Off-Nominal - 171 - Stiletto Starship (with Jack Beyer)

Episode Date: October 18, 2024

Jake and Anthony are joined by Jack Beyer, Content Manager for NSF, to talk about SpaceX doing the dang thing! They caught the booster!TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 171 - Stiletto Starship (with Jack Beyer) - YouTubeSpaceX on X: “Watch Starship's fifth flight test”SpaceX on X: “Starship on its fifth flight test. Views powered by @Starlink”Starship’s Fifth Flight Test - SpaceX - LaunchesSpaceX Catches a Super Heavy Booster During a Milestone Flight 5 - NASASpaceFlight.comStarship | SN5 | 150m Flight Test - YouTubeDouglas X-3 Stiletto - WikipediaFollow JackJack Beyer (@thejackbeyer) / XJack BeyerNASASpaceFlight.comFollow Off-NominalSubscribe to the show! - Off-NominalSupport the show, join the DiscordOff-Nominal (@offnom) / TwitterOff-Nominal (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterJake Robins (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterMain Engine Cut Off (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@[e-mail]) - jawns.club 🐘Off-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

DLS and go for main engine, start. They did it, Jake. They did the thing. They did it. They did the thing. They did the thing. We've got someone who was, I don't know exactly know where you were during this, Jack, but you were somewhere because NSF is always somewhere with these flights.

Always. Always. How's it going? Anywhere there's a rocket. Oh, good. I was about like, I don't know, three miles, four miles in change, away from the launch. so always a treat to be that close. That's real close.

That is really close. The closest you can get, and that's a really big rocket. Yeah, there was a moment during boost back. Yeah. There was a moment during boostback where it was like, oh, that's right. It's an RTLS, and it's literally coming right for us.

Everything's fine. Yeah. You could tell how the angle it was coming in. That thing was gliding to some extent. It was definitely, looked at the trail and its angle of attack and the bend to the trail. You're like, yeah, it's doing a little, steering a little bit. Let's do a little lift.

I feel like we've been saying for basically this entire development program so far, like the booster's going to have some cross range. Even Falcon 9 has a little bit of cross range. And you can definitely see that on display. So cool. Yeah, yeah. It was, it's why I'm trying to imagine, like, is there, is there any, like, time in history where something that big was coming down that fast, like on purpose.

Like, you know, besides like an airplane that is meant to fly. Like, I can't think of anything quite like this of that magnitude, right? Like, it's such a large object that's just like screaming down at, you know, terminal velocity or whatever it was. Right. Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know. You're normally not one for superlatives, Jake.

That was like a ultimate superlative. Yeah. But it was just, it's just so big. Like, there's, there is, you know, scale is a quality all its own. Yeah, and it's, it's funny how it affects, it affects your perception of the movement of the thing. Like with the starship, I don't even know what to call them anymore. The initial flight tests, the hops, I guess we could call them hops. When the starship's coming back belly flopping, it's so massive that it just looks like,

it looks like a blimp, like lazily floating through the air. It's hurtling towards the earth, but because of the scale of the thing, it just looks like it's moving impossibly slow. Same thing with straddle launches, carrier aircraft. Rock? When it's in the air, it's just like it doesn't look like that should be a thing. It's just hanging there. Big airplanes do that, man.

I got, I was, I just so happen to be driving. This sounds weird, but if you've ever driven in Philadelphia, you would know this. You can drive on a section of 95 that's on a bridge. that on certain days is next to the way that airplanes approach Philly International. And we were driving like last week or the week before. I'm like, oh, cool, 747's coming in, like, right as we're coming up. And then I'm looking and I'm like, it's got like a blue nose to it. I'm pretty sure this is the president landing right now.

So I got to drive next to Air Force One on approach, which is fairly epic as the viewpoint that you had. But that's the same thing where it's so big that the, what is it, the relative, like the displacement, relative from one time and since to another in terms of lengths of the vehicle is not very much. So it looks like it's barely creeping along because it's like, well, it's going one vehicle at a time, not 15 or whatever. Yeah, yeah. It's all relativism.

But this thing was hauling ass. I will certify it as hauling ass. We're going to talk about it. Jake, what did you bring to drink? Because barely me and you were going to fight about Starship. And I want to get to that part as soon as possible. All right. You're going.

I left in the fridge. Cover me for 30 seconds. All right. We'll van. We'll fan. We got it. We got it. Did you bring anything, Jack?

I don't know if you've stocked up since the flights. It's just a Modelo. That's just killing it. I mean, nothing fancy. It's what you need, you know. A hot,

a hot Texas Day kind of beer. You know, like a baseball game kind of beer. You don't want, you know, I don't want to be out here drinking like an imperial something. You know, no,

we're having a chill. Yeah, exactly. What do you got, you bring it back? I got. A petite. see that. Paramo.

What is that? Armo. So this is a pale ale from a pale ale from Colima. So if you know where Manzanio is, it's close to there. Look at that.

I'm closing out the white wine for the season. I had one bottle of Aronachia left, and it's now into the 30s in the morning out here. I can't be drinking white wine too much longer. Sorry, 30s?

Like 30 degrees? Fahrenheit. Yes. Not Jake's 30. Yes, feels like has been 36 in the mornings up here. Wow. How can we get some of that down here in Texas? Please.

It's nice, man. It's really nice. Actually, I think it was either yesterday the day before I was driving out to Starbase. And since Hurricane Francine and all the rain that we got, my AC and my land rover has been broken. Hooray. So I'm driving with the windows down. And it was just like, oh, oh, hello. Maybe in a day or two, I'm going to actually get.

to wear my hoodie. Like, it's actually getting a little bit chilly. A slight chill to it. That's all we got down here. Nothing, nothing like that. You got to Ace Venture your way into air conditioning at this point. Yeah, it's been, it's been warm here, mostly. But this last couple days that we finally got some colder weather. So it was real nice this morning working outside. But it was, uh, have you gotten the Comet View yet? No, I got clouds like two nights in a row. I've been looking so yeah I'm gonna try it's not looking good right now but we'll we'll see it's legit I can see it from downtown Philadelphia so not much but it's just a little bit there but I took my four-year-old up to the roof of a parking garage which he thought was like the greatest

adventure that we've went on it's like we're gonna go see a comet from the parking garage all right there were two other randos up there that were looking for it and I like pointed it out to them they were enjoying that so was the was the fun for the child more the parking garage or the comment because I feel like if they're my kind of like when I was a kid I'd be like oh awesome we get to go in this weird stairwell it's like no comet comet the funniest part is it's just our parking garage where we park our car but I don't think he ever realized that if you go to the top floor there's no roof and that was that was the truly mind-blowing part of like you can see the whole sky and the whole city from up here so that's apparently our new hang is the top of the

parking garage I remember when I was really little hail bop comet hail bop came through and that was one of the many little things that if you were making the like insane person like wall map with the threads like figuring out why I'm into spaceflight I credit that fully

as well so this is yeah that is definitely for our generation because it was also epic like that was this is a comet that was like a fucking comet you know what I mean there's a distinct difference I hope at some point in our lifetimes we get another

comment that it's that bright because first of all, okay, what do we even call this one? Comet Atlas? I'm not even going to venture to try and pronounce the actual like. Yeah, I don't know. I've given up a comet names in this era. We'll refer to it. They always have slashes in it and they come and go and some of them

get obliterated that I'm like, whatever. Pan stars, maybe. I'm always so upset when I, when they have the names with the year discovered in it and it's always like, oh, asteroid, whatever, whatever, 2024. you know, is going to pass within a hundred meters of earth. And you're like, okay, this is too close and too soon.

I need the distance to go bigger and I need the years to go further back. I want lots of notice on this. I was talking my dad last night, my dad and I were out and I was telling him, you got to take a look at this thing. It's like, well, when did they discover it? I was like, I think pretty recently because it's got a recent year in it. He's like, well, when's the next time it's going to be back? I'm like, probably never.

That's as much as I looked up about this. Years. Irrelevant. Both of these things irrelevant. Just go look at it, Dad. It's West. Yeah. It's a surprise, yeah.

Yeah, it's been a real treat, though. Like, I did not know or expect it really to get to naked eye visibility. And I feel like, you know, I'm a photographer. I'm a nerd. I like space things. So generally when there's a comet coming into the solar system, like, I'll know about it. And I feel like the same thing happens every time. Maybe it's just recency bias, but it'll always be like, oh, it's going to get close to the sun,

and they're predicting it's going to get super duper bright, and then it goes around the sun and breaks up because of the gravity or whatever. And it's like, oh. So the next one's going to do that. This one's already on the way back out, I think. Right, right, right, right. There's one at the end of the month that is going to be like, I don't think that's going to make it. Right. Which I think is metal.

That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. What is the solar system, if not metal? Like, there's so much about it. question that many people that have appeared in the show would answer with different things. So, yes, you're clearly into rockets. I'm going philosophical with it.

All the astronomers are like, yes, correct, metals. Actually, if you look at this periodic table, it is a lot. It's all metal. Yeah. Speaking of all metal, hey. Hey. Where do we want to start with this? Because I've got, first of all, Jack, give us some on the ground.

So you've been there for how many of the launches in person? All of them? every single starship launch or launch related activity, except for SN5. That's an Lenship description if I've ever heard of it. Launch related activity. So SN5 is the only one that I missed, and that was because of the pandemic.

That's missable. All right, so give us a vibe check. Give us the power rankings of vibes on what flight was driving the normies crazy down there? Like which flight has had the biggest, like response or what's sorry yeah just vibes you know how did it feel which one was the coolest which one had the most regular people crying which one are you going to remember later well i mean i'm definitely going to remember all of them that's like a cheesy answer right but

no each one has its own unique trials and tribulations um flight one i will always remember because you know it was one of those instances where we didn't know what to expect fully you know we didn't know if it was just going to blow up on the pad. Like I was researching what the army tells people to do if there's like a nuke going off or like trying to figure out, you know, like, okay, how do I, in case it goes pop, I did the math, it's like 16 seconds from the pad roughly till the shockwave would hit where I was at at my location.

So it's like, all right, you have 10 or so seconds to mash the shutter and then six seconds to get on all fours. But yeah, each launch is kind of different. Flight 2 was the most beautiful up until Flight 5. Now I think I would say Flight 5 was the most beautiful. And the craziest one yet easily is Flight 5. Like, no question. To attempt to catch a booster so early in this program,

I mean, I certainly didn't expect it this early, and to do it so flawlessly. Although I have been saying, if they decided to go for a catch, I thought they'd be successful. And sure enough, they went for it and they were successful. They made it look easy. So, yeah, recency bias, but I'm going to say this one, this one was the best so far. They definitely, too.

Yeah, they shook some expectations of this because, like, you know, we're always like trying to predict this or that or what will happen or what won't happen. And I usually get, get like, a lot of points betting against Starship because the timeline's always slings. and things always take longer and there. And this is one where I just like totally struck out. Like I'm like, there's no way they're going to do it this early. And if they do, there's no way it's going to be even close. And if it is close, it's no way it's not going to blow up when it hits it. Like I was like, everything is going to go wrong with this.

And they, I struck out on man. It was like everything happened early and fast and good. The early part is especially crazy. Like at some point, we're going to need to dissect what exactly happened there. because launch is so rarely move left on the timeline. And in this case, I mean, it was not even like, oh, a couple days, oh, week, no, it was like an entire month plus. Like, hey, guess what? I hope you're ready for launch because it's happening.

And we're all like, what? November? Hello? Yeah. I hopefully, when Eric Berger puts out his next book and it goes, Starship to Modern Day, we get a fly on the wall. We get the FAA story. Yeah.

Oh, God. So many, so many questions. Yeah. Because it was like, oh, also, you're a month and a half early and also the next one's cool too. Right. Yeah. And worth pointing out, the next one is cool too, not because it's going to be exactly

identical. They just said the proposed changes for Flight 6 fall within the scope of what they're approving for Flight 5. So who knows what they might. I got a guess. Should we go around and guess what the difference is? Oh, okay, yeah. I got a guess.

My guess is they seem to be tantricly approaching this whole vacuum and relight of the engines in space, and they're finding out of the atmosphere. They just seemed very hesitant to do that and go into full orbit. So my guess is that they really, somebody did the math that they were like 20 seconds away from orbital if they kept burning the engines, something like that. So it's in the margin of tens of seconds. I assume they're going to relight the engine, but retrograde.

So they will pull the reentry point in tens or hundreds of kilometers. I like that. Thus prove out that the in-space relight will work. And maybe even two burns, so it's like, you know, circularization burn and then at the orbit burn, but they're both heading retrograde. That's my

assessment. Because that way they can stay a suborbital the whole time, but they still prove out what they need so the next one can be orbital. Right. Thank you, over complicated that, Anthony. You just got to turn sideways and burn a... Plane change.

You call it. Antinormal or whatever. Plane change. Actually, Jake, that's not the worst. Not the worst idea. If you come in too short, you're going to come in hot and then they're still working out the heat shield tiles and stuff. So, you know...

Plain change. You don't want to do that. I like it. Can we talk about the catch, a future catch attempt of the ship, too, and how this might... Maybe that, we need to talk about that so we can understand what direction we should burn. here for a test. They say they're going to try a catch of the ship. I say early next year, we can salt a taste on that one. But there's questions about, okay, but the arms face east

and you're coming in from the west. So what do you, is it a, you overshoot and you do a short boost back? Like, how does that work? Can't it, can't it turns? I thought I could spin around. What do you mean? Can't swivel all the way, right? Can't the chopsticks like rotate around the the tower and point in any direction. Not the entire tower though. No, no, no, no. No, it's like 120 degrees of range, something like that. Enough to lift and then stack. Right, basically. Um, okay, lots of things. I'm going to try and keep all this on track in my head because I have had very little sleep. Sorry, um, I think they're going to, okay, first off, when Starship's coming in in belly flat mode, it's basically going almost completely straight down. So figure it's coming down on top of

the tower at that point. It's already nulled out its horizontal velocity. For the flip, it will be like, like, let's say this is the tower. It'll do the flip and get further away from the tower because you're flipping. I'm not

working. Got it. And then it'll translate back towards the tower, I guess is what I'm trying to say. Translate is post flip. Yeah. So you overshoot the tower, you flip over the ocean, and you translate back onto land. Right. But

That is going to be ridiculous. I'm going there for that mission. I've already stated that to my family of now four. I got to say, having experienced many Falcon 9 sonic booms from RTSs and having experienced many shuttle sonic booms growing up in Florida, that super heavy sonic boom, man, oh, it was intense. It was like, I don't even know what to compare it to. It was the most intense sonic room I've ever felt.

And it was just delightful. It was delightful. I can't wait until we get that with the ship, too. Please listen to the whole sentence, FAA. It was the strongest, and I loved it. Yeah, I mean, ultimately, I do wonder how fast will brush up against public willingness to accept loud noises like that on a regular basis. terms of like how much what kind of cadence can this program ramp up to in some ways it's the

massive size of the rocket is almost like a like a liability um because you can only launch it from appropriate places and you know at some point you're going to ruffle some feathers people be like it's too loud it's like it's a clap of thunder it's fine um but space x is like no i want to do this 10 times a day every day forever i kind of wonder like you know if they if they get to a point where it is becoming a nuisance and they are getting complaints and it's bothersome. Like what you can probably do some kind of engineering to mitigate some of it, right? Like, you know, we saw so much pushback on Starlink and they painted them a different color or whatever and they made it better.

It didn't make the problem go away, but they made it better, right? And, you know, is there like some sort of weird like, you know, sound cones they can put on the bottom of this thing to like break up the boom of it? I don't know. It's so amusing to me because there are, there is an ex plane right now. Like NASA actually is building an X plane. Yeah. to study how to contour the design of a plane to make the sonic booms less loud.

And it's a really goofy looking plane because of the necessity of physics. And now I'm imagining a starship that is like in that vein. Like that's that's quite amusing. Yeah. Just like a starship with a giant point on the bottom of it. Right. Yeah. Stoletto starship.

Yeah. They'll have a silly name for it like that too. Yeah. Stiletto or like, Spikey boy or whatever. It's going to be. At this point, there are,

there's nothing to be surprised about if a name like that comes out. SpaceX is good at doing the fun little meme stuff. Did you guys see the, the pie Raptor on, on Booster 12 when they lifted it off? Yeah, there's a little pie painting on, on 314.

Yeah, 314. Yeah, 314 serial number of Raptor. they put a little pile of going there. I love that they still do that. That's like a throwback to days of your when we used to actually be able to see. 314 is nuts, by the way, real quick. We're glancing over, just 314 of them.

It feels like they skipped a bunch and painted higher numbers on. Yeah, maybe they iterated the hundreds of generations, right? 11, 12, 100, 101, 102, 202, 204. Yeah, the first two digits are just a serial number. It means it's the first lot. Yeah, yeah. Oh, man.

Here, I found a picture of the pie, Jake, so you can see it. This one. Nice. Look at that pie stencil. Wow. Yeah. That's great. There you go.

And it's in red paint. Look at that. Quality. Jake, I think we were happening upon this in the pre-show that we have potential fight brewing between me and you on what this moment goes. Let me posit what my take was. I did a podcast earlier this morning on the Miko feed, but I will, TLDR my take for Jake's purposes. I think the, there's been like four eras of Starbase, right? There was the initial, there's barely any infrastructure and there's, and we're star hopping and we're doing Raptor flight testing

primarily, a little bit of structures testing. Then there was ship testing phase. which started with, I think, SN5 and 6, you could say, and then ultimately was SN8, 8, 9, 10, 11, 15, right? Something like that. Something like that. Yep. S&8 was the epic one where they did the flip for the first time. We all lost our shit.

I think that, by the way, was the... I think if I'm power ranking SpaceX visual treats, I'm putting Flight 5, SN8, and then the first Falcon 9 landing as my top three, because those were the moments that I was like, holy shit, this is a different thing. So the ship testing phase happened. And in both of those cases, the Starship flight or the Star Hopper flights took place over a series of like eight months or even less, maybe six months, something like that. Ship testing was similar. Tightly coupled, there was like little bursts of them, right?

Yeah, and it was every like two months, there was something happening at the longest. And then there was this moment where it was a two-year gap because they needed to build so much infrastructure to even, get to the next part. You could support Star Hopper, ship testing with very little propellant, not much infrastructure because you needed a launch mount and a landing pad. But now they needed to do an entire launch tower, a huge tank farm, all the production for boosters and ships, all the regulatory stuff to get through to be able to fly this trajectory that was not just a hop. And that phase, I think is what took so much longer than any of us were prepared for. I don't think any of us would have bet two years of that before they got back to this, what we're testing now.

And then we got into the full stack testing here. And I think this is the moment that we're through that. And from here is where the launch rate can accelerate to a unbelievable degree because they hit pinpoint accuracy on the starship reentry. They landed next to a goddamn buoy in the middle of the Indian Ocean so they can get a video of it. They caught the thing on the first attempt. They do the thing. It looked amazing, right?

It didn't even look like stuff was on fire and blowing up. But other than that, like those are much easier problems to solve than catching a gigantic booster on two little legs. So I think the five flights worth was like the teething phase of all the infrastructure phase where we blew up a launch pad and had to figure that out. And then we blew up a couple of boosters. Now we've got reliable raptors, reliable reentry, and a catch of the booster on the first try. And the last piece is to figure out how they can get cleared for that 25 flights a year that

they've applied for. I think they've officially applied for that, right? like all the paperwork is is in and it's somewhere in the system. I feel like that was legit. That sounds right to me. I'm not Alex. Yeah. But yeah, that sounds right.

So I think we are now into fifth phase of Starbase. And I'm like pretty convinced that this is the insane increase in launch rate, which is really important because, I mean, they're at, this flight was. ship 30 and booster 12, and it was the fifth all-up flight test. They were way ahead on production iterations and way behind on flight iterations. And now they can start to write that pace, which is, I think, really important for anything interesting that happens to Starship. Right. I mean, SpaceX has their whole fly, fail, fix, whatever. Like, they iterate, and part of their process is needing to fly. So I'll often tell people, like, when they're visiting

or when I'm explaining the Starship program, we'll be like, yeah, they're going to launch this one in a couple of weeks or a couple days or what have you. But it's basically already obsolete. Like, they will learn a lot from flying it, but in their internal design teams and in their workflow, like these things take a lot of lead time before we ever see a part roll out of Star Factory.

So they're working way ahead, which is crazy. Concerningly so in some cases, I feel like. The fact that they are like generations ahead before they've flown them. And that's what I'm saying is I think that they've made it to the point where they can shorten that gap to be a little tighter. And that's a thing that feels much more SpaceX than what the last two years has felt like. Yeah.

I feel like we're at the start of the curve, you know? Like the line has been trending upwards and we're hopefully right at the point where the graph just goes, wee! Like straight out, you know what I mean? Jake doesn't buy it though. Jake is, Jake made a sour face when I told him that 30 minutes ago. So I want to hear what your vibes are, Jake. So there is a phenomenon with watching SpaceX where in the aftermath of them making a big accomplishment,

we get all like starstruck and our eyes are all dazzled and we always kind of like imagine. It's like, oh, this is it. This is the one thing we're waiting for. And then now it's ready to go. To your point, I am 100% sure. You can go back into my Twitter feed from like the SN8, SN9 sort of. era and it's like, we're going to be orbitals in six months or something. Exactly.

But oh, you sweet summer child. Like, no. But I think that's my point, Jake, is that those were the vibes then. But, and that's, I get your point when there's a, when there's a single part of the mission that went so successfully. But this was everything from launch to landing of both pieces. They made huge leaps in all of the fronts on, from infrastructure to the ship to the booster.

All of them were, were so beyond. what we would have couched at. Yeah. I feel like it is different this time. It's possible. Smash cut two years later, we've got jackback on the show after like flight 10 or whatever. You see to talk about it.

You don't know. And I think about, you know, it's not really that different if you think about the first Falcon 9 return to launch site, right? You know, the big one. That was a big moment too, right? That was like,

you're coming off return to flight. First time coming in land. Like, was that the first time? full thrust one too. I think that was like a new iteration of Falcon. Like they, that was a similar thing where like they knocked off a whole bunch of brand new

first and it all worked and it was amazing. And they landed that thing and you and I started podcasting because of it. Like it was a big, big day. And, um, you know, the flight rate the next year was basically the same. And then they,

they threw out that Falcon. They had to invent a whole new Falcon after that. I'm not a whole new one. But you know, they, they, they had a whole new design revision for it after that. Uh,

flight rate started to go up a year. you know, two, three years after that. And so I think that, and that's fine. Like, I'm not saying that's like... But they were flying that based on demand at that point. That's the difference. Maybe. Is it didn't have a Starlink kit, you mean?

Well, certainly didn't have Starlink, but yeah, they were flying a couple of cargo missions a year, a couple of geos satellites. I just think they were... They're just making up, like, they... All of the next stuff that they need to do is like, we got to fly 30 times. You know? But I think sometimes we don't have like have a good grasp on on how done it is right now. It's it's the most done it's ever been.

And so sometimes we think about like this is it. Like, you know, we just saw it got caught by the booster. Guaranteed like two years for now, we're going to look back at this first catch and be like, look how freaking janky that was, man. The thing's on fire. It's a piece of garbage. It doesn't look right. It's fucking all over the place. It bumped into that thing and shook the whole.

It's not supposed to do any of that. Like we're going to have that hindsight when they're way better at it. And then we're going to go, oh, yeah, that's why it took extra long to get really good at it. Because they had to fix all those things. But we just don't have that visibility now. And we always do this every time there's some amazing SpaceX moment. So I'm couching my revelatory. That's fair.

That's fair. I mean, there is a reality distortion field here in Starbase, like 100%. Like, that's a famous term for Steve Jobs and days of your. there's 100% a reality distortion field here. So I get that. I don't think you're wrong. And I completely agree. The pace of this program is so insane that, yeah, two years from now, we'll look back on this and be like, wow, that was, that looked busted.

Or what have you? Like, I go back and I look at the first full stack ever with ship 20 and booster four. they stacked it with a fricking rasta cream like the tower didn't have chopsticks on it like it was the most janky thing ever

but at the time it was like we're going to the moon baby and playing fly me to the moon on the PA at the launch site and it was like yeah orbital and then yeah two years later I did watch earlier today

I watched the old this is the I guess this is the flight you missed Jack this is SN5 I watched this clip and I was like, shit, that looks like the videos you pull up from the early 60s when they were still working on shit. Like, look at, I'm just going to go full screen for a second because the, I don't know,

there's a quality to this video and a ridiculousness to the test article and the barrenness to the landscape that you're like, the off center engine firing. It's like, what were they even doing? I'm so glad I got to see SN6. These stupid legs that fold out like that. I love those legs. I love those legs. I love little.

Look, there's no guys. Just a couple little guys. The amount of dust that's thrown up. There was just so much that was, I just thought about when we're super old and we watched this video and we're like, that is a ridiculous, ridiculous video. Yeah.

I will say, seeing the booster come back and approach the tower during the landing burn very much reminded me of SN5 and SN6. Very similar kind of, just tube with like raptor plume gimbling at extreme angles. It was very satisfying.

And a slightly less, slightly less surprising that they were able to have such good control over booster 12 given that they were able to do that with, with five and six. I mean, those were insane. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think they,

the SpaceX had such like, this is like their transferable skill is like piloting the booster down. Right. how many of they have, how many falcons have they landed? That's a lot of experience that directly applies to what they're doing here. So like in a weird sense, it's like,

oh yeah, of course they had accuracy land in this thing. Like it's a new vehicle, sure, but all the math, it's the same physics, you know, it's just bigger.

And so they can, they can probably do the math. Here's the thing about that. One of the aspects of them being able to now fly free, and when I say they're able to fly frequently, right, there's the regulatory stuff to get through, but the fact that they have a launch tower still and they didn't,

blow up that and the tank farm and presumably like it gets better from here is notable because that is what allows them the infrastructure allows them to fly more frequently but the fact that they're able to do that is going to allow them to do the same process they've done with falcon nine which is trim in all the margins find the optimizations change trajectories if you watch a falcon nine land now and what it was doing in 2016 it is completely different like different engine patterns different timing right everything is different what's weird about starship though is that there's, I think, was it, Scott Manley was tweeting that, like, the, where the booster staged at effectively was like half the amount of energy that Falcon 9 usually has at first

stage staging. Wow. So the booster was coming in with a lot less energy behind it. But what's kind of cool is that, obviously, you've got payload considerations to make in terms of performance, but the ship is going orbital every time and reentering from orbital speeds every time. That's the point. Which means that the booster, you can try to, you can try to.

like take some work off the booster in a way that is not as one to one as it would be in other architectures because the ship is always going orbital whether the ship does more work or the booster does more work the ship is always reentering from orbital speeds which means if you can play with that and make the booster have a softer reentry then you can kind of give it a better environment and still have the same effect on the ship whereas with traditional second stages you just don't there this is not really a thing you can make it's not a trade you can That probably explains why, like, the, you know, the future plans for Starship, the stage differences, like the height on the stage one and six, you are getting pretty close to 50-50.

It is like not like other rockets. Right, right, right. But that's the total mindset shift when you think about either just a lot of excess performance because you have an upper stage that can go orbital and re-reused, you can budget extra performance because you're getting the whole thing back, which you can't make that trade in other environments. or you can refill it for higher performance needs. And so you can take work off the booster in a way that something like New Glenn in its current

configuration doesn't, it's got to follow traditional rocket equation. Right. And that's kind of crazy. Traditional. Semi-reusible. Yeah, yeah. Traditional as in the last 10 years, yes. Traditional as in what Falcon did, yeah.

It is nice to see Starship enabling us to think about, you know, think about these, trades completely differently than normal because I'm tired of the status quo. I want the cool new thing. So, hooray. Like, we're pushing the boundaries a little bit. Upper stages have sucked in the last like two years generally across the industry. Most of them have had issues. Even speaking back in nine now. All the upper stages have sucked. I'm out here. That's the hill I'm dying on. Upper stages below right now. Except for Centaur. It's all muscle, right? Well, yeah. That one did fine. That's all muscle. All right, so Jake's not buying, not buying the increase of flight rate. I want to just like level set too.

Like I don't think the program's going to fall apart. I just think like every time, every time we do this, I just like, so whatever the expectations are, just like take like 10 or 15% off the top. Yeah. Yeah. Like it's cool down and it'll be fine. And it'll be. And whatever happens is going to be awesome and it's great. It's just, yeah.

This is not the time to go to to go to the betting. sites and start putting money down on those big numbers. Hey, man. Watch it. Watch it. I do wonder if there's any prop betting on Starship. Oh, yeah. Like out in Vegas?

Oh, no, no, no, maybe. Listen, I don't have to go to Vegas. Jake advised me not to give too much away because of the people that I'm betting against on a particular app that is allowed in the U.S. right now. And if I inflect too many of the NSF followers, I will start losing money instead of winning money. But there is a single app that has. SpaceX bets.

And last time I mentioned this, I was winning tens of dollars. I have increased that to hundreds. So that's good. Yeah, I'll send you the link. Yeah, I might know a guy that would be interested in that. Someone named Schmack Schmeier. All of us. All right.

Let's talk tactically, though, where they go from here, right? Because we've got another tower in your neck of the woods, Jack. We've got another tower at Cape Canaveral. that exists. I would like to check back in on what the status is there and like what's going on? We got a lot of towers.

So what are we doing with all these? Right. You tell me, you're the guy doing this, tower watching. I do wonder what's going on with the tower at 39A. You know, they tore out the orbital launch mount there or the legs for it anyways.

They have an orbital launch mount in Florida, but they didn't actually install it. It seems like it's going to get scrapped. I don't know. I feel like it's going to be a while yet. Was that just Bechtel lobbying, building that tower? Like, look at this. I'm going to try really hard to be.

I don't know. Actually, I don't think Bechel was a contractor, but that was a good joke. But yeah, tactically going forward, I think it's going to be Starbase for the next couple of years. Just as everything ramps up, I don't think they're going to start touching 39A with Starship until the program's a little bit more mature because it's a hollowed ground, right? How far along is like manufacturing tooling there? Because I assume you also want to build the vehicles there too, right?

Like they're not going to boat these things over. So that facility also has to be up to speed, not just the tower, right? Right. Okay. I could be misremembering this, but they basically, they just built that giant hangar X too, building off Roberts Road. Robert's Road. I think initially we expected that to have some Starship production going on in it, but it ended up it's all just Falcon 9.

They needed all that space for Falcon 9 in order to support the cadence that they're at. So they're going to have to build another very large structure at Roberts Road, plus presumably megabase, some sort of high bays. So I feel like Starship production in Florida is also a ways out. But I mean, I'm here for it. I would love to see that. It's just right now we're still, it's just baby steps still. I mean, we're coming off the post-launch like feel goods, but we're really like we're saying earlier.

We're at the point of the graph where it's going to start going up, but we're still just like toddling along. Jake, it sounds like you're bringing them down a little bit, I think. 30, 40 minutes in, Jax a little bit. Rope you in to reality, baby. That's my job. I guess the big, the big thing now is going to be

what else changes once they start doing these orbital refilling tests. Yeah, that's the big real. That is filling these things up and making sure that works and like how,

you know, how much boil off do you lose? And so is there like, are you just where stuff is located hardware-wise, you might need to relocate a lot of it. Yeah. And like,

so there's a lot of iteration they have to do there and all that iteration depends on the flight rate as well. So like we got some more mountains to climb here before we're like for, you know, picking out dorms on on Mars base one or whatever. Now they're going to move the fins. I get top bunk, by the way.

Yeah. I have my own room. Thank you very much. Sorry. We can start. We can take big, big quarters there. Oh, God.

I want to go to space. I want to go to space. in a freaking starship and have that much internal volume to play around with. Sorry, what were you saying about the fins?

Moving the fins? They're moving them around. They're changing where they're at. They still can't. They're shifted them up a little bit. Yeah. Right, right. On the version two,

they're more leeward. They keep catching fire. Yeah, that seems like a big thing. You probably shouldn't generally catch fire as you're coming through the atmosphere. It's probably a bad thing. No two fins are not on fire.

The heat shielding is definitely, I still have like, qualms generally about the... If qualms? Not that they don't work, but just that seems like a real situation. Like, I would like to know the relative budget that they're spending on the heat shield program. Economics is a big question there, right? I think they'll get it to work, but it's like, but are you going to get it to the point where you have, like, the refurbishment level that is talked about, right? Where it's just like, yeah, we're just going to like land these things.

and roll them down the road, feel them up, and back we go again. Like that, you know, that utopic idea of rapid reusability, are these tiles there yet? I don't know.

That's going to be an interesting thing to solve. That's always been a struggle. And this underlayer now, which... Yeah, there's like an ablative layer that they've added, which...

Yeah, that doesn't sound reusable. No. You know? Quite literally isn't. Now it ablates when you need it, I guess is the point, right? You don't need it all the time. And if you do,

it's nice to have there. So that's cool. Yeah. But... Yeah, I don't know. I'm not super worried about the heat shield. Maybe I'm just an idiot, but I feel like it's... Well, okay, let me rephrase.

I am an idiot, but correlation, causation. But yeah, I'm not super worried about it. I feel like that's a solvable problem. I think it's just, you know, shuttle memories of like that was the issue, right? Yes. That I totally understand having, like, past shuttle trauma make you leery about... And like, someone says tile and you're like, ugh. Yeah.

Reinforce carbon carbon. I'm like, no, I don't like it. So I get that. The tiling on the Starlink terminals is really cool, though. I'll tell you that. That was sweet. Yes. Yeah, all those little like a kutra maw, little pods and things.

Yeah, all sorts of little shit on there. Yeah, it's really, some of them are really, really beautiful. Like the way that they like manage to like tessellate all the tiles and make a nice little box on the side of the thing. But again, I think that's my, that doesn't sound cheap. That sounds very expensive to make little. spoke little tiles for your exact Starlink panel that you're using at the moment. Right. Yeah.

If you put yourself into like Elon Musk's brain and like how he likes to approach engineering problems, I find it like not difficult to imagine that he's furious about the tiles. You know, like it's got to be. Why do we have these? I want to just wrap it and stay in the steel. And that's what it was supposed to work, you know? That was supposed to be. This is the thing.

It's like when you're going through, when you're going to the checkout like at the grocery store and it's like 15 items or less. And you're like, yeah, but I got three cartons of eggs, but it's all eggs, so that's one item. It's one thing. The best part is no part. The best part is no part. But there's 18,000 tiles. No, no, no, but that's one part. That counts as one part.

It's not a thousand. It's one department. It has one boss. Yeah, one VP. We hired them six months ago. We ought to call it. He's 26. Highly accurate. I still do. The other aspect of this, when they caught the booster,

the first thing that I, my first, like, thought was, just put it back down, man. Like, just do it. Put it back down on there. You know, you got it. Why was that not immediate? I don't know, because it was on fire,

was the answer. But it was very obvious to me how they could just put that thing right back down, stack another ship on top. And then I was, so that's what got me down the rabbit hole of thinking about architecture stuff again.

And the difference between booster rate and ship rate in terms of, And there's still some corners of the Starship architecture that I'm concerned, not concerned about, but like have some questions about of doing higher energy missions. Is there a kickstage play here? Or are you bringing your own kickstage if you're someone who wants to send something to Europa off the Starship? And you can buy a flight to Leo or Gio or whatever, you know, reusably and then do your own thing. Because the refurbishment sounds like it's going to take a while between ships.

if what we're talking about is like inspect all the all the tiles all the ablated material get it ready to roll again although i really hope that with modern technology and like computer vision and you know machine learning like lasers like can we just get a scan bot like that like eliminate the humans out of the loop there and just bring the ship in scan it with a crap little lasers i don't know yeah sounds like it should work right yeah i'm i'm no rocket scientist but uh yeah yeah SpaceX use lasers to check the heat lasers and you've got it. That one's on me.

LiDAR and AI. Yeah. And blockchain's probably got to be in there too. Oh yeah, definitely. They all got to be on blockchain each tile individually. To your point, we are sort of, we are getting to a point where all of the weird logistical stuff and all the all this little like execution details are going to start to matter. At a certain point, you can't get enough propellant here in,

Starbase to fulfill the launch rate that they want because everything has to be trucked in. So like you start having to think about things like a pipeline from the other side of the shipping channel where they're building a giant natural gas terminal things like like. Yeah, yeah. Like, hey, that's synergy. Hooray. But yeah, there's all sorts of things like that. That's the real kingpin down there.

Whoever runs that joint, come on, baby. That's a business. Yeah, no kidding. Yeah, no, you're totally right. The scale is giving me something that is. we haven't worked at all the kinks that are going to happen with that. Like I just, I'm thinking about now the,

the upper stage, the Falcon upper stage with the, is it niobium or whatever, that metal they can't find enough of. And so now they're like trimming the, the bells. Like, make the bell half as big on the ones we don't need any performance on.

Like they're going to hit those kinds of limits now. It's like, okay, how much methane do you need? Okay, this much. Okay, how many methane is there in the United States at any one time?

And you're like, okay, well, we need about 82% of that. You're like, okay, so that's actually an, issue we need to solve you.

It's a real thing, right? And I mean, we're just such early days still. Like if the Starship program was a puzzle, we maybe have the four corner pieces out on the table. But we're still like, we're still flipping over pieces. Like not all the pieces are even right side up yet. We're just like still trying to figure out what this picture even is going to look like. Yeah.

And it's one of those mean, like cruel practical joke puzzles. It's just all white pieces and there's no picture on it. Yeah. Says the guy in this rat roadside NASA hat. Look at that thing. You like that? Yeah. Quality.

Yeah. Casey, our guest from last week is last week, two weeks ago? When was Casey on here? I don't remember. Time is an illusion. Last week. He's like, yeah, I'll just slap one of my terraformers here and we'll extract the methane that we need from the air.

Let's do it. So he'll be moving to Star Base soon enough. Yeah. I'm all for that. Let's get Casey's hardware on a starship. I don't think it needs to be on it. Just near it. That's my point.

Yeah. On Mars. Yeah. Think bigger. That too also. Yeah. That's a whole other aspect. Do you think there's got methane on Earth?

Yeah. It's going to. Like at a certain point, mining water to make methane is, uh, it's like, it's water. It's precious. No, we're going to turn someone into methane. It's like, no, like, I don't know. That's, that's a whole other thing. I can probably go down like the hippie-dippy rabbit hole or it's like, well, should we really be using the water?

It's like, no, no, shut up, Jack. Progress. My concern on that one, the Mars one is, is the water is, it's not just sitting there in casks ready for you to just, you know, put into the machine. I think there's a little bit of underestimating in terms of like, where is the water? How do you get to it? And what other kinds of garbage is inside the water? Like, you're going to have to like treat it before you even turn it into anything, right?

Right. It's like this is a whole other pipeline we've got to figure out. Right. There's so much infrastructure stuff like that that's going to have to be sorted out at some point. And sometimes I just wish I could hit the fast forward button. Be like, all right, 10 years from today, what of all of all of these? questions that we have right now have been, you know, sorted out or answered or what questions do we still have?

Yeah. What's that meme that's like super apt for where we are in history where it's like too old to explore Earth and too young to explore the planets? Like we just missed it. Like, you know, there's no new, new territory that we're going to be able to walk into anytime soon. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, but this is the best era of spaceflight. It is. It is. It's, come on. This is the coolest. It's just like Starship, though. It's the best it's ever been, and we're going to look back at it. I'll be like, oh, remember how shitty it was back in 2024 when we had like nothing flying except those like five starships?

Man, who are? Terrible days of those were. This flight broke out of the space circle in a really, really good way too. I was getting a lot of the stray friend texts about this. I was getting a bunch of... CNN front page above the fold. Yeah. My dad sent me a lot of videos.

I was like, Dad, you know, I've been like watching this thing for years. He's like, oh, I don't send those to you because I want you to, I don't, I think you saw them already. I send them to you so that you know I saw it. And I'm like, all right, that's right. I appreciate that instinct. Yeah. But like, it broke out way beyond space circles in a way that I find interesting. I mean, Mike Bloomberg's writing op-eds about SLS being maybe not worth it now.

So that's a thing to consider, you know, it was a real moment. I didn't see a reception, but I also, I mean, I've just been head down working. Yeah, your task is something different. I have just barely watched our own stream. I have just barely watched anything. I haven't even watched the SpaceX stream. Like, I don't even know so much of what's been going on.

But I'm glad to hear that. I'm glad to hear that. Well, here, we'll pull up Mike Bloomberg's op-ed, and we'll see what your take is on NASA's $100 billion moon mission is going nowhere, is the headline. But if you look at the URL slug, always one of my favorite things. The other headlines that they try.

Heck yeah. It is Michael Bloomberg, Artemis Moon Mission is a colossal waste, is the slug in the URL of this year. Op. Right. Wow. Yeah, there are government boondoggles,

and then there's NASA's Artemis program. That is the lead of this. It's really unfortunate because I would not describe Artemis as a boondoggle. There are aspects of Artemis. the Aro Boondoggle looking at you, Becktel, mobile launch or two. But yeah, that's unfortunate. But I get it.

Because Orange Rocket bad, right? Although I do love it. But why is Mike Bloomberg doing op-eds about us less? This is a real moment that we need to consider. Yeah, that's interesting. You're quite an optimist, and I appreciate that. listen there's been a lot of op-bets in recent days there's been Bloomberg dr. Z's out here talking about it I mean burger had a really nice write-up of it all but I don't think the space launch

system subreddit was surprised by his name being in the mix right right we're at a real moment in time where this was our pre-show content but 2024 a presidential election a lot of budget in all these different directions of NASA, planetary science, to what do you do with ISS, to what do with the Artemis program. There are so many pieces in play at the moment, so many questions open, and importantly, there are, for some of these programs, a lot of hardware, and for some not a lot of hardware. And that's the, when decisions have to get made, and there's video of a booster getting caught by a tower in Texas, and, I mean, SLS exists.

but Gateway is still rolling off the production line and it's like just metal circles. Those things matter. And also they didn't take into account the weight of their wires. So anyways. It's a lot. It's a lot of wires, man.

You ever have done that many wires? Yeah. What? I don't think you've ever run that many wires, have you? Dude, I'm looking at like some electrical work on my house right now and I have to run some like big cable long distances. It adds up, dude, both in cost and mass.

Let me tell you. With your house, if you get the amount that you need wrong, you can just go back to the hardware store. It's not a big deal. Mass on satellites is kind of important. It just feels like we're at an inflection point. I really do think the next couple of months are pivotal, and some decisions are forced to be made right now

because there's budgets to be created. The NASA administrator will be changing in a couple of months, whether that's within party or not. And, Jake, you brought up before the show that Pam Melroy was at the IEC, changing the definition of continuous human habitation in lower thorpe to continuous capability. There's shifts happening right now.

And SpaceX wants to fly as soon as possible always, but it does feel more important at these times. And I don't know, Elon seems to be paying attention to the election. So maybe there was a little motivation to get this flight pulled up in October. Yeah, maybe possible. I do hope you're right and we are at this sort of inflection point. And it's like, if it is, if this flight is really going wider than than previous ones in terms of like regular people's consciousness of it, I'm so happy to hear that.

That's amazing. Because at a certain point, this program is going to start doing really insane stuff like sending humans back to the moon. And I really wouldn't want it to be a situation where it's like, people don't even know or care. So hopefully it continues to, you know, capture the hearts and minds. Hopefully flight six gets more attention than Flight 5. Hopefully it builds, right? Especially as they start launching, you know, more and more and more with increased cadence.

It's going to be awesome. I just hope the general masses think so. As long as they don't blow it up, man, it'll be good. That's when the mainstream media turns against them, right? That might be my ultimate theory on why this one did so well in the media, is that nothing blew up. Someone was telling me, they were like, oh, thank goodness, they actually went for a catch and caught the booster because if they hadn't and the ship had just done exactly what it did, which was land perfectly on target, but then blow up, the headlines would have all been, SpaceX blows up another rocket. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. SpaceX rocket explodes during test or something like that. Tesla boss ruins another NASA rocket. Yeah. Yeah. You got to SEO it.

You got a search engine automizes. Major Trump donor blows up a piece of metal near Mexico. And Tesla boss. Elon Musk ruins NASA's plan to return to the moon. Unfortunately. Oh, man. Yeah.

She's narrowly evaded that that situation. Narrowly. missed that one. Thank God. One of these days I'll have to take some photos of the cards against humanity lot. I have some questions about that. Is that photo on that website legit?

Did they stack a bunch of hardware in their in their lot? Yes. I don't know the photo off top of my head that you're talking about. What's the website, Jake? I don't remember, but knowing the tone of the other communications is probably like SpaceX sucks get off our land.com or something like that. Hold on. I'll find it.

It's like two friends fight and like you're equally friends with both of them. And you're like, no, no, no, come on. Like, don't ruin the friend group. Like, let's all just hang out. Come on. Oh, yeah. I gotta find this website. Somebody will know in the chat.

But yeah, the TLDR is yes. The lot has a whole bunch of stuff on it right now. And it's also under like many. inches of water in a lot of places, but it exists. I think this is it. I think this is it. They have this as their 2017 picture of their piece of land, and this is their 2024. Yep.

I just am curious if that's actually accurate. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, basically. I don't know. I was just curious for some validation, so I appreciate it. Yeah. It's unfortunate, right? Because it's not even, I wouldn't even fault SpaceX for that like it's the contractor put stuff there maybe maybe somebody didn't tell the contractor like hey maybe the contractor didn't get a survey done i can't imagine why you wouldn't yeah but yeah that's a whole weird thing it's a silly mistake is what it is yeah yeah yeah unfortunately they

picked a really uh bad target to drop shit on someone else's piece of land yeah yeah right that's why that's why it's like come on guys you guys you guys demonstrated that you can catch a like a a jillion ton booster that came back from space. Like you guys, you guys are capable people. I'm really, I'm really confident you can look at a map and know which squares say SpaceX and

which ones don't. I mean, you say that. You say that, but like, you all remember booster number one? Remember what they had to do with booster one? They built it in the high bay,

but it was too big to get out of the high bay. So they had to cut off. the bottom ring in order to even roll it out of the high bay. In fact, it was too big to even be stacked or lifted onto the transport stand in the high bay. They had to cut a hole in the roof and lower a crane down into, like, yes, they were able to catch a booster and they're very smart people, but also there are some very questions. Listen, there's some late nights at Starbase, okay?

There's some late nights. Not wrong. I think the charitable way to say is there are things they care about. and things they don't. Things they prioritize, Jake. There's only so much attention you can give to problems, and this one did not make the cut.

Jack, where should people follow along if they've not partaken in your universe? I'm on Twitter as the Jack Byer. I'm on Instagram as neon heat disease. Yeah, I think those are the two best places. Jackbuyer.com. If you want prints from my own personal store. yeah it's a king crimson lyric

Prague rock man wow all right uh you know LA neon city anyways you lost me you lost me

you lost me yeah I've lost myself truthfully to be honest so we'll just sometimes you just got to let him go yeah yeah I'd lose you with my music too

though don't worry it's a thing Jake I'm uh check of my email to see if we should say this next part of the show but should we say the next part of the show

I did not I get a confirmation on this one. We should. I feel confident about it. I feel pretty good about it. But yeah, so we, last week's episode with Casey Hamer was a bit of a layup. We really wanted to start talking about, you know, projects at NASA and how much they cost.

And why are they so expensive and why do they get more expensive? And so we're going to continue that conversation next week with one and only Thomas or Bukin. He'll be coming on the show. So we're going to talk about science missions, especially, like what's going on and why are these things? Mars Sample return will be a big point of discussion, I think, because there's lots of news.

Do you hear that news, Anthony? J.B.'s coming back. He's going to fix it. I didn't hear that news. Is he? Yeah, yeah. See the Morris Sample return efficiency department? Is that what J.B is?

He is leading the review board for those proposals. So we're going to talk about that. It's quite a stack team, actually. Wow. There's some good news to juice. We'll see if you do your impression of Dr. Z to Dr. C. We'll see. My doctor's

eating pressure is not that good. It's supposed to just NASA that you do. Yeah. It is. Yeah. All right, y'all, thanks for hanging out. Jack, thanks for hanging with us. And hopefully we'll talk to you after the next flight.

Yeah, can't wait. Thanks for having me. See you. Thanks, everybody. Bye.