Tim DoddHi, it's me, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut. Welcome back to Starbase. This is part two of our tour with Elon Musk, and part one we took you around Starfactory. We saw what's new. A lot's changed in two years, but in this one we're gonna take you out to the launchpad and we're actually gonna see the entire full stack rocket with Elon before its fourth flight test.
Tim DoddThen we're gonna go talk to Elon after it flies, see what went right, what went wrong, and what to expect on future launches. So part two, let's get started.
Narration(Elon whistling the 1812 Overture)
Tim DoddHave you ever got a chance to see it from like the beach side? Sorry? Have you ever got a chance to see it from like the beach, from the dunes?
Elon MuskYeah.
Tim DoddIt's pretty insane. I love the heat shield side is the coolest part by far.
Elon MuskYeah. It's a, I mean, it's a damn tall rocket.
Tim DoddYeah.
Elon MuskSo, and it's gonna get taller.
Tim DoddIt's just, can we get even closer? Yeah. I don't, uh, even when you're underneath it, you don't quite get the sense of scale. Yeah. It's just insane. Geez, look at that. Hey, I gotta get a wrap around with you right there. That is so cool. I mean, the scale just doesn't make sense. There's nothing else out here to like compare it to, you know.
Tim DoddIf this is a huge tower next to a ginormous rocket in the middle of nowhere with no buildings, no like, no anything. So it's, it's just so hard to put to scale. I mean, those grid fins the size of a car. Yeah. And they're so far up there that nothing makes sense.
Elon MuskYeah. It's a gigantic rocket. I mean, it's 5,000 tons at liftoff, it's the largest flying object ever made of any kind.
Tim DoddAnd you're trying to catch it.
Elon MuskYeah. Catch it with Mechazilla arms. I was actually slightly inspired by Kong vs Godzilla, you know. Mechazilla.
Tim DoddYeah, yeah. That's the reason for this.
Elon MuskWell, there the reason. Like I said, there's many ways to solve this problem. Obviously you could do it with landing legs. The problem with landing legs is, you've got the weight of the landing legs and you've gotta protect them on entry, especially for the ship. That's tricky.
Elon MuskAnd then you've gotta get a giant rocket from where it landed back onto the pad onto the launch stand. So I was trying to think of what is the, in the limit, the most efficient, most rapidly reusable architecture would be — that the thing that lifts the rocket onto the pad is what catches it.
Tim DoddWhat catches it. Yeah. So how, is there still plans, like how will the ship actually get caught? Are there similar nubs on the ship as there are —
Elon MuskThere aren't currently nubs, but there will be.
Tim DoddYeah. Okay. Like deployable, like catch it on the armpits you know?
Elon MuskJust like, you just grab it by the flaps.
Tim DoddOr do you, is there the nubs then some —
Elon MuskThis is a matter of much debate, but again, there's like a lot of ways to solve this. It kind of depends on what range of landing velocity we're gonna deal with. Because if it comes in with a lot of momentum, you have to have much stronger catchers than if it doesn't.
Tim DoddRight.
Elon MuskNow the downside, if you try to reserve propellant such that it is a very precise landing, you're burning propellant to achieve that precision. So that's also — which one is better?
Tim DoddThat's also mass.
Elon MuskYes. Yeah. So do you want static mass or dynamic mass in the form of propellant? There's some combination of the two is needed in order to have the ship get caught by the arms and not have the forward flaps sheared off when it comes down.
Tim DoddRight. Are the flaps there — talks to the flaps kinda of having a little bit of a redesign too? Like maybe moving a little bit? Yeah, yeah. Is that still — so the —
Elon MuskThere's actually, if you understand what the ship's trying to achieve — it's actually bugged me for a long time. At least for the Low Earth Orbit missions, it's coming back with an empty cargo bay. So the ship naturally wants to come in engines first, 'cause that's the heavy part. The center of mass is low.
Elon MuskSo now the rear flaps counter the center of mass, the center of pressure. So you're really balancing pressure and mass. It's basically the seesaw. Now forward flaps that are not fully stowed are actually hurting you, because if you have got a maximally stowed position of the forward flaps, that means you still have some frontal area that is pushing the rocket backwards and making it want to go engines first.
Elon MuskSo whereas frontal area in the rear is helpful, frontal area in the front is counterproductive. So you really ideally want the flaps to be in the stowed position, invisible to the flow, so they're not trying to tip the rocket backwards.
Tim DoddBut I guess it's not like you're trying to maximize braking necessarily. You're trying to achieve a certain glide ratio and things like —
Elon MuskThat too. You've gotta control it through hypersonic, supersonic, transonic and subsonic. And at least until you get to subsonic, the challenge is not having the engines go into the flow. Basically you're trying to maintain an angle of attack that's around 65, 70 degrees. So if this is the earth, it's doing roughly this angle.
Tim DoddYeah.
Elon MuskAnd so the rear flaps, the aft flaps are out as much as possible to try to keep the engines from scooting forward. So if the rear flaps deploy, that increases the drag. It pushes the ship this way. When the front flaps deploy, it actually pushes the ship back. So what the front flaps really are doing, they're really trim flaps. They're not trying to change the pitch angle.
Tim DoddThey're trying to maintain it almost.
Elon MuskWell, you need to control the ship in your roll in addition to pitch. But the work of essentially controlling pitch is really the rear flaps, and they're trying to move the center of pressure such that the engines don't go into the flow. Like, so ship's going like this. Rear flaps deploy, it makes it want to tip forward, which is good. It counteracts the mass at the rear. The flaps at the front are really therefore trimming your roll.
Tim DoddPrimarily. And they all interact with each other too, which is —
Elon MuskA hard part. Yeah, exactly. That's why it's like ish — technically the front flaps also do some pitch action. But for setting your fundamental pitch angle, it's the rear flaps. And you want your front flaps, when they're back, to be invisible to the flow, so that your rear flaps don't have to do extra work.
Tim DoddRight. That makes sense. So, but you also need some margin though, too. So having those be able to dip out and do a few things to maintain, you've —
Elon MuskGotta control your roll. So you really kind of need like three control surfaces, and we have four, so slightly more than you need. And in the high heating regime, which is where this really matters, the air is very stable. You don't have wind really. The air is homogenous.
Elon MuskSo if the ship is operating properly, it'll look like it's barely doing anything. The flaps are barely moving. And it's just maintaining this angle.
Tim DoddYeah, 'cause it's not having to react to all these turbulences and all this stuff.
Elon MuskThere's no disturbances. Until it gets into the lower atmosphere, obviously.
Tim DoddYeah. And then the whole thing is there, almost like — you know, when you're going from hypersonic and supersonic, is there, like, obviously the control scheme's almost changed a little bit to a certain degree.
Elon MuskSure. Oh, changed a lot.
Tim DoddAnd those, it changes a lot. Subsonic. Big time. So that's probably pretty crazy, the model that — and like get some sense of where that's going now, but at the end of the day, you're still gonna have to see how it happens when it actually gets to that regime.
Elon MuskYeah. Once you get to subsonic, the ship is falling like a skydiver.
Tim DoddYes. Like we've seen.
Elon MuskSo the flaps are kinda like arms and legs of a skydiver. So it's counterintuitive. It's not at all how an airplane works. Airplanes don't fall.
Tim DoddIt's like 90 degrees to what an airplane would do, basically.
Elon MuskYeah. Yes. 90 degrees to what an airplane would do. It's really analogous to a giant skydiver.
Tim DoddI mean exactly. 'Cause that's exactly how a skydiver —
Elon MuskPretty damn close.
Tim DoddYeah. Maintains their orientation. That is just the craziest thing. When I — I gotta ask. So, you know, you have the ability now as SpaceX, where you're at, to be able to do iterative design like this. If you could have done that on Falcon 9, had a total blank slate and literally just minimum viable product, we're gonna throw that thing out — would you have done that on Falcon 9?
Tim DoddBecause Falcon 9, people forget, you know, they look at this and they go, oh, they don't even know what they're doing. Well, you guys know how to build a rocket and launch it for the first time. Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy. I mean, you've already done that. In hindsight —
Elon MuskWell, who's saying we don't know what we're doing, and what have they done?
Tim DoddOh, exactly.
Elon MuskIt's easy to be an armchair rocket engineer.
Tim DoddYeah, exactly. But they don't understand the prototyping, the testing phase. So if you could have done something like this with Falcon 9 in the early days, would you have done that if you could have?
Elon MuskWe wouldn't be able to make Starship without the benefit of Falcon 9. So it's sort of like saying if you had a time machine or something — when you get into like time machine logic loops. So I mean, this is really — there's nothing in common. We learned a lot from Falcon 9, but there's nothing in common, there's no design element that Starship has in common with Falcon 9. Nothing. I mean, I take it back. You've got grid fins in both cases, right?
Tim DoddYeah. You know, there may be some common-ish avionics or something.
Elon MuskNope. All new avionics.
Tim DoddYeah. Geez, that's insane to think about.
Elon MuskWhat, all new avionics, all new software, all new —
Tim DoddAnd tower two is starting to head this way from Florida. It's looking like, and that's gonna go over that way. Is that right?
Elon MuskYeah. And tower two will be, have a number of upgrades. It'll be taller to allow for the next generation of Starship. So we're gonna add a few sections to that. And then the redesigned arms will be shorter. So if you look at those arms up there, those arms have very high moment of inertia, they're very long.
Elon MuskSo when you have long arms, it's hard to move them fast. And 'cause you have to move them and brake. And so it's just a lot of momentum.
Tim DoddAnd a lot of dampening.
Elon MuskYeah. So the new arms will be able to move much faster and they'll be a fair bit shorter than those arms.
Tim DoddBasically right at the catch point. Like there's pretty close, not too much beyond that.
Elon MuskYeah. So they'll be a fair bit shorter. Maybe be like a couple meters beyond the catch point.
Tim DoddWell, is there any kind of redesign to the OLM and the booster bidet and all the flame trench and stuff like that?
Elon MuskYeah, it's a total redesign — which I don't know if we should do a total redesign, but the guys really wanna do it. So it's like, okay.
Tim DoddLike it'll have like more of a flame trench this time.
Elon MuskYeah. Yeah. This has turned out better than I expected though, I have to say. On flight two when it took off, it was like, hey look, it actually worked.
Tim DoddIt's cool. It didn't blow up. So, but the ring and stuff, is anything changing? Is it almost like a whole everything new? Or is it —
Elon MuskPretty much.
Tim DoddWow. Yeah, this's just crazy.
Elon MuskThe hold-down arms also change. Well, it's really the launch arms, 'cause the current ones have some potential to bind and grab the rocket, which would be real bad. So we have a new design for the launch arms that take the load of the rocket and then retract so that they're not gonna bind and potentially cause the whole thing to explode.
Tim DoddThat'd be bad. Especially at this stage. It's getting a lot more legitimate and, you know —
Elon MuskWe're trying to protect against the explosions. I've got basically bunker, like concrete walls. A lot of steel protecting the launch tower. So, gosh, that wall is designed to protect the propellant tanks against a full explosion of the rocket.
Tim DoddSo tower two, that's on its way — they're literally loading up barges and you have sections out at the factory and everything. So tower two is like already — I mean, it's crazy to think how quickly it's all coming, and you're gonna be building that here all year probably. And wouldn't be surprised if that thing ends up being used already by next year. Can't even keep up with this. That is ridiculous.
Tim DoddWow. Tomorrow after this thing launches, would you want to do a quick little, like, rundown on how you feel about it?
Elon MuskIt depends on how it went.
Tim DoddLet's say it makes it through reentry, both of 'em.
Elon MuskSure.
Tim DoddOkay. Well we better shake on that then. Huh? Now that'll be awesome. I mean, tomorrow's gonna be phenomenal, I feel. How are you feeling about it now that you've had time to see it all and, you know, looking at the data?
Elon MuskI think the odds are on our side, but there's still some chance that the rocket blows up on liftoff. It's not zero. I mean, this is the best launch site and the best rocket we've ever made on Starship. So it has the highest odds of success.
Tim DoddAnd you can even tell the amount of attention to detail and things on the ship and the tiles and everything. It's —
Elon MuskIt's much more finesse.
Tim DoddYes. Yeah. It doesn't have like clonky bits.
Tim DoddYeah, exactly. Oh man, it's gonna be exciting. Can't wait for it. It's gonna be — I hope people will pay attention to this, 'cause it's history in the making, you know? We're watching —
Elon MuskAnd the cylinders are now pretty straight. You know, early versions had — were like kind of a Michelin man situation.
Tim DoddNo one, especially like Mk1 like you were talking about earlier. Like Mk1 like a —
Elon MuskMk1 was, let's just say lighting was important.
Tim DoddThat is awesome.
Elon MuskLighting was important.
Tim DoddOh man.
Elon MuskYou need like romantic lighting for Mk1.
Tim DoddWell I really, really appreciate you taking time. You know, T minus — oh god, we're within like 12 hours now, so T minus 12 hours and hopefully we'll see this thing lift off tomorrow again.
Elon MuskYeah, it's wild. Alright.
Tim DoddCool. It's wild. Thank you so much Elon.
Elon MuskThank you.
Tim DoddThe next morning that Starship stack with Booster 11 and Ship 29 did indeed launch for Starship's fourth full stack flight. Our Everyday Astronaut / Cosmic Perspective crew managed to get some amazing slow-mo shots, but only for the first few seconds due to cloud cover. We can't wait for the next launch, so we hopefully get some incredible slow-mo shots of the booster returning and hopefully a catch attempt as well. That will be crazy. And of course we'll be covering it live in 4K when it happens.
Tim DoddBut the good news is this test was the biggest success of the program yet, with both the booster and the Starship upper stage reentering and softly splashing down, which was great news for us because Elon kept his promise and followed up after this historic test. So just a few hours after the launch, I met back up with Elon to discuss what went right, what went wrong, and what to expect in the next launch.
Tim DoddBut before we hear from him, I wanted to point out touring Starbase has highlighted the challenges of accessing direct reliable information about space flight and the aerospace industry without being overly sensationalized. And today's sponsor embodies these principles perfectly. Ground News is an app and website that gathers news articles from more than 50,000 sources globally and puts them in one place, so you can compare how different outlets cover the same story.
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Tim DoddThere's also the factuality chart and the ownership chart, which shows about 50% of these articles were written by media conglomerates. These are all things that can influence bias and framing. Then we can scroll down and see every article about Flight four and compare the headlines. I think it's fun to see what words are used in each headline — which ones mention exploding or test or Elon Musk.
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Tim DoddThat's the plan that I personally use and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to stay well-informed and gain a deeper understanding of the news. There's also a link in the description too. Okay, now let's hear from Elon about how he thinks the launch went.
Tim DoddThat was — come on. I mean, hey, go sick. That was amazing.
Elon MuskYou saw it, you saw the whole thing? I did predict that would happen. Although there's the question of why didn't we do more about it? Like, we did do a lot.
Tim DoddOh my gosh. That was insane.
Elon MuskYeah. Yeah.
Tim DoddDo you feel pretty satisfied with the results of —
Elon MuskYeah, it's awesome. This is a really, I'd say, best outcome day. Really, really.
Tim DoddIt is. I mean, as you were watching the grid fin start to burn through — or not the grid fins, the flaps — you had to have thought one of those was just gonna rip off, right?
Elon MuskYeah, I mean, the heating — you could see the heating from the internal cameras. You don't need infrared cameras. You can actually just see it glow. So the thing about steel is, it's gonna glow for a long time before it fails. I think one of the biggest lessons is the incredible resilience of a high temp stainless steel alloy. 'Cause it hung in there.
Elon MuskAnd so, you know, you always wanna be careful about jumping to conclusions. You know what, like the — we need to jump to conclusions mat from "Office Space". Right? Don't jump to conclusions. So we have to be a little hesitant about reaching conclusions before we fully analyze the data, 'cause sometimes your first guess is wrong.
Elon MuskBut we obviously need to make the flap hinge area far more robust. So we'll really go crazy hardcore on that. Hopefully I don't eat my words, but that will not be the reason — if the next flight doesn't make it back fully intact, that will not be the reason. Flap hinge will not be the reason. We're gonna just spend a bunch of mass.
Tim DoddJust make it super robust, overdo it for now.
Elon MuskYeah. I mean there's just things you can do, you know, to increase the tile precision, decrease the gap, improve the gap filler, thicken the tiles. If any gap is not perfect, then you had to crack the tile, pull it off, do another one. It's kind of a pain in the ass.
Elon MuskSo it's not like we thought — if we thought there was something obvious that could be done about the flap hinge area, we would've done it. But like I said, we'll just go to town, you know — probably thicker tiles, thinner gaps, better gap filler, maybe even tightening the tolerances. There's a whole bunch of things that we can and will do for the next flight.
Elon MuskI'd mentioned yesterday that we have an improved design of Starship coming down the pipe. Not immediately, but it's something that I've actually been kinda harping on — just saying like, guys we need to do this — for a while, which is to move the forward flaps leeward so that they're not at the kind of 180 degrees. They're moved kind of leeward.
Elon MuskSo it'll look a little bit asymmetric with the rear flaps. The rear flaps are where they should be, at 180 degrees.
Tim DoddSo those aren't improvements you'll see already on like ship 30? 'Cause ship 30 —
Elon MuskNo, it's a total redesign of the whole front section. 'Cause you've gotta redesign the mount points. The reason I — it's not like the team disagreed with me about this. They did agree, but they were like, is that really the priority? Because you've gotta redesign all of the support structure, you know, the actuator mounts. It's a huge redesign of the front end.
Elon MuskAnd there'll be a number of other sort of improvements we do, you know, to the header tanks and the whole front section. And it's kind of like front section version two, which would be much better. So more reliable, more payload, and also easier to manufacture. Which is a big deal.
Tim DoddDo you know, did the aft flaps and the forward — like, did all of 'em kind of have similar burn through, do you know?
Elon MuskNo, the right forward flap was the one that had the — you know, 'cause there's these tolerance variations. There's a little bit of just stochastic, you know, luck. You know, it's like there's a bit of Russian roulette going on here. Which was the unlucky tile.
Elon MuskBut it looks like there was probably — I'm just guessing here, it's speculative — that we had probably the gaps on the tiles were a little wider on the right side than the left side. 'Cause it was really the right front flap that by far had the biggest issues.
Elon MuskAnd we can see this in terms of, when the vehicle is trying to control itself, how much deployment does each flap have? So the other three flaps had more or less normal deployment, but the broken flap had to really go all out and stick its like skeleton hand really far out to have an effect.
Tim DoddIt reminded me of like Short Circuit, like Johnny Five in part two. I don't remember if you remember that movie Short Circuit, Johnny Five was alive.
Elon MuskThat's a long time ago.
Tim DoddA long eighties movie. Yeah. And he gets like all beaten up and he's like just this like skeleton, and he's like still fighting along. And it just reminded me, like seeing this like claw of a flap, I couldn't believe how little it was needing to move though. And was still —
Elon MuskOh, it was moving a lot at the end.
Tim DoddWas it?
Elon MuskOh yeah, yeah. It was going to like full deployment, especially subsonic. But it performed admirably for it. It was sort of an insane level of destruction.
Tim DoddI can't believe it still could move when all of it looked like it — you know, like you'd think the actual —
Elon MuskMe neither. I'm like, holy shit, is that thing still moving? But the actuator was still working — the link actuator, you know, the actuator linkages did not burn away. The hinges were still working. It's like, damn, okay, that's insane.
Tim DoddSo I couldn't believe that.
Elon MuskYeah. Yeah. Totally. So now, it was able to maintain stability subsonically, but because of the ragged flap, it was not able to steer itself to the exact right position. So it was about six kilometers off positionally. But it did manage to maintain stability all the way to the ground.
Tim DoddDoes this make you — I mean we talked a lot about ship, but booster obviously did phenomenally well too. Was that on target?
Elon MuskYeah, the booster was almost perfect. I mean, so obviously there was one engine that didn't light — or, it didn't explode, but that we thought we should not turn on. It had aborted during the start sequence out of concern. But 32 engines is fine. It's resilient to multiple engines being lost and still completing its mission.
Tim DoddYeah. Like each engine lost is only 3% of thrust. So it's pretty minuscule compared to another vehicle that could be 50% or a hundred percent even. But on landing burn, it seemed to lose another engine as it was lighting it for landing burn, but it still looked like it did a pretty precise touchdown it looks like.
Elon MuskYeah, yeah. No, it landed in the water, intact. On the water. It was literally bobbing in the water and then obviously it tips over, and when it tips over, it smacks down pretty hard 'cause it's like falling from 70 meters, like over 200 feet.
Tim DoddYeah. So I know you mentioned on X that you were planning to actually try the — do you feel like you might wanna try doing the booster catch next?
Elon MuskYeah, we'll talk it over with the team, see if there's any lingering concerns. But the point at which we can do an accurate boost back and we can execute the landing burn, which we've shown — then I think we should try to have the tower catch it.
Tim DoddWow. And you don't feel like you need to have tower two ready before you do that?
Elon MuskNo, not necessarily, because we do have replacement parts for the arms, and they're actually a better set of arms we could put on there. Those are kind of old design. I mentioned that those arms are actually too long, so the moments of inertia are too high. So you want actually shorter arms that can move faster.
Elon MuskSo my inclination — you know, but the way these things work at SpaceX is, it's rare for me to sort of drop an imperial decree. Once in a while I will, but it's pretty rare. Usually it's like, we'll talk it over with the team, see what the general consensus is, and move in that direction.
Tim DoddYeah. That's gonna be wild. So, hopefully next, are we gonna kind of see more or less a repeat, you think again, of this mission profile — maybe bring the booster back, maybe do a — would you maybe do a raptor relight this time to kind of prove out orbital capabilities in coast phase?
Elon MuskYeah, that's a good question. We haven't decided. Are we going to do — like clearly Raptor relight does work. We had the three — you had three relight —
Tim DoddRelight.
Elon MuskYeah, the three steering engines, which would be the ones that would relight, relit even after all that drama, coming through crazy heating. And of the two tiles that we put in the rear where we took the tiles off, we'd actually put some backup ablative there. One was two layers of ablative, one was one layer of ablative.
Elon MuskThe two layers of ablative did not burn through; the one layer of ablative did, but I'm not sure if it actually burned through the steel too. But it did erode the single layer of ablative. But it just says that if you have two layers of our ablative, it does not actually burn through. So that could be your, before missing tile, a backup —
Tim DoddLike you're kind of talking about that. So, worst case scenario next time, which we'll probably, knowing you guys, be in a couple months already.
Elon MuskYeah. We're depending on how many — on what changes we make. I think from a SpaceX standpoint, I think we're ready within 30 days. If we need to make a bunch of changes, I'd say from a SpaceX standpoint, not counting regulatory, we're ready probably in less than 30 days. If there are bigger changes, I'd say we're ready no later than 60 days, but probably close to the 30.
Tim DoddAnd that's where people are gonna be shocked that you're seeing these vehicles just continue to increase cadence. I mean, this is the third flight in a row where you've lifted off the most complicated vehicle ever made right at the top of the window. You know, not scrubbing for days and days trying to figure out how to launch. Just like the countdown was so smooth. Hit T zero, off you we go.
Elon MuskWe did have a ground valve, a propellant tank valve on the ground that needed to be tweaked. That's what pushed it a little bit. But the vehicle itself had no issues.
Tim DoddThat's still incredible. I mean on like the fourth flight ever of the largest, most powerful rocket ever built. I mean that's insane and it's just gonna keep going. So yeah, we're really excited. I know you guys have a lot to keep going here, so I really appreciate that you did follow up with us. This is —
Elon MuskAwesome.
Tim DoddAbsolutely awesome. Absolutely.
Elon MuskYeah. Yeah. That's huge, right? Occupy Mars, man.
Tim DoddYeah. You're making progress. Congratulations again. Thank you so much for your time and can't wait for the next one.
Elon MuskAlright, cool.
Tim DoddAwesome. Thanks Elon. Thanks again so much. Elon and everyone here at SpaceX who made this tour possible — huge thank you. This is just incredible. We're so excited for what's going on. We're gonna be out here for the next flight. You better believe it. So stay tuned. There's a lot more excitement to come.
Tim DoddAnd I also owe a huge thank you to our Patreon supporters. If you wanna help support the work we do here on Everyday Astronaut, head on over to patreon.com/everydayastronaut. And another quick shout out to our sponsor Ground News. Check them out at ground.news/everydayastronaut for 40% off the Ground News unlimited access vantage plan this month.
Tim DoddAnd while you're online, be sure and check out our incredible merch store for shirts like this. Our orbital shirt, we've got our Heat Shield tile collection, Falcon 9 Model Rockets, lots of other incredible stuff over at everydayastronaut.com/shop. Thanks everybody. That's gonna do it for me. I'm Tim Dodd, the everyday astronaut, bringing space down to earth for everyday people.