Lex Fridman Podcast - #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel

Episode Date: February 2, 2023

Tim Dodd is host of the Everyday Astronaut YouTube channel, where he teaches about rocket engines and all things space travel. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/lex to get 10% off - MasterClass: https://masterclass.com/lex to get 15% off - Shopify: https://shopify.com/lex to get free trial - ExpressVPN: https://expressvpn.com/lexpod to get 3 months free EPISODE LINKS: Tim's YouTube: https://youtube.com/@EverydayAstronaut Tim's Twitter: https://twitter.com/Erdayastronaut Tim's Instagram: https://instagram.com/everydayastronaut Tim's Website: https://everydayastronaut.com PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (06:18) - SpaceX rockets (26:56) - Falcon 9 (31:08) - Starship (35:27) - SpaceX rocket engines (43:05) - Elon Musk (58:41) - Twitter (1:04:46) - How rocket engines work (1:09:37) - Rocket fuel (1:13:03) - Rocket engine cycles (1:25:27) - Rocket cooling (1:40:24) - Multistage rockets (1:43:57) - Single-stage-to-orbit (1:49:33) - Aerospike engine (1:57:18) - Greatest car engine of all time (2:02:27) - Starship (2:05:19) - Wet dress rehearsal (2:11:29) - Landing (2:25:47) - Seeing starship in person (2:34:54) - Starship orbital test (2:41:32) - Gwynne Shotwell (2:46:43) - dearMoon project (3:05:46) - Fear of death (3:14:12) - Everyday Astronaut origin story (3:40:04) - Soviet Rocket Engine History (3:58:51) - Russia, China, USA (4:13:20) - Starlink (4:21:06) - First human on Mars (4:24:04) - Moon landing (4:30:11) - Nuclear propulsion (4:37:51) - Bob Lazar (4:44:54) - Aliens (4:48:42) - Sci-fi books (4:52:00) - Long-term space travel (4:58:47) - SpaceX competitors (5:10:07) - Kerbal Space Program (5:16:33) - Advice for young people

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. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got better help from mental health, masterclass for online learning, Shopify for e-commerce and ExpressVPN for privacy and security. Choose wise and my friends. Also, if you want to work with our team, we're always hiring good at Lexfriedman.com slash hiring. And now onto the full ad reads, as always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors.

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That's all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com slash Lex to that's all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com slash Lex to take your business to the next level today. This shows also brought to you by ExpressVPN. I've used them for many, many years to protect my privacy on the internet, but also just for whatever you use a VPN for. There a million reasons this is my favorite VPN. There's a big sexy button you press it it just works. On any operating system on any device that's the thing you want from software is it just works. It does this thing it doesn't do a million extra features it does does this thing. It does it for an affordable price.

Anywhere you want to use it, it works. And obviously for VPN was also important to band with the super fast. It's fast. It just works. I don't know. I love great design and engineering in the software space. So that's one of the many reasons I love ExpressVPN. Go to www.expressVPN.com slash blackspod for an extra three months free. This is Alex 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 got Falcon 1, Falcon 9. There's different versions of those, Falcon Heavy, Starship and also the the Dragon Cousins and so on. Well, yeah Falcon 1 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 Russia. Then on the after a foil attempt at doing that, he decided he was going to try to develop his own rocket. And the Falcon 1 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 1, which was a single Merlin engine, followed by an upper stage engine called the Kestrel engine. Pretty small compared to the things they're working on today, but that Merlin engine continued to evolve into being the power plant for the Falcon

9. They went from a smaller 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 originally 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 an uncrewed at first spacecraft that conducts the ISS and the Falcon 9 rocket that can take it to the International

Space Station. And the Dragon rides on, it's the thing up top that rides on the big booster thing that launches it into orbit. Exactly. Yep. The Falcon 9's the semi-truck, the dragon capsules, the payload. You know, it's the thing being dropped off basically at a assassination. And in this case, the destination is the Irrational Space Station.

And yeah, so they developed those relatively quickly and became a commercial success before you know it. 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. Like 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 year SpaceX beat the entire country of China, I mean, 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, some of them are literally like 100 kilograms or something, and like not large payloads. So SpaceX customers are different, different,

so whoever wants to send payloads up into space. Yes, but right now their biggest customer is actually themselves with Starlink. Starlink. One of the biggest reasons they've launched so much Mast Orbis because Starlink is designed around the payload fairing and the payload capabilities of the Falconite rocket. So 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, another manufacturer might have made up

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 mask constraints are volume constraints. And they made a funky look and satellite. The things like the size of a table folded up, which isn't anything I've, you know, were they ever seen before.

So, but it's purpose built to fit as efficiently as possible inside their fairing and inside the capability 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, people so can linger on them. What are some interesting memories

to you of the different developments in Falcon 9? The very first Falcon 9's had a square array of engines. I had like a three by three grid of their Merlin one engines, the one Ds. And I think it only lasted, I don't remember if it was two or four flights before they went into this octo-wub configuration where there's eight, like a ring of eight engines with a center engine in the middle.

Still in the same diameter, 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 a corner engine and then like an edge engine and then another corner engine, you can just make eight of the same kind of part of the octa web. It's called the same shape and then your interchangeability and your manufacturer ability 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 touched this thing, they 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 was, I was at, that was the first launch I ever went to, was actually to see, it was CRS-3, so commercial resupply mission three, it was probably there. 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? I wasting his time trying to Land a rocket. It's not gonna work So you said the Mars plan 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. 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 immediate that they wanted to try to recover. 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, almost 20 years later, and rocket labs 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 the helicopters and 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. And then literally just like grab snags onto the parachute. Wow. And it's pretty amazing. And but this is a small rocket. The rocket's only about a metric ton. The booster is empty.

So the rocket releases parachutes. Yep. Like really high up. I would love to see this. Yeah. That'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 principles 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 reentry long

enough to build a pole to parachutes. Yeah. They're mass fractions. And in that varies, every single rocket's different. 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 reentry of the first stage, which is something that SpaceX wasn't able to do at the time.

What's, what the, 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 reentry 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. And, 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 any, 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 destroying the vehicle on reentry. And then they realize, I think at some point, there's probably a similar crossover. They're like, well, for lighting the engines already to 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've left them. So you were there before that then, right? Yeah. Yeah. In 2014. Yep. Early 2014. So that, and for me, that was so fun watching, you know, that was like the peak of me just becoming obsessed with this idea. I'm watching it with, like in 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 CRS4, almost landed, CRS5, almost landed, CRS five almost landed. CRS six. CRS seven 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'm like, Oh my God.

Now what? You know, and it blew up on a cent. It was their first failure. So is there 18th flight of believe? CRS seven, the upper stage had a stage had one of the bottles inside the tanks that are filled with helium, and one of those bottles broke off on a scent and actually just completely over pressured the upper stage and the upper stage blew up and the whole rocket went kaboom in a non-controlled 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. And stuck the landing. Yep, mainly. 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 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 of 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 gonna see this launch is probably gonna 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 impitch that too. I think the the people that I was working for at the time, I think they kind of were downplaying it as like, well, it's not a big rocket, so 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, 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 boosters about as big as you can ship across the country period without like completely shutting down highways. It is made within those exact

specifications of like having lane privileges and bridges and everything. It's 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 we 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 with my own eyes, I remember just being like, this is so much cooler than

I thought. It's 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 it 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.

I went home. My camera saw it. I left my camera out there. I like a remote triggered camera. My first image is as a launch photographer at the time was it was CRS-3 but I went home, my camera saw it. I left my camera out there, like a remote triggered camera. My first image as a launch photographer at the time was, it was CRS-3, but I went home. It scrubbed too many times. 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 livestream of it. So I didn't even get to experience my first launch.

Anyone that's ever tried to go to a launch is can 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 the code and 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. I mean, 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 do perform control at such high stakes, effectively. Like, you know, that code is probably not written in JavaScript, I guess, as well. I'm saying. Actually, no, I don't, if I remember, I, again, this is well outside of my domain. But they, they're coding in a common language. It's, 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 you, you know, started SpaceX, it's X, we're just going to code in the most common language so that we don't have to have people wanting this archaic, weird thing, and we can just literally pull people off the streets and be like, here, right it. Yeah, it's probably C++.

I mean, it'd be epic if it was like Python or something, but I think reliable systems have to be written in C++, 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. Oh, and the old old days, like they were inventing code and language from scratch. For sure. It was still incredible that it's able to do that like you just the feet of engineering involved is just it's 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. It's just incredible to see. Yeah Well, the 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, say, say, it stopped 200 feet above the ground, there are only options to kill the engine and then it's just going to fall at 200 feet. So, 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 kind of start 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 window of where it could burn. So if all of a sudden it's kind of coming into hot, you have room to throttle up. If you're coming into, you're actually a little too early, 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 they're continually playing with that to try to get it. Because every every bit of fuel they're using and proponent they're using to land is proponent 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 just continue to evolve and edit that and just get it to be the workhorse. We're coming up on 100 consecutive landings. Perfect landings, 100. I think they've done like 150 something landings altogether,

160 altogether, but we're talking like in a row without blowing up, which at the, you know, five years ago was completely experimental and insane. And now we're coming up to the point where 100 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 benefit and their gain. Long term gain. Like it's a long term investment in being able to recover the boosters. 100%. Can you believe all this was done basically 10 years so that we've seen this development I believe all this was done basically 10 years, so that we've seen this development in over a period of 10 years. So like, when we started commercial space light at scale to today, where it's almost starting to be mundane.

Yeah, well, how can I say I want to do? 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. And just seeing what it was like back then to what it's 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 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's a really big deal. Now it is 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 of there's countless. It's insane. It's hard to really, really, really hard to keep up with. I want to, 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's gonna fly the orbital launch, you know, and that's like Immonentish like month or two scale time frame and yet I'm still like I can't tell you when that's gonna I can't tell you anything about like when we're gonna land on Mars or what that's what that economy and what that You know the scale of launch operations is gonna look like in order to do that because it's just so hard to, I wouldn't have predicted, we're at today five years ago, you know, 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. I think when you make certain engineering decisions and the hiring decisions and like what you focus on in terms of both business and engineering, it's good to think on a scale of 10, 20, 50, hundred years. This is one of the things that Elon has 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, 15, 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're turning back to the brief history in the space rockets. All right. 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 falconine evolved more or less kind of like just got more powerful and a little bit longer and more capable. But nowadays they fly, it was called the Block Five,

even though it's like the eighth or ninth iteration of the falconine, but they call it Block Five. It's someone 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 leg work these days, and they're flying, you know, up to 15 times, I think, right now as the current booster leader. They're also recovering the fairing, 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 exp expanded is the upper stage. That's where the Falcon 9 is ending. It's really doesn't make sense to develop that infrastructure any longer. They went with the next step, which is go even bigger physically. They have more margin for upper stage reusability. That's what we see with Starship and Super Heavy. The Super Heavy booster, 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 as the time it was the ITS, the interplanetary transportation system. Later, and I think about 20, 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 the, that is where we're're at today and that's what they're working

full steam head on. And what about Dragon who mentioned 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 it's ironically it's heavier altogether. So you'll never see those cool return-to-launch site landing, the boosters 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. That's kind of the, so there's, yeah, Starlink, Dragon, Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and Starship system. It's kind of the whole SpaceX world, really. In terms of the space ships involved, what do you or some of the major milestones in that history? We kind of mentioned a few.

Yeah. The kind of 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. 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 re-flu one. Yeah, then flying humans was a huge one, DM2, Bob and Doug, for NASA. Bob and Doug, yeah. Bob and Doug. Incredibly, you know, that was, that was a huge, huge step, I think, for SpaceX was flying people. So it's first major commercial launching of humans on a 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 running 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, like just crossing the Carmen line going straight up versus going into orbit like 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 success as a testing and so on? What would you classify at this point

as a milestone, a starship, would be a far or whatever the name is, I 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 thrusted to fly something.

And 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. And then after that we saw SN5, SN6 kind of do the similar 150 meter hops with a little bit more elegant systems, proving out more of their tank building, proving6 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 their, you know a lot of just subsystems and then the big ones physically were in and end of 2020 in early 2021 when they flew the SN8 9 10 11 and 15 What is the answer for an SN? Thank you serial number or start number. Yeah, so SN, these are just names, numbers,

numerical representations of the different testing efforts. They skipped some numbers, right? Yeah. If they scratch a test. Yeah, and lots of times it'd be like literally that they're building, you know, because at star base 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. Yeah. They will have someone 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 Yeah, they 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 almost like oh, we actually evolved that we don't use that header tank now So it's gonna go on to this one so they'll have like parts of certain rockets built and expect ask literally ask literally scrap it, like not scrap it like in the, you know, joke term, like literally just go scrap it. And they, uh, so they, they just evolve and iterate so quickly. There were some epic explosions. Um, I think Starship is something about it, uh, probably

just the amount of fuel just leads to some epic, 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.

Yeah. And so it actually hasn't been the failures have been really epic looking of big visual fireballs, but in terms of spaceflight, there's 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 roaster was launched. I forget what year that was. Yeah, 2018. That was quite epic. Would you put that on the milestone?

Oh, yeah, yeah. Falcon Heavy demo was like, definitely a big, big, big milestone. Yeah. Is that funny to you that there's a roadster floating out there? Yeah. Do we know the location of that roadster at this? Oh, yeah. Where is roadster.com? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Where is it orbiting something? Yeah, it's orbiting the sun. So it's orbiting the sun. So it's orbiting the sun. And it's orbit is basically between the earth's orbit and beyond Mars. So I think of like 2.5 AU of Firemum, right? So it's beyond Mars's orbit and it's 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 it could absolutely be done. You know, the hard thing at this point, because it's on an eccentric orbit, would be rendez-vousing with it because you kind of had to be in alignment with its orbit to really line up well with it. But yeah, I mean, someday I don't see any reason why we couldn't at least send for sure an uncrewed, you know, feel unwanted 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. I really 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 haven't cover? See, mention all started with the Merlin engine and a customer engine.

What, yeah, through that lens. Yeah, what's there? The engines are relatively small number, which is easy for us, or the other Merlin. Merlin's evolved throughout time to be from the Merlin to the Merlin one seed and Merlin one deed, to the Merlin one D full thrust, and all these other kind of tweaks of the same architecture.

A Kestrel engine 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 kind of consider engines. Well, 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 where it's kind of taking hints of the future Raptor,

but now we're well within the, well within what you'd consider a Raptor 2 variant. And 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 who every day astronaut is, but if you don't somehow know, go, go, go check is 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 discussed 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 Fidley bits and he's the number of Fidley bits was decreased between Raptor 21 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 designs so you can manufacture it. And in general, simplification leads to better performance and testing and everything. So the number of Fitley bits, sure there's a Wikipedia page in that now, as an index, is a 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 and 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 like using that as a trade study instead of just like pure metrics of, you know, because

at the end of the day, like, okay, if it's cheaper and does, you know, 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, you know, but there's, it's so funny because spaceflight is just the ultimate, you know, it's 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, you know, but even things like on your first stage, when you're, when you're, 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? Is actually a more important metric than how raw, efficient the engine is. So it's funny. Then in space, it's kind of the opposite. The thrust-to-weight ratio doesn't really matter. What really matters is the actual, the specific impulse is called. Like the nozzle escape velocity of the,

or the ejection velocity of the, how fast is the gas moving? It's 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, is you can't really perfectly plan everything. So, and you always have to have some spare leeway, you know, especially as you're testing new vehicles like Starship. Yeah, so 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 solidified the thing that can be relied upon, especially if it's a crude mission. Yeah. That 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 gonna do a design freeze because SpaceX does evolve and iterate so quickly. They were saying that it was leading, especially at the time it was leading, especially at the time it was a mission called AMO-6, and they lost a rocket. They've only lost two rockets, like ever really, as far as trying to get something to space.

For the Falcon 9, sorry. And the second one, AMO-6, I mean, 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. And it's like, if you guys keep tweaking this thing every time you take it out to the pad, it's going to be a problem, you know. And so there is some pressure from NASA to kind of slow down on the iterative process. And, but that is also why they were able to evolve the Falcon 9 to be what it is today

is because they did just evolve it so quickly. Literally like one after another was never really the same. And we're definitely seeing that with starship now. Like 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 development and commercial spaceflight? Oh yeah, yeah, there's a lot of, especially like around DM2, there's a lot of talks and the press conferences and stuff where you'd hear people say, you know, this was a big, 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, you know, and do something, you know, 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. And, but at the same time, SpaceX, I think, even expressed, I don't remember if 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 Kuhnig's minute, 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 have two SpaceX facilities with him, you've interviewed him, you've two space activities with him, you've interviewed him, you've interacted with him. What had 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 questioner constraints, he says that a lot, but he also does it a lot. Though, you know, there'll be times where like, you'll see him change on a dime because he's like rethinking of something in a newer different way. And for me, you know, I, I, I think we all put constraints on ourselves. We, we think about our own limits, you know, on, on things that we can or cannot do. And I think it's made me kind of question like, well, why am I, why did I say no, I can't do

that? Or, you know, you know, just off the top of my head. A good example. I, 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-bri. And every year, you just, you know, like thousands of people get together

and they ride across Iowa. And it was the last summer, met up with some friends and they're like, hey, you don't wanna go on rag-bri this year? I'm like, it's like a week away. They're like, yeah, you some friends and I'm like, hey, you don't want to go on rag by this year. I'm like, it's like a week away. They're like, yeah, you want to go? I'm like, yeah. And so I did go without, and it was one of those moments

where I was proud of myself because it's easy to be like, no, you know, I'm not ready. Or this is my constraint is like, I'm not in shape. But like, just question that, you know. And so I think when it comes down to questioning your own constraints, it's, yes, even to that level of like, 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 the question of constraints in a place like

aeronautics or or robotics or autonomous vehicles or vehicles because there's people there's experts everywhere that have done it for decades and everyone admires those experts and respects those experts and you for you to step into a room knowing not much more than just what's an 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 a hardened, 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 crowd-grip propellants or whatever. And someone walks in and says, why don't you just put a heater element in there? Or something like, 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 not, sometimes it's just stubbornness for failing to acknowledge a better way. And I've seen it both directions, so which is really interesting.

So you need both, but that tension's 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 like a new way of doing it. And Elon's done that. I've seen a lot of great engineers do that. I say in the machine learning world, because it's been so much development, I've seen a lot of great engineers do that. I've seen in the machine learning world

because it's been so much development. I've seen that happen. Usually when there's like rapid development that starts to come into play. Yeah. And yeah, and I've seen that autonomous vehicle space bringing 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 engines? Since you've learned about so many different kinds of engines over the past few years, just like 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. You know, the concepts finally being utilized today were already literally done in the 60s. Yeah. You know, so a lot of the things that SpaceX is doing isn't a novel concept per se. You know, they're like, for instance, the Raptor engine utilizes the full flow stage combustion cycle engine.

And that was already developed by the Soviets in the 60s for an engine called the RD270. And it makes sense. Like on paper, 100% it makes sense because you're basically extracting the absolute maximum potential of the chemical energy in both propellants. And at the end of the day, like you had 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, but at the same time, so are rockets. Rocket engines are already stupid complicated. So 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, like future of that engine, is that going to be worth it? Obviously SpaceX said, yeah, I think we can actually develop this Raptor engine. So it's just interesting to see the things that have been looked

or even reusability, like the space shuttle was reusable. It was fully the upper stage shuttle itself, the orbiter was, I mean, that thing was for all intents and purposes, a reusable rocket. Now that it live up to its expectations, not necessarily. So it left a lot of bad taste in people's mouth on the ideas of reusability. So for SpaceX to kind of come back into the room

and on the table and say, we're gonna use a reusable rocket. Specifically, we're gonna do a fully reusable rocket. You know, a lot of people are, even still the day, a lot of people going, yeah, you're not gonna be a reusable rocket specifically. We're gonna you do a fully reusable rocket. You know a lot of people are even still the day a lot of people going Yeah, you're not gonna be able to do that Even today even today. So like long-term you're not gonna be able to reuse a scale Yeah, but yeah, definitely I think the number of people that are saying that today is is a Small portion of those that we're 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. And there's a large number of people that had the factual reasons to think that and do that. At the time, they'd only landed like two rockets or something, when they did that, or maybe three, it was a very small number. When they announced that actually they had just lost, a couple of months prior, they just lost, in most six, so they like, there was still this young blossoming company and they'd come in and be like,

we figured out reusability and now we're gonna 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 gonna go to Mars. It was just, pretty out there, like it really was. And, you know and it's gonna go to Mars. It was just pretty out there. Like it really was. And, you know, it's a lot of 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. What is 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, maybe there is actually the opportunity to be fully reasonable. That's definitely probably the biggest constraint that I think has

been questioned. That is being- That's a really good ability. Yep. And then, of course, like the broader one of costs of bringing down costs that you are able to kind of bring down costs so much that this something like colonizing Mars or many trips to Mars will be a possibility. As people don't even, it seems so far out that they don't even have time or give effort

to questioning it, 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 the things where you look at the curve. You look at like 10 years ago, that was ridiculous. Following this curve, if SpaceX goes from, you know, two years ago,

launching, I don't know what it was, 40 times to 60 times to 100 times this year, is there a mount? 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 you. Like, yeah, I think, but you got to think it's at we're increasingly 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. I need 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 a neural-incoed-bane 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. And 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 computing 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

at each of these companies, obviously. Yes. 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, like 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 cos fallacy so much that it almost gets to the border of like being, you know, like throw out everything before it's even we've known 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. 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 it a go to Mars. Like it's just or even governments. Yeah. Clearly because like you said, the Mars plan was not existing for NASA.

Yeah. Still really there isn't much, you know. So I think if how many people in 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 more society and like serious leaders of engineering Efforts or nations and so on. Yeah, there's which it does seem if you think about it that it's obvious Yeah, and the grand eventuality, it is obvious.

Of the human civilization, 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 things get, sometimes just totally thrown together. And totally just like get it done just to get it done and start moving in that direction. And then he'll leave and go to 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 caps, 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 on any one thing, it almost is like, I'll spend too much, you know, like it's like the, like, too many tornadoes. Yeah, too many tornadoes. And I think it can 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 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 came down to Starbase and they just

started building like you wouldn't freaking believe. I mean, it's just things going crazy. Beeping. 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 the 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 it, 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, but that's still... Borderline impossible to pull off, and that was really weighing having on him and the team and everybody. Yeah. So to have this chaos of development is fascinating. Yeah. to pull off and that was really weighing having on him and the team and everybody. So to have this chaos of development is fascinating. Yeah, big time. And I think they really had to push, if they hadn't done that, if they hadn't done that

big push, we might only be now seeing a rocket stacked for the first time. It might be a lot more finished rocket, a lot more high fidelity, a lot more flightworthy 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 and human

civilization, do you think do you worry about his involvement in 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 it's 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 see any sort of politicking as ever anything that's really, ever uniting thing. I understand that I totally agree with you, especially space, I'm inspiring you to, 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 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 does 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 we got going on. So that's been a big challenge, but as 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 Ways 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. And so, but you know what? This life, one of the reasons that's fun is through the chaos, like 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 little 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 space flight and even are 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 gonna be able to, you know, continue space flight 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 right team and the blue team and

the, and then it the 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 on 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 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, a hundred years ago, so many of the things that are 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 in the most of the developed world will have a good number of those things in their life.

That's just continuing to increase and continue to get better. 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 a few videos on this, but how does a rocket engine work? You're wearing some of the instruction manuals, but for one type of,

like what's the fuel, what are the 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, hot, high pressure gas, very energized. There's a lot of energy involved.

And then literally turning that into molecules 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, you 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 into kinetic energy. Now, if you start scaling that up, 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, cause it's a little bit more dense and all the others. Or you know, the majority of our atmosphere, you can, or sorry, it's more sparse. You can condense that down, sort of a really high pressure bottle, and then just literally shoot it through what's called a D. LaVell

nozzle, which is something 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, when it's subsonic gas, you start shrinking, you can strict the flow. It's actually speeding up just like a highway if you go from, or any of these examples like like a water hose, 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 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 basically, 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 plus percent just the weight of fuel. So you just have to lift the fuel that's going to take it into orbit. And that's the thing specifically for rockets. You're just 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 the space earth has a pretty intense gravity. It's to overcome. We're lucky because if I think of his 10% either way like 10% harder it'd be like we could still do it you know we'd still with our current technology we'd still be able to get stuff into orbit man things like reusability and This you know commercialization the success that we've seen in the last 10 years We would just be on two thin margins, I think 10% easier and we would have been like I mean It's just like totally different. It's so much so much easier. It's like this big, you know sliding scale and 10% in either direction

We'd be either screwed or or really happy, you know As far as getting into space. So it's just hard enough that things like fully reusable become 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, pointing up, flame me and 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 this chemical rockets, liquid solid gas, hybrid, there's electric. So what are the kinds of fuels we're talking about? What are oxidized? What can you just explain your shirt? I guess. Yeah. So really, I mean, fuels, there's kind of two terms. Well, you'll generally hear the word propellant being used. It's anything that is used to propel a space after you're used in a rocket. And 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 fuel and oxidizer in a spark. Now, some fuels will 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 better than liquid oxygen. So, it can be better than liquid oxygen. So, it can be better than liquid oxygen. So, it can be better than liquid oxygen. So, it can be better than liquid oxygen.

So, it can be better than liquid oxygen. So, it can be better 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 from wrong, but the Falcon 9 uses caracene

and then starship uses methane. Yep, good methane. Yep, for fuel. And they both use liquid oxygen for their oxidizer. For, for their oxidizer, okay. Yep. 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 pre-mixed. 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. Yep. Yep. So how many solid-based fuels are there? Is that they still being used to do? Is there most rockets? Yeah, and the United States really is the only ones that, well, the only ones that I guess early on, because it was really just the Soviet Union versus the

United States. The United States started to use solids pretty 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, you'll still see them 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 5 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's 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 lot of rocket companies that use missile technology. They might be a variant of an ICBM that just uses solid rocket fuel because it is relatively easy to develop model rockets. It's used solid rocket motors and stuff like that. They're still around but they're just not as elegant and not as used these days. What are rocket engine cycles?

Getting, I think getting more towards your shirt 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, close 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, 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. You can get it so thick that you store the propellants and really, really high pressures. But obviously that doesn't scale very well. At some point your rocket so heavy, you can't even leave the ground. Or it's just so much of your mass,

it's 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 it increased the pressure through a pump. Now, obviously a pump's 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 would be considered like open cycle, closed cycle, full flow stage combustion cycles, are ways to tap into the propellant, actually, and then there's tap off, expand our cycle, and 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 pressure of an engine, and then that can be connected to a shaft to pumps. And those pumps can increase the pressure of the propellants and force it into the combustion chamber. Now, the difference between open cycle, close 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 engine, 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 propellant flowing to the engine,

and 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, you know, unused fuel. A good amount of that fuel is just completely, and especially because the turbine, you get to keep it from melting. So you can't run it at like optimal ratios. Not necessarily stoichiometric and 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 molecule 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 gonna 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 temperature. So you end up with this dark, sooty smoke pouring out of that gas generator, that's just unburned 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, your 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 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 close cycle. So there's fuel rich, close cycle, which would be you're flowing all of the fuel through the turbine, or there's oxidizer, close 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 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 backwards 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, we're talking about engines that are at 200 or 200, even in SpaceX's Raptor engine up to 300 bar in the main combustion chambers. 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 gas generator or your preburner. So I have to be higher pressure than that even in order to have the flow going the right direction

through the engine. So now you'll have those close cycles. You'll have fuel rich, you have oxidizer rich. The tricks now, you're starting to get, it's crazy, there's just so many compromises. Every little decision you have of like, oh, I did this, now I, you know, I don't know, crap. It's gonna do this. For instance, fuel rich, if you ran kerosene, fuel rich, you know, how I mentioned SUT coming out of the gas generator.

Well, if you run Sot 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'll end up blowing up the engine. The soot itself is so damaging that you can't really run a fuel rich caracene engine. What exactly is soot? So it's like fuel somehow mixed up with the smoke. Like what? I wonder what, what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it.

I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it.

I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it.

I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it. 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 carbon, really hard, you know, forged in a rocket engine carbon. I wonder how you figure all that out too, is that to be experimentation? Some of that is come, come, like theoretical, but like you're going to have to build the thing at scale and actually test it. And trial and error.

If you're trying her, there is many decades of trial and error. And many pieces of engines that you're trying to piece back to, like, what the hell happened here? Yeah, what happened? Yeah. Okay, so that's close 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 to the pumps. And the rest of the oxygen is actually going through the pump, the primary pump, and straightening combustion chamber. Now, a full flow of the idea is you're going to actually pre-burn both your propellants. Both 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 oxygen are going to arrive in the main combustion chamber as hot gases 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

methane is now gaseous methane. And they're meeting this combustion chamber at still ridiculously high pressures again with, and for SpaceX's Raptor engine, they're meeting at 300 bar insane amounts of pressure. And then they, then they combust from their own 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 have two different states of matter and they just might not, they might take a little more coaxing to what's that word? Coaxing coaxing? That doesn't sound like a right word. It's not correct, right?

Coaxing. Coaxing, yeah. Yeah. All right. I don't know. We'll cut that in post. We'll have Morgan Freeman over Dova. See how old he was. Cokes.

The fascinating thing is their cogs, they're gases in combustion chamber. But yeah, they just take a little bit more. It takes more time in the combustion chamber to have liquid gas interaction, like mixed together and unleash as much of their energy as he 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 of the engineering, then the cost of the design of the engineering, what are the different trade-offs between open cycle, close 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 expeling the exhaust gas, the gas generator 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. Close cycles offers 10 to 15% greater performance generally because you're not wasting that propellant. But it's complicated. It's a lot more complicated, especially for 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 time, they'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 is is eating and using that engine is fuel basically. So oxygen rich is generally very hard, but that is what the Soviet Union ended up doing with almost their entire line of engines was close cycle oxygen rich.

But, you know, so those two are kind of generally hard, but offer great performance benefits over open cycle. But at the end of the day, you know, full flow is, by far, 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 2, why is that engine using Fullflow? 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 just isn't another cycle type that is better than it, but of course, it's very, very hard to develop. So far to date, the RD2 270 and the 60s was built. There is a power head demonstrator built in the United States in the 90s and early 2000s, I think, maybe just the early 2000s. That was just the power, just the pumps and the turbines and the pre-burners, no chamber, no nothing. That was a big deal. The United States took millions of

dollars to just develop that, and then their SpaceX is wrapped around. So you talked about the combustion chamber and how damn hot things get high pressure. A lot of heat. How do you keep the thing cool? You have a great video on this. How do you get it from from what you call it metal rich engine rich from like the metal from melting. One of the ways is to let it be engine rich. It's actually you can use a blade of cooling. You can literally let make the walls thicker than you normally make it, make it out of material that will blade away that will kind of chip away and take some of the heat away with it.

It's very, again, primitive. It's actually what SpaceX first used on their first Merlin engines. They used a blade of cooling. So it's basically a carbon nozzle. And you just let it get the carbon inner layer of the engine was not of his carbon. And you just let it get chewed away and eaten away. And that's just something you factor in. It's not a 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 melts away to know what thickness. But boy, that's a dangerous. I just think that this part of the design seems so silly. So obviously, you probably, you know, it's again, it's not the most elegant.

The problem to your geometry physically is changing too, because as you're roting 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's, 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. Oh, a bunch of chaos. Just can I, which I can't imagine having to figure all that stuff out, honestly. Yeah. So the more elegant thing to do, there's a couple other things you can do. But the kind of the most common one,

especially when we're dealing with liquid field rockets, is something called regeneratively cooling. And the idea is you basically just flow fuel or oxidizer through the walls of the nozzle on the chamber before they go through into the injector into the actual combustion chamber. By doing that, you're taking heat out of the, you know, 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, liquid gas, lots of times, even if you pump them both, as they're 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. That's because they're using that the fuel or the oxidizer to cool the walls of the engine. So when you look at a rocket engine,

although it looks like a nice, beautifully uniform cylinder, smooth thing, there's sometimes like the channels actually like milled into the walls that they run fuel through. And even though they're tiny, they can be like two, three millimeters thick, they'll actually still have a channel that goes down in U-turns and comes around and comes back all the way down to the tip of the nozzle and everything.

So it's just insane that, you know, that's pre-designed and that's like, so they design those channels. There's probably some optimization there, like how the flow happens. Well, especially because you're thinking about a conical thing or like a some iconical thing where the area is getting smaller and smaller and smaller or flowing the same amount of propellant through it as you are down to the, you know what I mean? Like the propellant has to, so they have all these unique things like, you know, sometimes different manifolds where they'll inject more, less fuel in certain areas and there must be like propellant simulation software because 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, walked up, up hill in both ways. Was like, I mean, like anything back in the day before computers, well, you're like, like, he just had to do it. And then like, your simulation of modeling

was like a sheet of paper where you're like calculating stuff. Well, but you can, heat flux, you know, 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 have never tried measuring the heat flux of anything. I barely even know what that means. I'm just smart enough to be creative with my friend. And you have a lift. So, 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 bubble

of law compared to XYZ. So, you know. Yeah, materials people. between the walls of it and into the propellant blah blah blah blah, compared to XYZ. So, you know, materials people, like I've met just all walks of life, especially just through MIT, through everywhere, where some people are just like 100x smarter than anyone you've ever met at a particular thing. Like you mentioned copper, they'll know.

They heat dissipation through different materials. They'll understand that like more than it's like holy shit. It's possible for human beings to deeply understand a thing. Dude, aerospace is full of that. You'll have people that are so niche in some thing that know the average person is never even remotely thought of yet. This person has done it 40,000 different ways in a, you no, the average person has never even remotely thought of. Yet this person has done it 40,000 different ways in an environment being like,

well, we find out that if we turn it four degrees that way and add 4% Naomi, you know, like just things that 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 not shlod 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. They're just geniuses. Like you see you 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. Like we celebrate in some big public spectacle. Yeah, look out great there. Yeah. But the people, like, yeah, at these aerospace companies and NASA, SpaceX, the kind of stuff they're doing, just the, 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 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, what, I don't know what the word would be, introverted or something like that or whatever, but that's actually kind of the whole point of everyday astronaut, like that's almost the whole point of what I do each year from the beginning, I did a thing called the Astero 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, you know, I think Elon definitely helped make spaceflight cool. Helped make that like 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, the coolest places to work as the most important things. Sports are great and everything. I'm a big form of the one fan and things like that.

But at the same time, if we should be celebrating the people doing this crazy work, clocking in countless hours, just trying to figure out this one little thing that's gonna help us further our understanding. I mean, what's cooler than a giant thing with a really hot fire that goes boom and goes up into the air? I mean, like, there's no, it's like, to me, like, bridges are inspiring.

It's like an incredible architecture design. And like, the humans are able to work against nature, build these gigantic metal things, but like rockets, with like 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, you know, riding that super powerful thing up away from the thing we call home Earth. It's like, it's so amazing. Exactly. So freaking amazing. Well, I think that's kind of part of my like story arc is I just used to be a huge car and motorcycle guy. Like I just loved you know, things that go fast and you know, are loud and go fast and make lots of power. And at the end of the day, like at some point, you realize nothing goes faster and it's louder and makes more power, the rocket.

You know what I think that's, I think that's kind of where I eventually just ended up, you know, wound up there just because there is nothing cooler than that. Yeah, this is the ultimate level of reaches a car guy is you 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.

You know, like it's it's the same universe here. And yeah. So Elon, with your conversation with him on the Raptor 2, was talking about, or you were talking about, like 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 of going where you're talking

about keeping the turbine from melting, you can just run it off of like off nominal basically, off, you know, typically fuel rich, just run more fuel through that. So it's cool enough. You can actually do that locally kind of in your engine. So you can keep it so, you know, imagine a combustion chamber and the top of it's just a flat, like imagine a shower head and then you have like, you know, 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, you know, and your mixture ratio is off, but only for a little portion of the big picture. You know, 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 it's a starship. The F1 has this huge, huge, huge engines. There's five of them on the Saturn V. And you'll notice that like, 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, an actual boundary layer of cooler gas against the hotter combustion chamber gas. So 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 bentum and you can see that the 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 going and that section of a nozzle is cooled by the film cooling of the gas generator. section of Nozzles cooled by the film cooling of the gas generator. I mean, the aerodynamics of cooler gas and the hot gas, because you have to have this kind of layer, right? Yeah, protective layer of cool, like, understanding that, obviously, it probably has to do in modern times, there's probably really good simulation of aerodynamics.

But and to do it in terms of pressure to, like, to make sure it's in the right place, that doesn't like go back home. Go backwards, exactly. If they have that manifold, even six inches too high on that nozzle, yeah, it's just gonna go upwards, you know. 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.

Nearing infinity, yeah. Especially because, I mean, you can't do like a small model of it. Maybe you can. No, you can't. You're not really skilled very well. No, you have to do the full testing. And that's why you have all the kind of, that's why you have a starship, all the tests that, you know, you think, why would you need to do so many static fires and so many tests?

The wise of failing so many times, can't you get it right? But like, it's very tough to get it right. Well, 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. So that's a luxury that SpaceX does have with the scale of Raptor. They're building Raptor cheaper than probably almost any other engine, you know, maybe we've

said some of their own, at least at that scale. Then before they're testing, you know, I think since last March or last April, they've tested a thousand Raptor, you know, a thousand engine fires, I guess, not just Raptors, but, you know, 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 overspending our turbine in this degree

and this frequency is harmonic at this blah, blah, blah, and all of a sudden realize it's rattling and, you know, it did this and then you can engineer around that, you know, it's like, ultimately, you know, 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 insane amount of failures to learn from, you just know your system inside. Now you know those margins, you know

where the failure points are, you know how to engineer around them. And that's how I approach dating. No, I'm just kidding. Because we're talking about engines. So most rockets, I'm just kidding. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah's a good question. So ultimately, you know, like I said, you're kind of pushing about 90% of the rockets, like 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, you know, like I said, the Falcon 9 on its own is about 20 tons, just the booster is about 20 metric tons. So it's not insignificant amount of weight.

So the idea is with staging is you ditch anything you don't need more or less. So in the Falcon 9's 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 this fuel. Once it's out of fuel, you let go of the second stage and Teddall, you actually just basically started and lit a brand new fresh rocket. You know, this brand new fresh rocket now doesn't have all that, 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 around, it needs just one instead of nine. This engine can be optimized for the vacuum of space as opposed to having to operate at sea level with all of our Actually pretty thick atmosphere, you know relatively So you there's 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% Hard or 10% easier if it was 10% easier single stage or it would be no big deal And it probably would have been been like the way to get to orbit by choice,

just because 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, and you know, we almost kind of actually the first orbit to take humans, or 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 they actually dropped off two of its three engines. So it just ditched some of the engines,

but if it hadn't done that, so kind of people were like, well, that was single stage. It's like it still had a staging of it. 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 might be able to put like, Falcon 9 booster on its own. Like if you just flew one of the side core boosters of a Falcon heavy with a nose going on and everything, just say, I'm just gonna fly this on its own.

You might be able to put like 10 kilograms into space or something, a very small amount. Well, throw a second stage on that thing and now you can put 17,000 kilograms into space. So it's just an order, 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 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 Rehearsal gets even harder it gets even harder. So first off, what is just a lingana? What is the single stage to orbit rocket? Yeah, 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 Yeah, 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?

it your the the payload fraction of a rocket is like three to five or six or seven percent would be like, you know, the amount of payload can be rid of the total mass of the rocket. Like you're lucky to get into beyond five percent. So if you're now having to deal with the weight of the rocket by a 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 weight. All of that fuel, all of that big giant flame you see is literally mass being thrown out the back of the rocket. But what typically isn't expended, at least during nominal operations,

you're not seeing the engines being expelled out the thing until you get to staging, of course. And that's where you're ditching all that dead weight. So single stage orbit, your margins just become so small that 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 I'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 cut in, you know, on a third and has another little engine, it'll have a hundred or a thousand times more payload capacity than the ones 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 at, as efficiently at sea level, at kind of optimized efficiency at sea level, and just by their, by the way, they're designed to 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 also efficient in a vacuum too. You can do 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 had developed a new technology? It's like, okay, we'll apply that technology to a multi-stage rocket. And it's gonna 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 ditch that way, you know? Because there are costs 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 survival, well, the upper stage, you only have to put a big heat shield.

I mean, starships, 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 is not going to orbit. It's only going a fifth or a quarter of orbital velocity. So it's the heat that it experiences. It's survivable just by the stainless steel. You don't need an additional heat shield.

So obviously, if you're trying to reuse a 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 a 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-statesha orbit to orbit a 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 thing, say I want to mass into orbit compared to something else. You know, we're talking like rocket labs electron are really small rocket. It's like, I think 1.3 meters wide and something like, you know, 18 meters tall. I mean, it's a small rocket.

If you were to, you know, the, and it can put something like 300 or so kilograms into orbit. You can either launch something that size or again, like 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 gonna be cheaper to build, you know, chip around all the stuff? And then you also look at, you have fixed costs,

like the idea of flying a, but this, this, oh, again, everything in rocket science is compromised, because now you have fixed costs. Like the idea of flying a, this, this, oh, again, everything in rocket science is compromised. 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 minute where I'm going to pay $5 million to fly a rocket between all the people going on, say all the propellant, all the licenses, 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.

The business case is going to send you in one direction pretty quickly. You mentioned Aerospike engines. I think the internet informed me of your love affair with Aerospike engines. Find somebody that looks at you the way Tim now looks at the Horsbach edges. 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 blow 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 at 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 on my exact, like now boil it down to 45 seconds. So the aerospite engine basically is an inside inside out engine, more or less. So with a traditional engine, 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? Aerospike 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 you can do 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, aero spike 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 then it's pushing up against the, you know, because it's equal on both sides against that kind of the ramp, it's pushing up against the rocket. So that's where that force comes in, is against the 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, against the chambers. The hard part with an aerospike. So the cool, okay, I guess the coolest thing about an aerospike 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, it's continually

just converting more and more, it's 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. It's 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 that walls of the nozzle exit and what happens is it's it's kind of unpredictable you get these pockets, these oscillations and there'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, that ambient pressure is pushing the exhaust gas into the wall.

As opposed to a conventional engine that 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 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 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 aerospeite 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 a 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 does the 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 model. Does anyone actually flown an aerospike engine? No aerospike engine to date has ever been flown on an orbital rocket. Why not? And would you like to see a future where they're used?

Clearly, because I think they're cool. You know, in the same way, that's the core of your love affair with aerospike engines is cool. It's just, and I said this in my video, actually outside before I came in here, I saw an Rx7 on industries that I just love, and that uses a rotary engine.

On paper, the rotary engine is like, more efficient, does it, you know, smaller, more efficient, all these things, but in practice, it's like, the thing is actually just like unreliable hot, and you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, burn's oil. It's kind of the same thing with the air spike engine. Like, and, you know, it's blah blah blah blah, burn's 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, your throat area, no matter what is going to have the throat of the, of the rocket engine is always where it's the hottest, you know, it's the hardest thing to cool. And with the aerospike, if, you know, if it's inside out, now your throat is no matter what way bigger, it's almost like the size of the nozzle likes it 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 a circle inside a circle, you have just insane amount more surface area

to cool with a limited amount of fuel. Don't forget you're using your fuel as your as your coolant. So if you also now take your throw area and you have X amount of space that you need to cool, you only have a limited supply. It's like side this stuff that is there are ideas of for cooling, of for cooling out spike engines. It's same physics apply for a 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.

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 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 of the amount of time just slightly increasing the performance of your normal engine in the first place, you know. Again, I'm going to have to more or less 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 the other things are different for me, but 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. Let me, maybe, the FDRX7. It's just two darn cool, honestly. It's just two darn cool, honestly. Maybe, there you go. Well, what about the mid 90s that makes it special? Just that's the only time everything was there.

It's more that I love the engine and I like the car. It's attached to you. I'm not actually a big fan of 90 styling, personally. But just that, the 20B, it's just such a cool, cool engine. And it's twin turbo, sequential turbos. So they used, they, a bigger turbo 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 9,000 RPM and you wanna get a lot of pressure out of that turbo, you have a big turbo, it's gonna take forever. Like you're gonna have, you know, your floor, and then like, right, it's gonna take a long time for that turbo to get a lot of pressure out of that turbo, you have a big turbo it's going to take forever. You're going to have your floor and then it's going to take a long time for that turbo to get spooled up. So that 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. It's this 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, uh, 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 is a deep gutter hole. Like deep. Oh, it just hits you.

This is like the, it's just gonna 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 the elegance the curves whatever it is Well those come and go. You know, to me, styles change. It's just forever. Yeah, I'm gonna apply that to my daily life once again. Metapores 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 ever and without 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 Literature Creature. So we talked a lot about cars and EVs and stuff.

We went to that unveiling and literally, like we had like almost a non alcohol induced hang over the next morning of like morning the hideousness of cyber truck. Come six months later a year later and I'm like, Damien, that thing's actually kind of cool. Yeah. That also teaches you something about, again, it's to the thing you said earlier, sort of going against the current of the experts of the beliefs or whatever is and making a decision from first principles. Some of that also applies to design and styling and fashion and culture and all that. Some of that, you know, so in fashion especially, it's so interesting. So speaking of being rebellious against the current, the current fads actually

is the way to pave the new fads. I wanna didn't take long for others to follow. You look at like currently like what Hyundai's doing with their I free up to one like the Ionic or something like that. It's square, it's like 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. 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, uh, porches, porches. I still can't quite understand the small size, the curves. I don't quite get it. Like I said, I don't love the look of the RX-7. 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 in from a bunch of different directions. Can you just say what is Starship and what is the most impressive thing to you about it? You've talked about the engines involved. Maybe you haven't really kind of like 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 make it that happened

So what is this thing that we're talking about? Yeah, so 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 you know all this is currently aspirational until it's working. So I'll say it's, I'll say what it's aspirational going to be. And obviously I have faith that that will happen, but I 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, or 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, on 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 they'll, 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 wrap engines are the ones that generate the thrust that makes it the most powerful rocket ever built by a almost double. Compared to the Saturn 5 really? The N1 had 45 mega-neutons of thrust. The Saturn 5 had I think 35 or 40 mega-aneutons of thrust. The Saturn V 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 this happening? So what's a static fire this happening? So like, what's a static fire with some of these raptors look like? And what do we stand? You're just talking about offline. Like the thing that happened yesterday was impressive. You know, everything in this is kind of iterations. And so, you know, the milestones that we're seeing, we actually have on everydayastronaut.com. We have a milestone checklist of like all the things we're hoping to see, that we kind of 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 feeling 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. Yep, right. Where's the milestones? Rightant all the way. This is the first time. Yep, right there. Where's the milestones?

Right there at the top. Click that big picture. Yep, just anywhere. That big picture. Yep. So there's the what dress rehearsal. So what's the what dress rehearsal? Yep, so that's where they, for the first time,

they filled it completely to the brim with both liquid oxygen and liquid methane. Now they've done component level testing where they fill 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 gonna explode. You could just have a big giant pool of liquid nitrogen like flooding the area,

but it's not gonna be an explosion. So they've done that for cryotesting 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 in 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, while fully stacked on the pad. Like, basically, I mean, it is 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 and the prior history of space flight. But it's a really simple launch stand.

They basically have like this, it almost looks like a stool, like a, you know, like a milking a cow stool thing with a, a hope, a big giant. Now I know you're from Iowa. Yes, we all know what that stool looks like. Oh, yeah, we all over and sitting on that stool, milking cat. Yeah. And there, 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 They are the O well M some people say next to it is the orbital launch tower the O well T and that is not only Integral to fueling up the upper stage and I have the upper stage has to have propellant lines run to it

So that they can fill it with propellant and 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 chopstick, so the whole system can be called meccazilla.

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 of 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 Chop Six 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, um, 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 the like what's essentially like two like relatively small ball joints that hold the entire thing. And so I have to land very precisely on these mounts and 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? Well, you don't have to balance the thrust and all the... You can negate some of those 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 wrapped 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 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 think factor that in. And that's how many engines are involved in the landing part as the three wrapped 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 seven or something, or nine, or something, some number to accelerate quickly, or decelerate quickly, that's the same thing. And then shut it down to three,

or something to for a little bit more granular control. Because unlike Falcon 9, Starship has enough engines and variability to actually, if it needed to hover to maybe more precisely align itself with the pad, it would have that capability. And especially having multiple engines, if you only have a single engine running, you can't really roll 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 its vertical axis You 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 needed Align it to those landing nubs, you know on the landing arms and stuff 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 Speaking of pitching yaw the thing So Starship flips and it's belly flops. There's a interesting kind of maneuver On the way down to land Can you describe that maneuver? What's involved? Yeah, so this is definitely 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 The as it's falling, you know, you can you's falling, you can let the atmosphere do as much work as it can. And so if you have an unsymmetric, it's not a ball that's falling. This is some kind of object with shape. At one face of it is going to have more surface area than the other face. So in the shape of 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 service area. If you flip that on its side, you actually have a lot more service 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. 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, you're belly-flopping. You're maximizing the amount of surface area that's in the wind stream 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 they'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 like auxiliary landing engines. You don't have forces, you know, even if you were to land like on its belly with a separate set of engines, you don't have to have forces, even if you were to land on its belly with a separate set of engines, not only would those engines weigh a lot and be extra complexity, et cetera, et cetera, but you also don't have to make the ship be able to handle landing on its belly

as opposed to having the forces be vertical through it. But it's a giant thing. 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. I have to have another kind of fuel. Like, there's just complexities there that involve, plus the actual maneuver is difficult from the like what are the thrusters that actually make that make all that happen.

You're adding a lot of complexity, not a lot, but your 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 gonna take to go from horizontal to vertical, this rocket in particular, 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 dihydro angle, at a dihydro 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, it's just insane amount of torque in order to move these quickly enough to be a valid control surface.

So that's a huge complication of moving these fins and developing that landing algorithm and the control for a huge vehicle with flaps going in and out to stay stable. Then as you light the engines, now all of a sudden you want the top, you want to flip the rocket 90 degrees, the rear-ward flaps, the bottom flaps, fold in. They tuck all the way into a minimized drag. That's going to make it want to swing down. You extend the upper flaps. That makes it so that the nose wants to pitch up.

You kick on the engines, they're now lighting all three engines, at least as the last, like successful times. They like 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're pushed the rocket, you know, at the time the nose is at the time of letting those engines, the nose is facing the horizon and the engines are facing the opposite horizon. Yeah. So you now shot at a decent amount in an often, you know, the direction that you're not falling, you know, so you have to factor that in an often, you know, 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, and in this case, you're going to land on the inside the arm, the loving arms of the topsticks, you know, the creed arms wide open, you know, try to land inside this. Exactly. It's

finally 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 is perfect so that it can control itself into a control landing. And all this is done in like 500 meters, like 1500 feet. You're doing all of those things stupidly close to the ground.

It looks absurd. So far they've done five of these tests. The first four all blew up. They're all coming in from about 10 kilometers or 33,000 feet. Falling, flipping, again, this thing is huge. That just the booster or just the upper stage of this is like 50 meters tall. So it's 155 meters tall, about 165 feet tall. Nine meters wide, it's a 30 feet wide. It weighs something like, I don't remember if it's something like 120 metric tons, so 120,000 kilograms, you know,

a 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. Yeah. So this is upper stage is doing this belly floppin' over. Yep.

So this is the stage that would presumably have humans on board if we were to use. And if things continue to plan out, here's something I would love to see. Just saying this. Yeah. If you already have these big arrow 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 the Space Shuttle. Ooh. I mean, that worked. The braunded it, the Soviet Union's braun. I rolled my real heart there, so. Thank you. Wow. Wow. Really good surprise. I'm very impressed. I'm very impressed. I rolled my art real hard there, so thank you. Wow. Wow. Really good.

I'm very impressed. I'm very impressed. And, you know, the brand did it. We have other space planes like the X-37B. We have the upcoming Serenavada's Dream Tracer. 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 5000 kilograms into space if we just land at horizontal.

If we kind of give up on our ego and landhors on the, at least on earth, then, you know, Actually, it's like we can get another 5,000 kilograms into space if we just land at horizontal. If we kind of give up on our ego and land horizontally, at least on Earth, then 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 other planets and Mars doesn't have a runway, doesn't have 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 a 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 thought to be useful. There's only one percent 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 air stream. I guess it's probably more like 60 degrees, 70 degrees to the air stream, where it's belly flopping. And it's going to especially do that on Mars. It's going to need to use up as let the little bit of atmosphere there is, you know, you're coming in 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 air stream to, you know, a 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. But in my opinion, yes. 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 it's, if someone runs a 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, it doesn't matter, land horizontally on a runway, then that's what's going to happen.

It doesn't matter, but they still will develop, if the ultimate goal is to land on Mars and they'll have a dedicated Mars variant, which will likely look different than the Earth variant. They'll 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 uh 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. Yeah over and over and over and there's a chance that you you know You have just a a cyclor just uh, 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 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 could do back to Earth. Once you're at Earth, you rendezvous again with another landing starship. That starship might be horizontal runway starship. 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 flaw of the space shuttle. It 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, you're flying on a chair through the air. It's incredible.

You didn't even know this existed and now you're complaining about it. That's great. Exactly. So 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 that was the decision to flip close

to the ground. Yeah, yeah, closer to the ground 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, 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 of 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 I mean, the best thing would be you flip at 100 meters off the ground, you like all your engines to maximum thrust, you pull 50 Gs, you land on a dime basically. Obviously, there's no margin there. There's diminishing returns on that gravity loss thing and in your high thrust weight ratios. That's a pretty good compromise. Yes, it looks scary, but they could be a lot more aggressive with that. Yeah, and squeeze out even a little bit

better performance, but there are diminishing returns. That's 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, 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. It's so star bases right on the border of Mexico and the United States and various other

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. Assume it's not closed for testing, because they do close the highways during the week, you 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 100, 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 Soviet Union and during the N1 and the Saturn 5. Imagine just being able to drive up right next to the launch pad. There's no way. And so to have this kind of access to this program is so incredible. The craziest thing is when you're

driving out on highway four, it's bumpy, it's 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're just sitting there, where am I? And then obviously you kind of turn this corner and the trees and the brush kind of clear out. And obviously you get a sense of driving down the highway. You're just sitting there, where am I? And then obviously you kind of turn this corner and the trees and the brush kind of clear out and obviously 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 heat haze, through the atmospheric distortion

and you just see this weird, it looks like a city almost on the horizon. There's tons of these tall buildings, there's a weird ominous launch tower thing with arms wide open and sometimes add a giant metal rocket and it just looks so, so weird. I mean, 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. Yeah. You stand there and you just go, what is this? And also, I mean, 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, a 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 a starship? So far it's been high stakes, like it's been insane because 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 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 there. Like here, we'll just limit the thrust away ratio and just 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 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're just diminishing, you know, it's just fading, fading, fading, fading, you still get that rumble, that sense, but, but those first five flights, the suborbital hops were, just, I'll cherish them forever, because you're 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 fairly dense

urban area. It's this massive thing. You've seen it, you stood there, you look at it, you're like, wow, it's crazy. You've seen people working on it. They're a 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. And the first time, 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, because I had spent so much time driving around and seeing it,

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 that everything about it's just crazy and the sound that 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, you know, hide telephoto lenses, tracking it. And what's funny is there's a pretty strong wind up there at altitude. And it was moving. There's a lot of, um, gas, gas is 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, oh, 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 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 gonna crash down in Brownsville. And finally, they shut the engines off and we're watching it fall, and again, we're thinking like, oh my God, this is gonna crash down in Brownsville. 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, falling, super controlled, and we're like, oh my God, this is perfect. And all of a sudden it clicked, and I see it

with my eyes, I finally like tracking, it's straight out, like straight in front of us. And 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, this 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 the same 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. It just felt like it was so close.

And so when it finally lit its engine and it flipped, I was losing my mind. Cause 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 is anything else. It'll be the biggest, heaviest, largest thing to ever fly. It's going to shake everything. I can't wait. I have all 33 Raptor engines. I've been active at once.

Have they tested that? No, that's coming up. That's kind of the next milestone. I don't know when this will come out, but 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. I think at this point, it seems like next week. So step one would be static fire? Yep. 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 engine 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 gonna light all 33 engines simultaneously. And although that sounds scary, let's not forget the Falcon Heavy that's now flown five times completely fallously has 27 engines running simultaneously. So they definitely have, 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, like it talks to talk to you more about, but leading up to that, of course, is like, what is some of the tests here on the way? So is the static fire, the fully stacked with the two stages, will there be, and then are the things you 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. Yeah, 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 columns, 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 other is maybe, maybe more, maybe not for the full stack testing, the D stack and the, there's a 33 engine. So, so realistic, we're expecting them to D stack and SpaceX, I think just tweeted that actually 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 pretty high risk if they do blow up the rocket. 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, because if you think about it, normally the launch clamps are holding onto an entire rocket weighing 5 million kilograms, 5 million, you know,

it's weighing it and insane amount. So those clamps don't actually have to hold 75 mega-neutons of thrust. They really want to have to hold down 25 mega-neutons of thrust. You know what I mean? They're not designed to hold down all 75. They do 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 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 destack

You know, they don't want to have all 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, 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 on all the items.

And hope the big one too is the FAA launch license. There, that'll be 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 that kind of beautiful, magical thing when you live in reality. Because it is, I mean, it is a big rocket. One, the biggest thing, it's not so much, the FAA doesn't necessarily care about the success

of the rocket. They didn't really just care about the safety of public and public property. 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 X, Y, and Z.

Here's the potential damage. Here's the blast radius. 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 know, that have a perfect mixture ratio of your fuel and oxidizer. If on 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 it, you're lighting all of its simultaneous things. It's 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 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 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 for something

that could very well happen this year, even just a few months away, making a prediction. By the way, you like superstitious on this kind of stuff a little bit. You don't get worried about jinxing it and that kind of stuff. I would imagine you would be waiting for all of these launches to keep getting delayed, where you start thinking that there are certain things you do will control the weather. My socks. I am aware of these socks. 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.

Yeah. 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. Yeah. So like realistically for 18 months, it had 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, a month or two, I was saying, I don't expect it to fly in 2021. 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, they're like, there's still a lot of stuff, they're gonna have to validate it, they're gonna have to test everything, every component.

And you know, people were like, how dare you say that even one shot? Well, the president of SpaceX is saying Q3 of 2020. I'm like, okay, but like, I'm just, I'm not gonna 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'm expecting like I'm trying to keep my march in April as free as I can. We'll put it that way. I love it. Actually just

in a small tensioned on going shot. Like what do you from everything I know she's an instrumental a really crucial person to the successful space ex 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. She's the glue to the tornado.

Tornado comes in and then she comes around and just really executes on and helps. You know, a famous story is that at some point Elon walked in or she 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 this might have been end of 2017 or something, and it flew for the first time in 2018. So we're talking like it's close to the end of development. There's hardware being built, all this stuff,

and Elon's literally in a meeting, telling people they're gonna cancel it, and we're gonna move on to BFR, or no starship, and just go full steam ahead on that. And she runs into the meeting and reminds Elon, we have X amount of customers have already purchased a ride on Falcon Heavy. We can't delay that. You know, so it's that business sense of like we yes, it's great to innovate,

but we also have to pay our dues 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 doesn't I think she has such a great perspective on everything. It really seems like everything, she doesn't, I wish she did more interviews because I would love to hear more from her. But man, like it just seems like- Hear that, Gwen. We're both of us.

Yeah, she hasn't actually done them in interviews, right? Not really, no, 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 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, my understanding is that she is absolutely integral and does just a insane amount of work at SpaceX. Yeah, I mean, so it's the project planning, but also the how the teams integrate together

and the hiring and this is the man in the whole thing. I think it's a lot of it. It's honestly even just the business, making sure the money's flowing and a positive trend more or less. Yes, Elon's obviously a money guy, but he thinks, I think Elon is so risky. He just loves to throw it all in

that he leaves little margin for error. You know, he's been really lucky with the role in his dice, you know, especially like when he started SpaceX and Tesla. That was the ultimate role of the dice. But I think she's a healthy balance to be like, well, here's our, you know, operations. And now we can continue to do this without risking everything, you know, and starships 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 SpaceX would probably find 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 could not 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. They're all in like all chips are pretty much as many chips as possible are in I mean this I 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

Where when they're already when they've already had very successful company. Yeah. 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 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 and people are going, why are you leaping into this insane program and system and risk when you have such a, you know, 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. The you've been selected for the deer 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. Everything that we've been talking about, you're not just be reporting on, you'll 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. Man. Yeah. Yeah, it's basically, it's the Willy Wonka of space, like a generous, 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's the individual?

You suck who my is out, but at the time, I'm telling a story. At the time, we didn't know. Okay, great. So February 27th, 2017, a press release comes out from SpaceX, saying, someone purchased a ride through us around the moon. We're gonna 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. So first time, I'm like, I'm going to make a YouTube video about this. Just 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 space X press conference. I'm 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. Space X 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 there in this giant luxurious, you know mega rocket around the moon And it comes out this individual named you Sakuma Zawa who is a Japanese billionaire Purchased this ride and instead of inviting, you know his friends and you know colleagues and whatever whoever's family members or whatever He decided that the most impactful thing he could do with this opportunity is invite more or less artists. And the original thing was like artists, you know, journalists, a painter, an athlete, you know, a, you know, photographer, videographer, you know, all walks of life face. When they said athletes, they thought of you.

They're like, I know guy. This guy rode ragdollons. But so and at the time, you know, is like, this is crazy. I can't believe this is going to happen. And you know, 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, different, you know, 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, you know, any one country or any one individual

or any, you know, set of military trained, you know, astronauts could do. I'll offer up a new perspective. Beautiful. I literally, I mean, at the press conference, I cried. Like I had a couple tears in my eyes. I was like, this is so cool. I was just paused on that.

So he goes by MZ. MZ, yep. How incredible is that? It's, I like, I think it's, you often don't realize the importance of individuals in human history. Like they, they, they define because this, this could be, we were talking about the importance of Elon in particular, you know, most of the work is done by large groups of people, there 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 a sort of 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. And that will be part of history. Yeah. And it's, it's, it's, it's it. And that will be part of history. Yeah. And it's easy these days for people to be cynical, you know, especially about like space flight and wealthy individuals. But really, in my opinion, and maybe, you know,

just the time I was just so couldn't believe this idea, you know, I'm someone that has studied a lot about, you know, the Apollo program, the people that have been to the moon and they're incredible individuals, you know, I'm someone that has studied a lot about, you know, the Apollo program that people that have been to the moon and they're incredible individuals, incredible individuals, but they're so saturated with tasks, you know, 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. Like that just psychologically has to be insane. And so 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. Like that to me is just beautiful. and create with the rest of our planet, like that to me is just beautiful. So that is the objective of the mission. That right there is the objective of the mission. And 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. It's the more real it becomes.

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, you know, there's a pretty comprehensive selection process with interviews and stuff, each step, I would try not to get my hopes up. And frankly, like this, let me be clear,

this was not something that I've always wanted to do. You know, it's not like I'm out there, I didn't start doing YouTube videos because I wanted to even go to space, like none of that. And I've said, hilarious, they've probably said, dozens or hundreds of times on air, like, yeah, I don't ever want to go to space. Because it's not like my, it's not a driving force.

It's not really a thing I even really truly pictured or let myself fantasize about, frankly. So each step of the selection process, I didn't really let myself dream about it too much or, you know, about it kind of 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. Like, you know, frankly, is it's, I've seen spaceflight stuff go wrong.

I've, you know, I think about this stuff a lot. So like, yeah, I get more nervous, but I also get more excited about that opportunity. Like, it's an opportunity that how can you pass? And it's still, I still have to actually stop pause thing 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, seeing the earth rise behind it. Yeah. It's going to be like, I can't tell you what it's going to be like and feel like. It's still epic. But it's insane to me that we're having this conversation, and that is my reality. And that someone was generous enough to consider the option of sharing this with frankly

strangers. And 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. And so 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.

Yeah. Amazing people. I would have, you know, 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 the chance to meet them and talk to them and Steve Ayokes on the crew. Like, well, who else is there? So you've gotten the chance to meet them and talk to them and Steve Ayokes on the crew like, well, who else is there? So you are obviously the star athlete on the crew, who else in terms of the artists that are there. So, 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 so far I have not met Steve Aoki 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, we can Steve, Steve Aoki, American DJ and producer and musician, top from South Korea's also a musician and a producer. So this all across the world,

so it's truly global, all different kinds of walks of life, all artists in different forms. And Steve is his parents are Japanese, but you know, let born raise in the United States. Yemi is a dancer and choreographer from the Czech Republic.

Rianan is a fine art photographer from, well, England and 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, yep, that's me, from the United States. Then you have Karim, who is from England and does also is a photographer and documentarian. It 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 he's also already been producing and he's very young. I think he's only like 19 or 20. I mean, he's been acting since he was like five years old or something. He's a Bali wood star. Like he is a star in Indian, which is really cool.

Right. Caitlin Farrington from the United States is an Olympic gold medalist snowboarder. So she, believe it or not, is the athlete not me. And she's one of the back crew members. So is me, you from Japan, who's a dancer. It's amazing. It's such an interesting group.

Is there something else you could say about MZ? How about you, Sakuma? Sakuma is now. So he's also a musician. I mean, is there something else you could say about MZ? How about you, Sakuma? How? You Sakuma is now. So 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 just 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 when there's frankly to be to be honest, we still I sort of know all of the details about this, you know, we're not yet, there's frankly to be honest, we still don't 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 maybe 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 a mission or axiom, where SpaceX flew individually. They trained for about six months. A lot of like reading manuals and learning the spacecraft. Yeah, you're gonna do like a rocky form on Taj 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. It just seems to want to film a self- himself shirtless in the snow. Doesn't make a... Why is he always doing this? Can't get him to stop punching me. So yeah, hopefully realistically, I eat a lot of the manual. But there's a physical component to all of this and that's really, I mean, that's fascinating. And it's also inspired in the sort of civilians can do this. That's really interesting. Yeah, I mean, this is, to me, this represents this and the other commercial space, you know, private spaceflight 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 that, oh, you know, why are people wasting all this money doing space flight stuff? It's like, well, I'm sure some people are saying that same thing about, you know, airplanes and early aviation going like, why are we, can't believe those people are wasting the government's,

you know, funding these stupid planes and stuff. How is this ever gonna benefit me? And nowadays, like, imagine if all the planes just stopped working. Like, we'd freak out. It's like, our economy would collapse. It would freak out. It's like a economy would collapse. It would suck. And it might be a long time before we get to that reality

with spaceflight. Well, no, if spaceflight halted today, space assets, all of our on-orbit assets, our life would be crippled. And I don't think people realize that. So it's all ready. We're already reliant on it. But now we're getting to the point where we're really turning that corner where 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. If you're born, now we're from now on, I think there's a real decent chance of, by the time you pass, there's an opportunity to a flown in space. Yeah, I mean, if I'm being honest, I still haven't lost the feeling of magic

of flying in a 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 Wi-Fi. Yeah, so it's just, it's like the contrast to that is like, wow, we're, we're incredible, we're incredible as a society. And it's like we develop some amazing technology that improves almost and measurably 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 at the same stuff will be happening with space travel.

It'll become mundane and boring at the point. The tough thing about space travel, of course, 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, is the landing and a whole lot of the world, whether it's docking with different transport vehicles or the space station or it's landing elsewhere.

I think you mentioned, since there's artists, there's filmmakers and so on, and you're all of those on top of being great athlete. I don't know, I'll just stop the running joke at this point. But have you thought about just in general, like we've offline talked about microphones and like all the different ways to film space launch, yeah, 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? Because there's so many opportunities to sort of think of how to do this. So one of the fun things to remember is that Starship is huge. Like its internal volume is that starship is huge. Like its internal volume is, the pressurized volume on starship is bigger than a 747s pressurized volume.

And it can take 100 metric tons to anywhere with enough refueling. 100, so we have, in theory, very little mass and volume constraints. Unlike prior, all other space flight missions ever, you're counting grams down to, you know, and just really can't risk. You have very defined parameters on what you 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.

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, and prewire, 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 so I really ideally one of the things I'd love to do I'm gonna be pushing really hard to actually try live streaming from inside

during the launch During the launch last dream from inside during the launch. During the launch last dream from inside that would be incredible. Wouldn't that be. It's possible to pull off. That's really, really incredible. Now there is the magic to the last dream because like that's real. That's right there. That would the world would tune in. 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 will 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, in safety reasons, why it might not be a great idea to live stream or 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 a giant explosive, powerful rocket? Have you thought about the risk of that, the danger of that? Have you contemplated your own mortality? How could I not? 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, these days, this day and age. It's obviously, I will have to see a lot of successful launches and have to have a lot of confidence in the

engineering and 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 drako 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 prove that that could

be a completely valid thing. The space shuttle through a hundred, flew 133 times fully successfully. It did have two failures, resulting in the loss of 14 lives. Um, 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 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 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 interrated and see 10, you know, or I have to 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. Will 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 of that entry velocity, though, because it is, you know, it takes another, it's about 30% faster to get, like, to go 30% faster than the lower thermo 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 we 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.

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, 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 the kinks out well before anyone's on top of it. Nowadays Falcon 9 and Dragon is 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 you're young? Yeah, have you gotten the chance to think about death is 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 and I'm going to see you've had moments when you realize it could end just like this. Yes. And I have for most of my adult life had dreams of falling and hitting the ground and it just all you get it ringing your ears and all goes black and then my head I go, oh shit, that was it.

Have you seen a therapist about this? Uh-huh. I wonder what it means. So I'm sure there's a forwardion interpretation. Someone in there that I'm going to also apply to my dating. Like, no, the joke is the running joke continues. Okay. So I mean, it's, it's fascinating in general, as I hope we'll talk about it in the early days of space flight that there is there is a

The task of reaching out to the stars is a fundamental risky one You have to take risk and of course there's really rigorous safety precautions and so on but still it's still a risk Well, and I think like most people that that for me the idea of dying isn't so much about myself It's about those affected by, you know, my loved ones, my family, my girlfriend, my friends, you know, obviously I don't want to have this be a traumatic experience for anybody, you know. It's already gonna be hard, like it's already,

I know my mom gets, my parents and family and friends are very supportive, that, you know, my parents are all about it, of course, but my mom is also very emotional too. So speaking of athletes, my brother-in-law has actually been on American Ninja Warrior two seasons, 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 gonna be like when she sees her son get on top of a skyscraper and ascend on a column of flames into the heavens? Like that's going to be very difficult, you know. And I've taken a mod they've seen star race and they've seen starship. They've seen a couple launches. I don't know if that's gonna make it feel better.

Explosive therapy, I guess. Explosive therapy, okay. I don't know if that's going to make him feel better. Exposure therapy. Exposure therapy. OK. Have you had that conversation with them about this? Like before agreeing to join? I mean, was that what was or is it one of those things? Like you just you don't have that conversation. I suppose it's understood that there's a love. There's a passion here. You just, you don't have that conversation.

I suppose it's understood that there's a love, there's a passion here. And realistically, I'm not, I'm going to be convinced and statistically convinced that this is relatively safe. You know, like, again, 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 99s, percent safe. Again, there's things that people do every day that are less safe than this.

Like you ride in the motorcycle. Again, riding in the motorcycle, doing wheelies at an over 100 mile an hour. Not used to. You do wheelies over a hunt. What? Ha. What?

All right. I'm not a smart guy always, okay? Well, you know, formation flying the fighter jets was likely a more dangerous thing. Yes. Then what I'll be doing in space flight. So as surreal as it is, we're talking about you 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, but pictures of yourself was named by fitness model. Fitness model. Obviously. Now, I did, I did a lot of weddings. I shot 150 weddings all around the world. So subjects, all kinds of material like a do do portrait also. A lot of portrait work and then just you know random like commercial things like you know food and beverages for businesses are like you know wheelchair ramp company. I shot their product like

you know it's random whatever a professional photographer does and Cedar Falls Iowa. You know, when did you all fall in love with photography with a visual medium? Do you remember? Yeah, I do actually remember. So I grew up drawing constantly. I was the weird kid that I would bring a sketch pad to the restaurants. Like every restaurant 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 fostered that. They would, you know, and 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 my cameras, actually my dad's old Pentax that I first shot

on a film camera and developing the film. I didn't personally develop it, like, you know, getting the film back, back in those days. 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 show it to other people. Just kind of like, to me, that was like the ultimate form of realism. It was like literally showing you the photons, basically, that affected this film. And so I mean, I was 19 when I got my first digital SLR

at Canon 20D and started shooting. And yeah, I just, I fell in love with it. It became like, I got a job at a camera store and basically all my extra money went into buying everything that I could at the time. 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 that I could travel and pay like, you know, afford to be able to do some big trips every year and develop some kind of, you know, portfolio of traveling. And not necessarily 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 like making big prints and having them displayed and that kind of stuff and pretty see. Are you still a canon guy? You still a canon allegisth?

No, no. I moved around. I did Sony for a bit. I still kind of shoot mostly cannon glass But adapted to either Sony was like lenses. Sorry like cannon glass. Look at you What do you think about the these things that I'm using Sony a7 for great? Great. Yeah, it's so 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 primal, I resisted everything. My whole journey with these camera thing, I'm trying to figure stuff out, is like primal lens, it seems so stupid. So primal lens is like a fixed zoom thing.

Yep. It's like why? Because I'm about going to like Ukraine and Thinking it's similar like Yeah, very similar to space flight, but you're very constrained because you're going into an unknown environment You're going to a war zone. You're going 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? What gives you like a good image versus a flexibility versus the weight. His 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 have to learn really quickly. But yeah, that of, it's a whole journey that you've already been on, but it's nice to have a beginner like me to explore that. I think there is a nice thing, just like as we've been talking about with a beginner's mind, to not let equipment get in the way of what your vision is of what a thing should look like. Yeah. Sometimes like, especially if you're a professional videographer, a photographer, a cinematographer, whatever you call it,

you can like fetishize equipment too much. You can get so much equipment. Now, I've interacted with it because I've been trying to learn from other people that have so much more experience than me. I think their advice is often like, very pushing a lot of equipment versus like, the final thing, like how do you create the art of it? Because to me, even photography is just like storytelling.

And so, like a lot of the discussion to me, that I enjoy, especially talking to creative people is like the final story. Like how, and I've learned, you know, like light, light is a weird thing. Like it's so interesting. It's so interesting how you can create a motion with light. Like with a little, you can 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.

Like because like that's the conversation I want to have. Like if people give me advice how to light a scene, all that kind of stuff is great. But the reality is that a little bit of light in a different direction that you have to understand how that changes contour on your face and everything and the expression that your face can like the expression that could be affected to communicate under on a different lighting conditions and then like the mystery of like having some of your face in darkness and some not, when you can only see the eyes and not the face, when the back on is visible or not, I mean, the, the, yeah, it's, yeah, it's all just like this interesting art form that 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. Because when you start learning about photography, learn about, you know, how the aperture It's fun with me with photography and rockets. They're both the ultimate story of compromise. Because when you start learning about photography, learn about 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 medium format camera versus a crop camera affects everything is a compromise, and price versus performance. You're like, there's always a compromise. You're always literally doing 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. Two teams of people will come up with wildly different things. When did you fall in love with rockets? Yeah, so the story keeps going for me, so I was doing... Sorry, I just dropped through the... Okay, it's high for time, everybody.

We'll go down a deep raffle there. 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, 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 didn't do the day. I'm not being very creative, you know? So I remember craving like 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 clickbait got me like, I'm like, oh, yeah, I'm going to see if you know, and I see that the minimum bit was like $250,000. I'm like, okay, no, I can't own the Apollo joy stick, you know, but I got me on this website called our auction. And so I started scrolling, okay, no, I can't own the Apollo joy stick, 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 made on, and they had like, 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 at a 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 the stuff. I think it's so cool. Look at all this old history stuff. And it 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 the SR-71, like kind of pumpkin suit.

Semi-pressure suit with a full helmet. I mean, it looks like a space suit. For all intents and purposes, it's kind of like a space suit. And I just bid on it. I think $325. And next thing you know, it arrives at my door. And from that point on, literally, I got it out. I immediately tried 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. So 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, there's a hose, that long hose, thing that would normally plug into an air supply, had a little plug on the end of it, so 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 below 90. So you're there for panicking inside. Yeah, a few seconds already reading like my premature obituary like idiot dies alone in space suit in this living room. You know, like just imagine.

Yeah, that would be like Darwin award for sure for sure. So, um, 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. Stars wide open. Okay.

So, um, so I ended up like the space to kind of like more or less haunted me because it kind of just, it's saddened like my living room for a long time. And I didn't know what to do with it. And I actually had a friend who is also didn't know what to do with it. And I 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. It's like, all right, you know, I walk across the street, literally live across the street, Taylor. And I put the space suit on, and I took this funny picture of me, and I'm 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, whimsical, silly mundane things. But I was researching a lot about like, you know, I was trying to hide Easter eggs. Like I was gonna hide in like the, you know, the echocardiogram of Alan Shepherd, you know, like his first flight into space and photoshopping that into pictures. And like, you know, doing all these little like facts

about space flight, but they're just hidden little elements in these photos. And man, doing the, I just fell in love facts about space flight, 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. 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 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 have 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. So many opportunities to have a light bulb go off or someone would be like this is awesome. And so yeah, I think I started so at the end of 2016 like throughout 2016 I realized I want to be done doing photography as a profession. 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 I had this thing. You know, at that time I'd been doing it for roughly two years and had seen, I don't know, like 50,000 Instagram followers or something. I thought like, I can 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. Yeah. And so it basically I gave myself a runway of one year, 2017 of like, I'm gonna throw stuff for the wall and see what sticks.

So I was doing like Twitch streams. I was playing Kerbal Space program, 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 curbal, like little alien guys and it's fun and silly, 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 27, 2017, when SpaceX had that announcement that their flights went around 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. It 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 was wearing the space suit. This picture. 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 the video did relatively well. Like I had no followers on YouTube.

Like I had maybe 102 or something. Is the video still up? Yeah. That's great. It's a watch. Yeah, that's so cringy. And as it should be, you know, your first video should be terrible.

If it's not terrible, then you spent too long trying to make it. Yeah. So 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. I'm 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. It's crazy. Like if you,

if you had 500 people attend a thing that you do, they'll be like, you're like a rock star, it's crazy. We lose perspective, I think. Yeah, we lose perspective very quickly. Very quickly. So I made another video. This one I spent more time on. And 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 what I love to do? It's like boom, you snap me. Boom, boom, post you're done an hour, you know?

And video is 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 it and it actually did really bad. And I was really upset. I'm like, I spent two weeks on the stupid video,

you know, worked really hard scripting and blah, blah, blah. And then it, you know, had like a thousand views or something. It didn't much worse in 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 every day astronaut. And I think it was like a month or two later, I happened to like, you know, check the analytics on YouTube and almost boom. That video, like kind of took off. And I got like four year, 50 year, 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 in. 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? So 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 gonna find your own voice. And I know like even, you know, Jimmy talked to you about that, like how your first video is gonna suck, you're not gonna be yourself.

You're gonna be nervous, you're gonna be, not gonna be on the tone, the pace, the things that are interesting. And actually, originally, I had constraints. I was really worried about making a short video because I thought there's no one who's going to watch the 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, for 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 just kept playing and getting longer and actually more and more in depth into the topics. And instead of getting like pushback, and being like, this is so boring, I realized as long as I was walking people through the whole step, 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 to just kept rolling.

And I'm like, all right, and 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, and you know, part of that is like, we do like script readthroughs with like our supporters and do like cuts of videos and people, a decent amount of people see it before it goes public. And 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. 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 that 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.

I'm 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. I mean, your, your epic video on the, the history of Soviet rockets comes to to mind and we'll talk about that in a second But it's called people to check it out the entire Soviet rocket engine family tree So that's something you've researched for two years. Yeah All right, you put your heart and soul into it. There's a lot of passion There's a lot those long journey. It's's 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, 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, you know, 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 gonna be a passion project. I honestly was like, if it ever crosses a million, it's a home run.

Because in the search, I had to do a couple of 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, it was a slow turn. Well, I remember when you first released it, and that's when I watched it. I remember like this, I saw when I when you first released it, and that's when I watched it. I remember like this. I saw 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. I add 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. I know. And then I just could imagine the torment you're going through. What if I use the different thumbnail? Is that Jimmy, the Mr. Beast, yeah, torment, like just a slightly different title or a slightly different

And I have videos ironically the last like I don't know five videos I've produced are Forbally flopping like some of my worst videos have ever made statistically the interesting one is like the you Summarize incredible video you summarizing the people should go watch about all the incredible video you summarizing that people should go watch about all the the awards video for 2022 like all the cool stuff that happened to me too. I remember that not being that popular. There's a few ones recently that are not that popular like writing a fighter jet. I thought I thought that was gonna be easy like one or two million. I don't know if I've paid the flights off to go there you know to me like in that video, it makes no sense.

And frankly, here's, here's at the end of the day. Yeah. I realized like I have lately, especially the last of the year, to kind of disconnected from the, 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, support Tim on Patreon.

Well, it's, that, but the, 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 just, it'd be super different videos. I wouldn't spend as much time researching because I just, you know, they'd 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 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 it is as difficult as you might think. I mean, it's an insane topic. And what do you mean by starting, I mean, like the ignition of a guy? 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's 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, but you have sort of the depth of the impact you have is, is a thing that YouTube can't give you numbers on, but it's, it's a really important thing to sort of remember that it's really not just about the YouTube numbers or it's off for 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, it's a, that's really important to sort of remember as you're creating it. That's something I, 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, the more the channel matures, the more I realize the importance of it as an overall mission, as opposed to like, you know,

in the first year or two, it's a rat race of growth and of 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 epicly researched video you've done. It's like it's truly an epic video.

So what again called the entire Soviet rocket engine family tree, took you two years to 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 and went through an insane iteration process and made so many engines. Like I didn't even touch any 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. They physically are still today lighting the main combustion chambers of the Soyuz engines, of the RD-107 and RD-108, with essentially matchsticks. They literally stick a T-shaped thing up into the chamber

and have a pyro technique in it that ignites the actual propellants in the combustion chamber. It's not the most elegant solution in the world. Yeah. 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, good or 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 like, all of it together. Yes, 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 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-dunes of thruster or something around and it's in the F1 is like seven or something. It's it's huge. Yet way more complicated way way more efficient, way just better engine in that sense, as far as performance goes, yet it never flew. It never left the stand. They never built the rocket around it. The N1, which was the most powerful rocket to a flown so far to date, it never made it through its first stage burn. All attempts failed spectacular and yet it had so much technology on it that was still unrivaled today almost

Like finally now we're beating it the NK 33s 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 sends out to you from the N1 family of rock and engines? Well, it's interesting because the N1 was the Kudz-Snetzov design bureau and he was actually an aircraft manufacturer. So he was one of the first people outside of kind of the 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 Kudnetsov, who had never developed a rocket engine. And so his first attempt at rocket engines was the NK series, NK15, NK33.

And they were amazing. They were brilliant. They're these wonderful close 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, he eats since he wasn't necessarily in the airspace, 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 and a hanger. And then we still literally used them in the United States. We used all together, I think it was like eight or 10 of them.

Repurpose them as they're called AJ 26s 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 end one of the rocket engines, that they're still that good, that they were the best choice for at the time, orbital sciences. Some of the culture that engineering has led to these things that still work, it's incredible.

You said that the RD-1-71 is one of the coolest engines ever made. Why is that? Yeah. 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 need to think, 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 such a large surface area of crazy flames, 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 figured 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 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 engines into two or four combustion chambers and kind of spread that work around so they didn't experience this combustion instability. So the R-171 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 mean, 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, I'm, 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. In seeing. I never even thought that was a thing you would ever could do, honestly.

I would, I got a 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, 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 role and your pitching your yacht

of auxiliary thrusters. By the way, did you get anything wrong in that video? Yeah. That people told you about? Yeah. I had a few things. Yep. First off, we had a graphic error where we actually, 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 copied and pasted. And I say it right on screen, but the like, and the voiceover, but on screen is 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 Koreliov's name. Kore. And I'm still gonna say it wrong no matter what. But my understanding, and from listening to native speakers, it's closer to Koreli is closer to Krelyev Then it is Korlev. Yeah, definitely. He said gay polish Krelyev

See, I will never say it that perfectly, but I know it's not just Korlev I mean again the English Translation of it likely I should have just said Korlev and said I'm saying it the dumb America way, but But you rolled your art. Cool, Merad. Excellent. Let me just ask you a difference in culture because you've reached so many rockets, so many different arrows that sat in five

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. There's definitely huge, huge cultural changes. The fun thing is that they kind of spawned from the same, they had the same starting place, both the Soviet rocket engines and Americans all came from the Nazi V they had the same starting place. Both, you know, the Soviet rocket engines and Americans

all came from the Nazi V2 rocket and the A4 engine. Literally physically spawned from that because at the fall of, you know, 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 or we're starting from the same like thing and letting two divergent, you know, 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 and not really evolve that much. Like they, I don't know, and I don't know why. I actually needed to do a history lesson on all of the US engines,

but it's literally like, as far as orbital class engines before now, I mean, 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, like, they wouldn't, and it was like a completely different engine. Yeah. So I just, yeah, 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 your more risk of verse. So you care about safety more about the value of human life. And the risk taken there, that you will iterate less. So yeah, I think the Soviet, especially in the early aspect of the program, I don't want to overstate this. Some of it is just through stories, you just air anecdotes. There are more willing to take risks. Yeah. Risk was human life, risks was the spacecraft. For example, the first orbital space flights from the Soviet Union,

the cosmonaut had to eject out of the capsule and parachute to landing. Yes. That's not very well like known. And it wasn't, they were 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 cause of not in one piece. So instead they had them just eject out of the thing and parachute to safety. Like, 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, you know, they threw all the spaghetti on the wall. That's funny that most people probably don't even know the first person in the space in America. And obviously everybody knows that. And it's like, it's kind of interesting how the space race and even World War Two, even like the history books, you ask most Americans, they think that America won World War Two,

like without America, like the real heroes of World war two is America. Yes, British people, they say, and everybody has a pretty good justification, like without Britain, without Churchill, their 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. Right. Most of the death happened. Yeah. Most of like most of the destruction.

But everyone has their perspective. And certainly on the space race, you know, the great accomplishment is the first man on the moon. You asked for a spree. Yeah, I was going to say. And then Yuri Gagarin from the Russian perspective, first man in space. And I think still persists in some of that in healthy forms. It's probably constructive to a little bit of competition, just pushes all the great scientists on your side.

But then what do you think about this Yuri Gagarin mission of the first human in space? And the Vastok 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. That's a, yeah, it's insane. What's insane to me is the first person in space

didn't just go to space. He went into orbit. You're a guy and 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. So they weren't terribly far behind to get a human into orbit like in the grand scheme of things, you know, 10 months difference. But at the same time, like the fact that so many units 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 like launching them like let's go or something like uh, I mean you're taking uh, we're talking about you being a starship like you're taking a pretty big risk being launched out into orbit. Oh, hopefully a lot less risk than what Yuri went through. So Yuri's the crazy thing.

Remember those matchsticks we talked about, you know, there's there's 20 main combustion chambers on Soyuz and there's for and it 12 more Vernier engines that all need to be lit. So you're riding it. 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 stage is, but we would call it like 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, your drags into the other tank, you know, you're it's it's it's a goner

So the staging process of of the Soyuz is is insane to me that that ended up working out I was just the the technology in Soyuz and I mean more or less that same rocket is what's still flying humans in soy use and I mean more or less that same rocket is what's still flying humans that are cosmonauts from you know 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 a stance today? It's history and its future most as it stands today, it's history and its future in comparison to NASA and other national efforts and in comparison to commercial space. Yeah. I mean, utmost respect for the engineers involved and everything that's happened.

I think a Nurglemosh 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, the Rose Cosmo's went from having, I think they got very comfortable at the top of, you know, from 2011 until, until 2022 or until 2020, they were the only ride to the International Space Station since then. Like, and it started, I feel like in 2018, honestly, I think that's kind of one of the 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, it had one of the boosters not detached 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 peers module, docked to the ISS, International Space Station, spirals the International Space Station out of control again,

with like a thrust or getting fixed on. There's a hole in as a Russian segment. There's, well, I think the most recent one right now, there's a Soyuz doctor, 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 micro-media right puncture, rendering spacecraft on user. Well, we don't know for sure yet. But it's just really been like this fall from grace were they had 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 the bronze shuttle and the inergia rocket were incredible.

Had they been able to evolve that into bron 2 and they're usable in Urgia? They had a fully reusable in Urgia on the drawing board and like I honestly fully think they could have done it. Is it 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 rocket-trans- space travel unites people, unites people even in a time of tension, conflict and war. So do you have a hope that we can return to that place? I think historically, space flight 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 is going to reenter, since it was not in the plant 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. And again, 1975 still very amidst the Cold War. Yet we have this collaboration that I don't know

what else could have done that. I mean, and think about what 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, you know, 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, like even if it was totally this like, you

know, cynical, you know, just trying to make a pretty face for everybody, for the cameras or something, obviously it's 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. Yes. And that has a ripple effect on the culture, on the different engineers. 100%.

And even just the astronauts and the cosmos involved, like, think about what probably went through their heads during this process of like going from, oh my God, I'm gonna have to work with them to getting to know them and then sharing meals and space. Like, that's a crazy transformation of timelines. And I would love to, I do think that spaceflight has the the ability to bond us in the United because it is ultimately, you know, this little tiny little planet we're floating around on, you know, it's the only, it is the boundary that we all share, you know, you only can

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, you know 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 cyber space and in the hot war space, cold war, hot war, all kinds of war, all kinds of economic conflict is between the United States and China. So China is going full steam ahead in developing a space program doing a lot of incredible work.

Like you mentioned, 64 launches in 2022 with two failures, but you know, moving straight ahead. And by the way, the space station, we had a lot of startups. Like a lot of the launches were from brand new companies. So to have two failures out of 64, I mean, that's still an impact. 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 on to 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, you know, 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 in hours, working really hard on pushing their program and

doing engineering work. 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 space flight programs and with the runway of like just keep on going. Like 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, they're really genuinely might be a race to the moon again and they're really genuinely might be a race to the moon again, and they're really genuinely might be erased to Mars. The part of music cited about that because a race is pretty cool. Yeah. But the hopefully is 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 They statistically speaking is harder to have a leader of a nation that looks beyond the political 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 is 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. You can have more reach. Tim Nad can have more reach than NASA, right? In terms of inspiring the world world and that's fascinating. Like that that gets power to the individuals that see past the the silly short-term geopolitical conflicts.

Yeah. That's the hope of the East. Yeah. Yeah. Do you worry that there might be a war in space? Yeah. Let's let's let's look out into the future. So forget.

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's 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. That's my biggest thing.

Because frankly, at this point, we can annihilate ourselves with terrestrial stuff anyway. You know what I mean? We don't need space to, and societies we know it. You know what I mean? But we do, we could really, and the good thing is, I think everyone, mostly everyone seems to understand this for the most part, that like we really can't be risking blowing up stuff in space, in low-Earth orbit,

because it could easily, like we could strain ourselves from space assets for 50 years. If I wish you can elaborate on this, so like what is the danger of the debris there that could jeopardize the space? So for instance, and there's only a couple of years ago, Russia did an anti-satellite test on an orbital. There's a, we've done this to the US has done this. I'm not pinning it on them, but we kind of know nowadays like don't do anti-satellite tests on orbital things because those things stay in orbit. You know, when you blow something up in space,

it's not like, you know, people think, you know, in space like, oh, you throw a something, it's just gonna 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, you know, 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, you know, 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 have all the shrapnel going everywhere, and then that hits another satellite, that creates shrapnel.

You can literally blanket our entire lower thorbit in 17,500 mile an hour bullets. We're talking, the kinetic energy in this is so hard for people to fathom because that you know that's over 10 times faster than most like rifle bullets and even like a big 50 cowl is not going to be you know we're still talking about about 10% that so you think about the kinetic energy. It's insane so a flock of paint can go through pains of glass It's insane. So a flick of paint can go through pains 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, uh, 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, I mean, the good and the bad thing is, the good thing is a lot of satellites don't operate in low-wether orbit. Like a lot of, uh, the, the ones that we use day to day, a lot of them are in medium-earth orbit. Like a lot of the ones that we use day to day, a lot of them are in medium-earth orbit, like the GPS or the geostationary, which are way, way, way out there. And because of that, they won't really ever de-orbit, like it'll take millennia to de-orbit, 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 carbon line 100 kilometers and also there's zero atmosphere.

The atmosphere just slowly tapers. 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. There's the occasional oxygen molecule. There's the occasional oxygen molecule. There's the occasional nitrogen molecule. And so that is actually drag.

So as a spacecraft in lower orbit, depending on its altitude, we'll take anywhere from five years to five months to two months or one month. Like depending on 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 the sorbit, etc., etc. until it reenters. So if we end up with some kind of catastrophic event where the entire lower th orbit has been inundated and blown up, it'll take months for the first band 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 at us. Terrifying, by the way. But it's really the, but again, the caveat is for the most part, the lower-thorough bit stuff would clear up within years. So we could get back to doing some more with it, 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 satellite wouldn't be wiped out, but the scary things 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. And 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 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. We'll 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 as 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. 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 anyone. Generally, I think Starlink is phenomenal. And I would be saying this if any company I want to make that clear that people think I'm just some, you know, SpaceX fanboy

or something and anything that is perfect. I think as your fan, I could say you're basically a fan, a fanboy or just a fan of everybody that's doing space though. 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 an hour about Artemis. We could talk about anything with ULA, obviously,

the all the other commercial efforts. We could talk about the NASA efforts, the, you know, the, I mean, and satan fight, like, are we going to really go with this conversation? I thought we were going to satan fight. And we might, okay. So like, anyway, starlight. You're a fan of everything. Starlight 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 Mediacom, 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. It's insane. I'm not going to do that. I bought Starlink.

It helps, but it's still not amazing. You can see where this is going in a year or two, three, five years. They're like, oh, I can totally screw the cellular 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 people

be able to learn and learn about rockets, learn about water management and architecture and city planning and fitness and health. 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 am 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 one-on-one, is give people access to information. And you 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 is people are smart. And no matter where you are, you give them the resources to learn. They're gonna solve problems.

They're gonna promise all. They're gonna engineer. They're going to, but if you don't give them access to that information, they're gonna be stuck in their cycles. And so I think the potential for Starlink is incredible. I think it's already impactful. It's already affecting people in rule 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 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. It can ruin observations, it can ruin data. But 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 a ground-based asset, 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 request that as they're flying over these satellites, they are 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'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, you guys keep the laser on. We'll deal with your laser. Good, good staff, you know, things like that, mitigating the brightness of them so they're not visible under most conditions. Of course, like, there's 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 space flight 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 all these other, you know, awesome space-based

telescopes, Chandra, you know, etc these other, you know, awesome space-based telescopes, Chandra, you know, all, et cetera, et cetera, whatever. And you, uh, 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 Web 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 astronomy from the ground? That's insane. The could be complexities to just having them any just another topic. So complexity is 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 satellites. Yeah. It becomes a very interesting robotics, a 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 two objects occupying space, if they're ones moving really,

like imagine trying to throw two basketballs at each other relatively easy. Now try shooting two bullets at each other and have, you know, at 90 degrees from each other. You have to have your timing down like, really perfect to do that. Now take that time's 10, you know, and these objects are taking up a physical space

very small amount of time. They're relatively small. Like most satellites are not very big and they have in 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 all space assets know, hey, I'm at this orbital plane and this blah blah blah blah blah and they know their altitudes and know There's 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 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 and be Considering that and considering collisions and considering all of the above 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 the whole sense. But there is the Mars plan that was at the origin of the commercial space flight efforts. Do you still see in dream about that day?

Let me be clear that I don't wanna go to Mars, but I do think if you're making me guess a timeline for when humans will walk on Mars, I 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 do, I definitely think by 2040. Like I first sure think that, I really think it's just hard to predict that curve, you know, that that project out that curve. We're going to go from feeling like it's impossible, like it's feeling like it's enough. You know, it could be another by the end of this decade JFK tap moment, especially if

China steps up with a space race. Yeah. It could be like, all right, NASA, NASA kind of says, all right, this Elon fella really makes us 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 space flight 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. I mean, those two things are very, so in some ways Mars is almost easier. If 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, you know, it's a slow down. Every one of those is a maneuver change.

They need to slow re orbit until it coincides, you know, hits the moon, and then if it's slowed 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 crunch 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 it, making it sound easy. It's not, but, but, you know, I think if,

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 sociological element, maybe a political one where, I think you're allowed to take more risks with Mars than you are with the moon. Yeah, it's done the moon 1969. Yeah, it's been a while. So PR wise you have to be much safer. Yeah with Mars

Like everyone's like it's super dangerous like super like yeah, you could take a little more Risk 100% with the with with man mission. But actually just going back to the moon landing Apollo 11 mission. I haven't talked about this. The amazing engine there. But again, the romantic question, when 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? Are you focused just like with the cars on the engines?

No, no, I still, when I need inspiration, I rewatch this documentary called One We Left Earth. I think it was a discovery channel, did it? Six part episode. It was narrated by Gary Seneis 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's, it really just summarizes that program so well.

And when I, and beyond it goes over to the space shuttle. But yeah, when I, 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 the weakness of the computers I had back then. Yeah, it's so much, I mean, yeah, it's so much was so little It's insane and but at the same time like I don't know if we want to talk about conspiracy theories or anything

but like it is all of like we have the proof in the pudding of like the 400,000 people on payroll like all of the paperwork all of the oh you mean now the the question the conspiracy if we land on the moon Yeah, like I think the receipts are there But it's like a lot of things like that I mean we're 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 Re-invigorate 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 things together.

Yeah. Yeah, but, you know, like, if I was conspiratorially minded, it's like, how the hell do 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, 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 propaganda, you know, different kinds of messaging. And I'm sure stuff like that was happening. Some kind of like little adjustment here and there to present things better and so on, but ultimately the action engineering project of landing on the moon. The fact that humans did that. I mean, this sad that we didn't have better

like waste to record it. And as I watched like SpaceX efforts and Blue Origin and these efforts, it's still not trivial to record the, how just amazing awe-inspiring spaces. It's like Elon jokes about, like, space does look fake. There is some element of it where you have to be there to experience it really. And I think it's currently still a non-solved problem of how do you capture the off 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, to some kind of format that captures the magic of it? 100%. And that's a perspective thing that I think about all the time. You know what I, 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. That's the cool thing that you're 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. I had you come to work. 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 cool like, oh my God, they had to do what?

To make it work? Wow, that's amazing. And I try to just always go back to that 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

the chemical engines that we talked about. What do you think about using nuclear fission and maybe the nuclear fusion for propulsion? We already have thermal nuclear reactors. They're 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. 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 El nozzle. And you also literally just using that now steam hot hydrogen and flowing it through a deal of Vell nozzle. And you also have to use that energy to spin the pumps to still pump the things. You're still kind of using like a lot of the tricks 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, nine hundred 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 it, you know, just like if you had a, you know, it's a golf ball versus like a bowling ball, you can only physically throw one so fast. And the other one is 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 at it, 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, you know, for major projects like a starship type of project, we're not, you know, 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 thruster 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. 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's 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 replace the S4B with a nuclear thermal with a nerve 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. Was just a huge shame to me because they could unlock a lot of interplanetary potential and just all of your dollars, which potentially interstellar as well. I don't think nuclear thermal,

we're not quite getting there, but then you get into nuclear pulse drives and things where you're literally basically ejecting a bomb out the back of your rocket and exploding and having a shock absorber and Pogo sticking your way out of the solar system. That, that's, I mean, by all physics, sure, you know, there's nothing wrong with that. It's not breaking any laws of physics. And, you know, I, but I just don't see us getting to that need anytime soon. I don't think we're just

going to travel. Yeah, I mean, that's, I mean, 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. You know, a hundred years ago, it would be stupid to try to predict the things we know

today. And, you know, a hundred years ago, it would be stupid to try to predict the things we know today. And who knows? Like, even, you know, 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. Well, and being able to study black holes, for example, a better, better, this does this happening outside of black holes at the edges of black holes and how the information is stored. The holographic principle, just 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 like, what is going on?

And how can we like use that somehow Propulsion, I mean seems like awfully crazy and futuristic at this moment But I think that's because we know almost nothing about You know that those kinds of objects were again where the general relativity and quantum mechanics start to start to have to be both considered to describe those kinds of objects. And as we study those objects, we may figure out some kind of unification thing that will allow us to understand maybe how to use black holes for propulsion. Like, to, I mean, you can say a lot of crazy things, but like basically.

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? And so, therefore, I'm not going to say that the best option for interstellar travel is nuclear drives. Like that could be like someone saying, you know, in 1600, the only way to fly is by strapping a thousand birds to your head, you know? But that said, I mean, everything you're saying is right, but human history is such like at the beginning

of the 20th century, the physicists, the Rutherford, everybody, this brilliant people that said we've basically solved all of it. Right, if you talk to most physicists, I think they're going to say like, we've pretty much solved. Like the standard model describes physics extremely accurately. Right.

General relativity explains the cosmos as we observe them extremely accurately. Yeah, there's a whole dark matter of dark energy thing. Whatever. Yeah, but outside of that, we've, so like we basically solved like, like where are you going to find gaps in knowledge that are going to somehow create warp drives or something like some wormholes. But it seems like throughout history, we prove ourselves wrong time and time again. Yes.

And this is well outside of any of my knowledge base. So I want to make sure that if I say anything stupid is because I'm, I just a peasant here in physics land, but yes. Well, a peasant's in physics land. But I really just think like it's very humbling that we're still using chemical propulsion and, and very in self, like injecting mass to, to propel ourselves. And I, 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 me on that.

God, I ask you another wild question. What do you think of Bob Blizzar, who claimed that he worked at and saw in Area 51, a propulsion system fueled by quoting here, maybe from Wikipedia, I don't know where I got this from, fueled by an anti-matter reactor which used as fuel the chemical element with atomic number 115. At the time it wasn't synthesized, it was later in 2003, synthesizedized named Muscovium. He said that the propulsious system relied on a stable isotope of element 115, which allegedly generates a gravity wave

that allowed the vehicle to fly into a veiled visual detection by bending light around it. No stable isotopes of Muscovium have yet been synthesized. All have proven extremely radioactive to king 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 actually 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 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 good is this guy at lying and making stuff up? Because 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 radar is like screaming at me like, this is all at full crap, you know. But I'd say like, there's still a part of me. It's just like, man, that is kind of cool. How did he know that? And like, you know what I mean?

It's like, I can click it. I think you were 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, 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 early thread to a brilliant, to a future, to a fascinating

solution to a mystery. So, but in this case, I mean, I have so many red flags from a psychological perspective that, but again, outside of this particular individual, I do wonder if aliens have visited us. I think aliens are everywhere. I think the universe is teaming with alien life. There's, it's very difficult for me to statistically understand, given how life finds a way here on Earth, just everywhere. It's the entire history of life on earth, from the very origin of life,

it seems to be damn good at doing its thing, 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 to eukaryotic cells, for example, that the universe, our galaxy is teaming with alien life, but it's all bacteria. They're all boring bacteria.

Or exciting bacteria, no offense to bacteria. But the no intelligence space-faring civilizations. I don't know. But I just, if I were to guess, I had to bet all my money, there is space-faring civilizations. I don't know, but I just, if I were to guess, I had to bet all my money, there is space-faring 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?

Then we might be too domed to detect them. Yeah, and like and so there I think you have to be extremely open-minded at what would we be looking for? Right 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 techno signature of a distant planet, 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? 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. Exactly. What you got? Yeah. Yeah. Like how, like, I'll show you mine if you show me yours kind of thing at the interstellar intergalactic level.

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 does it live

or has once lived on Mars, because if that's the case, that means for sure life is everywhere. Oh, 100%. And then you're like, once you know that, it's already keep interrupting, not shouting the hell up. It's supposed to be an interview, God damn it. All right, that, like, that, just the knowledge of that,

just the knowledge that a four 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-penetrains theory species, it'd be truly inspiring. You think that. It wakes you up. Do you get nervous still? I'm going to, I'm the interviewer now. 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 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, and today's world, 40 plus percent of people

wouldn't even believe it existed. Interesting. I'd be, it's just a very important thing to think about, especially as an educator like yourself. I think the current cynicism towards institutions and sciences, temporary, I think it's, they're basically the internet woke up. The internet smells bullshit. And it looked at, I'm sorry, I'm not being ages, but saying older scientists and they looked at them and they kind of said, you're kind of full of shit. You got a lot of ego. 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 foolish, being authentic, being real, not treating 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

of the scientific process, all the tensions, the conflicts, all of that. And I think once we fix the science communication system, adapt it to the internet, I think that won't be an issue. I hope. I hope. I mean, that's why people like you are really important is communicate with authenticity. That's definitely something to think about.

Yes, the early, listen, scientists too, like the phosphine discovered on Venus is they are extremely skeptical always. So definitely there will be a lot of skepticism. And it depends what it looks like. If it kind of looks like, this thing kind of looks like bacteria back on earth. Yes. 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, like totally different DNA, aren't they? Like this is not, we've never observed this ever. Yeah, then you're like, all right, cool. Of course, so that another promising thing that difficult to be definitive about,

but we just get better and better direct imaging systems. There's now, 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, there could be some gigantic... Listen, if there is like a car shaft type two civilization, we're gonna see the damn thing. It's gonna be producing a lot of,

it's gonna be rating a lot of energy. So the possibility of detecting some of that, that's also a real possibility with something like James Webb telescopes, like those kinds of efforts, that starts becoming a reality. Have you read Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary? I have not, no. You're going to love it. that starts becoming a reality. Have you read Andy Wears Project Hail Mary? I have not. No.

You're going to love it. Like it is basically almost answering that, like how could they not see us type of thing almost, where he creates this incredible, I don't want to spoil anything, but it's just 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 co-existing almost.

Yeah. I don't want to spoil anything because 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, but we just like, we see with this visual light, yeah. Someone could see an X-ray, etc. You know, like, and just the, we see with this visual light, yeah, someone could see in X-ray, et cetera, you know, like, and just the way we even come to the same perspective, 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 not like that, but, but it's such a unique and incredible story. I think Andy weir is one of the best science fiction writers that I can't say that with much authority because I don't listen to my science fiction. So zero authority. I really like Andy Wears books and that's because it's no different.

Well, that sounds like I'm really worried about that. It sounds like I would really love it. I've been very, I've done a lot of rating in my life, but like the science fiction is one of the things I've been really weak on. I haven't really read much and I just made more and more friends over the years recently 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? Well, I do both.

Yeah. Well, physically I sadly don't. it's a Kindle, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But, well, I run, I also do both. I do about, on a normal day, especially now, that I've been really focused on reading.

It's about 60 minutes of reading on a Kindle and I wanted two hours because I've run about two hours when I don't have like other stuff like today I won't run. 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 all the books are just the same. They're a little slower, but they're they can, 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 Listen to sorry that A book on propulsion like two years ago. I remember

But I remember that was extremely different. Yeah, it was ignition. Don D. Clark. Yeah, it was very difficult to listen Oh, I yeah, I don't read I listen while I'm on road trips or running or stuff like that too. I swear there's probably 40, or like not 40, but there's like eight minutes of, we tried PMZ 15, 13, BM412, RML, Munchel, Hi, Thruzine, for like, I swear it's multiple minutes of explaining one trial on something, because there's just so many different chemicals, I don't know, it's almost a joke,

okay, 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 of some of the challenges for long term space travel? Do you think about this kind of stuff, the biological stuff?

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 the 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-rather orbit, one of the biggest challenges eventually after your long-term space travel is bone density loss and not having gravity.

You actually have issues with a handful of things. Artificial gravity is easy in terms of relatively easy in terms of space flight. You can have two vehicles just tethered together and just spinning, give it enough distance and a decent enough spin velocity. 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 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. Mars is only about, we'll say six months. Mm-hmm. 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' den.

So we've had people for basically a year up on the International Space Station. It's not like it's not life-altering. Yeah, you have a couple days of not being able to walk very well and you do have some bone density loss and some other concerns. But again, that's insolvable. And I think the first mission is to Mars. I think it might, we might 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 feet from underneath them, or is it, do we need to spin up two space crafter, 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. You get really sick, you always feel like you're falling, your brain will tell you that you're falling constantly. But then again, okay, so 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, from zero to 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 six gravity like on the moon or 38% gravity is it is one six gravity actually enough to counteract 95% of the effects of low gravity? Or is it 15, you know, is it 1.6? Is it like a linear thing? Is 38% gravity totally, you know, 38% as bad as 1 or whatever, you know, is it a slight, like where is it down on the scale? So there's a chance that we don't need anywhere near 1G of gravity to counteract the bulk majority of these problems. We could have 0.1G or whatever is the right compromise of vehicle complexity and human biology and all of these other effects. This is absolutely a solvable thing. That is. And we figure some of this out through just experimentation. 100% along the way.

Yep. One of this is back to 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 and space. Asking for a friend, of course. I mean, 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 recreation aspect of sex, but the most important aspect of sex for long term space travel is pro-creation is, and also the full biological cycle of that, so that 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 solve. 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, like radiation. We know we have a really good data set on what radiation and doses do to humans. 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. Imagine being the first child, the first baby born outside of earth.

That'd be pretty cool. Yeah, that'll be cool. I would love to be alive to see that. That'd be pretty cool. Yeah, that'd be cool. I would love to be alive to see that. That'd be a big one. I don't know if it'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 of our thinking futurism that in 30 to 50 years, I definitely think we could have a full time like permanent major civilizations, like what Blue Origin wants to develop, where they have a huge like sphere,

and you're doing a lot of, especially heavy industry off of earth or not polluting earth, that makes so much sense to me. I think we could live in a lifetime where we thought the sense that 50s and 60s that people are going to be living in a working space like crazy. 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 But I really think in our lifetime we're finally getting to that point of, yeah, that that's the reality.

Let me guess 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 lie. 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, as a Virgin, is it galactic orbit? Orbit would be the competitor. Virgin orbit, there's rocket labs, electron rocket that you mentioned.

origin orbit. There's rocket labs, electron rocket that you mentioned. There's the folks you covered, Firefly. Yep. And what are we missing? There's the epic space launch system from NASA, I guess that is. Yeah. Tinkley NASA, but prime contractor Boeing and Boeing and orc. Lockheed. Lockheed. Yeah, North, where's the boosters? Yeah. Okay. Nice. So like what, 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, pendant paper, or not beyond pendant 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. There's Astra was another orbital rocket company.

There's a lot of companies. I think right now, the ones that I personally really believe in, 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, like 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 airplanes, how many airplane manufacturers, 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, realistically, in the terms of jubble, jess, and passengers, there's basically two. There's air buzz 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 you'll like, it's quite what I, it's quite the right kind of competitor. Let me, let me say this, you will, a has all of the potential, but just operationally, they're either you're 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 Rockalab was a little bit more of that nature. What do you think about? So there's just Blue Origin in general. Is that- Blue Origin, man, I, what Blue Origin has done with New Shepherd is amazing. And people just lot it because it's suborbital and it looks very phallic.

It's, it's, 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. You know, I, I see comments almost every day still of like, it doesn't matter because, you know, they're working on tiny It's like no, New Glen is more powerful and more capable than Falcon Heavy. New Glen is almost more of a competitor to Not quite as to Starship, but it's almost in that class. It's 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 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 it could become a close race. And it's just, we'll just, for now, we'll ignore SpaceX. And we'll just kind of talk about, I think who's kind of coming around the corner here Who's here? So let me just do a quick overview. I'm gonna shoot myself in the foot for getting some cool people here

And some exciting companies, but relativities one that if you you should definitely get to melis 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 like very little you know Upload a file and have a new rocket like that's amazing so in terms of long-term iterative process If if we're really talking about like hitting the ground running and and just seeing where the evolution takes you I think that's about as good as you can get you know I think what SpaceX is doing at starbase just 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. And like everyone, there's a caveat here that everything takes longer. Anything, any company tells you it's two or three times longer. Just period, rocket labs no different. But I really, they're working on a neutron rocket that's gonna be, I think 8,000 to 15,000 kilograms to lower the orbit. 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, it's not some kind of fascinating new physics breakthrough where they're using neutrons. No, no that's like a neutron. 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 gonna be,

it's here to stay, you know. I'd be remiss right now. I'm editing a video from an interview with Stoke Aerospace out in Ken Washington. It's just one of these companies that they have a long ways to go like they're still in the very they're 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 work. Well 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 it in the video?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That'll be hopefully coming out the next. Depending on what the schedule is down there, I'm actively editing that as we speak and it is so cool. I mean, it is like, 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 perfect world, they merge 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 and 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, that's impressive. And that's like, that was on average, if you think about like days off, time off, parts changing, over twice a day on average of a hydro-lock 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. They're starting to buddy up a lot with Northrop Grumman. They're gonna be building the booster stage for Antares, which is currently flying only out of Wallops, Virginia. And it's one of the only other commercial providers for the International Space Station.

And Northrop 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 gonna be able to get your hands on too much anymore. So they're looking to some US propulsion and stages. So they actually are partnering with Firefly

and their new and Tari's rocket will be a first stage built entirely by Firefly. So I'm excited that Firefly already has the propulsion technology. And they actually developed ironically, their tap off cycle engine was developed in partnership with Ukraine with Ukrainian engineers who developed the whole turbo pump system.

So it's like, it's this cool, melt 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 fast I could because he is brilliant.

Literally a rocket doctor, you know, it's. So, yeah, I mean, that's what like you said, is it the fascinating 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. And that makes me a little bit sad, of course. Yeah. But for several reasons, one is that the use of that technology is has really much like it's not that inspired. It's like a very military focus. Yes, to kill someone. It's to kill someone. Yeah.

There's not even like a side application. Right. And the big one is that the secret, it's a shrouded in secrecy as opposed to being a source of inspiration. Yeah, 100%. But that's the way of the world. 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. 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 the shore, but you know,

it raised and lowered its orbit, 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 a 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? What? You know, I've been playing more games recently because games are fun and they mind 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 it in orbit, how to get to other planets, there's no better way to learn about rockets. So, like, what is it in tail? 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, like, you get a little command module, click, you 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. And 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 say like you streamed, you still playing this, those any of those videos up? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, there's some of. Actually, the first videos I ever uploaded to YouTube were recaptured streams from Twitch that I just physically uploaded to YouTube.

This is awesome. And so it's me playing Kervel. 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, Today's in Space Flight History, but these days that probably just play Kervel. But I had my friend come sit next to me, his name's Jacob, and he is a former professional pole valter.

Just this really knows nothing about rockets. He knows nothing about space. Hilarious, like in the sweetest, most fun way, like he, you know, as an adult, asked me which is bigger than Earth of 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 and Kerbal Space Program. And he would just sit there and play guitar and sing about what I'm like doing and asking questions. Yeah. And it's still one of my favorite things I've ever done. Yeah, you should definitely do something like that. So basically just, uh, yeah, shoot the shit with a friend.

Get their curiosity going. Get the curiosity going. Just sit there and ask questions. And it was awesome. like that. So basically just uh yeah shoot the shit with a friend get their curiosity going. But then just sit there and ask questions. It was awesome. Like I mean, yeah, those are some I've done it a handful 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 in the game I go to the go to the moon? Yeah, so it's is technically a different solar system. It's the I'm like, go to the moon. Yeah, so it's technically a different solar system. It's the curbal system and you're on the planet,

curbin. So there's the moon, MUN. There's a second moon in the system on this planet. It's called Minmas. They didn't want to pay less. It's easy 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, the physics are all like real world physics. And I mean, there's aerosimulations. There's all of it's 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. It's, it's, and a lot more gravity. So it's just really, really hard to get off of. It's easy, relatively easy to land on Eve, but like, that's kind of like the ultimate boss in the game is 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 produce. Are you, is that something in the back of your mind also? Oh man, I love talking. Yeah, you're very good at it. I mean, yeah.

I find that I, it's just the problem with for me with podcast and I think that's the podcast that I've done have tried to be relatively topical about like the current space fight, affairs. And four, three or four years ago, that was actually 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 basics and the root. Really, so I'm really just trying to like, I'm trying to do less live streams if I can, but then again, like, starch up, I gotta stream that. There's no way I'm not gonna do that. But I'm really just trying to get back to 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 best. Yeah, I mean, it'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. That your voice is very much needed. So I think it's wise 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 livestreams, 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 had my choice of things, I would just ignore everything else

and just sit and lock myself in my house for a year and just sit there and make videos and go and travel every other month, you know? For fun, like not for space stuff, just go and do some other month, you know, for fun. Like not for space stuff, just go 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 that can be proud of like how to have a life that can be proud of how to have a career that 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 something like 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. 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 for 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. And it's just funny that we, maybe you feel guilty that you drink too much.

Okay, I don't know if there's a good advice. Go learn how to make alcohol. You know, be a starter liquor company. Yeah, starter liquor company. I mean, it was terrible advice. No, it's a 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.

What do you fall asleep thinking about? You know, like, but you stumbled on the space almost accidentally, right? I mean, yeah, yeah, the kid, the dude, when you were doing 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. How that works. That works. Then I wanted to be a scorpion trainer. Yeah.

Thought I could train them to cut people's lawns. Seren better. Yep. Yep. And then honestly, the majority of my childhoods. People's lawns got it. I think you know, understanding of physics early on, with just a little... The Pinterest man, Pinterest. Then, 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 of this space shuttle, but you know, it was a far down the list as far as things that I thought were cool. Ninja Turtles, Lamborghini Cooontosh, 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 going on to being one of the best one of the top educators inspirational figures in space and educators, inspirational figures in space, and actually traveling around the moon. And who knows maybe one day stepping foot on the moon and Mars, even though you say, and I'm not interested, it seems like you're not interested in certain things somehow. And you're 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, like I guess. All right.

Yeah. Yeah. I was thinking I was 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 human beings, just how excited you are for everything. It's just an inspiration you're joy to watch. Thank you for being you. Thank you for doing this 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. Tim Dodd. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from HG Wells. Life, forever dying to be born of fresh, 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. you