Off-Nominal - 176 - Cosplaying the Shuttle (with Adrian Beil)

Episode Date: November 22, 2024

Jake and Anthony are joined by Adrian Beil of NSF (and a long-time beloved member of the Off-Nominal Discord) to talk about Starship Flight 6.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 176 - Cosplaying the Shuttle (with Adrian Beil) - YouTubeStarship’s Sixth Flight Test - SpaceX - LaunchesSpaceX lands Ship 31 in the Indian Ocean but miss the Booster Catch - NASASpaceFlight.comSpaceX Launches Starship Flight 6 - Booster Diverts Offshore - YouTubeSpaceX has caught a massive rocket. So what’s next? - Ars TechnicaFollow AdrianAdrian Beil (@BCCarCounters) / TwitterAdrian Beil, Author at NASASpaceFlight.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. Hello, hello. It's a great week, Jake. Hello. That's the best week. It's a great week. We stuck the landing on this scheduling in a way that was just absolutely excellent, where we perfectly landed Adrian on the, how many days ago was Starship?

Three, two, two, two, two days. It's been two days. It's Tuesday, Tuesday. We did it, we did it, folks. I have a confession to make about this starship launch. You hated it? It was the worst one? This is important context for the hour-long discussion we're planning on having it.

And the confession is, I did not watch it. Man, already that regular. So this is going to also be telling Jake what happened on Tuesday. I was going to say, maybe the whole show we just pull it up over here and watch the 65 minutes of the flight. Yeah. All right. I'll work on that. I'll get that rolling.

We'll just watch it. It's going to be like a very delayed commentary with Jake on this on this launch. It's a very strange version of mystery science theater. It's like very strange and very like hyper-focused. All right. Well, I pulled out. I got like tied up when that like when it was happening. And then, you know,

I went and caught up like in our Discord and the news articles and stuff. And I just like, I think. I think I've got all the information. I don't think I need to watch the stream. I feel like there's a curve of how exciting a space launch is, and there's between like the highest of course is I will always watch it. Then there is I will watch it when it's live and I have time. And then there is I will watch the VOD.

So you're saying the curve is already below for you like, like when it's live. I'm watching and they're like only life. You didn't properly paint the bottom of that, which is Starlink launches. That's the next year down. That's the bottom of the curve. When it flattens out with a long tail, yeah, it's startling. No. I don't know.

I just, we're getting into, we're getting into, we're getting into, before me. All right. So whatever, but.

Did you also not bring a drink? Are you no longer participating in your content or what? No, no, I got, I found some new craft beer. So this is some, uh,

tempus. I don't know. I don't really know it's brown, but cream stout. Yeah. It's already that time of the year. Wow. It's cold out, Anthony.

It's in winter. It's cold out. What's it? Like, I don't know. The same time. We talked about this earlier. It's the same temperature. It's true.

It's always the same. There's just a moment where your, your Celsius reaches, or my Fahrenheit reaches your Celsius. That's the only difference in our life is that like my numbers match your numbers eventually. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I think we're approaching that time of the year. Like a flat DJ.

It's like a flat line. Just, I got, I got 26 degrees Celsius, sorry, today. Yeah, the feels like tomorrow here is 27. Wow. Yeah, that's cold as shit. You're way up there, buddy. What are you drinking then? Hot chocolate?

What do you got? Meat. Wow, look at that. Oh, look at this. Jake, your beat to it. Yeah, I, I, but it's, to be fair, it's just, it's just from the shelf. so I cannot say like self-made or anything. I've watched that.

So yeah, I'm just going with meat. It's a thing with, I connected with like Christmas and medieval fairs. And I mean, it's Christmas and getting there. I think it's allowed to get into the season yet now. So yeah, I'm starting the medieval season with some meat. All right. Love it. Do you have like a favorite time, by the way?

Still doing it. So this is a funny story. I always drink this brand because I don't know. I think there's some German, but they now have this fancy version, which is called legend. And they say it's like their best year ever. And I've never drinking it yet. So I still have a cheap bottle in the kitchen. If this turns out to be worse.

So we will see. We'll see. That'll be a shocking revelation. The legend class is just terrible. So it's like, let us know about that. This aged whiskey is bad. I'm going to get the new stuff. If it's about 15, I don't drink it.

Oh, well. Okay. I'm making a gin and tonic. I got nothing to look at again. I forgot to make it while we were pre-shone. That's like your go-to cocktail, yeah. It's just so reliable and delicious that it's hard to beat, you know? It's fresh.

Yeah, true. It's also, you only need, like, three things. Like, tonics. gin and limes. Yeah, for a cocktail. Yeah. Every once in a while it's nice to like bust out it. It's nice to bust out like some like giant concoction with 17 ingredients.

And like this is interesting. But then it's just like when you just need a drink, you're like, no, I just want two to three ingredients. That's easy. Two thirds of the recipe is in the name. That's kind of good. And the other part's like optional. It's like, you know, it's like, you know, it's like, you know, it's like. What, what do I need to do for gin tonic?

Oh, you got almost all. it. Easy to yell across a loud bar and pretty sure you're going to get the right thing, you know. You can also buy it in enormous volumes. So, there you go, and bring it all into your office,

like a complete alcohol. You need a, you need like a decoy, like a water bottle or something that looks like it. Stanley Cup. Well, Jake, what do you make of the Starship launch you didn't watch? Well,

Maybe what we have to do here is you guys need to convince me that it's worth going back to watch because, I don't know, the take I had on it was there wasn't really much novel happening with it. So I'm trying to figure out if I'm wrong on that. I mean, did you want to see what happens when they aborting a landing attempt or are you not interested in that, you know? Isn't the aborted landing attempt just what the first landing attempts looked like? Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. But the president and the head of Space Force was not hanging out for it or the soon-to-be president. So there was a little novelty to that. Probably, probably, you know, it's, I saw a great tweet that was like, I'll have to find this. It was a perfect example of like, you know, demos to your boss. How it's like working on my machine and then your boss is up and there it goes.

It's like, well, it flew back close. It got close, you know. It just worked a few seconds ago. You could see how it would work if everything was working right. You could see how it would have come together. That's exactly, exactly what it sounds like. Oh, that's interesting. That was supposed to happen.

Oh, that's new. Just give me a couple seconds here, guys. I'm just going to take a look at this. All right, but aside from the no catch, I do think, Jake, there is a notable element to watch of the descent, which is like it looked much less chaotic on the final landing burn than the last time where shit was blowing up and on fire and it, you know, weren't quite sure what was going on. This looked very much.

much more stable. So the changes they made that we were talking about pre-show from the call with the Diablo video that they were talking about. They needed to strengthen some areas. Seems like that all worked. Granted, I didn't look at every high-definition video and photo that NSF posted. So, Adrian, you can correct me if I'm wrong on this one. We're talking to the Starship re-entry, right? That's what we're talking about? No, no, just the booster phase. Yeah. I mean, booster. Booster, from what now is coming at, it was the tower, actually. aborting right so that the tower apparently the tower communication was Borg which could be because of that antenna at the top that was like bent it about 30

degrees off so that could have been an explanation but yeah overall it seems like the booster did quite a good job it looks stable until it hit the water and then toppled over and exploded but until then it looked amazingly stable so yeah I would say booster looks good let's get the Let's see if the tower gets it. Stage zero, eh? All right? Oh, man.

It was funny, too, because I was watching this. I happened to be watching this with my dad. And he was like, oh, why isn't it going back to do the tower? And I was like, they haven't said yet, but the largest rocket that ever has existed just blasted it apart. So probably it broke something. I had a pretty good confidence that, like, something chaotic happened on the ascent there. Because it sounded like at stage separation. they were calling out like we're go for

go for catch attempt so it wasn't like it was immediately you know I guess that's the one stipulation there I'd have right that it wasn't immediately clear that it was not going to work so imagine you you mentioned you had one guy in the control room though like everybody's cheering around here and again

excited after and you see like on your panel it's no go and you're like sorry again the best meme we've ever up with was the two red buttons mean with the flight safety or job safety. That was another moment. Elon's here. He brought the president.

He helped elect and the head of Space Force. And everyone knows we nailed this last time. And now we have to just like, you know, I guess it's not going to work this time. But yeah. I feel like this was also very much an education and also a lesson for the whole community in expectation setting. Because at the moment this catch was aborted, the, the whole space. community, Twitter, everything was like, aw.

Yeah. And it seemed like everybody was disappointed that the biggest rocket of all time did not go for a second catch attempt in a row. It's like, that was the expectation. Were we there already? Within like barely a month and a half. It's, yeah. It's like, oh.

37 days later. I'm so sad that they didn't land it again. What a disappointment. I mean, that you, right, that we joke about that. also, isn't that awesome that like that we hit that status already? Like, they've landed 300 and whatever Falcon 9s. They caught the first one they tried. And like, yeah, they just, they do nail it every time. So there is a level of disappointment that happens. Yeah. Which is dangerous, I think, for SpaceX long term that they've gotten that good. I want to see like a legit like academic study

from some sort of like social scientists, like exploring how this happens. Because like, I think we've all now we've like separated space into like two worlds, two standards where it's like there's like the SpaceX world and there's basic standards that SpaceX has to meet. And then there's like some other world where like like way less quality as totally acceptable and fine. And it's like, and this is this weird cognitive dissonance that we get into that it's just like we're all. It's outlier measurements. This happens. This happens.

I guess. Yeah. If I can bring my two worlds together. This a thing that has been talked about for a long time is. is this exact kind of standard matching with Apple and everybody else in the tech world, that Apple gets graded on the products that they ship and deliver like hundreds of millions of from day one versus everybody else's announcement. So they'll launch a thing and they'll be like, oh yeah, but meta and Google announced they're working on this other thing that half the time never ships and doesn't ship in the volume

that Apple does. And they get compared against these standards because it looks like on paper, these should match up. So I think when you achieve outlier status, you do just get, you start playing in a different, you know, completely different game than everybody else who's much closer together in what they're working on. So, but that's also what makes it awesome to be along for the ride that, you know, if you're somebody that can see that difference, you're like, holy shit, this is still absolutely incredible that they brought this booster back through and soft landed. Not that far. Do we know how far off the coast this was when it landed? It was seemed very,

very close it was very I mean we we had no problems tracking it we we got like like the whole bosphon explosion that SpaceX by way didn't show just saying um and uh all right i'll switch the webcast over at that part i'll switch it over i i don't like when companies shy away from showing explosions i always like you like well if you show the waterlandings it's off brand it's off brand yeah like why like when they when they didn't show them was like why why wouldn't you show that you always show explosion you made a video about that That was weird. But I feel like there's also a lot of parts here where they actually tried something here on this flight that was not that noticeable anymore because we're used to these big starship jumps with every single flight.

But they're still impressive. Like in space relight worked. And that seemed to be going very well. They removed 2,000 tiles and the ship still went through re-entry just fine. And they used apparently an old version of the tiles. for this one instead of their new version because they just wanted to test the limit. And that was interesting. I have a hard time understanding this.

So I'm glad that you're a little flummoxed as well. Also, 2,000 tiles. I cross-checked that stat three times when I first read it because I was like, or heard it, I guess, on the show. I'm like, there were 2,000 tiles to remove. How is that even possible? It's a big ship in this whole time. It's a huge ship, man. Yeah.

It stresses me out, though, right? It's all the bad space shuttle memories of tiles. We're just all PTSDed about that. That's so many tiles that they got rid of. And I mean, I know we saw a little bit of wrinkling and buckling in certain areas with, like, with regard to the payload bay and all that. But seems unrelated to the tiles, I think, right? I'm mad that they didn't show the banana all until the very end. Like, they showed the banana inside the payload bay.

but I want to see how the banana ended. Like, did it survive reentry? Was it blasted in reentry? Like, what's the fate of the banana? I only heard about the banana. I heard about it circumstantially. That's what it is. Jake is discovering, like, so much this week.

If you were going to fly a banana in the payload bay of Starship, where and how would you attach it? I think is the question I have for you. Did you see the picture? a little bit. I haven't seen anything. Okay, great. This is actually how, please tell us how you would arrange this banana. You're flying one banana in the Starship payload area. Where and how would you attach the banana? I don't know.

I guess in the middle at the bottom, is that kind of where you'd put it? Are you such a picture? Right on the thrust line, right? The middle at the bottom. So you're saying, like, on the floor of the payload area? Where you mount every other payload in the middle of the rocket. Okay.

Oh, okay. So standard. I don't know why that's funnier to be than what they actually did. Are there different places to put payloads? I don't know. Well. By evidence, yes. Starship banana.

Search is really failing me here. All right. Hello. Would you, here it is, I got it. Would you attach it like this? Uh. What am I looking at? suspended directly in the middle of the payload bay.

That looks like the inside of the VAB. Totally does. Yeah, would you... Is there I going to crane going to come across those beams and pick up a... Right in the middle. I love it. This looks like the way that those cool cameras fly over NFL games

on the cabling. Before we had drones, they would do that camera on the cables. Despite a camera. This is that version of it. Yeah. Yeah, they didn't cut to this enough. Adrian is correct. They attached it in a very comedic way,

and then they didn't cut to it enough during the flight. Absolutely. I also feel like the way this is placed, it feels for me that the camera was placed first, and then they were like, okay, where has the banana go to go that we can see it with this camera? It was not the other way around. It's like, the camera was there first.

This is not banana cam. This is a different thing. It's an engineering camera. They were like, where do we need to put the banana here? Yo, that payload bay is cavernous. Look at that thing. And you're only seeing, I don't know what percentage, but like a minuscule percentage of this whole thing. I said that I hadn't seen the picture of it before, but I actually have, I've seen this picture.

I just didn't know it was the inside of the payload bay. And that banana is tiny. I don't think I even saw the banana. I think I just saw that scroll by and a feed at some point. I was like, I don't care about what the inside of the Starbase factory looks like. I want to see the launch. So the one thing they did mention about this, too, was that to fly this,

they had to go through like payload approval processes to actually fly this as a payload on Starship. And so they mentioned, I don't know if this is a joke or not. It sounds like a joke, but they had to go through payload processes and they wanted to prove that process out with just a banana before they went and did it

with a bunch of Starlings. So that's one way to fail fast. Yeah. What does the manifest look at? It's one banana. How much could it cost? Yes. Here's my unpopular opinion.

They overdid the banana meme. Because it was on the outside and the inside? So they were like, like they did they started with putting it on the outside. Then that banana on the outside was halted by another banana. Then they had a banana in there. Then they had a banana in there. and the animation on top of the tower. Then they made their patch Chiquita logo with a banana.

And at some point, it's like your one uncle that tries to make the same joke over and over and again. And it really starts to not land anymore. It's like at some point, working hard. They had t-shirts. They had the t-shirts on during the webcast. You forgot about the merch opportunity. You know what's really funny to me on this. Like when I write like test, automated tests for code, like when I'm developing software,

I banana is like my go-to word for like faulty strings for inputs and stuff. So like if something's supposed to be like, you know, taking in like a UUID or whatever, and I need to test that it like rejects non-UIDs, I just put in banana to see what it. That's like my test, my test data. It's always banana. Like all my code base is full of bananas. So at retrospect, you always do like Control F. search for a banana and replace with actual things.

Well, I just, I just need, I need, like, some dummy string for, like, whatever, whatever reason just to make sure that stuff operates, stuff says no correctly to the things that's supposed to say no to. So this is really funny. All right. We didn't even let Jake watch the explosion. I don't think. We did not get his full commentary on, on the final dissent.

So I'll throw this up. A couple things. You mentioned the in-space relight. do you have a good theory on why they were so not necessarily nervous or hesitant, but it felt like this was given such a, like, you know, obviously it is important for what they want to do with the next couple of flights, but it always felt weird to me that so many elements of their missions are relighting engines, and yet this one was like, well, the in-space relight, like this is the one that really, really matters for us. This is the thing that we're

nervous about. We can't really change your trajectory until we do it. What is it that was so unique about it, that that is not there with the other relights that they're doing with the raptors? I think demonstrating in general their ability to relight is super important because they will fly over areas that usually rockets, you don't fly over, right? Because if they want to go for a ship catch, they have to fly over the US, Mexico, somewhere. And demonstrating you have your vehicle under control at any circumstances, I think is quite important, especially if it's like a 50 meter big. giant steel scraper that has shown the ability to survive re-entries

quite well. Because if you see about how much Starship survives re-entry, now imagine like 50 meters of that surviving coming all the way to impact. They need to show control and de-orbit

abilities and everything really well. They're lighting the engines on the way back in. That's what I can't. But isn't there also a zero G component to this? Because it's like all the other relights are happening under thrust or gravity, right? Yeah. I mean, for sure.

They, I don't think they have problem with the relight in general. It's for sure also like the zero G part. Because, I mean, they did McGregor test the other like a few weeks ago where they I think ignited one single rep the 30 times in a single day. And they just fired it over and over again. And they're like, okay, yeah, they got this relight. I mean, yeah, zero G. like the whole tank compression

also it's a transfer to the header tank because the usually fire the raptors from the main tank and the in space burn was done from the header tank so that was also like a transition to another tank so and even so are the landing burns have those been from the main tank up until now?

I think they should have been from the head of tank as well because that's the main purpose of that tank in theory because you prevent sloshing because otherwise your fuel is like this is why I'm confused though is that like I get you need Ollage and you need to settle the propellants and all of that, but that's not really an area that they have not done before.

Obviously, on Starship, it's unique, but it just, it felt like it was given such a gatekeeping element to the manifest in a way that of all the problems they're solving on this. It's like the easiest one of all the things that they've done so far. So it's always been a bit of mystery for me. Yeah, it's pretty weird. I felt like they had never, like, I felt like they also tried to give significance to this flight

because it's the last V1 Starship, right? It's the last before they have major design change and I think they've never at some point planned to like, okay, we will not go to orbit with V1 anyway. What kind of checkmarks do we need to check with V1 to be

more confident in our version to Starship? And there are I mean, at some point you just want to take the boxes before moving to the next step and I mean, what Musk now said, two flights until starship landing attempt, which is

okay. I mean, I doubted that for booster and then they did it, so I will not doubt again. I will not make myself a fool again. That one seems more like a long pole because of trajectory-wise, the fact that they're going to have to get this cleared to fly all over Jake's

countrymen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the nominal trajectory is from the south, right? Coming up over I'm pretty much entirely over Mexico exactly entirely over Mexico and then landing at the very last second you cross the border and land in Boca Chica

I wonder if they overshoot significantly and then like use the cross range of starship to just go back because that thing should have quite a bit of cross range in like the glide so maybe they're like overshooting quite significantly and then they're

just trying to go back from the Gulf instead of like coming in from that side because the tower also is oriented that way. Yeah. The tower has the arms open to the Gulf, so they cannot just come in from the land side and

land a tower. They need to come from the Gulf side. But can't you, couldn't you like come over like, you know, say you come from the west and you cross the tower like you know, pretty much after the point where you're almost going vertical,

like where you crash into the Gulf, you know, just a few hundred meters offshore, but then you just go vertical at the last second. Like, you don't have to, like, go all the way out and then turn around and get westerly velocity to come back, you know? Like, you can just kind of come in on top. You don't need to fully cosplay the shuttle on this. You don't need the S-turns and all that kind of stuff. They basically have almost no horizontal speed anymore at 15 kilometers. Like, at 15 kilometers, they add into a belly flop. So from that unload, they have cross-range.

So they probably stop over the goal with the 15 kilometers. doesn't then fly in from the Gulf, somewhere in there. When you say fly in, you mean fall in from 200 meters to the east, pretty much straight down. 200 meters east and 15 kilometers up is like, it's vertical. Let's be serious. That's a rounding error at that point. It's a brick with flaps. Yeah, yeah.

That's funny. So all in all, we're feeling good. Is there any any lingering, like, I wonder about X, Y, or Z. What's your biggest concern with Starship at the moment? I will go round Robin on this one, Adrian. Heat shield, and it's not even close. Like, there's one thing surviving the heat shield,

and then there's one. Their goal is to make this rapidly reusable. So, and that heat shield, yes, it gets to the point where the ship in some shape or form and with some flaps survives the re-eniable. but they're so far still from surviving that for, hey, you can flight it again. Yeah, yeah.

That's a great point because it's like their heat shields are not built the same, right? Because you have like, you have different levels of standard, right? There's like the lowest level standard is like for human spaceflight is like Apollo capsule. Like it needs to get the capsule to the ground safely once and then you're going to put it in museum. So like that's like the extent of what you need to do with it. right? So like if if the crews land safely with the enough confidence interval in one time, you're happy. And then you go up to like shuttle level where it's like, no, it needs to come back and then it can be serviced for some amount of time and then it can go back up and come back

again. That's like your next level of quality. But like yeah, the way that they want to launch Starship, like it basically needs zero servicing. It just needs to be pretty much reusable right out of the gates, right? Like, you know, what's the the idea is it just lands and you move it from one pad to the next filled up with fuel and off it goes again, right? That's kind of the, that's the pie in the sky hope for this. So like, they're far from that still. They might be landing this thing, but like it's far away for that. Yep.

Are we at all concerned about the propellant production and acquiring needs of starship? Because I'm trying to find this line from an Eric Berger article from last month. I think I found it. Yeah. Let me read this one excerpt from a burger article. Another major but unappreciated issue is commodities. At liftoff, the super heavy booster alone carries a mass of 7.5 million pounds of cryogenic propellant. Starship requires about a third as much.

That sounds like a lot because it is. Liquid oxygen comprises a significant majority of this, and each launch puts a serious dent into the U.S. production of liquid oxygen, which is used by various customers, including hospitals. Put another way, launching four Starship rockets in a single day would consume all of the nation's liquid oxygen capacity for that debt. day. So it's like a foreseeable amount of Starship launches is all of the liquid oxygen that we have in the country on any given day. What is the game? I mean, there's the other branch of like Twitter

drama where what's his name was like, oh, this is a shadow government for a propellant factory or whatever. You know, where are we out of the spectrum between solvable problem with 23,000 trucks as the latest environmental assessment states that they would need per year versus shadow government for a propellant production facility. Well, because the methane's not the problem, right? It's specifically the oxygen, right? Both seem like a lot to me. So please enlighten me if one of them I should be more concerned about than the other.

I think in general, if you get to the Falcon 9 or higher launch rate with Starship, we are talking about you have to move away from tankers. You have to start thinking about here is the pipeline. that supplies this pad and here is the production for all of that liquid oxygen and methane a few kilometers away from the pad and not just get a few companies deliver it to you like i feel like at some point you have to rethink um how to supply this even more because um right now they need about two three days to resupply the staying farm and that's limited by the amount of trucks they can even get to highway four in that time frame yeah limited by roads not not not any of laws of physics.

It's like limited by it's like it's this funny like where's the road to Mars right now gate keep and it's like it's a single as a two lane highway going down to a beach and so yeah

I mean what the 20,000 trucks or so would be 60 trucks per day or something like there's stupid numbers at some point and they need a pipeline for future pets at some point. At some point they will need a pipeline and they need a proper facility to produce this. That's going to be like another one of those gating events too, right?

Like, because we've, you know, we talked about this before where there's like, there's like waves in the starship testing, you know, like they do a whole bunch of like stuff really tightly together and then they get a bunch of data and then they go to change. And then we go like a period where there's like not a lot of change or not a lot of activity, right? I wonder if that's going to be one. Like this current pattern that we're seeing is like, you know, okay, we launch every one to two months.

and we do that and like we're not going to get out of that until you know we can make a big infrastructure change because you're right like it's got to be pipeline level it's got to think big space exercise ideas here right can't be trucks forever I mean they played with that one

with that one air separation unit they had like one single little air separation unit in their side and played with it for a year and then they scrapped it I was like, okay, did you just give up or? This is like such an Amazon cardboard box situation. And that was their thesis project. And then they finished it and that was it.

So, an Amazon cardboard box situation? What is that, Jake? Is this a how many carboxes they need for Amazon? Yeah, like Amazon scale was so large that like they couldn't just like go to Staples and buy cardboard boxes. It was like we had to, I think, I don't know all the details,

but I think Amazon ended up like. either starting their own cardboard company or they bought like a bunch of them and just like incorporated like they vertically integrated cardboard into their their e retail their e retail say right so what's the crazy part is that space x could that the scale that they operate at is increasingly ridiculous and yeah they're going to they're the biggest launch provider with the biggest satellite network and there's soon to be the biggest broadband provider and then soon they'll be the biggest supplier of liquid oxygen in the u.s like it's you know because Sublime all the hospitals is a rounding error for what they need for the starship.

So why not make a bunch of money selling it to the hospitals as well? So that will fund, yeah, broadband and liquid oxygen to hospitals will fund the trip to Mars, I think is probably more accurate than we realize. I hate that this is accurate. I hate the fact that like this is probably happening. Like at some point, every other company, like I would assume at some point any like a big chemical company comes around and we'll just partner with them. However, this is SpaceX. They really hate to partner with companies sometimes in production. And they're like, nope, got to do it ourselves.

Yep. And the funny thing is we will see, there will be. So right now we, the rocket nerds watch this, right? There's probably a group of people that like is very into air separation units and like chemical plants. I wonder if there will be like the Bokar chika of chemical plants. Those separation nerds, man, they're getting hot right now. whatever the air separation NSF is going to be setting up

webcams at the air separation Yeah yeah You've got a niche smaller than ours Jeez Yeah That would be so funny though Like there's like Like people tracking the air separation units

And like oh this week They placed four new air separation units And they use a new V2 design And it's going to be someone With a spreadsheet Calculating output Through the pipeline and everything SN6 of that unit.

SN6 was kind of like a one-off. SN7 is really where things turn the corner. Oh, man. Who are? We got to find them. We got to find that concrete nerd that we have in our notes. Oh, yeah. Find somebody who is like really into concrete.

Yeah. I feel like that storyline's over, though. The launch mount seems fine. Yeah, it is. Yeah. Solve problem. I mean, besides the fact that they completely scrap the design for Tower 2 and started in a whole new design now, but

hey, who would have ever thought that a flame trench was the good idea? I don't think anyone wrote that down, so yeah. It is a bummer that the places that in the U.S. that are good to launch rockets tend to be swamps that you can't dig in. It's just like a high crossover between those two things. So, yeah, it's a bummer. I mean, the biggest part of their foundation work is always like getting that ground even workable. they're like, oh, dang it, we have to do another foundation.

And you can see them like preparing that ground for months before they even get to get to put concrete in there. Yeah. That was the whole, the beginning of our podcast, Eric, they were just compacting sand and bocicca chicken for, you know. Yeah, dumping in sand. But when I used to, when I was in Vancouver and I worked in an office, there was a, it was like in an office park. And I was like, it was a brand new development. We were like one of the earlier buildings. and it's right right on the river bank.

And so it was bad, bad soil as well. So it was the exact same thing. Like we'd go for like walks at lunchtime. And it was just like these giant lots of like, you know, like corporate office style buildings. Like that level, that's like scale of lots just with towers of dirt, you know, and those like weird like cube shapes that they were like pyramidal cube things that they build. And it's just it's all he could see for miles. It's hilarious.

Yeah. And for years, yeah. That's how long it would take. Hmm. All right. So what is like I didn't watch this one partly also because the next one feels like the important one to me like this V2. So can you can you give me the Cole's notes of what like what is coming up with this big? Why is V2 big?

Oh, well V2 is bigger. That's the first thing. It has a I'm not even joking. It has more propellants. Stretchier. Yeah. Yeah, it's stretchier. It's the first step to the very, very hideous V3, which is the pencil, the completely long pencil.

But, yeah, besides that, they change the flat positions. Like, they have now teased for three years, basically. Yeah, they are like, they have the hinges now actually not in the plasma anymore, and they tuck them a bit bit behind. It's going to be like a goal-wing airplane now, isn't it? Like, it's going to be like the way up on the back. it's a Tesla model X in spaceship form It's going to be it's going to be amazing

There's some like the raptors will be mostly still The current V2 apparently first And also the booster will not be upgraded at the beginning The first V2 ships will fly with V1 boosters Because the V2 boosters not even there yet So that rollout will be gradual But as always there's also like millions of smaller improvements There's probably some

the changes that we don't even know yet, but that ship is just looking different from every single aspect we can observe on it. Yeah, it is, it's the stretch, because only the second stage is stretching, right? The first stage is not. The first stage will stretch a mini, middle, a bit, but not on the next flight,

but on the first flight on the V2 booster, which right now is like flight 10, 11 somewhere. they upgrade that booster later because the booster will probably need the new tap pad because the booster apparently gets new QDs and wouldn't work with the old ones and they have to upgrade that new pad. So they need a new pad ready. So they basically fly this franken stack of old booster and new ship. So it's going to be fun.

And V2 booster, is that the one that we'll do away with detaching the hot stage ring? Or is that down the line even further? According to the very, so there's a lot of ifs and buts here to add because they... By the way, this is our questions, we are very in tune on most space news. This is a testament to how much information NASA spaceflight puts out about Starship. We're like, Adrian, please come on and give us the cliff notes of your previous six months of coverage. So when can I stop watching the stupid hot stage ring float away from the booster every time? So the V2 Starship, according to the graphics that, the V2 booster, sorry, according to the graphics that SpaceX showed, has the already integrated hot staging ring.

Who knows that graphic is eight months old now, which is about ages at this point. So who knows where we are? Yeah, it's like, I mean, that's basically a century. And then the booster will, I'm getting some numbers here. The booster will go from 71 to 72.3 meters, and the ship will go from 53 to 52.1. So both vehicles basically get a two meter increase. And then on V3, it gets stupid. That's eight meters for the booster and 17 meters for the ship.

The ship will then be as tall as the boosters now. That's still wild to me. Honestly, that might be one of my favorite, like, narratives of this whole like rocket age that we're in is that like the reusability isn't just like take old rocket make make cheaper it's like it's actually like that we're starting to see like the cascading effect of of the like the the requirements cascade into the engineering which are starting to fundamentally change what rockets look like where the second stage is as big as the first stage which is weird like that is all other rockets that would look oh it does it looks weird on this one too

It just looks weird, right? And it would just be completely untenable for any other rocket, right? It's not even the booster stage anymore. It's just the Earth stage. Yeah. That's the stage you only on Earth, everything else you can do with the big ass ship. We're just like, it's insane, right? It will have 70 meters.

That's a Falcon 9 as an upper stage. Yeah. Just like that. That's your upper stage. Absolutely. I mean, the whole stack will be 150 meters on V3, which is, that's a big rocket. But I feel like we also seeing the first signs of requirement logins

and design lockins already hurting your potential to iterate certain things. I bet you, if you would be SpaceX right now, you could change everything. You would change the diameter of the ship and booster. but they built a factory and everything now primed for nine meter production rings and they are kind of locked into nine meters. So I wonder if it's going to end this on where we're at. Yeah, because now we're far enough away.

I mean, so this is my whole thing all along. The single question I would ask Elon Musk is tell me about the day that the decision was made to move away from carbon fiber to stainless steel. Because that story has never really been told in terms of, was there a whole segment of the company pushing for stainless steel and they were giving the carbon fiber team time to prove their worth and eventually like something snapped and they made the decision because the diameter decision feels locked into that era as well and I'm curious now far at this far away from that I forget what even year what year was it when they put that carbon fiber thing out

in the in the sound up near you or where you used to live Jake it's like 20 that was like 2017 or 18 or something Yeah. So far away, right? So how do we look back at that era? And then I guess I'd need to remember, like, where the diameter decision was changed. Because that was still the 12-meter tank when they were testing that. Or was that down to the 9 meter at that point?

That was late BFR, if I recall correctly. That was changing to 9, like the late BFR area. But it was about the same time. Yeah. Yeah. But I also feel like we are more and more closing in on what ITS, the international transport system. Back in the ITS scene, not, you know, the pre-the-FR scene, yeah.

So I feel like there's a designer of the original ITS who is feeling more and more justified because the design of Starship is getting longer with more, like everything is slowly but surely coming back to ITS again. And it feels like there's some person sitting there like, yep, told you. I was right. 12 meters was the way.

But what is the path to that, right? Because someday you have to, on the infinite timeline, as the brain teaser goes, there will be a bigger diameter starship. What has to happen to actually make that possible, right? All the factories are the wrong size, launch mounts the wrong size. We're going to need even more liquid oxygen and liquid methane. You're going to need another cash cow. You need whatever is after Starlink to pay for it. I mean, the hospital supply.

Yeah, yeah. Everything. Like the whole factory, everything is nine meters. We, it's, it's the transporters. The, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, this launch site was designed to be for the transport of nine meter vehicles. And, um, I feel like we are getting a, I don't know, Bokuch, Bokachika 2 at some point where they will, like, this is five to 10 years from now.

but they will probably be a Bocchika 2, where they will start to develop the mysterious 12 to 15 meter starship, and they will start to do hop tests with that. I feel like that's the next vehicle. Where do you think that's going to go, Adrian? Give me, let's test your U.S. geography skills. It's probably... Do you hit an upper limit on, like, size from an infrastructure perspective?

Like, sure, Bogotika V2, but like, At some point, do we need, last week we talked about the magical propulsion technological advancement that, you know, it's an extra zero. Do you do, at some point do you need that to just exist before you can, you know, landing on on Mars with current technology. Like we've hit an upper limit on the mass there. Same idea, right? Like how much bigger can you just take the exact same rocket and just go up? Like can we have a 12 meter? Can you have a 20 meter diameter rocket?

How about 100 meter diameter rocket? Like where is the end of that in terms of like, yeah, we no longer can move this around or fuel it. It's just too big. It is where it is and that's as good as it gets. You're going to vertically integrate the crane industry into your entire operation. It's the conveyor built meme. It's like, I guess we are building towers now. Yeah.

So, yeah, I don't know. They were probably at some point, some company will find out. I mean, that's not even guaranteed that's so far in the future. Who knows? Maybe it's not even space action. And it's all use case driven, right? Like at some point, they'll be like, ah, shit, we needed more diameter for this thing. But so far, they've flown a banana.

So, you know. Yeah. Yeah, that's the other side of this imaginary future is just like they build Starship and no, no demand materializes. Also, can we start, Jake, can we start shit posting that they've only flown a banana so far to space with Starship? And like, hold that as the line. I'm going to post some very inflammatory tweets of like graphs of like total mass to orbit. Yeah, yeah.

And the starship just has 12 grams of whatever. Yeah. I love by the way that it technically, it had a positive parody, right? Like I think Jonathan McDowell said something about that like with the in space burn and everything. They had like a parogy of 50 kilometers. So almost. Technically, yeah, this one was at least. East with a positive parody.

Would it have made it all the way through the atmosphere to have completed an orbit? It is pretty heavy. It might have. Probably would have. I mean, it makes it through the atmosphere. So what would the apogee be on the other side? Apogee was, I think, 190. Like, not that high.

So it's a thing that... I don't see the big deal if this thing can only fly one banana to space. I really think there's a... There will be a... I mean, this is a depressing future. But I think there will be a phase after Starship where will we have to wait for the next demand to come up? Like there will not be a demand initially for Starship to or whatever comes next. So you just need a whole market to even fill out Starship first.

And this is all exclamation point. If everything that they are vision works and they are getting to that point of four times a day launching, whatever. But once that demand is there, then somebody will be like going further and going crazier. But I think there's a, if you're only like launch and development, I think there will be a bump. I think there will be a time where you have to look at payloads more. I like payloads. We saw that with Falcon 9, right? Like they ramped up and then they hit kind of a plateau where they had like cleared their backlog.

And then it kind of like flattened for a bit. and then Starlink came around and then I started climbing again, right? So you can see the same thing just because of the scale where like Starship sort of like eats up all the Starlink demand and then it kind of flattens out for a bit and then we have to wait for whatever the new thing is going to be, right? Well, but the tricky part is that there's going to be so much of the Starship manifest that is fuel for other Starship things. So there's a, if they're doing anything sufficiently interesting, there is a sort of like

baseline amount of Starship launches that will be launching fuel in the space. like I have I yes but like we got what two or three three HLS flights on the books like so okay so it can be so call it 15 or 20 launches we got a cargo a cargo one on the manifest yeah but your bottlenegged with a Ryan flights so like there's just not going to be that many HLS launches let's be serious right bad news it takes four months to launch all the fuel for HLS good news it takes four months to stack an SLS yeah yeah yeah so I mean there's a There's some stuff, but most of the stuff that they're going to do is going to be, it's Starlink.

At first, it's going to be all Starlink, maybe, like, all the time. And so you don't need refueling for that, right? So it's going to kind of like peter out for a bit, I imagine, the same way that Falcon did. You don't think we're launching humans to Mars in 2028, Jake? I am not clicking that button on Calci for that one. I'll tell you that much. Big payout. Yeah, big payout, yeah.

Yeah, I always feel like there's, uh, um, actually, sorry, my mind just jumped totally well, it's going to be a fun for the statisticans, because right now we count like one launch, one mission, right? We always are like Starlink 6-68, 6 launch today. That's one launch, one mission. So do you count tanker flights at individual rocket missions? Or is like, like, the mission is Artemis free, HLS? And then you have seven supporting flights.

It's going to be like, this launch vehicle completed six missions so far in 50 flights. All these launch tracking websites are going to have to do a big database migration to add some sort of parent entity around. Campaigns. Half of them had like the launch and mission field be the exact same data entry. It's like always just works. Got to be a one-demandie relationship now. Oh, man. What a nightmare.

I always like when Jonathan McDowell has to work this stuff. out live on Twitter of like, what should I do with this thing that was weird? You know, this mission failed in a weird way. How do I account for this? This is a major aspect of it. Hopefully, he's thinking about it. Maybe we should have them on to just game plan scenarios such as this. It's so funny how like this.

Look at Artemis, what's the one with Artemis 4, right? It has like 8,000 moving parts because you've got all the tank of flights for, well, is this one that one's just, is Artemis 4? the Starship second one or the nuclear or the moon first one. That's the nominal one where it's like they launch a piece of the gateway

and in Orion and there's an HLS flight and blah blah blah blah blah. Yeah but is that the Blue Origin one or the Starship? I forget. Artemis 4 is stars. Okay. Five is five.

Okay. So four, Artemis 4 in your parlance of like how many flights for this mission is astronomical because it's a bunch of gateway flights. It's a, Dragon XL flight

to supply the gateway for the entire campaign. It's all of the tanker flights. It's the Orion. There's just so much. It's depressing when I think about how many things are on the critical path for Artemis 4.

I feel like somebody really needs to tell the European Space Agency at some point that they just need to stop producing more ESMs because it seems like the one part of this whole thing that is just produced and produced and produced.

And it's totally backing off. Watch it over there. All right. Listen, I'll be bringing that kind of Airbus energy into this show. Sorry, not only Airbus also Talas because they built the structural frame. So it's just the European production line that is just working. It's got the same energy as the solid rocket boosters, right? They're like delivered.

Like Artemis 9 is like at KSC ready to go. Yeah, it's like, check Mike. Go get one out of the cellar. Adrian, let's say, hypothetically, the gateway were to be cancelled in three to four months. How do you think the European industry at large would respond to this? Would you be pumped to go to the surface alone and not, you know, contributes I-hab and all this kind of stuff to the gateway? What are the vibes? I mean, I think, first off, I like space stations.

so I would be bummed. That's my first. My first reaction would be, but I want Moons Space Station. Totally out of any budget discussion, I want Moons Space Station. If, I mean,

as long as ESM still exists, we still are partially in the game. Once SLS gets on the chopping block next, then, oh boy, it's looking grim for the... I mean, you'd be in the game.

Like, just built something for the surface, man. Come on. Yeah, I mean, You just stated your production capabilities over there. You just rolling these suckers off a production line. We have this one trick. We needed to dig into that other one for the power supplies and all that kind of shit. We have that one trick.

We have that one trick. We can build that one service module. And that trick is working really well. That and a pressure vessel, the size of the ISS turns out just that's our sweet spot. I think as long as TALS are linear spaces in Europe, we are fine. because if anything any pressure vessel comes up anywhere in the world, they will be like, hello. We got that. We can do pressure vessels.

That's kind of what they do. I'm having like a hilarious step outside of yourself and look down on the conversation you're having a moment because you were just like, hello, European person. Donald Trump just got elected. What are your thoughts on this? And space is what we came up with us. I wanted to talk about. Listen, we ignore everything else. I got Elaine here.

It's just funny to me. I got a lane and we got five minutes left in this show, Jake. I don't know how deep you want to go on all that. I don't want to go on it at all, but this is funny. It's like it's possible that the Europeans have other concerns. I mean, let's talk about it's fall as to the line. I would love for some more European space autonomy. I would love if we are not completely dependent on Artemis to have any chance to go to the moon.

That would be amazing because it's just a small piece of this whole election, whatever happened there. But it's one of these pieces where you cannot control. Right now, nobody in Europe can control if we will have an Artemis program where we can piggyback a seat on the moon. And that sucks. And I don't want that as a European space fan. I want us to go to the moon. I want us to be able and capable.

And I think they are capable engineers in Europe, obviously. Like, they're very capable people here that can build cool things. There's just not enough funding and enough will to go to the moon. Do you take the large cargo lander argonaut? I think is that correct? Do you take that program seriously, or is it kind of something that is there, but maybe it'll be more serious in a couple of years? It's serious if NASA wants to trade a seat for it. Like, Argonaut is obviously a bargaining chip that was placed on a poker table.

It's like, like, NASA and Issa sit on this table, and they're like talking about moon landing, and he says, like, drawing a new poker chip because they run out of chips. And he says, like, but we have Argonaut. And it was, what's that? That's my whole thing though, right? Is that like, y'all aren't contributing stuff because you want to go to the moon. Apparently your fetish is Moon Space Station.

You want Moon Space Station. But I don't think like Europeans at large really give a shit if someone's in orbit of the moon. But landing on the moon and walking on the moon is in a whole other level. That's what everybody wants and we all know it. Let's just say it, right? Like, we want to go to the surface.

That is my take. We all want to go to the surface. So why are we screwing around elsewhere? That's good question. I think you're over I overestimated the you overestimate the central European willingness to go to the moon. I think 50% of the population at most even know what ISA is. That might be higher than in the US. Like we European space excitement is not really existing.

If we go to the moon, it would probably be on page two or something. This is the struggle that all the space program stuff happens, right? Because even in the space epicenter of the United States, it's like, hey, what should we be doing with your space dollars? And we're like, everybody's like, asteroid defense. And you're like, how about a moon program? It's a stepping stone to Mars. And we're like, we literally just want asteroid defense. Yeah, we would like, how about how about really, really meaningful science and asteroid defense?

That would be amazing. So moon? Yeah, yeah. saying moon base. I hear you. Moon base and moon base and job program. That's all we have for you. Sorry. Very funny tangent.

You ever watch that movie? It's an older movie. I'm aging myself here. It's dealing Harvard with Jason Lee and Tom Green. No? Tom Green. Holy shit. Yeah. That's all this one. You are dating yourself. There's a funny line in it where Tom Green's character gets called an asshole.

And he's like, why did you go me a casserole? I said Athol. He's like, I heard casserole. And it's like one of those lines that just like stays in my memory for the rest of my life. And I just like quoted at random. I heard moon program. And there we got it. It's it's so it's painfully true though.

Like it's sometimes it feels like we have to endure the fight about the next big launcher. So we get like as a, I assume at least decently interested science community. it always feels like we have to endure whatever launcher right now is the flavor to get some signs out of this. It's like can we sneak in like environmental surveillance satellites on this cool new launcher? That would be cool. Please. Japan tried that. You want to be careful with that one.

Oh, my God. All right, Saichi over there. Jeez. Bringing the heat. Adrian, please point people to what they need to be following with NASA Space Flight. these days, considering that you guys have probably 6,000 cameras all over the world.

What's the current camera count for NSF? I think somebody counted about 40 for the last Starship flight somewhere there. It's a lot. Yeah, in general, with nasospaceflat.com for articles, basically each day,

X or YouTube, if you want, Starship or anything content, we have a YouTube channel, of course, that we try to have multiple videos a week about Starship and also, I want to point out, we do a weekly new show that I wish more people would really, really join watch because it's a great new show this weekend spaceflight. It's amazing. The team's doing an amazing job with that.

It's such a cool show to watch. And if you want something that I really recommend, watch this weekend Space Flight. There. That's my main recommendation. We got it. Nailed it. Jake, next week is American Thanksgiving. we're a month later than your Canadian variant.

So we will be off the following week. I'm pumped for this one, Jake. We've got Matt, the founder of AstroForge, who went on a press tour recently in which I got multiple texts from people that had interviews with Matt and said, you really got to have this guy in the show. Talk about asteroid mining.

Apparently got a lot of hot takes, so it's going to be pretty wild. I'm excited for it, because asteroid mining and hot takes. is a recipe for content, baby. We got a lot of content in that one. It's going to be great. So look out for that one.

And yeah, we got to, listen, we got to get this off nominees list together. Jake, it's coming up. Not too far away on the schedule. Yeah, yeah. A couple weeks away. Is this going to be the year that we don't do it the few hours before the show? Is that going to be the one that? I've been collecting them all year because, holy shit, are there so many?

Yeah. We have three funny moonlanders this year. This year alone. We had three funny moonlanders. We had the not-so static fire from China. I mean... I forgot about it. It's out of control.

It's out of control. So keep you up to do. This year is so good that there are people that are like texting us like, oh, man, this is definitely going to be an off nominee. I'm like, that one doesn't even make the short list. If there's so much that I... If there's one, I would nominate this to TN loan three failure of static fire, because as a person that also writes about China, that was the...

funniest morning ever because I was, I think, sitting in some sort of meeting and somebody said like, oh, Tian Longfrey just lifted off. And I were like, it was static fire. What do you mean? It lifted off. The greatest. So good. Oh, wow. Adrian, thanks for hanging out with us. Thanks for everything the NASA Space Flight crew does. Y'all are pumping out content to an extreme that has never been seen. Level like liquid oxygen at SpaceX levels of content of NSF. So. Thanks for having me. The camera business, yeah.

Thanks. Thanks for having me. And once again, I will always say, thanks for starting my space journey because of nominal is where I got really excited for space. So I love you all. And then he made an Excel sheet and the rest is history. So watch the last agee in appearance for that story. So if all of you want to kickstart your NASA spaceflight career,

Discord.com or offnom.com slash Discord and join our community. That's where you go. All right, y'all. The career path is Offenomenal. or NASA space plate, SpaceX. That's the way it goes. It's the pipeline. That's the pipeline, yes.

Yeah, we need an exit plan, Jake. Yeah, yeah. All right, y'all, we'll see you later. Bye. Bye, everybody. One, two, three, four, five, four, three, two, one, end of death.