Main Engine Cut Off - T+107: Chris Gebhardt

Episode Date: January 15, 2019

Chris Gebhardt of NASASpaceflight joins me to talk all things SpaceX: Starship and its upcoming hopper tests, DM-1 and the government shutdown, and more. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 34 executive producers—Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, Ryan, Jamison, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Mike, David, Mints, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd the Everyday Astronaut, and six anonymous—and 213 other supporters on Patreon. Chris G - NSF (@ChrisG_NSF) | Twitter NASASpaceFlight.com SpaceX gearing up for Starship tests at Boca Chica – NASASpaceFlight.com Falcon 9 with Dragon 2 rolls out for DM-1 dry dress rehearsal at 39A – NASASpaceFlight.com Email your thoughts and comments to [e-mail] Follow @WeHaveMECO Listen to MECO Headlines Join the Off-Nominal Discord Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhere Subscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off Newsletter Buy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off Shop Support Main Engine Cut Off on Patreon

Welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. I'm Anthony Colangelo, and I've got an old friend with us again, Chris G. of the NASA Space Flight Chris's. It's just, I think, how you're referred to across the internet. How's it going? Yes, it is. Chris's. It is, I think, how you're referred to across the internet. How's it going? Yes, it is. Chris's. It's going well. How are you? Good. As we were talking before the show, this is a somber Philadelphia today, so I feel like

I need a friend who doesn't care about football to talk to in the wake of the Eagles disaster yesterday. So this is good to get out of football land and into space land a little bit. Indeed. And you probably couldn't have found someone less interested in american football maybe the other chris i don't know well maybe the other chris i do call it uh we do go back and forth between either calling it round ball or oblong ball so you know but he is an actual like true football the other football and the other football sets of them uh so i've been

thinking about this whole Starship situation with SpaceX and I haven't talked about it on the show at all because I just was kind of waiting to see how they did with all their construction, whatever the hell they were doing down there over the last couple of weeks. And I cannot think of anyone better to have on the show to discuss this

and help me figure out what the hell is going on. So I think at this point... I'll do my best. Yeah, hopefully you can help me teach me things um we are going to link to a story that you've got coming out today about the hopper uh as we call it so we can maybe point everyone there to talk about like what the hell it is in definition sense uh and maybe just talk a little bit about what we think about the project just because i feel like we could get caught up for about a half hour just talking about what it is and is not,

though I'm sure that'll be wired throughout this and all that. So we kind of got the sense that this is the grasshopper of Starship. Is that still how you're thinking about it after seeing it come together in completion? Very much so. That coupled with some of the federal communications permits that they filed for the first series of test flights, thinking about it in terms of the grasshopper that was the test article that SpaceX built to test out the procedures and basically get a handle on how the Falcon 9 would come back to land. It's a good way to think about this. Really, because for some technical context, the FCC filings for the radio communications

that they've done already for the Starship Hopper, I'm going to go back and forth in this podcast between calling it Starship Hopper and Star Hopper, although it is important to note that it does not have an actual name so these are all just just making stuff up as we go we're just trying to figure out the best way to to describe them um but yeah so the fcc communication filings that they've already done call for uh two types of initial test flights. The first would see this vehicle take off and reach a maximum altitude

no higher than 500 meters off the ground. And those tests would last for no longer than about 100 seconds. So to those of you listening who don't know meters and are more comfortable with feet, that would be just under 1,650 feet. So 1,650 feet as a maximum altitude.

Now, what we will likely see first is just a ignition of those rafters, lift off a few meters, a few feet off the ground, reduce the thrust and come back down, right? Because one of the things they're testing on this is this very deep throttle capability to, you know, you're not just slamming the engines to 100% as you see with the Falcon 9 and off you go. You've got a really deep throttle that's down to 20%, 40% to reduce your thrust to just under what the weight of the vehicle is so it comes back down because it has to land especially when it carries people it has to land yeah that's a pretty important mission critical piece of it pretty important part of that yes um and and gradually those first series of tests will eventually get up to this 500 meter um you know

1600 feet level and then come back down gradually building that experience as they get more comfortable with what the rocket's doing. And then after they're comfortable with that, the second level of testing that they've already filed for calls for the hopper to reach a maximum altitude of five kilometers, or roughly three and a half, or roughly three miles in altitude. and for those tests to last about six minutes and those are the tests that we expect to see the hopper actually break the sound barrier in so that's sort of a good so that that is the technical way of saying that it is you know thinking of it as grasshopper is a good way um to think about it yeah and i

think if i remember correctly the grasshopper essentially did the first phase of its testing and they were planning on taking it out to Spaceport America. Am I in Mojave somewhere? They're going to take it out into the desert and do bigger tests. But then they decided to start doing testing as they fly missions. There's something in the back of my head that says that's correct, although it's been so many years that people will have to forgive me if that is not entirely accurate. But I think you're right because there is something that sticks in the back of my mind that Grasshopper proved the concept enough to them that what they then transitioned to were the attempted soft ocean landings on some of the Falcon 9 flights. It was like CRS-3 or something, right? Something like that and some of the LEO missions.

And these were the first few flights of the Falcon 9 full thrust that just didn't have legs attached to them at first. And then the more comfortable they got with that, they graduated to the drone ships, which we saw. And then, of course, they stuck the first landing. Wow. Just over... Three years ago, right? Three years ago.

Thank you. It was December of 2015. Time flies. Yeah. So, you know, we probably won't, you know, this is a guess, but it's kind of an educated guess with this, right? That we could expect that the Starship design will be slightly different in terms of its test sequence, because we're talking about a much bigger vehicle. We're talking about a much more important, not just optically, but for Elon and SpaceX's ultimate goal and for humanity in general. We're talking about a very more, a much more important long-term goal for this, right? And getting a handle on everything

that we have that's new with starship and there's a lot we're going to get to the stainless steel aspect of this in a minute i'm sure um you know we can probably see we'll probably see them do a lot more tests on a subscale basis than we did with with the hopper yeah and they definitely they have to operate differently because with falcon 9 they were working with something that was active as they were developing these recoveries. It wasn't like they were saying, from the first launch, we're going to start recovering this thing. With something this big, you can't really just start launching them

and figure it out as you go, which I think is a lot of people's worry with New Glenn, that that's such a big stage, and they're sort of banking on landing those first couple on a boat at sea underway. So there's you know, once you're once you're in the mindset of this is a reusable vehicle from day one, you know, the stakes get amped up on that first launch quite a bit more. So you would expect. Right. This kind of test campaign. Right. And you can and you know, we were talking a little bit about the show that we're going to go back and we're going to talk historically about how we built reusable rockets.

And the shuttle is the obvious thing we're going to go to here. And you can see those test campaigns, right? The test flights of Enterprise, making sure that we knew the landing dynamics in the final realm of flight there. Of course, that led to the ultimate test flight in history, you could still say, with STS-1. But, you know, you're exactly right. You have to be able to have confidence

that you're going to recover it because you're banking on all of these things being reusable and reusable multiple times. And, you know, going back to what you said about the Falcon 9 is, yeah, you know, going back to what you said about the Falcon nine is, yeah, you could afford to take a little risk with the Falcon nine and use it as part of the development testbed because it was something new. You know, we, we, you know, we're covering an orbital class booster like that under retro propulsion, but you would also already launched

it on its primary mission. So instead of just chucking it into the ocean, there was something to be said in terms of efficiency for testing it. Yeah, it was doing nothing else. It was just going to plummet to the ocean. Might as well make use of the time. Exactly. And we've seen that over and over and over again. And obviously, what December proved to us is that there's still a tweak that needs to be made to the Falcon 9 in terms of redundancy for the hydraulic systems on the grid fins. But yeah, this is a very different thing because it needs to work quite well the first time once we get to the big old BFR that's coming. So the other thing that I'm looking at here is that if they are getting to this part of needing to test these little hopper flights, that has to say good things about Raptor to where it is now, because you would assume you wouldn't get to this part without being really confident in what Raptor

is already proving out on the stand down there. And it sounds like they're redesigning materials or something else. They said, Elon said a radically redesigned Raptor, but we don't really know what that means. Do you think it's just materials or do you think there's something else they said elon said a radically redesigned raptor but we don't really know what that means uh if it's do you think it's just materials or do you think there's something else going on there um oh you know that's a that's a big speculation because we do only have radical redesign um i i think the thing that we need to keep in mind with Raptor, right, is in terms of the radical redesign that he's talking about, right, we know that they have foregone the development of both the sea level and the vacuum variants of Raptor to something that's called a dual nozzle expansion, which is basically you build the sea level nozzle and the vacuum nozzle, right? And you have one engine design throughout. That obviously needs to be tested. You need to know that that's going to work. That's definitely part of the redesign. You need to know that we've

talked a lot about, and this is the deep throttle retro propulsion that I was talking about earlier, that, you know, deep throttling engines, you know, especially these high efficiency engines like Raptor is, from 100% of rated thrust all the way down to 20% or 25% of rated thrust on each of them is extremely difficult to do because these engines have to be designed to work optimally at all thrust settings in between there. And that can have some interesting knock-on effects to the materials, to the overall design of the vehicle itself.

And so that's a huge part of the testing that's got to happen. We've seen Raptors already tested, but the new radically redesigned Raptors, Elon said, should be on the test stand in McGregor sometime in February. So maybe more like March for their first test firing. So that's about as far as I'm willing to go on it. I don't really want to speculate. We could make stuff up all day about it.

We could make stuff up all day. We could write the best Raptor fanfic of anyone if we wanted to put you to the test we could and then tomorrow it could be different um but but the other thing too is that unlike the falcon 9 right which has really perfected this single engine landing burn right where that single merlin is is more or less thrusting at that maximum thrust for it right the raptors and and the bfr that the starship for people listening to this podcast bfr and starship are the same thing to me um because it was bfr for so long yeah um so just bear with me on this um because the nomenclature changes a lot and it's hard. Yeah, there's too many names to keep up with. There's more names than there have been years of this project at this point.

Yeah. But, you know, the BFR and Starship have to be designed to have engine out redundancy at every point in the flight envelope. engine out redundancy at every point in the flight envelope. And that includes the retro propulsion burns. So this is why the deep thrust, the deep throttle is really important because you have to have multiple Raptors firing on the landing burn in case one fails. So you have others that can compensate for that. And that's another part I'm sure of the redesign that they're looking at is how do you optimize all of that? So that's about as far as I'm going with that. Yeah. And then the other part, last thing on engines that I've been thinking about is, you know, it's okay if they're starting to do hopper flights without the final, final Raptor, because they have so many other things to work out. You know, all the software control,

you know, mechanisms that are going to exist there, the new flight dynamics of a new shape of a vehicle. So they can work this stuff out with an early Raptor, as long as it's reliable enough to do these tests. And then as they improve Raptor, put the new engine in the new vehicle, just the same way they've done all these revisions of Merlin over the years? They could. It depends on exactly what has been redesigned in the Raptor, right? If some of the plumbing elements and some of its connectors versus the previous iterations have changed, that makes it a bit more challenging to do. At that point, you could say it's sort of analogous

to trying to fit an Atlas V engine onto a Falcon 9, right? That's not going to happen. And I'm sure someone's head just exploded at a ULA SpaceX crossover there. But that's kind of why I did it. And that's probably a bit of hyperbole there. But if radical things really have changed in terms of the connection points, in terms of the plumbing, in terms of, you know, because plumbing diameter is also something to consider. Fuel flow rates and different size of tankage that they would need to support that and whatnot. Precisely. It could make that slightly problematic to just easily switch it out. Not impossible, but just in an easy sense. But the other thing I'll say to this, too, is that we don't, so we've seen little engine bells on the bottom of the Star Hopper vehicle that's undergoing construction at Boca Chica right now. And there's nothing, unless I really missed a tweet from Elon recently, there's nothing to indicate that those are the actual engines and that they're not just placeholders. nothing to indicate that those are the actual engines and that they're not just placeholders um you know a uh a first test fire of a redesigned raptor in mcgregor in february or march

given a realistic timeline for when this first hop might occur could also lend some support to the fact that we're going to have a blend of them, or that the next three radically redesigned Raptors coming off the production line in Hawthorne are going to go to Boca Chica. You know, we don't have a good answer for that right now. So it's kind of an open-ended question of what version of the Raptor is going to be used for these Starship Hoppers. But Starship Hopper tests, pluralized the wrong thing there's only one starship hopper um but but but you you would also be correct in that you know there are a lot of other things to work out first um before you start thinking about how three raptors test fire

together yeah there's so many other things one of them being the material change that we've got with this version oh Oh boy, yes. Getting away from composites, which I always thought was a bit of a... That was the long pole of the previous iterations of this. And we saw them do composite tanking tests that seemed to go well if what they were trying to do was blow up the tank. Yet, I don't know if anyone confirmed that that was actually the intent of taking that composite tank out to the middle of wherever they took it out in Washington State. Now it seems like they're going to go back to stainless steel or I shouldn't say back to stainless steel because they haven't done

stainless steel things yet, but they're going more towards a hot structures kind of idea here. Less heat shielding tiles, more hot metal. I feel like that alone accelerates Starship timeline. Maybe not accelerates it earlier than they've said before, but makes it more realistic that they could hit the timelines that they had set out originally where composites I've always felt like, man, that would be amazing if they really did this in time. But you know, this metal, a very known quantity, something that they're clearly comfortable working with because they welded

this thing together in like two weeks down there. How do you feel about the whole stainless steel situation? I mean, in several ways, I think it's ingenious. I think we're going to see quite a bit of evolution from an interior perspective, or an internal perspective, I should say, to SpaceX as this iteration of Starship and its super heavy booster underneath it, which there's some indication that it will also be stainless steel, undergoes its evolution before Elon briefs us again on all of these changes. Working to the advantage here is the fact that 300 series stainless steel,

which is what they're now using, or is now the design for Starship, is when you build it, when you're making it, right? If you expose it to these colder conditions instead of hotter, instead of heat conditions when you're making it, from what I understand and what I've read about this, is it provides a stronger structure. steel is cold to these super, super chilled temperatures that you'd be doing with liquid oxygen and liquid methane, which is the fuel and the oxidizer that the super heavy booster and Starship will use. And that provides a stronger material, right, for the entirety of the flight envelope. So that's important, right, because it's got to fly through a whole regime of some pretty significant changes, right? Especially when you consider the fact that the Super Heavy is going to have to hold the Starship,

so there's going to be an additional level of structural integrity needed on that booster as it's holding all of that weight from the top part. Yeah, exactly. it's holding all of that weight from the top part so yeah exactly um and then that the booster has to flip around and and come back into the atmosphere and land and starship's got to do the same thing but starship also has to you know survive atmospheric heating during launch which provides a different level of heating peaks at different points on the vehicle than would atmospheric entry. It's then got to be subjected to well, well, well, well below zero temperatures in the vacuum space, entry heating at Mars, takeoff heating at Mars, reentry back into Earth's atmosphere. It's got to handle a lot.

you know, re-entry back into Earth's atmosphere. It's got to handle a lot. So a stronger structure is, I don't think anyone's going to fault them for going with a stronger structure, right? This might also lead to something, you know, to the Raptor redesign as well. Because if you've got a stronger structure, you've got to tweak the Raptors and the engines as well,

one could think. Though the Raptor redesign could be completely different. We don't know. But, you know, the other advantage here, and it seems wonderfully counterintuitive, but we'll go through it as best that we understand it based on what Elon has said of the design, right, is that a stainless steel structure, especially a stainless steel skin on the outside of this vehicle, could have wonderful, wonderful benefits for atmospheric reentry. So if you think of the Dragon spacecraft,

which has its PICA-X heat shield and its ablative shielding, if you think of the shuttle, which used reinforced carbon-carbon composites and silica tiles and everything for the brunt of reentry heating, we are used to coating our vehicles in these heat shields that either ablate and burn off, thus dissipating heat, or radiate and absorb some of the heat as well, like the shuttle's heat shield did. But stainless steel, another way that you can radiate that heat and provide thermal protection during atmospheric entry is through reflectivity. And 300-series stainless steel polished to a near-mirror finish, a mirror is one of the best thermal reflective and heat reflective materials that we have so what you're talking about what elon and spacex are talking about here with starship is that you have a mirror finish reflective surface on the starship

and that will radiate most of your heat from that's generated from the plasma as you come into the atmosphere and i'm realizing that we're looking at each other over camera and i'm like doing visuals with my hands that are not just imagine sweeping hand looking motions you know out into the ether um but you know that that heat that you're trying to dissipate and prevent from soaking into your vehicle during atmospheric entry is caused the part of the vehicle that is taking the brunt of that plasma force during atmospheric entry. So if you go back to the space shuttle, this would have been the black underbelly part of the shuttle. supplement that reflectivity of the steel surface with an active cooling technology, which in this case would be some of the liquid methane that's still in the propellant tanks, and you pump that through.

And that liquid methane then prevents the deterioration of the structural integrity of the vehicle and helps absorb and dissipate the heat that is absorbed. Captured by the metal, yeah. Exactly. It's more like an engine at that point. Like a lot of liquid engines have cooling channels around them that, you know, that metal is taking all the heating from the actual combustion, and then the fuel that's flown around it takes that heat away. And in some engine designs uses that heated gas now to, you know,

run a turbo pump or do something else inside of the engine itself. And I don't know if there'd be any idea to reuse that heated methane inside of Starship, or this is more of like a heating-only kind of situation. I'm not sure what they would do with it then. There would be one option that I could potentially see, but it depends on exactly what the thermal characteristics of that methane that's circulated through becomes, right? Because you need the methane to still be at a certain temperature in order for the engine to function properly and optimally. But a potential, and again, this would depend on how the raptors are being designed and what spacex wishes to do with it but one potential from a historical standpoint is that you could then flow that methane directly into the engines and use that methane to light the engine for your

landing burn um and this is not as far-flying as you as might seem because as you were talking about in terms of actively cooled engines for rockets, the space shuttle main engine did this with liquid hydrogen, where the liquid hydrogen would come out of the external tank into the main propulsion system first and be channeled down into the engine around the outside of the engine bell and then back up through hundreds of tubules inside the actual engine bell itself so even though you had 5 000 degree temperatures on the inside of the engine that negative 200 whatever degree liquid hydrogen kept the engine bell so cool that ice formed on

the outside of the engine right and then that hydrogen flowing up through the engine bell was then directed into the igniter chambers and then combined with oxygen and used to then produce the 5 000 degree heat that it was previously trying when you start thinking about this too much there's too many temperatures going on you're like i don't know if it's hotter can i touch it is it can i touch this thing can i hold it well you'd be dead from the sound yeah Yeah, that's true. But, you know, the important thing that this is leading to, and the point that we're ultimately trying to make, is this might seem like an, oh my god, this is insane, right, type thing. And in reality, it's not, right? As SpaceX has done, right, this is a combination of what they do best, the ingenuity and looking toward the future and not taking, well, that won't work if we've never tried it before. SpaceX is all about, well, if we've never tried it, how do we know it doesn't work?

How do we know that we need to find the balance, but we also can't be afraid of innovating? At the same time, we can't be afraid of knowing what has worked really, really well in the past and carrying that forward. So this idea of actively cooled, active cooling systems, well-tested in the field of rocketry and in other fields as well. So it's not, honestly, to me, that much of it. When I first heard that, it wasn't that much of a stretch for me to go like, oh, that to me, that makes a lot of sense. Use what you have because the ultimate goal isn't just to reuse the vehicle. It's to create a fully recyclable system. So in that regard, I'm sure that methane

that is used for the active cooling part during reentry will be reused in some capacity, whether that's for fuel or for, you know, Pressurization. You could do so many different things with it. Yeah, you could. And I'm sure that will be a part of the next presentation. And if it's not, I will ask that question. Yeah, thanks. We'll all be with you in spirit at that moment. We're like, what are we doing with the methane, Elon? I don't know. It's weird, though, because you also have to figure, you know, there's not, if given the plans for Starship, like, hey, this thing could land anywhere in the solar system given enough refueling opportunities. Not everything in the solar system is going to provide reentry heating.

provide re-entry heating. So it can't be critical to the function of that portion of flight, because if you're landing on the moon, you're not going to get that same atmospheric re-entry, because there's no atmosphere to enter. Insert nerd argument here. But you're not always going to have that regime of flight to rely on it to be a mission-critical piece of that portion of flight. Right, right. From what has been said, you're exactly right. What we're talking about in terms of the actively cool system would be to prevent overheating

depending on what atmosphere you're launching out of. There is atmospheric heating that takes place and thermal protection is necessary during ascent as well because when you're accelerating very quickly through the dense lower atmosphere, you're still creating friction around the vehicle. Of course, that's dwarfed significantly by reentry heating forces.

But SpaceX is also looking at that retro propulsion design. And BFR, from what we saw in that presentation back in September, right? BFR is going to have a very, and radically different trip through the atmosphere to landing than the shuttle did. So we're not talking about it necessarily being critical for every phase of flight or being critical for landing in general because you're right if if you know when when starship lands on the moon you have no atmosphere so you don't need active cooling for atmospheric entry because there is no atmosphere right you have other problems which you maybe or maybe not could use the same you know landing with the the cooled side facing the sun might provide some benefits on the on the moon where you have disparity of temperatures so it's that i feel like this is this portion where it's like well it's going to be specific to each flight and those are variables that we're like 19 steps away from caring about so maybe we should not worry

about it too much that that we might be 19 steps away but that spacex is certainly thinking of because it has to go to the design and and you're exactly right you know um because you know one thing you have to consider too is maintaining thermal conditions across your vehicle. So this might be something, too, with stainless steel and with methane and, you know, how this works when you're in direct sunlight in orbit, where the vehicle is going to slowly spin around its axis so that one side is not constantly facing the sun or constantly facing away. around its axis so that one side is not constantly facing the sun or constantly facing away. But, you know, again, for historical sake, sometimes the space shuttles had to do what was called cold soak and point that black underbelly completely away from Earth and away from the sun before atmospheric entry to cool it down so that when you then turned around and slammed into the atmosphere, you had a, you had better thermal conditioning on the vehicle.

So all of this is to say it's 19 steps away for us. Somebody's worried about it in Hawthorne today. SpaceX is thinking about it, yeah. I just feel like the entire theme for me of this Starship project that we see right now is that it all makes it much more realistic in my mind. Not that I thought that SpaceX was unrealistic before, but it was a much bigger technical task previously, given the materials they're using and the architecture. And this I feel like a lot more confident in, you know, especially with something like the space shuttle original concepts and X-15, they used hot structures in their thermal management

systems extensively. X-15 was based on it. And the original, back when NASA was kind of the one directing the shuttle project before the Air Force got involved, there was concepts for a straight winged orbiter that didn't have to have a thousand mile cross range. And that was nearly all hot structure instead of a tiled based heat management system so i just feel like it's it's so much more realistic and it to me makes it a lot more likely that we'll see you know productive starship flights in the near future whereas the other one i felt like could have had that x33 slip potential uh always around the corner kind of situation that we see with a lot of different space projects. I'm excited about it. Oh, definitely. And there is something to be said.

You know, I was reading, perhaps I shouldn't have, but I was reading replies to a Twitter thread. You're like three levels into an internet mistake at this point. Yes, yes, pretty much. It's like reading the comments at the end of a Twitter thread. You're like three levels into an internet mistake at this point. Yes, yes, pretty much. It's like reading the comments at the end of a news article. But it was kind of shocking to me to see someone trying to basically

say that hyping Starship is not what media should be doing um and to me there's i mean to me a no uh in several ways it's exactly what we should be doing but hyping it in in the way that that what i've really seen us doing where we're like, okay, this is cool. It is coming together. We still have a lot of questions

about what this is eventually going to be, what it's eventually going to actually look like and everything. But there is a moment when hardware starts coming together and you're in the tangible phase of development, that excitement starts to build. And I think rightfully so, because, you know, we've gone through multiple iterations of this vehicle, just like we went through multiple iterations of Falcon Heavy, right? But then the first time we finally saw that beast, which is going to be less of a beast once you put a BFR and Starship next to it. But once we finally saw that rocket on

the pad, right, that sense of excitement built to a level where, you know, you can start to say it's real in terms of you're seeing it with your own eyes. And in that sense, you're right. We don't mean real as in we ever doubted that it would come to fruition. But that doesn't mean it. You know, we can be excited and we can talk about all these cool new things with it while still acknowledging that we have questions and still rightfully acknowledging that there's a lot there's still a long way to go with this. But I don't think that takes away from excitement and, you know, helping to build public interest and also public understanding

of what's actually going on in Boca Chica, a town which I'm sure almost nobody who didn't live in that part of Texas knew existed until just a few short years ago, thanks to SpaceX. Not to knock Boca Chica. Absolutely. No, right. It's probably a great town. But before this, we wouldn't have been planning flights and trips down there, as we probably would be considering at this point. Yeah, trying to find the closest airport.

Right. You're right. Yeah. You're like, holy crap, Texas is big. That's a long ride. Yeah, exactly. So similarly to what you're talking about there, I feel like we're at that phase with DM1 right now, where we see some hardware on the pad uh but yet there still seems to be a long road to go uh maybe for a variety of reasons yeah hey man i'm a professional podcaster baby yeah what the hell's going on chris i thought we were going to get ready to launch uh okay yes um so uh yes so dm1 the the falcon 9 uh complete with the dm1 crew dragon was rolled out to the pad um and underwent fit checks um erected uh vertical and everything uh they swung that access arm over that brand new shiny access arm over to do fit checks to make sure that everything was really working, which is step one of the process.

We knew that that's what was going to happen, and we knew that there wasn't going to be any type of fueling operations happening with Dragon on top of that rocket just now. And we knew they needed to do this. It's pretty standard once you get, once you've made modifications to a launch tower like this to roll a vehicle out there and do fit checks. Shuttle program did it with Enterprise and everything as well. So that's not surprising. There is still some paperwork and final clearances on NASA's side that they're working through, which leads us probably into the discussion of what you didn't ask, but is certainly in a lot of people's minds right now, which is to what effect is the government, partial government shutdown in the United States affecting this?

And to that, to that, there needs we need to be a little careful in how we talk about this. There is there and I will be entirely honest that there seems to be levels of confusion with this. There are some saying that it's not having any effect whatsoever and that these slips would have happened regardless because NASA is working through its final checklist and its final clearances for flight. There are those that are also saying that the shutdown has had some effect and that maybe these final clearances wouldn't have taken as long. The problem is there's no one to ask a definitive. There's no one to ask definitively.

It turns out if the shutdown is debatable, there's also nobody there to answer your question. 14, well, 14, 15 days to the New Horizons flyby of MU69, Hyperbelt, where in the days leading up to it, it was no, NASA's not going to cover it. No, NASA TV can't function. No, there's going to be no social media. You have to go to the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab website to watch it. And then all of a sudden it was, well was well no actually there has been money for this all along that was already pre-approved so nasa tv will cover it but not the public affairs folks because they're furloughed and we're not paying them and and there was so much confusion surrounding that when apparently the money was already there right so i think it's fair to say that if something as big as that had that much confusion in the run-up to it, and so

much back and forth, that there's also a deal, somewhat of a confusion going on with exactly what we're seeing here. I would venture that it's probably a combination of both, right? This partial government shutdown, which furloughed, I mean, technically furloughed every NASA employee, although some are deemed necessary to work and are working without pay, like the flight controllers for the International Space Station,

certainly people within commercial crew, because these reviews are continuing, right? So they are being forced to work without pay. Other employees of NASA are not reporting at all. So I would venture that it's probably both, that there was some confusion in the beginning stages of this as to exactly what the knock-on effect would be, which did end up having somewhat of an effect. Although I would say that probably now they have a very good handle on it. And that the delays we're seeing most recently are probably a firmer understanding of just how far we need to go.

Of course, we know it's no earlier than early February. I do not believe there's a publicly confirmed date for that target yet. So that's what I'll say about the government shutdown. Now, but let's talk about, since you talk about hardware, right, and DM1, I think it's important to talk about what's next from a hardware testing perspective, right? So I just drove by or within view of Pad A yesterday, and I can tell you that the Falcon 9 is no longer vertical. Whether it was horizontal on the pad surface or back in the HIF, I couldn't see because I was several miles away. But that indicates that the initial fit checks are complete. that indicates that the initial fit checks are complete.

So what we could expect now, there was no indication either that the fit checks revealed anything that needs to be tweaked. Of course, shutdown scenario, good luck finding information on that if there are. But the next thing we can expect is that Falcon 9 and Dragon will be back in the horizontal integration facility at 39a they'll remove dragon from the top of the falcon 9 we'll roll it back out right and we'll go through practice countdowns right and um and then we'll do fueling and we'll do static fire

and then we can also expect um and then it'll be rolled back into the pith connected back to dragon and hauled out to pad again um most likely for the launch campaign um which right now would target early uh early february it seems like a lot to do when there's this many variables at play so i'm getting a little bit more sad as it gets closer to February. But I don't know. I mean, the other factor that I've been a little worried about is the whole ISS schedule as well. That's something that you're tracking a lot, reading the flight planning documents and all that. And I guess to give people a sense of how this works um that document it extends you

know a number of months out into the future and it shows what spacecraft is going to be where what ports are open and they they have all of the visiting vehicles as well yeah even progress and soyuz included so they have to manage all those schedules with different restrictions like when the iss can't accept any new vehicles, when they're flying at different beta angle restrictions. And there's a thousand variables in this document. So I guess, you know, if the shutdown shifts things and if, you know, different schedules for like CRS flights shift, what does that look like, that process to get a flight like this onto the books? You know? Is that something that gets priority over the other flights that are happening? Or certain cargo is going to be critical because

they need food, they need water, they need certain things like that. So I guess, where does this stack in the priorities of ISS right now? Well, so first, let's talk about consumables on ISS like food and water. The ISS is very, very well stocked. I believe before the last resupply CRS-16 launched up to the station and the last progress went up to the station in November, the ISS was good. I think the limiting consumable was out to eight months or something like that. So the ISS is very well stocked. You know, and we've already seen, you know, the CRS-17 resupply mission of Dragon up to the station, which was February, is now looking like it's March as the schedule shifts. So the important thing to remember about the visiting vehicle schedule is what it's known as, is that it all shifts and

moves around constantly based on what's needed, based on what's ready, based on what might be a good time for these vehicles to go up. So, you know, there is obviously a desire to get DM-1 off the ground as soon as everyone is ready to do that. February still seems like a very good month from the visiting vehicle standpoint to get that mission up there. You know, the docking port is ready. The crew is ready. And the crew is, the three-person crew that we have up there is, you know, more than capable of handling that. We don't need to wait until the ISS is back to a six-person crew at the end of February or beginning of March. So, you know, from that perspective, in what you're saying, there's nothing that would prevent a launch in February. The beta angle exceedance is taking a quick look at the visiting vehicle schedule.

The next one we'd be looking at would be in mid-May. So there's no beta angle exceedance that we'd be worrying about. that we'd be worrying about. And the juggling of what do we need and when would ultimately come down to those questions with Russia and with our international partners. The next HTV isn't until later in the year, so Japan wouldn't be a part of that discussion per se. That's kind of a weird situation, though.

It's like, hey, Russia, is it cool if we test our vehicle that's totally going to cut you off from cash flow it gets to a weird situation I haven't been too hopeful about the NASA Roscosmos relationship in the last six months things have seemed pretty rocky with Rogozin kind of being a jerk of some sort do you have any sense for how much that's going to affect

the ISS partnership solely because the seats that the U.S. buys from Russia are a significant portion of their funding year to year, just percentage-wise, based on how much they're charging the U.S. now? How do you think that tension plays out? Well, I mean, yes that that is that is certainly um i don't want to put this i mean yes let me ask you a super political hot button question well i mean there will be an effect right but but this has been known for for over a decade at this point that that this was coming.

And, you know, remember, too, that we didn't, you know, that originally the shuttles did the crew rotations for the International Space Station in the early days with the Soyuzes acting as the lifeboats and the rescue crafts, right? And that all sort of shifted when we lost Columbia, obviously. And then the shuttles never did full-scale crew rotations. They did single crew rotations after that through 2009. But we've known this was coming for over a decade. Roscosmos has had a lot of time to prepare for this. And remember too that the plan will also be that Russians will launch on the dragons and the star liners heading up to the space station.

And the Soyuzes will keep flying as well. So, you know, this isn't like we got mad at them for geopolitical reasons and we're like that's it no more money right um we've known about this it's been a long time coming ross cosmos has time to prepare for this and and for the agencies to work out what that new partnership um what the new partnership will be and what it'll look like so i i don't think there's going to be a like well screw you it's like in our space station going on our own elements to this right you know and and to back that up we have seen despite the current political tensions that there are between the Western world and Russia, those have not extended

to the International Space Station in terms of the working relationship. We've seen Congress say we need to get away from Russian-made engines on the atlases, and we've seen that back and forth. We've seen the, you know, like, okay, you know, we should really commit to commercial crew, not in funding, but in lip service from Congress and the Senate. But there's never been a, that's it.

We're going to stop this partnership together. So we really have done a good job of mitigating that in terms of the International Space Station. Yeah, and that's a good point that they're invested in it to a certain extent because they know they're going to be flying on it as well. We don't know the full details of that. You know, if that's a straight up barter or swap, I guess would be like, we'll fly you if you fly us. And that way we can maintain our sides of the space station if anything goes wrong with either of our vehicles.

I think that's how it works. That's the sense that I've got is that it's a straight up swap. Well, remember, there will always be U.S. So the station is divided into two segments called the USOS, the United States Operating Segment, and the RS, the Russian Segment. There will always be a Russian cosmonaut, and there will always be a member of the USOS on board at all times. That will not change. There will always be a representative of those two nations and organizations on the station. That does not change with the introduction to the commercial crew spacecraft. always be a representative of those two nations and organizations on the station.

That does not change with the introduction to the commercial, with the commercial crew spacecraft. It's one of the reasons why Russians will fly on the commercial crew spacecrafts. Right. So that's, that's going to stay exactly the same, which is pretty much the answer to your question of how that works i think it's just disturbing when we see the the tensions drift you know we used to say like oh this doesn't affect space yet and then we started seeing these that get chipped away the last couple of years not not just on the launch side but then you got rogozan who's the head of roscosmos now who keeps saying

dumb things in the media and there's just these like this slow intrusion into space when you start seeing these cracks form and it's troubling to say the least well yeah and you know what i'll say is that you know there's that you know when i say that we have not let the geopolitical elements between the Western nations and Russia really affect the International Space Station, that does not mean that they haven't. I mean, obviously, of course they have. We've talked about engines. We've talked about paying for seats on the Soyuz and everything like that. on the Soyuz and everything like that. But, you know, of course everything we do in space with NASA and Earth's Cosmos is rooted in politics because they are political entities and they are political agencies that have to abide by what the in-power administrations want and what direction they want. I mean, we certainly see that with NASA, not just from an international perspective, but with it's going to be Constellation. No, it's not. It's going to be constellation just with a different color.

It's, you know, which gives us SLS. It's going to be the moon. No, it's going to be Mars. Right. We see that change and fluctuate. And, you know, we don't see as much fluctuation with Russia, primarily because they don't have that kind of turnover of power that we do in the United States. But, you know, one thing to remember for the head of Roscosmos is that he is answerable to the Russian government. And the Russian government has a particular line, just like the US government has a particular line that needs to be towed and needs to be respected. And that's a lot of what, I would say that that's a lot of what we see. And I know you're probably directly referring to, so I'll just say it. You are directly referring to the, oh, the Soyuz MS-09 was deliberately sabotaged on orbit. You know, well, since you said crap, I'll say bullshit to that.

Sorry, like, no. And just for the sheer moment of, how would you do that with nobody else noticing? I mean, let's just start. It's a little far-fetched, yeah. It's far, yeah. I know the ISS is loud at night, and there's whirring, and there's noises,

so like, you know, you're really good, you turn up some music and get a drill going i guess nobody would notice that but within there remember the um remember the political context behind that right is to is not to accept blame for something that you can put off on something else right um which with the string of what we've seen in in with in the russian space program with with the failures with the launch failures that we've seen recently right makes sense so you have to remember what the political context is when you're viewing these statements and yeah it's it's i don't think there's it's not like something that i lose sleep over you know but it's definitely notable that the the death by thousand cuts like there's a couple of

more cuts this year uh and then you know looking forward there's no way to say for certain what different government programs are going to be interested in what because everybody's having hard budget times right now and there's you know priorities are shifting everywhere so there's you know a million ways it could go it's just something that when you see future plans be made it creeps into your head a little more so it it does i mean it it definitely does but you know a good thing to remember with the international space station is you know we depending on you know the.S. government has expressed interest in extending the International Space Station out beyond its current end date. The ESA, the European Space Agency, the Canadian Space Agency, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, all pretty much seem to be on board with that and have taken steps to take ISS out through 2030. Right. So we're talking about 11 more years with the International Space Station,

which is, I will say too, you know, we need to remember from a structural standpoint and a decay standpoint from its components is holding up so much better than was originally predicted. It's, you know, on the level that we tend to get excited when SpaceX tries something new, we should be equally excited about what NASA and Russia and ESA and JAXA and Canada have done with the International Space Station. Because this is a vehicle that we thought we were going to have to be really pouring a lot of effort into upkeep and to replacing very critical components that we have not had to do. This is a very well-built laboratory in orbit. So taking it out, these incremental, right, first it was 2024, then it was 20, well, first it was 2016, and then 2020, and then 2024, and now it's 2026, and now we're talking

about 2030. And all of that is based on the fact that the station is in such good health. I mean, it's good to say remarkably good health. And it's a true testament to building something durable, which also should not surprise us that another aerospace company that we talked about at the beginning of this can't do the same thing. Right. same thing. Right. So that's an important thing to remember as well, is that we're talking about extending this out another 11 years, which obviously who knows what the geopolitical situation, I mean, who knows what the geopolitical situation will be in a month. But, you know, let alone 11 years from now. And remember that when we're talking about any tensions or any public things we see between Roscosmos and NASA.

Yeah, it's good. It's good. That's an inspirational way to end the episode. So I feel better. There you go. I feel like I went on a journey. I felt really good about Starship. I started not feeling so good about DM-1 and I'm back.

I'm back. So this has been therapeutic, Chris. I try. Where should everybody go to follow you out there on the internet? Yes. So first and foremost to nasaspacelight.com, where you can see my articles as well as the articles from our whole host of writers, including Thomas Burghardt, who has the BFR article, which we will link to in the, well, if you go to nasaspacepike.com after Monday afternoon, you'll see it right there on our homepage

as well. And on Twitter, you can find me at ChrisG underscore NSF. Awesome, Chris. Thank you so much for hanging out. It's been too long since I've talked to you. I feel like it's been a very long time. I know. You said when we were talking before the podcast,

you said the last time we talked was after the Eagles won the Super Bowl. That was last year. I know. I was like, oh, man, it's been that long. It's been too long. I hope we have you back sooner than that. Maybe once we get DM1 off, we can do a little quick thing. Are you going to be at the launch?

Oh, yes. All right. So then maybe I'll just call you on the phone or something. We'll put a little mini episode out after it happens, finally. That works. Thanks for having me on again. It's always great fun. Good talking to you, man.

I will talk to you pretty soon. All right. Sounds good. That is all we've got for you today, everybody. Everybody head over to Twitter and tell Chris, thanks for coming on the show. He is always one of my favorite guests to have on here he's just I feel like we could have talked for 12 hours here about Starship

and all the things so I hope you enjoyed the conversation and before we get out of here I want to say a huge thank you to everyone supporting Main Engine Cutoff over at patreon.com slash Miko there are 247 of you supporting the show over there every single month this show was produced by 34 executive producers There are 247 of you supporting the show over there every single month.

This show was produced by 34 executive producers. Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Brad, Ryan, Jameson, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Mike, David, Mintz, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, The Everyday Astronaut, and six anonymous executive producers. Thank you so much for making this episode possible. And everybody else at patreon.com slash Miko, we just crossed the $1,000 a month mark, which was one of the goals I had set, where we're going to actually start doing some live streaming for special events, for recording shows. I'm working on my setup, so keep an eye open for that. That'll be happening pretty soon. But for now, that is all I've got for you.

Don't forget to head over to mainenginecutoff.com. I've got the blog there where you can read what I'm talking about during the week and the show notes for this show. So check it out and I will talk to you pretty soon.