
effects of that.
We know the effects of one G really well.
That's our majority of our data set, but we don't really have much data on the long-term
effects of, you know, one-sixth gravity like on the moon or 38% gravity.
Is it, is one-sixth gravity actually enough to counteract 95% of the effects of low gravity?
Or is it 15, you know, is it one-sixth?
Is it like a linear thing?
Is 38% gravity totally, you know, 38% as bad as one or whatever?
You know, is it a slight, like where's it down on the scale?
So there's a chance that we don't need anywhere near one G of gravity to counteract the bulk
majority of these problems.
We could have 0.1 G or whatever is the, you know, the right compromise of vehicle complexity
and human biology and all of these other effects.
Like we, this is absolutely a solvable thing.
That is-
And we figure some of this out through just experimentation.
100%.
Along the way.
Yep.
So in my dating life, I think one of the essential fundamental research questions I'm wondering
about is the dynamics and so the details of how you have sex in space.
Asking for a friend, of course.
I mean, that there literally is sort of work on this, right?
Because like if you think about long-term space travel, I mean, sex is sort of like
the, there's the recreational aspect of sex, but the most important aspect of sex for long-term
space travel is procreations and also the full biological cycle of that.
So from the embryos, the development of the baby, the giving the birth and all that kind
of stuff.
So like, you know, there's a lot of really difficult problems of biology there to understand.
And perhaps it's all, some of that, again, just like you said brilliantly.
Some of that can be just solved with engineering outside of the human body by creating a gravitational
field like that.
But maybe along the way, you can figure out how to do that without doing it, but we're
balancing the costs and so on.
And radiation is the other thing.
We know we have a really good data set on what radiation and doses do to humans.
Like we know, we can measure radiation, we know, we can approximate, you know, and kind
of give edge cases for the Mars transient and getting to Mars and being on Mars.
And the simple answer to that is like at the end of the day, if we have to, you know, dig
into Mars or find a tunnel to live in so you get some extra mass in between you and cosmic
radiation, so be it.
Like that's the answer then.
Again, none of these are like insolvable problems.
They're just things, hurdles you would have to overcome based on, you know, the risk exposure
and the posture there.
Like being the first child, the first baby born outside of Earth, that'd be pretty cool.
I would love to be alive to see that.
That'll be a big one.
I don't know if they'll, I don't know, because it's such a dangerous thing, it's so risky.
I think that could be in our lifetime.
You think so?
Yeah.
I would like to think in a perfect world for thinking futurism that in 30 to 50 years, I
definitely think we could have a full time, like permanent major civilizations, you know,
what Blue Origin wants to develop, where they have a huge sphere, you know, and you're doing
a lot of especially heavy industry off of Earth, so you're not polluting Earth.
That makes so much sense to me.
Yeah, I think we, we could live in a lifetime where, you know, we thought that since the
50s and 60s that people are going to be living and working in space like crazy, and at any
given point, we're lucky to have 12 people in space today.
But I really think in our lifetime, we're finally getting to that point of, yeah, that
that's a reality.
Let me, because you mentioned Blue Origin, can we just lay out some of the competitors
to SpaceX, so much of what we talked about is SpaceX, specifically because they're sort
of pushing the boundaries of what's possible in the commercial space life.
But there's a lot of, like you said, incredible work being done for large companies and small
companies, startups and so on.
So who are the competitors to SpaceX?
A ULA, you know, Launch Alliance, Blue Origin, there's a Virgin, is it Galactic Orbit?
Orbit would be the competitor.
Virgin Orbit, there's Rocket Labs, Electron Rocket that you mentioned.
There's the folks that you covered, Firefly, and what are we missing?
There's the Epic Space Launch System from NASA, I guess that is.
Thankfully NASA, but Prime Contractor Boeing and
Boeing, Lockheed.
Lockheed.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Northebris and Boosters, yep.
Okay.
Nice.
So like what's interesting to say to lay out the land here that you're excited about?
Just in general, I think if you aren't working on a reusable, some form of reusable vehicle,
like physically working on it, pen to paper, not beyond pen to paper, like bending metal
for a reusable vehicle, you're gone, you're toast.
I think we're well into that being the only provable, you know, way forward.
The only way you're going to compete and survive is a reusable rocket.
Fully reusable would be great, but that's obviously massively aspirational still, but
it will come.
But to me, the list, you pretty much had it right on the head, Astra was another orbital
rocket company.
There's a lot of companies, and I think right now the ones that I personally really believe
in, you know, Rocket Lab is awesome.
I really think that they are, one of the few that I believe can actually build a Falcon
9 class rocket today with their technology, with their knowledge, with their investments,
with their funding, you know, and they've proven themselves.
There's very few, they have actually made it look easy.
I think there's a lot of startups and a lot of new rocket.
There's too many launch providers popping out of the woodwork right now.
They won't all survive, of course.
I think realistically, if you look at like airplanes, how many airplane, you know, there's
a handful of airplane manufacturers.
There's not hundreds and thousands of airplane manufacturers.
I think it'll be a similar thing for spaceflight.
I think we'll see, you know, realistically, in the terms of jubbo jets and passengers,
there's basically two, you know, there's Airbus and there's Boeing.
So I think in the long run, there'll be two or three major players.
I think there'll be, you know, 10 minor, like as far as launch providers, as far as the
ones actually leaving Earth and getting into orbit, I just don't think there's a ton of
room for individuality, really, you know?
Yeah.
I would love to see it like a really serious competitor to SpaceX in the way that SpaceX
does things.
I don't know if ULA is quite what I, it's quite the right kind of competitor.
Let me say this, ULA has all of the potential, but just operationally, they're either Lockheed,
Martin and Boeing's like love child, they're kind of set up in a far too traditional manner
where they just really aren't given the opportunity to innovate, like a lot of these startups
are.
So Rocket Lab is a little bit more of that nature, what do you think about just Blue Origin
in general?
Blue Origin, man, what Blue Origin has done with New Shepard is amazing and people just
laught it because it's suborbital and it looks very phallic.
So I guess the meme matters also, it's modern day.
But it's sad because people don't see what they are also working on, which is New Glenn.
I see comments almost every day still of like, it doesn't matter because they're working
on tiny.
It's like, no, New Glenn is more powerful and more capable than Falcon Heavy.
New Glenn is almost more of a competitor to not quite as to Starship, but it's almost
in that class.
It's a heavy lift launch vehicle, it's huge, it's crazy, it'll be nuts, they're very actively
working on it.
I still think we're three years away from it launching, but that's a very strong competitor
in the class of rockets that SpaceX is currently making.
So SpaceX is currently leading the way, but that it couldn't become a close race.
We'll just, for now, we'll ignore SpaceX and we'll just kind of talk about like, I think
who's kind of coming around the corner here.
Who's here?
Let me just do a quick overview.
I'm going to shoot myself in the foot for getting some cool people here and some exciting
companies.
But Relativity is one that if you should definitely get Tim L.S. on the show, who is the CEO of
Relativity, they're doing 3D printed rockets.
The ones that have the world's largest 3D printer, they're getting really close to their
first orbital launch.
The cool thing about them, the reason that I think they're exciting, the reason that
I think they have the potential is just how quickly they can iterate.
I think 3D printing a rocket is really dumb.
I think iterating with 3D printing on a rocket is brilliant because you can literally change
software and have very little up little file and have a new rocket.
That's amazing.
So in terms of long term iterative process, if we're really talking about hitting the
ground running and just seeing where the evolution takes you, I think that's about as good as
you can get.
I think what SpaceX is doing at Starbase just physically bending cheap steel is probably
also a very valid solution.
So I really think, and they have the engineering chops, I think they've got some amazing people
there.
Again, Rocket Lab, I adore what they work on.
Like everyone, there's a caveat here that everything takes longer.
Any company tells you it's two or three times longer.
Just period.
Rocket Lab is no different.
But they're working on a neutron rocket that's going to be, I think, 8,000 to 15,000 kilograms
to low earth orbit, like it's a good medium class rocket will compete right along with
Falcon 9, hopefully.
By the way, Neutron would be its name.
It's not some kind of fascinating new physics breakthrough where they're using neutrons.
No, no, but they are using, they're also using liquid methane and liquid oxygen.
I just think it's a really, it seems like a great rocket and assuming they can actually
get it flying in two or three years, I think they're going to be here to stay.
I'd be remiss right now, I'm editing a video from an interview with Stoke Aerospace out
in Kent, Washington.
It's just one of these companies that they have a long ways to go.
They're still in the very, they're behind the curve, frankly, in terms of launch vehicles
right now because like I said, there's so many coming out of the woodwork.
The idea they're working on, their solution to a fully reusable rocket is amazing.
One of the coolest concepts I've ever seen.
Are you going to cover in the video?
Yeah.
I'm going to be hopefully coming out the next, depending on what the schedule like is down
there.
I'm actively editing that as we speak and it is so cool.
I mean, it's genius and if they can actually get it to work, I can see them merging.
I can for sure see someone potentially, like I, perfectly, in a perfect world, they've
merged with Rocket Lab.
They Stoke develops the upper stage and maybe even the engines.
They are the two guys, the CEO, the co-founders of that company have, they are engine like
propulsion engineer magnificence.
They have, they used to, they both have worked at Blue.
They developed engines in a hurry there and then left Blue when it felt like it was getting
too slow for them.
And now they are, I mean, these guys fired a 15 chambered rocket engine instead of four
from the Soviet and we're talking 15 chambers, single turbo pump, 70 times in the month of
October.
Wow.
Wow.
That's impressive.
Wow.
And that's like, that was on average, you know, if you think about like days off, time off,
you know, parts changing over twice a day on average of a hydrolox engine, that's insane.
So I love them and I hope the best for them, but they're also topical right now.
They're top of my head.
So, what about Firefly?
What I like about Firefly, they've already got kind of a traditional aerospace backing
there, starting to buddy up a lot with Northup Grumman.
They're going to be building the booster stage for Antares, which is currently flying only
out of Wallops, Virginia, and is one of the only other commercial providers for the International
Space Station.
And Northup Grumman is a very traditional aerospace company, you know, like lots of solid
rocket boosters and they've purchased, ironically, their current Antares is reliant on Russian
engines and Ukrainian boosters, two things that I don't think you're going to be able
to get your hands on too much anymore.
So they're looking to some U.S. propulsion and stages.
So they actually are partnering with Firefly and their new Antares rocket will be a first
stage built entirely by Firefly.
So I'm excited that Firefly already has the propulsion technology and they actually develop
that, ironically, their tap off cycle engine was developed in partnership with Ukraine,
with Ukrainian engineers who developed the whole turbopump system.
So it's like, it's this cool meddling of these worlds.
Their former CEO, Tom Rekusik, was like, I have an interview with him and he's anyone
that can just spout nuances and facts.
I just love.
I just soaked that guy's information up as best I could because he is brilliant, literally
a rocket doctor, you know.
So yeah, I mean, that's what like you said, the fascinating thing about these folks, they're
legit.
They're such great engineers that bring these rockets to life.
And then there's all this stuff that we know and don't know about in China and other parts
and other nations that are putting stuff into orbit.
One of the sad things also is like, you know, with Lockheed and Boeing is just military
applications in general.
There's so much technology that's currently being developed that we probably know nothing
about.
Yeah.
And it makes me a little bit sad, of course, for several reasons.
One is that the use of that technology has really much like, it's not that inspiring.
It's like a very military focus.
It's to kill someone.
It's to kill someone.
Yeah.
There's not even like a side application.
And the big one is that the secret, it's shrouded in secrecy as opposed to being a source of
inspiration.
Yeah.
100%.
Like, what was that one plane that you covered that was like, we know nothing about?
Oh, the X-37B.
Yeah.
X-37B.
Yeah.
Orbited for over 900 days and returned.
Like, yeah.
I want to know about that thing.
What's that thing up to?
I don't know.
That's what's...
It's so frustrating.
We know when it launches, people, you know, amateurs track and know, they even will be
like, oh, it changed orbit, you know, it raised and lowered its orbit, blah, blah, blah.
We generally have just almost no idea what it's doing up there.
And it just saddens me.
Because I want to know.
And it's awesome.
It's a great vehicle.
War.
What is it good for?
You mentioned Kerbal Space Program, the video game.
Someone asked you what video game you recommend for learning about space and rockets and you
said, duh, Kerbal Space Program.
So tell me about this game.
What is this game?
And I also saw, heard that a second one is coming out.
So what...
It's true.
Like, you know, I've been playing more games recently because games are fun and they remind
you that life is awesome.
So why should I play this game?
If you want to learn about rockets, how to fly, how to build, how to get into orbit,
how to get to other planets, there's no better way to learn about rockets than playing Kerbal
Space Program.
So what does it entail?
Like, do you actually like...
It's like SimCity and Microsoft Flight Simulator for rockets.
Oh, interesting.
So you will get to, like, what do you design, the rockets?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's...
Okay, so I started playing it in, like, 2014, I think, around as I'm, like, falling in love
with space.
And I became obsessed with this game.
Like, literally, you know, you take a little command module, click on a fuel tank, boop,
you choose your engine, boop, you choose a stage connector, boop, you connect more tanks
and build these space planes and fantastical things, and it's all, like, physics-based.
Yeah, it's available.
This sounds like a commercial.
It's available on PC, Mac, and console, like, it's available everywhere.
But wait, there's more.
But wait, there's more.
And...
You said, like, you streamed yourself playing this.
Are those any of those videos up?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
There's some of my...
Actually, the first videos I ever uploaded to YouTube were, like, recaptured streams
from Twitch that I just physically uploaded to YouTube.
This is awesome.
And so it's me playing Kerbal.
We...
I used to do this kind of, like, a podcast-style thing.
I should get back into this, because it's one of my favorite things I ever did.
It's called...
We called it, Todayish and Space Fight History, but these days, I'd probably just play Kerbal.
But I had my friend come sit next to me, his name's Jacob.
And he is a former professional pole vaulter, just this really knows nothing about rockets,
knows nothing about space, hilarious, like, in the sweetest, most fun way.
And, like, he, you know, as an adult, asked me which is bigger, the Earth or the Moon.
And I love that for him, you know?
That's fantastic.
He's just a delightful human.
He would sit next to me, we would recreate a historical space flight mission in Kerbal
Space Program, and he would just sit there and play guitar and sing about what I'm like
doing and asking questions.
And it's still one of my favorite things I've ever done.
Yeah.
You should definitely do something like that.
So basically, just, yeah, shoot the shit with a friend.
Get their curiosity going.
Get the curiosity going.
Let them just sit there and ask questions.
And it was awesome, like, I mean, yeah, those are some, I've done it a handful of times.
I think we probably did, like, 20 or 30 episodes or something, and it is, it's definitely something
I would like to get back to doing.
Can you in the game, like, go to the Moon?
Yeah.
So it's technically a different solar system.
It's the Kerbal system, and you're on the planet Kerbin.
So there's the Mun, M-U-N, there's a second Moon in the system on this planet.
It's called Minmus.
They didn't want to pay license fees or what?
Well, it's just a little easier.
It's a little bit smaller, so the physics are easier.
Oh, so it tries to be consistent with physics.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
The physics are all, like, real-world physics.
And I mean, there's aero simulations, there's all of its, like, one-to-one, you know, for
Earth physics.
That's awesome.
It's just on an easier scale, solar system, so it's easier to navigate.
But there's still, like, there's a planet called Eve that's kind of, like, Venus.
So it has a really thick atmosphere, really thick, really soupy, and a lot more gravity.
So it's just really, really hard to get off of.
It's relatively easy to land on Eve, but, like, that's kind of like the ultimate boss
in the game.
It's, like, getting off of Eve.
So that's one of my favorite things to do is build these crafts to get to Eve and try
to return home.
You mentioned that.
There's almost, like, a podcast thing.
You also did our ludicrous future.
What, is there a podcast in your future?
Are you thinking, do you enjoy the medium?
You're so incredibly good at talking.
It's less effort to, sort of, to produce.
Are you, is that something in the back of your mind, also?
Oh, man.
I love talking.
Yeah.
And you're very good at it, I mean, yeah.
I find that I, it's just, the problem with, for me, with podcasts, and I think that's
the podcasts that I've done, have tried to be relatively topical about, like, the current
spaceflight affairs.
And three or four years ago, that was actually, you know, manageable for me to keep up with.
These days, man, I can't keep, I just can't keep up with it.
I gave up on trying to be super topical, and I realized that maybe my biggest talent and
the things that resonate most with people is just trying to explain the, like, the basics
and the, and the root, it really gets, so I'm really just trying to, like, I'm trying
to do less live streams if I can, but then again, like, Starship, I gotta stream that.
There's no way I'm not gonna do that.
But I'm really just trying to get back to, like, making the deep dive videos where I
have no limit on how long and how deep and just really go for it, because that's actually
what I love to do the most.
Yeah, I mean, that's, like, views aside, those are just works of genius, and you're getting
better and better at them, and, like, that's the, that, in terms of the beautiful things
you can create in this world, those are that.
So, like, if you continue, especially where the way space travel is developing, like, that,
your voice is very much needed, so I think it's wise to, to do what you do best.
And I think I'm feeling more and more, especially this last year, I did a lot of, like, livestreaming
and traveling back and forth between Florida and California and here and just handling
major, like, big live streams really stressed myself out, and at the end of the day, I was
like, all of this is taking away from my ability to make videos.
And that's, ideally, honestly, if I, like, had my choice of things, I would just ignore
everything else and just sit and lock myself in a, in, in my house for a year and just
sit there and make videos and go and travel every, every other month, you know, for fun,
like, not for space stuff, just go and, and do some light traveling, you know, some.
Like around the moon or what?
Yeah, just some light traveling.
What advice would you give to young folks, or just folks struggling to find their way
in life, whether they're in high school, college or beyond, like how to have a life they can
be proud of, how to have a career they can be proud of.
You've had a really interesting journey yourself.
What from that can you draw, give your advice to others?
To be honest, like, I feel like it's so painfully obvious to follow your heart and follow, like,
what makes you happy that I'm just shocked that people allow themselves to sit on like
mediocrity, you know, like, to just sit there and be like, well, this is just what I do.
You know, and some, for a lot of people, that's perfectly fine.
Like I have, you know, some of my best friends are clocking in and out and they're perfectly
happy.
They have a wonderful life and absolutely no judgment there, of course.
But for people that are stuck feeling like they're not sure of, you know, what's next
and how to bring light into their world, you really just got to listen to, like, what
does make you happy?
You know, people feel guilty about, oh, I play video games for eight hours, then start
learning how to make a video game, learn how to do reviews of video games or make, there's
so many, you can work in the video game industry, you know, you don't have to isolate your love
from your work, you know, and it's just funny that we, you know, maybe, maybe you feel guilty
that you drink too much.
Okay.
I don't know if this is a good advice.
Go, go learn how to make alcohol, you know, be a.
Start a liquor company.
Yeah, start a liquor company.
That was terrible advice.
No, it's great advice, but it's also in your own story.
It seems like you've almost stumbled on, like, some of it is just exploration and keeping
your mind and heart open to discovering that thing that grabs you.
Right.
What are you fall asleep thinking about?
You know, like.
But you stumbled on the space almost accidentally, right?
I mean.
Yeah, yeah.
I think it would you, when you were doing up being a professional photographer, would
you have known?
Oh, no.
Well, do you want to know what I wanted to be when I was a kid?
What's that?
Well, first, when I was young, I wanted to be a tractor.
I'm not quite sure I understood.
Yeah.
That works.
That works.
Then I wanted to be a scorpion trainer.
Yeah.
Thought I could train him to cut people's lawns.
Better and better.
Yep.
Yep.
And then honestly, the majority of my childhood.
People's lawns got, I think you know, understanding of physics early on was just a little.
The Pinterest, man.
Pinterest.
Right off.
And from like probably six until like early college, I wanted to be a prosthetic engineer
and never once did I think about anything rockets, really.
You know, I had like a, I had like a space shuttle poster, I had some space shuttle Legos.
You know, I liked space and you know, I knew well of the space shuttle, but you know, it
was a far down the list as far as things that I thought were cool.
Ninja Turtles, Lamborghini, Coontosh, B17G flying fortress.
Yeah.
I guess that means if you just keep your heart open to falling in love with an idea with
a passion.
Yeah.
You could start from that, from Ninja Turtles and scorpions cutting the lawn to being one
of the best, one of the top educators, inspirational figures in space and actually traveling around
the moon.
Ninja Turtles, maybe one day stepping foot on the moon and Mars, even though you say
you're not interested.
It seems like you stating that you're not interested in certain things, somehow results
in you doing those things.
My friends joke that like, I'm going to be the first person to go to the moon against
their will.
Like, I guess.
All right.
Yeah.
Dang it.
All right.
What's the food like?
Guys, we're going to start a fundraiser.
Please like Tim just doesn't want to have to, he doesn't want to go, you know.
Definitely don't want to do it.
All right, Tim, you're an incredible person.
Thank you so much for everything you do.
I've been a fan of yours for a long time, not just the content, but just who you are
as a human being, just how excited you are for everything.
It's just an inspiration and your joy to watch.
Thank you for being you.
Thank you for doing the stuff you're doing.
I can't wait to see what you do next, man.
Thank you so much for talking with me today.
That was awesome.
Thank you so much.
It's my pleasure.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Tim Dodd.
To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now, let me leave you with some words from H.G. Wells, life forever dying to be
born afresh, forever young and eager, will presently stand upon this earth as upon a
footstool and stretched out its realm amidst the stars.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.