What's Going On In This SpaceX Rocket Video?

you'll see this video that SpaceX put on Twitter it's actually the entire single take launch of the transporter 6 Mission the mission that launched a little while ago carrying 114 different payloads into space now it's awesome because it's a single take of this Rocket taking off and going up and doing the flip and then turning back around and coming back down and landing at the lz1 back on the shore but there's so many little interesting things that you can see if you pause it and play it again pause it play it again so I figured

that we would do a little bit analysis of the video so we could talk about some of the things that you can see as we go through the thing the first important thing is to figure out where this camera actually is right if you look at the rocket it's actually up above the grid fins you'll see that later on in the video but the grid fins are just below it and it's looking down the bottom of the rocket the first thing you'll see now that you know that this camera is up a little more than

halfway up the rocket looking down is that you're looking at the pad infrastructure right and the number one thing is right in the middle of the screen you see some water jets sort of going in that's part of the Deluge system that actually starts up before the rocket engines actually light and it's there to absorb some of that initial like ignition impact and so what you do is you put some water in the way and that energy coming out of the engines hits that water and atomizes it turns it to steam and sort of diffuses

and diffracts it so it's not just bouncing straight back up at your rocket the next thing that you'll see are what's called rain Birds coming on in the rain Birds you see across the top of the screen and those are like sort of nozzles that spray a little bit wider fan in that comes on after the center Deluge pipes come on the active vaporizing that water from liquid into a gas takes energy and that is energy that's not going to come back at your rocket or go off in all sorts of random directions flame directions

are a big part of launching Rockets like keeping control of that energy when you're close to the ground is super important cough cough Starship another thing that you can sort of see is the transporter erector the Tes on the right hand side and that sort of leans back a little bit in advance to sort of get out of the way but you don't want it to be right next to the rocket as the engines pass it and spray flame all over it so what you see happen right there after ignition and liftoff is that transporter

erector throws back it's literally the transporter the te throwback and it throws back even further so that the Flames of the rocket engine don't directly impact the sight of it the transporter erector actually carries up some of the umbilicals like how they fuel the rocket and how they get electrical connections to the second stage and all these different things right and so you want to protect those lines those hoses equipment whatever as we get off of the pad a little bit here there's a great shot of the flame director the flame trench that's controlling the

direction that exhaust goes now if you've seen that awesome drone shot of Starship doing a static fire down at Starbase you see there's no flame trench there it's just a flat piece of concrete underneath and therefore the exhaust goes in every direction right here at pad 40 there's actually a built thrust Direction trenched flame trenches whatever you want to call it that creates this big directional plume out in One Direction and that sort of controls where that exhaust is going to end up it doesn't just go in every direction and end up in all your

other GSE and into your dumpsters and whatever it goes in a specific Direction you can really see how that plume is I don't know directed by the flame trench as you continue to go up you see the Rockets start to do a little bit of a roll there you can see the space coast in the background all the little roads there the beach that's all part of Cape Canaveral space force station and so the first pad of Cape Canaveral space force station that we see is over on the left hand side of the screen that's

going to be slick 41 space launch complex 41 which is part of United launch Alliance where they launched Atlas fives from and where they're going to be launching the Vulcans from so as we continue the role in the rocket climbs higher and higher launch complex 39a and 39b come into view over on the left hand side lunch complex 39a of course is where SpaceX launches their other Falcon 9s from the crew launches go from there and the resupply missions going up to the International Space Station go there because unlike 40 which has no Tower or

crew access armor or anything like that 39a has the tower and crew access arms that they can use to load I don't know astronauts onto the crew capsule on the way up the next pad over 39b we recently saw launch from there that's where Artemis 1 and SLS took off uh just a little while ago and as we continue to get higher away from the space coast we see more things start to happen the biggest thing that you really start to see is how the fire coming out of the back of the Falcon 9 starts

to change you know down on the ground you know if you've ever drawn a rocket and you draw like the little pencil flame coming out of the bottom right that happens because of the atmospheric pressure down at sea level not at sea level there's all these air it's not molecules air particles whatever you want to call them right densely packed in it's why you can breathe pretty well when you're down at sea level then you go up a mountain you're like I can't breathe anymore there's air is not as dense you're not getting as much

oxygen what that air does is it actually keeps the flame sort of like I don't know in a flame shape coming out the bottom of the nozzle as you get higher like climbing a mountain the atmosphere gets a lot thinner right and the thinner atmosphere has less of an effect sort of pushing that flame into the pencil flame coming out of the back of the rocket and you see what's called plume expansion the plume starts to expand out the sides and of course it's a falcon 9 it's got nine engines on the bottom so instead

of just one big nebulous Cloud behind the rocket you actually get sort of discreet little expanding flame plumes coming out the side of it of course there should be eight of those right because you got eight engines around the outside and then one engine in the middle so the higher and higher you get the thinner and thinner the atmosphere gets and the more and more that exhaust plume expands out behind the Falcon 9 you really get to see it there you get the main engine cutting off and then all of a sudden there's some things

that you can't see on this camera shot looking down the rocket does a couple things you're gonna see the upper stage separate that means the second stage sort of separates from the booster the parts that's going to come back down to land at the cape and the second stage is going to continue going on also behind the camera for a minute the fairings are going to separate and those are those protective AeroShell fairings up at the top that protect the payloads while you're down in the thick atmosphere but once you get up high enough the

atmosphere is thin enough there's not so much air that you can just get rid of the fairing don't want to carry the mass of it anymore but you don't also have to protect your payloads from the atmosphere and so what you see here all of a sudden is the booster flipping around because this is an rtls literally stands for return to launch site right it's going back to where it came from it's not going down range to a drone ship or anything like that it's going back to the k tape to a landing pad call

it LZ this one's going to lz1 that's just a couple miles away from where it launched so here you see it flip around because right now it's still ballistically falling away from the launch site and it needs to turn around if it's going to end up back where it started so it does this flip you see these cold gas thrusters sort of spewing out the sides and that gives it a little bit of force up at the top of the rocket to help flip the rocket around backwards once it gets flipped around it literally did

about a 180 there once it gets flipped around it ignites the engines again not all of them just a couple of them and it does what's called a boost back burn the Boost back burn actually keeps it from falling down range it stops its progress downrange and it starts to turn it around so it starts to fall back towards the cape instead of falling onwards to the ocean down where the Drone ship would normally be if it was a drone ship Landing after the engine stops you can actually see the grid fins deploy up at

the top of the Falcon 9 there's four grid fins that sort of stick out to the side there that almost look like little flippers right the trick is up high there's not a lot of atmosphere so the grid fins don't really have anything to push against they have air flowing through them but when there's no air the grid vents are just sort of out they become more and more important the lower into the atmosphere that the rocket gets as you get closer down to sea level there's more air molecules to flow around the grid fins

and that allows the grid fins to you'll see them turn side to side like this and help direct the rocket without expending fuel you can see the entire Coast of Florida here you see the cape the bump of the kit that's literally The Cape the Cape is the part of the land that sticks out from the normal Coast that's why it's called a cave right there between the grid Fin and the body you can actually see Port Canaveral where the cruise ships come in and where the stages that end up on drone ships come back

in if you've seen any of our Fleet cam videos you can also see other parts of Cape Canaveral space force station and then all of a sudden you get these supersonic retro propulsion the entry burn that is the atmosphere starting to get thick and so Falcon 9 fires up more engines to start to slow down and aim at The Landing Pad it's not quite there yet but it's helping slow itself down before it gets into the thicker atmosphere now watch closely when they do the entry burn here you'll see one engine light and the Flames

get bigger as they light two more engines just like before and then you get shut down all right all right now here's something that we always get in the comments this thing over here that's actually a piece of ice whenever we get the thrusters firing whenever we get the engines start to uh light up again there are little bits of ice that have formed on the outside of the pipes and tubes and things like that and when they get this force of the engines firing up sometimes it knocks a couple little chunks of ice loose

there's also stiffener Rings there's a couple different things that come off the rocket stiffen rings on the second stage on the way to orbit but all the time we get people in the comments saying oh geez UFO it's like everything can be a UFO if you're really bad at identifying flying objects that one was ice now the cape gets closer and closer in the rear view remember the camera's looking down and the rockets sort of going down towards the LZ pretty soon a lot more quickly than you might think the round lz's up here it's

going for lz1 for this landing and they used to have the SpaceX logo on them I'm not sure they still have this maybe they kind of have the SpaceX logo but here you'll see the final Burns this is the landing burn when the engine's light one more time and they help guide the rocket right down to The Landing Pad there's some thrust vectoring that happens so literally the engine's sort of wiggling a little bit in either direction to help you know push the tail of the rocket this way or push the tail of the rocket

that way you see those grid fins doing work they're tilting back and forth helping direct the airflow but the trick with that is as the rocket slows down the grid fins become less and less effective if you don't have a lot of air moving past the grid fins very quickly you don't get as much Control Authority off the grid fins so you've got this really precarious balance where you need to slam on the brakes but you don't want to lose all your Control Authority and you better be in just the right spot when it's time

to touch the ground you may be wondering where are the legs the entire launch of the rocket the legs have been folded up onto the side of it and even though the landings pad is right there you still don't see the legs right before touchdown with like as little time left over as possible you'll see those legs sort of your little puff off the side and then they follow the rest of the way down there's a little push to help get them going but a lot of this is just the rocket slamming on the brakes

and the legs wanting to keep moving and that makes them unfold like if you're in the car and you press on the brakes it sort of pushes you forward in your seat belt think of you know you're next to you in your car having a landing leg and you slam on the brakes and the leg tries to keep going forward as the car wants to stop it's the same thing that's happening here the leg tries to keep going and that's what makes it unfold like you see now finally if they've done everything right the rocket

touches down with just a little bit of fuel left and shuts off all the engines and you can see sometimes we call it suddenly rock at the rocket has appeared on the landing pad this is not a suddenly rocket situation because they gave us a single cut entire take of the rocket from takeoff all the way back to Landing from here on out there's a lot more things that SpaceX has to do there are things that need to be vented or cleared from the rocket of course I have to bring a crane over there they're

going to attach a crane to the top of it of the cap and pick it up and lean it over and put it on a transporter and move it over for more processing but I think those are a lot of the really interesting things that you can see in this video massive thanks to SpaceX for putting this out I hope you enjoyed it if you thought this explanation was interesting or informative or I don't know whatever leave a comment down below if you want us to do more things like this we don't do a lot

of commentary like this but maybe it's something we should do more of in the future my name is John Galloway for NASA space flight and we'll see you nerds later foreign [Music]