First Look Inside SpaceX's Starfactory w/ Elon Musk

- Hi, it's me, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut. Welcome back to Starbase Texas. This is of course, where SpaceX is building their Starship vehicles. This is part one of two parts, and part one, we're gonna take you around the factory, see what's new, see the ships, see the boosters, see star factory from the inside for the first time, and just learn a lot along the way. So stay tuned for part two where we'll take you out to the launchpad and we'll also follow up with Elon after the launch and see how it went. So without

further ado, let's go on another tour with Elon Musk. Cool. So yeah, as we were saying, I mean, obviously a, a lot has changed in the last couple years. I mean, [It Has?] this all maybe in theory, I don't know, I mean, - Looks exactly the same. It hasn't changed a bit, - But once was tents is now a permanent looking factory. - Yeah. It used to be intense in tents, and now it's in a building. Yeah. Yeah. So we've got this, I think, pretty good looking rocket factory building that we've almost completed. Completed the

exterior. This is, this will enable us to have serialized production of the rocket, especially the ship, which would ultimately be made, you know, long term probably be making a thousand a year of the ship. So, thousand a year. Yeah. Well, you know, gotta build a city on Mars. Yeah. - That's insane to think about. - Yeah, I don't, I mean, we may not build a thousand year right here, but I think this is, this is capable of a hundred a year. Really? Sure. Wow. It's only a ship every three days - And that's nothing. And

Well, it is funny 'cause now, you know, if you think about it, even Falcon 9 these days, you're producing a second stage about every two days. Yeah. And a few years ago, that would've been impossible, you know, no one would've imagined Yeah. That they're building an upper - Stage. And this year we'll make almost 200 upper stages of falcon. - That's - Unbelievable. And next year, probably over 200. - That's - So, so - That's a cadence of people I don't think are, you know, just even, you can't even imagine, you can't even fathom that

kind of, you know Yeah. Output like that. That's - Just crazy. Well, Falcon 9 is, is actually a heavy lift vehicle. So, you know, it's, there's roughly 40,000 pounds orbit. Yeah. So, which is in normal rocket language would be a heavy lift. Yeah. So now Starship's gonna be able to do a hundred tons orbit with Starship 2 maybe a little more than that with Starship 3 like at the 9 meter diameter, essentially, when the nine meter diameter is sort of fully stretched out to what ends up being from 120 meters total length to probably 140

or something like that. Then it's lot, this is like a lot of optimizations and improvement engine improvements, heatshield mass improvements, reducing the amount of propellant needed for landing, kind of basically do all the things that we've somewhat done with the Falcon 9. And you get to a pretty efficient vehicle. I think we'll be able to do over 200 tons to a useful orbit with Starship. That's insane. So, and that's with full reusability, that's a full reusability, which isn't Yeah. Insane. So that's twice the Saturn V with full reusability and full and rapid reusability. So it's

the booster and the ship are coming back to the launch site. Right. - Should we, should we take a look at, at what's going on in there? So, so as far as, you know, we're seeing all this, you know, you're talking about even version one maybe be able to do less than a hundred, but is is version one really even gonna, I feel like version one in my head - Is just a, yeah. Version one is a, is just to the, the point of, and, and really kind of Starship, we're version 1.6 / 7, I

don't know. Right? Yeah. It's like we're, we're like many iterations through on, on version one. Yeah. So, - And it's just like a, it's just a canvas. It's like a, it's a test experiment still at this phase. It's just a, yeah. I don't think people, they see it and they don't understand that like, this is all still a giant test at this stage. - Yeah. One way to look at technology is to look at it as like, you, you're rendering an image in successive levels of detail. So the first layer of the image is very,

very blurry and things are out of place. And then with the, with the next pass, it gets a bit more defined and things kind of shift into place and you do another pass and another pass, and eventually it's something that is refined and, and, and actually works. Right. But we're, we're in uncharted territory with, with Starship, so it's not like nobody's ever made a fully reusable orbital rocket. Right. And that's, that's really the, the critical breakthrough necessary for life to become multi-planetary. For us to become a true spacefaring civilization, we have to achieve full and

rapid reusability. Yeah. So I call it rapidly reusable, reliable rockets. - Reusable, RR squared or R-R-R-R. Yeah. Yeah. Pirate - Space - Pirates. There we go. - So, - And it's, the thing is that people need to remember is getting, achieving orbits in solved, I mean, you guys have been getting to orbit for a long time. Course. Reusing - It, solve, getting, I mean, getting to orbit at all was solved in the, in the fifties, right. I mean, for, you know, so, so I mean, I really don't think there's another point in point in another,

an expendable rocket. Right. In my opinion. So, or at least I think the math clearly demonstrates that it is, there is no point in a, in an expandable rocket, you have to achieve re reusability. We, we have reusability in cars, we have in airplanes, we have it in bicycles. Horses, yeah. It's bizarre to not have reusability in any other form of transport boats. It would be insane to like chuck a boat away after every trip. Right. But this is how rockets have worked for the vast majority of time. In fact, SpaceX is still the only

rocket that that is has any reusability with Falcon 9. Right. So with Falcon 9 we, we bring the boosters back. We, we, we fly them frequently. We bring the fairings back, we refly those. It's only the upper stage that is expended right now. It doesn't, Falcon 9 does not qualify as rapidly reusable. Right. Because the, the most of the time the booster is landing on a ship in the ocean. Right. - So it takes a few days to get it back. Yeah. Oh, that's speeding up like crazy. I mean, the cadence out of the cape

is unbelievable. - Yeah. We're trying to squeeze every like, quarter of a knot that we can out of the, the drone ships. Yeah. - So seems that way. - Yeah. We're, I mean, we're jacking up the power on the ships streamlining, streamlining them, increasing the power on the, the tugging vessels so we could just haul ass as quickly as possible. - Well, yeah. I think you just had your fastest turnaround just last week. There was a, I mean, it was something like, I don't remember the time, but it was something like two days or something.

Yeah. From, from catching back and then out to catch again was just you know, insane. It used to take so much longer. And yeah. Those are all those little things that people just aren't necessarily paying attention to that are continually improving and Yeah. - No, the SpaceX Falcon team is doing an incredible job of achieving fast turnaround reusability given the architecture. Yeah. Now that's, that's still, however, a couple days to get a booster back and then, you know, at least a few days to refurbish it for flight is still not rapid by aircraft or, you

know, vehicle, you know, and, and like, take cars, boats, planes. Right. You know, doing a trip every four days is not, would not Right. Cut it in a car. Right, right. Or an aircraft. Right. So with, with Starship, the booster comes back to the launch site is caught by, caught by the arms, or, you know, this would be quite spectacular Yeah. To see giant mechazilla arms catching a rocket in midair. Yeah. And, and then those, those arms put it back on the launch site. So you can have the booster back on the launch mount in,

well it's gonna come, it's gonna come back and land in like five or six minutes. Right. So, so then you can probably get it back on the launch site in, well if you really push it, you probably put get back on launch site in 10 minutes. Right. Or even five minutes. And then you can fill it up in half an hour. So you could, you could be ready to go an hour later from the booster standpoint, and then if you've got ships lined up, you can drop another ship on, you know, fill it with propellant.

And in theory you could be launching every couple hours. Yeah. - It's hard to imagine now, but it was hard to imagine where Falcon 9 is today. You know, 10 years ago no one would've imagined what Falcon 9 is doing now. So I I think time will tell that, you know, you can just keep chipping away at all those little improvements. And so do you think you'll actually - Fly? Yeah, Falcon 9 used to be have reusability measured in, in months, then weeks, then days, and then for, but for Falcon 9, the architecture is limited

to you. You really can't compress it down less than several days. Right. When you take the landing out to sea and then the necessary refurbishment of the booster Yeah. That is required. So with, with, with Starship, we'll take it from days to hours. Wow. Do you think? And yeah. And then, yeah, so then there's the, the ship has to go around the earth and, and depending upon what or orbit it has, it's gotta have a ground track that comes back over the launch site. Right. So that could take several orbits so it, the, the ship

could take, you know, several hours, sometimes half a day or something like that to come back to re-align. Yeah. Yeah. So you'd, you'd want to have a lot more ships than boosters. Yeah. So if you're really going for max launch rate, you probably want roughly, I dunno, five ships to for every booster. For every booster. - Yeah. And that's what you guys are building a pretty massive cadence here of, of ships and boosters already. Yeah. Now do you think, - Well, I mean, yeah, it's, it's pretty slow compared to what it will be like very

slow. But we're also iterating the design. So like each one is a little different from some cases, a lot different from the last one. Yeah. - Are any of these, what, are any of these gonna be the V2 yet? Are we starting to get close to V2 hardware yet, or? Yeah, - Just this, the, the stretch version is basically V2. Well, I guess it depends on whether we call it V2 or don't call it V2. The slightly stretched version is V2 arguably. That, so you can see, you know, what we have here is a Starship

with, I've seen the heat, the heat shield side and the non heat shield side. Yep. It's got the, what we call the Pez dispenser for tossing out the next generation Starlink satellites, the, the V3 satellites. So those will be very wide diameter like, like sort of, I dunno, seven meter diameter satellites. Yeah. So, you know, 22 feet or something like that. Right. So, - So are these actually gonna be like, are we hoping to see after, let's say this test goes well tomorrow, do you think the next one's actually gonna go for orbit and start

deploying test, like testing out as trying to deploy Starlink? Or are we, where do you think we're in, in that whole mix? Like is that maybe a few more down the road to start actually deploying payloads into orbit? - We'll see how this mission goes. I mean, this, this year is not, not about delivering satellites for Starship. It's all about ironing out the, the, the design question marks. So the, I mean the major things that remain to be solved for Starship, the biggest, the, the, the single biggest one is what does it take to get

through the high heating of reentry? So you can see the, the heat shield that we have there. We have some uh, well, let's say that un unsolved questions Yeah. On the heat shield. Yeah. A bunch of which we don't even know that they are questions. And, and, and some we're aware of because there've been challenges in the past, like with space shuttle Yeah. The, the sort of the hinge area and the hinge gap Yep. And sealing that hinge gap and not having hot gas just go flowing super fast through, through the, through the interface there.

Yeah. Through well at, at where the flap hinge is. Yep. 'cause if, if, if you get hot gas flowing through rapidly that that'll cook anything Yeah. Including the tiles. So, so you've, you've got a, you've got a hot gas seal at the, the forward and rear flap hinge. And so, you know, one of the key questions is, does that seal work? Right. We think it'll work, but it may not work. Then there are some, you know, questions of like how well do the tiles stay on. Right. There's a, there's a fundamental challenge here where the

tiles are ceramics, they're very brittle, they're like a, like a coffee cup Right. Or a dinner plate. Yeah. So you've got essentially a whole bunch of dinner plates stuck to a steel surface. The steel surface is getting cryogenically cold 'cause of the propellants, so it's shrinking. Yeah. So on ascent, the, the rocket is shrinking, it has shrunk. Yep. So you got, you can't have the gaps and the tiles be too tight or they will just shatter against each other. Yeah. Yeah. The gap will be too tight. Yep. Then when it's coming in for landing, the,

the shuttle, the, the, you no longer have the cryogenic propellant in the main tanks and the shuttles get, the tiles get very hot. Yep. So now they, they want to expand. Yep. So you've got a contracted inner surface and expanding tiles. Oh, geez. Yeah. Right. So, and, and the thing is like, you can't, you can't have a big tile gap because then the plasma will get in there and melt the primary structure behind it. Exactly. Exactly. So like what's the, what's the right tile gap? And that's gonna vary depending upon where you are on, on

the rocket on the ship. Yeah. You know, so it's, it's gonna be like some parts of the ship have cryogenic propellants, some don't. Yeah. There's also the, how well do the tiles attach if we attach them and they, and we accidentally break one. But it's hard to see then that that could be an issue. Right. And we currently think we're, we're probably not resilient to failure of a, to loss of a tile in the hot sections of the, of the ship that are the, the tank portion. So that the, so if if - The pressurized

- Areas Yeah. The pressurized areas. Exactly. So, and, and so technically the nose will be pressurized too. So if the, if the pressurized areas lose a tile and then you melt that area, that'll cause it to pop. Right. Right. So the ship will explode. Yeah. So now people have asked like, why are there some missing tiles in the rear of the - Ship? Well, like right now, flight four, you got I think three tiles missing right now. Yeah. Yeah. - So those are in the rear of the, of the ship, which is un pressurized region.

Yeah. Yeah. So that's an un pressurized re region where we think we can see, well you can, you can have a melt through of the un pressurized region and it will not cause failure of the, the vehicle. Yeah. Yeah. Like you might have a little hole there or something. Right. But it's not gonna pop the vehicle. - Right. So that's, you're literally doing it as like an A:B test almost of like Yeah, we see what happens if we're missing - Tile. Yeah. What happens if you lose a tile? Huh? Now we, we do have plans

for a secondary shield beneath the tiles that is much better than what we have right now. So right now we, and some of the site can't say the details of it because it's like ITAR control is sort of secret. Right. But the current material we use, we think is not resilient to a tile failure. We have a new design that we think is resilient to a tile failure. - So behind the underlying structure. - Yeah. And essentially it's got ablative. So if you do, if you lose the tile, you have to replace, give your backup

up the ablative. Right, right, right. So you, you, you'd have to, you'd, you'd, you'd lose out on reusability because of the lost tile and the, and the ablative, - But you have a, but - At least it's intact. Yeah. - And you'd recover it, re refurbish it Yeah. And get it back out on the Yeah. On the fleet. That's - Cool. And especially for carrying people, which ultimately we, you know, expect Starship to carry it maybe a hundred people at a time to Mars. Right. And also to the moon. Yeah. Then, you know, it's gotta

be super reliable. It's gotta have no, no, ideally no single point of failure. Right. - So have you given up, I a long time ago, you're talking about transpirational cooling or active regen and stuff. Did that just kind of didn't make the trade or - I, - The mass trade that we did, I think it's this point, like it's four years ago or something like that. Yeah, maybe five. It, it seemed like at that time it would be at least twice as heavy as a, a ceramic heat shield. Now since then, the weight of our

ceramic heat shield has grown. Yeah. And then when you factor in the, the secondary shield, that's additional mass. Right. So, I don't know, it may not be that big of a difference between actively cooling a heat shield and, and having ceramic tiles. - Have you seen what, what Stoke Space out in Washington is working on where they have a, it's of course a aerospike's gonna come, come outta my mouth. 'cause for some reason Aerospike comes out every time we talk about anything. But it's a aerospike, but the base plug is actually the active region heat

shield. And so as it, and it's expander cycle, so as it comes back through the atmosphere, it's actually, you know, heating, they're using hydrogen to, to actively regenerate, you know, and cool the heat shield and just gets dumped out the, the nozzles basically as it's, you know, as it's going. And that actually also gets some of the gaskets vented out through the middle. So you also have like a, a boundary layer there too of, of gaseous helium or hydrogen in the, in the front. And it's being actively regen. I think it's, it's a really cool,

cool concept and I was really impressed. It's a, it's, it made me just think about like regen, you know, active regen in a different way. And I thought that was pretty neat. But I know you guys had talked about the transpirational cooling years ago, so it's, I didn't know if Yeah, - I think it's probably correct that that, that a ceramic heat shield is gonna do better than transpiration. There's also the question of like, if, if once if you go to Mars and you're coming in and, and hot and you're come or you and you're

coming back to earth, you're coming in. If you come back from, from Mars to earth, you're coming in very hot. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's not clear where the transpiration cooling could succeed there. It came up there. Yeah. - Your here's my wacky dumb idea of the day is on the inside of the tank, if you had like a thermal camera, you have like a fire hose with cryogenic coolant, just spray if there's a hot a burn through Sure. Spray it down from the inside. I don't know, I'll just, I'll always be happy to throw out

the dumb the dumb ideas. Especially when you have header tanks there, you know, that are filled with, with the cryo all pressurized ready to go, you know, all it's gonna take is one, one heat shield tile missing potentially and could have a Yeah. A bad day. You know, - There's a lot of ways to solve the problem. Yeah. So the, I mean, what matters is that it is solved. Yeah. Even though like, yeah, there are, there are many ways to achieve pool reusability. What matters is that, is it is achieved. - Yeah. A hundred -

Percent. And then bet once you're in the sort of over the hump of full reusability where the one system is slightly better than the other is a secondary concern, right? - Yeah. It's tomato, tomato at that point. Yeah. Yeah. Should we keep moving along here? Yeah. So when, with flight three, when it, when it broke up, that was mostly just because obviously it couldn't maintain orientation, so it didn't even have a chance of - Having the heatshield. Oh yeah. You would've noticed that the engines, there was a lot of like fire coming from the engines

area. Just not, you know, that's not good. Yeah, yeah. On reentry. - Right. Definitely not when the - Engines aren't on. - Yeah. - So this is, you can see we're just finishing, we we're try to get the shell completed as quickly as possible, but we still have a lot of work to do on the interior of the factory. But this will dramatically improve the production of the rocket Yeah. As being able to move from one station to another, which is a linear adjacent flow. - Hmm. I don't, I mean, I assume, I don't really

know what that means, but, - Well, I mean, the, the thing that really matters for, you know, people talk about the moving production line of sort of Henry Ford and the automobiles. What actually matters is linear adjacent flow as opposed to a production line that moves - Hmm. So, so - The, so it's, it's simple. - Okay. - Okay. Yeah. Like one thing leads one, one step leads to another Yeah. And it just, and things move along in a cadence. Okay. Yeah. Yep. - And you don't have to have the physical, - It doesn't matter

whether there's a convey belt or not got, it's the secondary concern. - That's the second. Yeah. Got - It. Doesn't matter. It just matters that, that, that there's a, there's a tempo. Yeah. So every station has roughly the same amount of work time. Right. And things move from one station to the next station and the specialization of labor at each station. Yes. Okay. So these are the principles that actually matter. - And that's what you guys kind of solved by doing the tents first. 'cause you could just willy-nilly rearrange things, see how things were actually

falling, see what order things were going in. But - The tents were very inefficient once you know what you wanna build. Yes. - Yep. Yeah. So it was the, your five step thing of don't get too far along in the automation before you - Yeah. You don't know what you're gonna build. Yep. Like it's simple to convey just how, how much, like, you know, this, this is, you don't, we don't even know what the rocket would look like. - Yeah. Yeah. - So, - And in, in some senses you still don't necessarily know it's still

changing - At this point. We at this point we're confident of that this architecture will is is at least one of the solutions. Yeah. Let's not say there couldn't be other solutions like the one you talked about, but that this will work. Yeah. It's just a question of ironing out the bugs and improving the performance of everything from the engines to the avionics to the primary structure, the heat shield, everything. Yeah. And that's, but it will work. Yeah. I think I was mentioning, or I was beginning to say that the, the, so the most important,

the toughest remaining problem is a, a reusable orbital heat shield. So there's never, nobody's ever made it reusable orbital heat shield. So the space shuttle is the closest. Yeah. But that took I think something like nine months and thousands of people to refurbish. Right. So it's difficult to call when can, can I call something that requires so much work to refurbish as truly re reusable? Yeah. Certainly not rapid. Yeah. So for the first time ever, there needs to be a, a rapidly reusable orbital heat shield, which no one has ever done. So it's a hard

problem. Right. So that's why I'd say that's, that's the number one biggest remaining problem. And the, the, the goal of this flight, and really the flights the, for the rest of this year is get through the high heating. So the, the heat shield survives. Yep. And, and then, and, and the, the ship is still operational and is able to steer to a specific location and do a landing burn Yep. In the ocean. Yes. And, and then the, the booster, we wanted to be able to, for this flight to come back and do a landing boom

at a specific location. Yep. So do we know, how - Far out is that gonna be? Do you - Know? It's pretty far out. I mean, we're, but, but I think we're pretty close to that. If we don't solve it on this flight, I think we'll solve it in, in the next two or three flights. So just having this, the, the, the, the booster, do the hot staging come back, you know, do a boost back steer, steer correctly and to a precise location Yeah. And do a landing burn and then, and, and, and essentially do

a simulated tower catch. So it's - Like, so will the tower actually - No. It's just a Okay. It, it, the rocket will think it's Right. Not trying to get caught by the tower. Right. - At least the, I thought it would be kind of cool if the tower mimicked it, you know, out here to make sure. Because I even wonder like how do we know the tower's gonna be okay? You know, like after a launch like that to be able to Well we, - We can, we, we operate the tower after the launch so

we can tell if there's any damage. Yeah. But yeah, if, if, if this launch goes perfectly we'll be able to, we'll we'll have the, the, the booster do a boost back and a, a controlled aero con, aero controlled descent to a specific location. Yes. Initiate landing, burn and be caught by an imaginary tower. Yep. Yep. And then the ship, if things go perfectly, which probably won't, it'll get through high heating, it will still be fully operational. It will control itself to a specific location and in the ocean, and then initiate a landing burn and also

pretend as to getting caught by tower. Wow. Now I think it, it, I think we've got maybe a 50 50 chance of the heat shield working. I mean - That's decent. - Yeah. Yeah. Like it's a high, a high uncertainty, but like roughly 50 50. But if not on this flight, it then in the next two or three flights, I, I think we'll solve that. Yeah. - Well, and you guys, let's, let's kind of head over here. You guys did make a decent amount of changes to hopefully ensure reentries better this time. Like you added

some new roll thrusters. - Oh - Yeah, yeah. And a few things like that. - Well, yeah. - What, what happened there that the roll thrusters got, because they got clogged it sounds like. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Don't tell me that was the, the old conversation we had of hot gas thrusters and all that stuff. Or was it, but still, I, I'm still confused. 'cause - They, they, they got ice, ice, ice in the, in the valves. - Okay. In the valves. Not necessarily, or in the, somewhere along the stream. - They, they got clogged by

ice. We're not sure exactly how. Yeah. But, but if water, ice, we'll get into the, the, the oxygen side, there's a small amount. So since we're the location that we're tapping off the engine is not, is not pure O2, it's got a little bit of a water ice. - Why - Is that? It's, it's, it's, it's ox rich gas. - It is ox. So is it coming off the actual Yeah. Like exhaust or the turbine side. Yeah. Really? Yeah. So wouldn't it have, - Wouldn't even have a little bit of it's ox rich gas, but

it's Yeah, no, it's, it's got burnt fuel. - Yes. Wouldn't it have a little bit of CO2 in it too then? And can that turn into an ice? Do you freeze CO2 with that temperature? 'cause I think, yeah, - Well anyway, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's got stuff that can turn solid at cryogenic temperatures, the thing that's relevant, right. So - Yeah. Ice, whether it be water, ice or Yeah. Or CO2 ice or whatever. Ice, ice. - Yeah. And it's solid stuff that does that. Blocks, - Blocks things. - Blocks things. So we do, we

we we've improved the sort of ice strainers or the ice catchers. Yeah. We improve the valves. And something I think we'll do in the future is move to, for critical valves, serious parallel valves. So any one valve failure does not, no matter what happens, does not take out the ability of the ship to orient itself correctly. - So are you avoiding doing like a more of a traditional heat exchanger, like around raptor? You know, like, like I think Merlin probably does that, where it has a heat exchangers to heat up to be able to ride

stuff. The helium. Yeah. I'm just curious. I've never heard of an engine using like already combusted to be able to be the ullage gas, you know, off of the, off the preburner. That's pretty unusual I think at least, I don't know. - Yeah. Well we're, our rocket is autogenously pressurized. Yeah. So we're pressurizing the fuel side with gaseous fuel. Yep. And the oxide with mostly gaseous oxygen. Yep. And yeah. Now in the case of autogenously pressurized, we have to create the gas. We're not merely warming up a gas. We have to produce the gas. -

Oh, interesting. Is that how the shuttle did it too then? 'cause the shuttle ran on the RS-25's had autogenous pressurization on - The, on the hydrogen side. Yeah. I think that it, I, - Well I guess I don't know if it's on both. - Was it on both? I don't know. I don't know. I think it was at least on, on the hydrogen side. So maybe on both. But when, when you, when you have autogenous pressurization, you've gotta produce the gas. You're not just heat it up. Okay. So there's a lot more mass you better

come up with Yeah. - Literally. - Yeah. It actually affects our max power on the, especially on the fuel side. So the fuel pump has to work well, both pumps have to work harder, but the fuel pump especially is a limiting factor. Like if we turned off autogenous pressurization on the fuel side, we'd actually be able to get more power out of the fuel pump. - Oh yeah. 'cause you're having to drive all that. - Yeah. You've gotta, you've gotta gas that you're, you're, you're, you're bleeding mass flow right. From the, you know, from the

engine. Yeah, from the engine. Yeah. You're, and yeah, I mean there's, there's quite a lot of work in, in taking a cryogenic liquid and heating it up to be a hot gas. Right. So you're a phase transition and, and, and that big temperature delta. Yeah. So it's actually a, a lot of work to produce the hot gas from a cryogenic liquid. - That's crazy. So is that what also, can we, can we kind of step in here and see the, all the boosters? This is crazy. Is that what also was the blockage of the LOx

tank on the booster too then? Similar ice buildup, blockage? Or was it on flight three? The Raptors were shutting down during boost. Backburn had an ice buildup. Is it a similar thing to that? - Sorry, it's hard to hear you. - Yeah. Is that what caused the, the booster to shut down on flight three with the ice ice buildup? Was it a similar type of thing? Like an autogenous pressurization issue that clogged a few of the engines? - Yeah. We didn't have enough pressure to start the engines. - Okay. - So we're low low pressure

start the, the, the, the full answer is quite complicated. But because arguably we could have started with with lower pressure or we, we didn't need to start all the engines anyways. This, this time we expect to have a lot more pressure and we are able to start at lower pressure and we don't need to have all the engines fire. Okay, cool. You know, hopefully. Yeah. So, - Geez, this is crazy. Wow. The scale is just almost impossible to to imagine. And - Yeah, three, three boosters. - Wow. That's just insane. This looks so cool. -

Dang. - Lot of engines. - Yeah. It's an insane amount of engines. I mean, right here we're looking at what, 99 Yeah. Engines for these three vehicles. Nine ounces. Nine nines. - Nine, nine Raptors on a wall. - 99 engines and a ship ain't one. Yeah. That's absolutely insane. The scale of these things, it's just hard to, hard to fathom. Wow. So are you guys are trying to move down to three grid fins, is that right? From the, from the four Is that - It's sort of high priority. It's a, it's a mass optimization to

move you, you definitely only need three. Yeah. And I think technically you could do it with two if you're willing to oscillate - Yeah. Like turn for yard, then road roll again for pitch and Yeah. - That's definitely, you know, you're asking for a bit of trouble if you just have two grid fins. Right. But it is technically possible. Right. The three three for sure. But that's, that's like a, that's a fairly minor optimization, right. - With the, the, the cowbell diverter things, you know, the, the ullage gas thrusters or whatever. I need to clear

something up for myself because I'm getting confused. So cold gas thruster, we'd say like, would be like a nitrogen thruster where it's just literally compressed nitrogen goes out of an nozzle. - Cold gas is room temperature gas usually - Is room temperature. And then are we, would we consider that almost like a warm gas - Thruster? Yeah. Warm gas thruster. - And then like a hot gas would be where it's a reaction. Probably like a bi a bi propellant thruster still - For both the booster and the ship. You don't really need much control. The

attitude control needed is, is small. So you just can't have a leaky valve or a stuck valve [or a stuck Valve]. - Yeah. That seems, I I, this is like the third time we've - Falcon 9s, is all cold gas. - What is - Falcon 9s all cold gas. And we've done, I think six starts. So it's, it's, it's cold gas that has been maintaining propellant settling and attitude control for, you know, 12 hours. Right? - Yeah. So, and you have a lot of it on tap. So that's, I don't know why that's still a

hard one for me to fathom. Even though we've talked, this is the third time - Now its got a lot of hot gas. Yeah. Or warm gas, - Especially when it's empty. It's, it's all warm, warm gas. Yes. - The, the delta delta V needed is tiny. Yeah. So it's very tiny thrusters are needed. Ah. So yeah. - So how much do you feel like after you fly, how much is it like, oh God, we have to change all of these? Like is it, is it literally you find something on one and then you're literally

like in immediately having to make changes on all these things? Like everything that's in production? Yeah. - You're just learning lessons. There's, there's hundreds learning changes that actually take place. Not a few, yeah. Hundreds. If you go to a detail level, there might be thousands of changes that happen, - Especially when you get software involved. I'm sure it's - Software for sure. I'm just taking a, talking hard. It's hardware. If you're just, look, the hardware changes across the ship and the, the booster and the engines, it's thousands of changes between each flight. But many of

them are very small. But a very small change could be a big deal. - Imagine how long it'd take a traditional aerospace company that had a, a rocket they're working on to make a thousand changes between flights and then fly it two months later. I mean that's, that's what we're doing here. This is, you're barely over two months from the last flight and the vehicle's had over a thousand changes - Easily. Over a thousand, several thousand probably. So that's insane. - Like - You said, a bunch of 'em, a little changes, but say like, is

it different in a way that could have a, an effect on the rocket? Yeah. Yeah. That's probably several thousand. - And do you feel like for now, are you generally like kind of overbuilding them to just try to get through the point of being able to prove the heat shields prove all the stuff and then eventually you're work on - Mass? Yeah. We're, we're trying to answer the questions that I mentioned. The biggest question being can, what does it take to get through max heating? Yep. With a reusable heat shield, then being able to have

the booster come back and be caught by the, the tower Yep. And have the, the ship also come back and be caught by the tower. Yeah. So those are the three very big things that need to happen. - And that's in your mind when you're launching these, including like flight 1, 2, 3, you're, those are the questions. Like those flights are just to answer bonus questions - Full reusability. - See I think people just don't understand that that's, you're not looking at trying to get out there and, and launch a satellite tomorrow. You're trying to

answer the - Questions. The payload, the payload for all the flights this year is data is data just to learn things. So it's, it's design refinement to understand what actually, what, what works, what doesn't work. Yeah. You know, some things sometimes work Right. Which can throw you off 'cause it worked once, but doesn't work again because of the combination of factors isn't the same. Yep. So, so you want to have, so the first things you'll find are like fundamental errors of design where success was not one of the possible outcomes. Yep. Then in some cases

it's kinda like Russian roulette success is sometimes possible. Possible, right? Yeah. But once in a while you, you blow yourself up. Yeah. Yeah. So that's gonna require a lot of flights to, to figure out those like the, the one in 10 failure, the one in a hundred failure, that kind of thing. Yeah. There'll be a whole bunch of things like that. - Well, kind of even like the SN stuff when 8 was darn close to landing 9 was almost a reversion feeling. 10 was better, 11 was worse. Like there's a little bit of a ping

pong as things were kind of being tried and tested. And you're still kind of in that phase. Even even at this scale. I just don't think people are used to that. You know? - Yeah. I mean a lot, a lot of those like early tests were, were also just about us learning how to work with stainless steel Right. As the primary, primary structural element. Yeah. And working with liquid methane. Right. And with a, a full flow stage combustion engine. Right. As the, as the engine. Yeah. So a lot of what people saw was that the,

the, the flight, you know, did it land or not land, but we're just trying to figure out how do we work with steel Right. And how do we work with a methane as a fuel and a new - Engine architecture - And a totally new engine architecture - And new flaps. Like things that are just Yeah. - Do the flaps - New and novel. - Yeah. You have to actuate the flaps. You need, you need very powerful actuators for the flaps. Yeah. 'cause there are a lot of force. It's like an airplane moving its wings.

- Right, right. So - These are very powerful actuators that are needed. - Yeah, absolutely. - So, you know, and all of the, the the, like the, the engine to vehicle interactions are very complicated. Yeah. So, but you, you don't really see those on the test stand when you, when you're firing the engines on the test stand, you don't get the engine to vehicle interactions. And then you've got different Right. Engines vehicle interactions in flight than you do on the ground. - Yeah. Oh a hundred. Especially when you're changing orientation of a vehicle. Yeah. And

different G-Force and zero G mean all the things - There, there's no test stand that can test a, a rocket at 17,000 miles an hour doing six Gs Right. In, you know, every different orientation. Right. Exactly. It's not, it's not possible. Yep. - So you have to fly it. - Yeah. You, you do as much as you can on the ground, then you gotta fly it, try to figure things out in simulation. But a lot of things are not gonna be included in the simulation. So it'll work in some, but not in reality. - Exactly.

It's crazy. Shall we keep moving? - Yeah, - Sure. - Are you - I over here that way? Yes sir. We are just about to de-rig from the crane and then - Right on. - Geez. - Wow. - Are we good down there? Yep. - As you can see, the Raptor is a lot cleaner than it used to be. It looks like this less stuff, but Yeah. - That - Already. - Yeah. - But these, these are still not like the, we're not to V3 here yet, right? No, - No. - Is the V3 the

same thing as like the Leet (733T) engine? Is that, are those - Sort of the LEET engine was, I think we will do that at some point, but that's like a, that's really a total tear up. Really. Yeah. Yeah. It looks like the LEET engine, but it's way more expensive because it still has printed parts, for example. So, but the, yeah, the next gen Raptor engine needs no heat shield. - Right. - So, - And because it's exposed, it has to have cooling. So there's integral cooling circuits throughout the, all the parts. So it looks

very simple on the outside, but it's complicated on the - Inside. Like even all throughout the, like the preburner and the Yeah. Gas manifolds and everything. It's all, - All that stuff you see stuck on the side disappears. - Wow. - And that's actually, you like that's being worked on now already. That's already, - Yeah. We have a design, we have a design that that, that works. It, it, it, it looks like the engine isn't complete. - Well yeah, you had that, that that render on the, that presentation it just looked like literally like a,

it looks - Like it's missing - Parts mock up. Yeah. Yeah. - But it's actually just the, the secondary circuits and integral cooling are part of each part, so Wow. So if you have a secondary cooling circuit, you run the secondary cooling circuit or, or secondary flow circuit through the various parts. Right. And we also eliminate a whole bunch of bolted and welded joints. So especially the bolted joints, you really wanna get rid of those. Yeah, - Yeah. - You know, - Bolts and flanges and seals of hell, especially if they're hot. So Yeah. The,

the next gen Raptor engine is actually a little difficult to service because there are parts that are, that don't have a flange anymore, it's just welded shut. Right, - Right, right. Yeah. So you're just hoping to be able to get the design up to be so reliable, hopefully that Yeah, you just don't need a service - Result. You need to change the part, you need to literally cut it open. - Wow. So you'll probably, at this point you might as well just like swap out the whole engine, I assume and just ah, - No, we

cut it open. Yeah, - Yeah, - We got it open. - Alright. It's just crazy. Yeah. - I mean there's a massive, massive bolted flange for the hot gas manifold that's transferring hot gas from the . Hot, hot from the fuel pump side. Yeah. You can see that - Three, - It's, it's, well it's hard to point at 'cause it's up in the air, but the thing that joins the, the, the, the - Fuel the ox. Yeah. The fuel to - Pump to the ox - To pump, yeah. The kind of band looking thing. -

Right. Yeah. The band looking thing that, that's a, that has a, a mon, a monster flange at the top and bottom. Mm. And you want to get rid of those two - And that has to hold a lot of pressure. - Hot. That's a whole lot of pressure. Lot of pressure. Yes. - Geez. - I mean you can see there's a lot of flanges here. I mean this valve is like, well this, this pump is like made of flanges Wow. Flange, flange flange, flange flange - And are, and like, - I mean these are beast

beast level flanges - And these are all there. So there is no like, active cooling inside of two like this or the current version of Raptor like this. There's no - Current version. Does not have, there's, there's no, there's no, well there technically is some, but there's not, the current version of raptor does not have sufficient cooling to be able to resist being in the, in hot gas plasma. Hot plasma. Yeah. It's not, yeah, it - Would melt. That's why I need, that's still why I need the shield here - Then. Yeah. That's why it's,

it's heavily shielded. But next gen, a bunch of the flanges you see here will disappear and it will have integral cooling and integral secondary flow circuits. Yeah. - Yeah. Do you guys look, is it possible to do a, - There's a whole bunch of engines down there pretty densely packed. It's a lot of thrust. - It's a lot of thrust. It is crazy. It looks like a, when you go to a Christmas street store or something just, yeah, that's insane. - Each one of these is the most advanced rocket engine ever made - And they're

just being cranked out like it's nothing. - Yeah. Super high pressure, high efficiency you've got a full flow stage. Combustion all the good. It's insane. Yeah. - Is there, is there ever been any look into, like, I know, you know, with aircraft turbines you can do, you know, like some kind of cooling on the actual turbine blades. Is there any way to do any kind of cooling on the turbine blades and, - And Raptor, we've, we've had that discussion many times. We probably head back into the, and see the main factory. - Geez. I just

can't believe how much has changed out here. You have two mega bays. I mean, last time I was out here there was only one mega bay and it's neither nothing had doors. Now you have doors. That's a pretty good creature comfort. It is turning into a real factory, you know, it's, yeah. Well this is a real factor that we're building here. Yeah. - So - Quite big. It's hard to keep up with everything out here. - Yeah. So this is a, we'll finally have a real factory for Starship, not just making it in tents. Yeah.

So long term we wanna try to get the thrust of Raptor up to around 330, maybe a little higher, maybe 335 metric tons. So that'll take us to a 10,000 ton thrust at lift off. - That's absolutely absurd. Sorry. That's absurd. Yeah. Yeah. It's absurd. Like beyond absurd. That's coming up on three times the amount of powers of Saturn V. - That's, yeah, that'd be roughly three times. So Saturn five. Yeah, - That's what you need. Like - 22 million pounds of thrust Saturn five is seven and a half. Oh - My gosh. - So

- Absolutely insane. Well, and I think, you know, there's this kind of feeling of why aren't we, aren't people doing things like the, you know, the Saturn V being built in the, you know, in the - Sixties, Saturn V is primitive compared to Starship. - Yes. And it's insanely expensive. It wasn't sustainable. - Yeah. And it was, it was expendable. So yeah, Starship is in a, I mean, just any rocket that is fully reusable, which no one has achieved because it is extremely difficult. Not because they didn't think about - Reusability. Right. Right. - So

it was just too hard. So, and obviously we haven't achieved that either. You know, we, we've gotta, I'm hopeful that we'll achieve achieve it by next year. So, but at least, at least we have a situation where we have a design where success is one of the possible outcomes. Yeah. So no, no prior design where success is one of the possible outcomes for full reusability. - Well, and if you think about it, let's say you guys for some reason just were like, okay, screw it. We have to launch 300 metric tons to orbit. You could

absolutely, you could. You could expend a rocket if you like. Absolutely had to for some reason. Yeah. - It be pointless. - It would be pointless. But like you have that capability like for the first time. Oh yeah. Since this added five. - Well, I mean generally if you can do 200 tons reusable, you can do double that expendable. Right. - 400 tons. Yeah. Yeah. Which is insane. Yeah. I mean, even to the point of if you had to do, let's say you had to do, you know, HLS or something to try to speed it

up or something and you know, if orbital refuelings not done or something, - No orbital re refilling, I mean, I don't wanna count check before they hatch, but, or orbital re refilling is really just docking with ourselves. Yeah. We dock with the space station all the time. Right. A space station is way harder to dock with than ourselves. - And but will it be all docking up to a, to like a depot? Is that kinda the plan? Is there to be an orbital? It depends on how - Quickly you wanna launch. So if you, if

you're gonna the moon, I don't know. I don't think you need a de depot. I think you just send a ship up and send tankers immediately. Yeah. And your boil off rate will not be too bad. Okay. So you now for the moon, you'd want to have a dedicated earth orbit to moon system because you don't need a heat shield. Right. Well I need a heat shield to brake I suppose. Well, prob probably actually. Yeah. The, the moon's like harder than it seems because it doesn't have an atmosphere. Right. So you can't use the atmosphere

to brake. So, - But if you have time - You can, I guess you probably have anyway. It's like yeah, for landing on the moon, obviously you don't need flaps, don't need heat shield and you need very little thrust. Right. But you do need pretty big landing legs. So in case you one leg lands on a boulder and one lands on a crater. Absolutely. And you don't wanna tip over. - Right. So Because that's a, you know, I think HLS, I don't think a lot of people understand that we're going from a 16 tonne lunar

lander with the Apollo program to a, you know, I mean I don't even know how heavy HLS is gonna be when it, when it lands. It's gonna be at, you know, at least 10 times that massive and or wait Yeah. At least 10 times that massive and acres of volume compared to anything that was landed during the Apollo program. And I just think that people aren't necessarily ready for how, how big Starship will be on the moon. It's basically a habitat when it's on the moon, you know, it's not just a little tiny tent like

the Apollo lunar landers. Yeah. - Yeah. I mean I think the, the next step is to go beyond Apollo and have a permanently occupied base on the moon. Yeah. Like Moon base alpha, that's the next step. So you don't wanna just have a few people there for a few hours who wanna have a permanently occupied base. Right. - This factory's huge. Yeah. This, and I guarantee we came back in a year, it'd be just up and running like a normal factory already. - I mean it'll be, this will be filled with equipment in three months.

- Geez. So is there a decent amount of like, new stuff that's like, is there hardware coming in here and tools that are coming here that will unlock like Yeah, just mostly production rate or even like new ideas or, or what's that kinda like? - I mean, you can build any given design in an artisanal way slowly with, you know, by having a lot, a lot of crews come to the same station, but in order to have real production, you've gotta move from one station to another where you have the same amount of work at

each station. Right. So this is meant to have a lot of stations. So you'll see a lot of work in Yeah. And you'll be able to see very clearly, I guess where the, where the blockages are - And make changes to it then. Yeah. - Geez. - It's so funny to think about how, I know we were only five years ago out here when the MK1 and all you had was a tent and Stargate was the biggest thing out here. That little Stargate thing. Yeah. And now you, I almost missed it trying to pull into

Stargate today 'cause - It looks like a little hut. - Yeah. It's like dwarfed by absolutely everything else out here already. Yeah. It's just crazy. Oh, that feels nice. - Air conditioning. - Holy crap. It just keeps going. Yeah. I thought that was the main thing. - Yeah. Geez. It was more behind that wall. Yeah. - Holy crap. So this is more of a, a real factory here. This is what the other side will - Look like. Yeah. The other side will look like this. You know, there were, we're obviously just checking each tile to

make sure it's not cracked and it's well seated. - How are you feeling about the, the way they're actually secured on there? Like the, the mounting point? Is that - Decent? We're continuing to iterate on the mounting point. - I always, I - Mean it's, it has a, you know, 99% of the time it works well. So it's just a question of figuring out what are the 1% that have issues with cause cause the tile to crack or some other problem. - I always keep thinking the, the one of the big challenges that you can't

access the, you can only access it. You can't access it from either side really. Like there's not a bolt you can screw on because you have, it's a snap-on. It's a, it has to be a snap-on. Yeah. Have you ever seen the like furniture mountings where like you have two pieces of wood joined together and then you spin a magnet on one end? Oh yeah. And it spins the nut on. I've always wondered like if something like that could be, - I mean this is basically, it snaps on and you pretty much have to break

the tile to pull it off. - Really? Yeah. - Huh. That's meant to go on and stay on. - Yeah. And we still see, like even on the, the parts that aren't tapered up, you know, like on the main's body, we still see some, some horizontal seams. What's the, what's the deal with those seams? I know that was like pretty bad. - No, they, they don't really matter that much. They're just different sections of the nose cone. So now this is somewhat of a debate. You could wait until the whole nose cone is made and

then, and then put the attachment points on at that point. So currently we put the tile attachment points on in sections. Okay. So that's why you've got a line, the - Horizontal line. Okay. Yeah. It's probably just a lot harder to, once it's all manufactured, it's so massive it'd be hard to put all the attachment points on. Is that kind of the problem - There? There's more one way to skin a cat. This is just a cat getting skinned. Yeah, - Yeah. - Yeah. It's not, it's not to say that there is not a better

way to do it. Yeah. There are. The first order of business is to get one way at all That works. Yep. Thereafter to optimize. Yep. - Hmm. - Watch your step here. - There's still a lot of work that we gotta do here. - Oh, that's cool looking. That's, is that the, the landing tank for Yeah, - It's the header tank. - Header tank there. That's insane. Geez. And then are those COPVs propped up against it like that then? Is that what those Yeah. Geez. - Gotta pressurize the head attack with something when the engine's

not on. - Exactly. Wow. So the, like the Pez door that we see on Starship now is that, do you think that's gonna stick around or is there still gonna be like a chomp or someday? Or is it - Well, for the Starlink satellites, they're pretty flat. So - The chomper makes sense. - There's no point in having a giant fairing for a, you know, flat little, it's a giant flat pancake. Right. - What did the, the door test go reasonably well on the last one, or, because I think you guys aren't doing anything with

it had some issues. Yeah. It's pretty rudimentary of course, I assume. - Yeah. But it's, well that you've got this sort of really quite sophisticated factory on a sandbar. On a sandbar by the Rio Grande. Yeah. Yeah. It's like an alien spaceship landed. Right. - Seriously. So these are, are these thrusters here then? Yeah. Is that what these are - Little, little old jet packs. This will take the detailed stuff of the, that might run a foul and ITAR stuff - Deal. - Yeah. I mean, I don't know if, if anyone is gonna copy us,

that would be, that's a hard thing to copy. - It's come a long way since three tents. Yeah, it sure has. I mean, everything's clean in this. There's no mud and dust. It's better when - It's has doors on it. Yeah. - I mean, everything used to have mud and dust. Yes. And birds and things. - There's only some finite mud and dust, but it's much smaller - Than, it's a long ways from - MK1. Yeah. Yeah. I mean the MK1 thing, it looked like the junk yard at Tatooine - Which was charming. Yeah. -

It was a lot of dust and mud. Farside rocket. - Yeah. - The bar, the farside rocket. I mean, MK1 was conceptual as a concept piece. Yeah. Concept, I'd say concept art. It was - Part of the journey. Absolutely. Yeah. So James pointed out that the, this actually wraps all the way around the, like all of that's still back there. There's more to it. Yeah. That's coming down. That's the dome line. Jeez. That's the dome line. Dome line and the coils. That's the starting line's over there. That's crazy. - Yeah. So we do have an

existing factory that's wrapped around the one you just saw. So that's, that's where we make the, the ship and the booster. So then - That will open up and you'll start Yeah. Serpentining it basically through there. - Yeah. Look that we'll take down that wall there. That is, once we have the doors on the other side, we will take down that wall and then you'll just have factory. We'll just kind of go as far as the eye can see. - It's so much bigger than I thought from the road. I mean, it looks big from

the road, but it's insane. Yeah, it's - Ridiculous. And obviously the, the, the sections get gradually bigger as, as you go south, right? So that's why things start off sort of short and then get taller as you go along - Even. Yeah. Even the roof line does that, right? - Yeah. It's gonna get bigger if the pieces get bigger. - That's absolutely crazy. Are you guys still using, like, I, I remember, you know, back in the day there's a lot of like Tesla motors being used. Oh, ac actually you said that way it out that

way. Okay. So there's a lot of Tesla motors being used, like, you know, to, for the fins and all that kinda stuff. And maybe even the grid fins had like literally a Model S motor or something. Are you still kind of using some Tesla parts like that? - Yeah, we just use the Tesla drive units to actuate the grid fins - And, and the big flaps still too. The on ship. - Yes. Sorry. Two. Yes. Essentially. Sorry, I was just thinking about something else. Yeah, the, the, the - Hey, - The, yeah. We use the,

we're we're trying not to use hydraulics. We're trying, it's all electric actuation. Yeah. So the engine is also gambled electrically. - Yep. So you're really moving away from hydraulics wherever, possibly. Really? - Yeah. There's almost, I think there's actually no hydraulics in the vehicle. I, if there's hydraulics some very tiny little part, huh. But I think there's none. - That's wild. Actually. I can't even think of another. - Yeah, there's pneumatics, - Right? A lot for all the valves and everything obviously. Yeah. That's crazy. - Geez. - It's surreal compared to what it was. Yeah,

it was surreal just a little bit ago. Wow. It just keeps going and going. That is - Crazy. Yeah. From one little tent. Yeah. - This is starting to make Hawthorne look tiny. And Hawthorne's a, - A big, well, Hawthorne's actually a whole campus. Cool. Absolutely crazy. - That's Meme Street. - Meme Street? - yeah. Is that, is that what it says now? - That's what, that's what it's called. - All right. I think we're jumping in a different car here. - But if you look at the street sign - We got Meme Street. Yeah.

It's - Literally called Meme Street. It's, that is its official name. It used to be called Wemes. And we changed it from Wemes to Memes. - The important things. I love it. Holy crap. Was that incredible or what? Huge Thank you to especially Elon Musk for showing us around and, and following up and, and just teaching us so much about what's going on and, and showing us the inside. Huge thanks. Amazing. And I also owe a huge thank you to our supporters, especially those over on Patreon. If you wanna support the work we do here,

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