[NEW!] Elon Musk Explains Updates To Starship And Starbase!

Hi, it's me, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut. Welcome to Starbase, Texas. Today. We're going inside star base with the ultimate tour guide Elon Musk. He's gonna take us through the High Bay to see where Starships are assembled.

We'll also see the new Mega Bay under construction and talk about SpaceX's plans to get this rocket flying. Now, I must warn you. Some of the things we talk about are pretty technical, but I've got a handful of videos to help you understand what we're talking about. There's links in the description to those videos and stick around because in the next videos, we're going to go up the launch tower.

Then we'll see the new Raptor 2's up close and personal, and talk about the Falcon 9's Merlin engine in great detail. And if you happen to find this video valuable, consider dropping a Super Thanks as a tip or become a channel member or a Patreon supporter for early access and to help show your support. All right, let's get started.

So we're making, we're making good progress with the Mega Bay over there. So that should be done in a month or so. That's tricky. The scale from because perspective wise right here,

it almost looks the same, you know, just from our perspective, but it's... It's about 30, 40 feet taller. So it's more about <laugh> you know, this case. So girth is more important than length because we just need, we need to be able to construct more Ships and Boosters. And you can see like, like the High Bay there is it's okay.

If you've got like maybe two or three, works in progress, but maybe have two or three workstations this in the High Bay, in the Mega Bay, we can have, like really, almost a dozen, maybe at least 10 workstations. So that's why the sort of width and length are more important there. Especially as we try to really get the production line going, we need more workstations.

The High Bay here is okay for making for a low production rate, but as you go to a higher production rate, you need, you just need more workstations. Yeah. And so that's bBooster, right? Yeah. Or half a Booster, half a half a Ship, it looks like. Yeah, exactly.

Looks like you do have those your vents there, the cold, the cold gas or the, the ullage gas vents. Yes. Well we're using the ullage gas, for attitude control. So instead of having separate attitude control thrusters, we're using the ullage gas, itself, for attitude or reaction control. So basically for attitude control in once you're in orbit or basically when you're in a vacuum, the impulse needed is very low. Earlier design iterations, we had a separate cold gas attitude control system with nitrogen bottles. But that actually doesn't make a lot of sense since we've got a bunch of ullage that we're gonna vent anyway. So might as well use the ullage gas for attitude

control and small Delta V changes on orbit. I had to admit, you taught us to question your constraints. So, that makes sense to me, for the Booster, you know, 'cause the Booster doesn't need to do it basically the second you turn the engines off, it's gonna need to want to vent a lot of its stuff anyway. And that's also corresponds with its first flip, but for a Starship like with docking maneuvers and stuff, how does... To me, in my head, the Venn diagram of needing to depress a tank and the Venn diagram needing to do an orbital maneuver, don't always, you know, have a huge amount of overlap.

So is, or is it not a concern? Can you, are they, is it always gonna be on tap? When the Ship gets to orbit you're gonna have still a pretty high pressure in the oxygen and fuel tanks which are autogenously pressurized. So you've got hot gaseous oxygen and sort of hot methane. But you have a lot more ullage pressure than... You actually don't need any more ullage pressure. So, like you've got more pressure than you need. The deorbit and the landing burns are done with the header tanks. So you actually want to vent the main tanks down to just above atmospheric pressure. Well, you want to

have enough pressure in the main tanks for structural stability. So it's pressure stabilized, but not any more pressure than is needed for pressure stabilization for atmospheric entry. When it gets to orbit, it's gonna have really a lot more pressure than is needed for atmospheric entry.

So we would in any case end up venting the the main tanks down to the pressure needed for reentry. So we'd be tossing that gas away. That's, if it's free, you might as well use it.

Yeah. We're gonna dump the gas anyway. So then why have separate tanks and everything, you might as well use that gas for, you know, attitude control and small maneuvers and then even then we'll still end up dumping the remaining gas that's not needed for entry. Okay. That, so because of that last statement, you'll be dumping it anyway. Definitely kind of, yeah. Actually when you look at the whole design, it actually, it's just like, obviously it was pretty dumb to have a separate a cold gas reaction control system, because, we have excess ullage gas.

If we simply have main tank vents that vent in the direction that you'd want, then there's no need to have separate ullage thrusters. You can literally just use the vent. So at some point, those will probably have like, almost like an Apollo style, like four, four way, set of nozzles or something. Right. Or because right now they're just facing prograde basically. Yeah. Those, so that would be for settling thrusters, basically the,

those ones up there. This side thrusters that you don't see on right now, that'll be added. So side vents. So it just still surprises me that you're not doing, you know, like capturing and doing some kind of high pressure, higher pressure, you know, hot gas thrust anymore when you have. No, the hot gas thruster was definitely overengineered and unnecessary. So just using ullage gas for small thrust, is the obvious move in this case. So

in retrospect, the obvious move it's much more efficient than having separate, cold gas thrusters. Well, I guess not, no, I think about it there probably hasn't, there's never really been a rocket where the upper stage or the actual spacecraft is 99% a giant empty tank or drained tank, every other vehicle Space Shuttle, you know, very small amounts of, you know, just the OMS pods basically. That stuff. But there's never really been a vehicle that's on orbit where it just went through a, you know, four or five minute burn, and now it needs to, yeah, that actually is really, really interesting. That's so crazy.

So it's a significant optimization mass and cost savings to use the ullage gas for attitude and reaction control than to have separate cold gas thrusters. I love it. I'd say that's like one of the biggest improvements that we've made. I gotta admit that was one when you were talking about the last time. And I kept thinking about it. Actually, I was actually- I was just- it was literally occurred to me in real time.

It occurred to me while I was explaining to you <laugh> I was like, wait, what are we doing? It was one of those things I kept just being like that can't be right, but you're yeah. I mean, it, it is, it seems to be. <Laugh>. Yeah. We kind of went through this exercise for the, the Ship and I was like, wait a second.

We should do that for the Booster as well. And that just occurred to me literally, while I was doing the interview with you. <laugh> like, okay. Do you mind saying a few things or, or do I sure. What, what do you think we should? I dunno, discuss... Yeah, I wanna see Elon's interviewing skills. Well, I mean, so this is Joe Petrzelka he'shead of Booster engineering. I don't know, anything

you wanna say? Like you point at things and describe. What's, new on like [Booster] 7 and stuff? What are some of the new things you guys are working on? On Booster 7, which is down at the pad right now, it's been quite an improvement over the first Boosters that we built four and five we simplified a lot of things. Like there was a lot of you just learned when you put things together.

The first time we were able to get rid of a lot of it and combine a lot of it, it's got some new arrow features, so it's got upgraded grid fins, and it has chines or strikes on the side of it. Yeah. And those are gonna make the reentry performance much better. So we'll be able to actually come in at a lower velocity and get higher precision when we're coming in for the tower catch. So we're really excited to try that out on that. Okay. Then I got one for both of you guys. Why are the strikes or whatever you, the chi-.

Chines. Why aren't they 180 [degrees]? It sounds like wind chimes. It's. Chimes with an "n".

Why, why, why aren't they 180 degrees to each other? It looks like they're about a 140 or something offset. Yeah. They're about 120 [degrees] actually. And what they do, it's not about just increasing the like wingspan, if you will. It's about getting the area of the cylinder of the rocket to pressurize. So those features help the rest of the rocket pressurize.

So it's more than just the area of those chines. You actually get more net drag on that section of the vehicle. At an angle. Right. Not, not. Yeah. Okay. So you're, so you're basically using that to increase like the overall surface area when it's coming at some kind of angle of attack.

Yeah. And so the Booster is very, it's very bottom heavy with all of the engines down there. And so you're trying to actually add drag area down there as well. And when you do that, that can let the Booster pitch up higher. Yes. Otherwise, if you don't have the chines, it wants to just come in.

Feet first... It's still gonna come in pretty, butt, end first, slightly little, slightly less, well, you. Can pitch it up to 10 or 20 degrees. Yeah. And.

Get much more control authority. And further, and it cross range. As Joe was saying, it's a little bit more than just increasing the cross section of the vehicle. Because you're not coming in-.

The integrated pressure profile on the base. The experienced wind is hitting the cylinder of the vehicle. And then it's rolling around the cylinder and it's kind of like losing pressure as it rolls as it rolls around. By having the the chines be not at 180 degrees, but a little, little lower down, we're catching more of that air that's escaping. And so technically you actually have slightly less cross-sectional area, but you have more integrated pressure at the base. Gotcha. Let's keep moving quick while this machinery's firing up. So, but.

These are very primitive chines. We can do way better first attempting. I expect to change them alot over time. Yeah. Well, one of the things that I love about it is that you're covering up the COPVs that. So it's both, both a COPV arrow cover. Double use side of it. Which I love. Ido fear that makes us less rigorous about getting rid of COPVs.

More complacent that they have a home. We could put as many as we wanted under them. So they were still a force-. Okay, good. But like, if you say, like, what's, what are optimized chines? You'd actually want them to get bigger as you get wider at the bottom. Begin to start looking like chip flaps. Like the simulation right away. Especially, especially as you're coming in, like you said, with such a big amount of mass and basically a dry can above it you'd really want the center of pressure to be as low as possible. Right.

Yeah. So that brings me to another question then you're still, I'm curious why you guys are still sticking with grid fins instead of like a more traditional, you know, stabilator or some kind of canard or something, you know, <laugh>. Well, this is a frequent topic of conversation. Exactly. We discussed this a lot. I mean, essentially like our optimization right now is getting to orbit. We know how to use grid fins from Falcon 9. Grid fins are

much more consistent than flaps as you go from hypersonic to supersonic to transonic, to subsonic. So you're going through these different marker regimes and grid fins are much more consistent than wing or a wingy thing. A wingy thing. Yeah. So especially as you go subsonic the center of pressure on any kind flat surface shifts significantly where you go from supersonic to subsonic. Could you be lighter than a grid fin? I think there's a good chance you could be. There's also another factor,

which is the actuator power needed to turn a grid is much less than is needed for, to turn a wing a sort of a wing, like thing. Of similar. Uh, yeah. Especially as that, as that set of pressure changes, uh. It increases the torque, the motor, right? On a normal wing. You're necessarily.

Be ordered so short that even if the center of pressure changes, it's not far from the rotation point. And so the, to torque required does not change dramatically throughout your mock regime transitions. Yeah. Yeah. But we are constantly talking about do we have the right number of grid fins Were they designed correctly.

Yes. So like, we're not saying we're right. To be clear, like, we're, we're definitely not optimal, but we it'll work <laugh>. We're like, it's probably, if working is good and it's one less problem to solve. We obviously don't need four. I think we could probably get away with two, definitely not more than three. Well, you're all the 2016, like original OG you know, ICS had had three and I remember that being a pretty unique design consideration, you know, and...

Yeah. There's sure number of iterations that this vehicles gone through is insane. Before it, even before it even hit the pavement. It had already iterated like <laugh> so many times. Well, I started questioning, you know, why for me, I always thought the grid fin was a lot of, it was being able to retract them on ascent, you know, get them out of the windstream, but now that you're not retracting them, I was like, well that, and then also, you know, the actual mass savings, you know, 50% of your, the mass of a grid fit is, is perpendicular to your, your control motion, you know, your control authority.

So I always wondered if like they, how that would, the trade would be on just, yeah. Compared to like a normal wingy thing. If you know your position well and you know, your wins well you can in theory have a ballistic arc when you do your boost back burn that is very accurate with nothing. We tried this in the early days of Falcon 9. Any small asymmetries on the vehiclewill cause it to go crazy, basically it'll spin up and start flapping around and it'll just start oscillating and rotating and... Dynamic stability becomes a concern.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So, so technically you don't, you don't actually need massive surfaces. You just need to be able to take out, um, the asymmetries of the protuberances on the vehicle and any error that you have with respect to position or your boostback impulse. Yeah. And, and even wind conditions and things like that. I'm sure might grow. So you really, don't the control surfaces you need are, are actually not very big.

We've shrunk the grid fins significantly from where we started out. They're much lighter. Even with grid fins, we really should be moving to aspirationally two grid fins, but certainly not more than three. And,

and the third one can be small. Little vestigial guy in the, I like just imagining a tiny little guy in, on one, on one sector. Yeah. Um, so. In the High Bay. We have, actually,

this is the liquid oxygen tank section for Booster 8 is coming along very quickly, right behind Booster 7 and then the Ship 24 nose cone. So this is the Ship that we hope to pair with Booster 7 for our first orbital launch. It's looking so much more refined already than even S20. Oh, uh, can we see the door on the back side of it? Yeah. I mean, it's not gonna blow your mind. <Laugh>. You'd be surprised, man. The internet sure loves that door.

Yeah. You gonna see the door anyway. So I guess why not? Because you're, you're at this point planning to launch [Ship] 24 with Starlink V2 already, right? Yeah. We'll see. I mean, it's just, like I said, I'm not gonna blow your mind here. You know, it's basically, it's like we call it the PEZ dispenser <laugh> and it's kind of like that it's the Starlink satellites are, You know, in this, rack, which looks like a frigging PEZ thing, 'cause they're like, you know, kind like rectangular just like a PEZ and they're stacked inside the, the nose cone inside the fairing. And since they're low profile, we only need a really a small door. With a small door, we can use pressure stabilization.

Like we can retain pressure in the fairing so we can at least partially pressure stabilize the the nose cone or fairing. And then we don't have a humongous hinge door. Like you might later on which larger pieces of cargo and things like that.

Yeah. We, we can make a giant door in the future, but this allow it's this a small doorways, a lot less than a giant door. Yeah. Yeah. Simple sensor. We could come up with for deploying Starlink. I feel like it it's just begging-. It could go wrong. To be clear.

Like if the mechanisms inside jam up that will be pretty embarrassing. Right, right, right. But it looks like it's just begging to have like two big googly eyes with a funny looking grin there, you know, or something.

So we are incurring some complexity for the sort of the racking system inside, 'cause you've gotta have a racking system. So it's more complicated than a PEZ dispenser, but it's the general principle is... Like spring loaded then or hydraulically loaded or something or? Uh, it's, <laugh>, it's, it's a bunch of electric it's electric, and with a bunch of mechanisms. And they just like roll themselves out and just zip out the door. And...

<Laugh>. Sorry. Inspired by pallet stacking technology. .

Like I watch YouTube videos of palette stacker. Exactly. Industrial pallet stackers. It's the same basic principle. They don't look super simple frankly but they do work. It's the same basic mechanism. I mean, there's some risk of, you know, you're loading it in at you know, 1G and then you're unloading it at 0G. So, you know, you could have some situation where you're unloading a mechanism and because you unload the mechanism, it now binds. Like,

so that's a risk that we that's hard to test for. Yeah. Yep. What, so this, so you're planning to actually do your first set of Starlink V2's on this vehicle, or wait, is this 25 or 24? 24? This is 24, which is currently scheduled ish to be the first orbital attempt. Right? So you are, so has the plan changed to go from kind of a sub orbital to an orbital launch if you're gonna be trying to pop out a couple Starlinks? No, we we're always gonna go. Our next launch was always gonna be orbital. Is it full orbital? Not.

Yes. Okay. So, so that would, well. Yes. I mean, yes for. Cause for a little while there was talk about like B4 and stuff and S20 back in the day doing like a, just shy orbit, you know, on the reentry by Hawaii and stuff like that. Never quite reaching... It's, it's still, it's basically orbit. Okay. Yeah.

There's no real difference. Small part between the... Yeah. I mean, you could just, it's the difference between, I mean, you're going like three quarters of the way around the Earth. Uh you're yeah. I mean, you. It literally like 30 meters per second difference or something it's tiny, it's hilariously small.

Yeah. It's extremely, yeah. It's, it's essentially orbital velocity. So there's just no point in doing, like, why not, why do an extra loop around the Earth, you know, and have another orbit burn. So. Um, but if you're. Really like, I wouldn't say that there's like high confidence that the first flight will work. I think there's a good chance that it does not reach orbit that there's an issue with the Booster or, or stage separation or if the Ship doesn't start or, and then even if it does get to orbit, there's probably the Ship makes it down intact is also not super high.

This is why it's entering over the Pacific and unpopulated area. So if there is an issueit's not a danger to people. So one of the things that a lot of people were asking about after, or, you know, once we started seeing the heat shield tiles is why they aren't scaled like a dragon or like, like a roof shingle where they're slightly overlapping and tapering and, in thickness, you know, why are they just have the gaps and everything. What's? I mean, you know, this, there's more than there's multiple ways to approach this.

So it's not that like a shingled approach couldn't work. You could have a shingled approach. The thing that will happen or, should in theory happen here is that when the tiles get hot, they will expand and, and tighten the gap. So the gaps that you see here should be smallerwhen the tiles heat up. Um, And you know, you're really not gonna see a lot of heat going down through those gaps is our expectation. So shingling does not seem to be important. We could be wrong about that.

That's kinda around the vehicle as opposed to... Right, right. Yeah. The flow is not coming straight in at those gaps. It's like. It's yeah. I mean, be coming in at an angle similar to the Shuttle, like I dunno, 60, 70 degrees.

So sort of like if the ground is so to the Earth, we're sort of coming in like that. And it's a balance between generating lift. Like for reusable heat shield, we wanna minimize the peak heat load.

So the peak heat load is going to determine if we melt the tiles or not. Yeah. And if you melt the tiles that they're not very good for reuse. So we're kind of balancing between generating, lift and...

So there's atmospheric density, velocity, and you don't wanna have like be high, be going fast in high density air. That's gonna be. You wanna kind of stay up in the upper atmosphere for a little bit longer than you would if-. You wanna slow down as much as possible in the thin upper atmosphere. So you minimize peak heating. That's the goal minimize peak heating. Which is pretty much what designed the whole Shuttle's airframe almost was that, that peak heating and the controlling that peak, that PQ.

Yes. So now we're gonna learn a lot from this first entry. If there's any issues the Ship will not, you know, if there's unexpected heating in some places, then the Ship will fail on entry and that'll be that. Yeah. Is there any talks speaking of failing and reentry and all those things have you guys there were rumbling for a little bit that you guys, someone was talking about flying Ship 20 still, or S20, just on a sub-orbital. Yeah. We've moved on. Oh, just for my sake, man. Those, those sub-orbital flights were so fun to watch. Cause it was so slow.

You gotta feel it, you know, that much longer when it's just sitting there, you know, ascending for several minutes. Like I've never seen anything like that. Those flights are cool. But like this... We think we've learned, you know, what we needed to learn really with the cyber bottle flights. Yeah. And there wasn't really much to learn so best focus on getting to orbit. I mean, yay. But also awww <laugh> like should be quite excited about people.

That's true. Yeah. Those, yeah. Those 33 Raptors, I think we'll put on a pretty... That'll make up for the slow slow, gentle climb will be 33 shaking everything. I think what'll seem pretty odd or like strange is that is this the Starship orbital stack is gonna come off the pad very fast. Yeah.

So, yeah, it's got high thrust to weight. What's its thrust- approximate thrust to weight. I mean, it should be like 1.4 ish, maybe 1.5 around 1.5.

Yeah. That's like Ariane 5 speeds with those SRBs once that, those light, that thing just shot off, shoots off the pad, you know? And. Yeah. It'll be like that. I mean, it's yeah. That'll be disorienting to see something that big, just accelerating that quickly, you know, it'll...

For a reusable vehicle you actually want to have a higher thrust to weight than an expandable vehicle. Because thrust to weight below one is not doing anything. So your propellant is not being useful below thrust to weight of one. So you actually want to have a higher thrust to weight for a reusable vehicle than for an expendable. For an expendable vehicle, the cost overwhelmingly is in the vehicle itself that you are losing.

But for a reusable vehicle, if it's, you know, rapidly reusable and completely reusable, the cost of propellant is the single biggest cost of the flight. And so you want to have a high thrust toweight so that more of the thrust is useful. Yeah. Uh, so. So high thrust to weight ratio literally is, is financially beneficial, purely on the you need less be able to do the same amount of work. Like, this may sound sort of mercantile but it's actually the, the, the thing to optimize for is cost per ton to orbit.

Like you can't cheat if you get cost per ton to orbit. It's not about what the mass ratio is or the ISP or anything, although we're aiming for, you know, to have a great mass ratio, great ISP, everything. But it's really, what is your fully considered cost per ton to orbit. At the end of the day...

Is that's considered cost per ton to orbit is the optimization. And any given technology is only relevant to the degree that it produces cost per ton to orbit. So thrust to weight ratio might matter more than ISP as long as it makes for a lower cost per ton to orbit. Yes. So the trade offs always end up with, does it decrease the cost per ton to orbit and that's what matters more. Aspirationally, like we don't always get. Right.

But the thing that really matters is minimize cost per to orbit. For Mars or the Moon minimize cost per ton to the surface of the Moon or to the surface of Mars. Just to give you a sense of just how much we need to improve it's really insane. Like right now, the cost of per useful landed ton to the surface of Mars is in excess of a billion dollars.

So 'cause you can't count the heat shield or the parachute or the useful stuff. So the landing systems mass does not count only the, like in the case of the rovers, it's really just the rover. That is the useful thing. So if the rover weighs a ton and it costs a billion dollars to get there, it's a billion dollars per ton to Mars. And that's roughly, you know what it currently costs now in order to make life multi-planetary and have a self-sustaining city on Mars that number will have to improve to, I think probably under a 100,000 dollars a ton, that that would be a 10,000 times better than the current state of the art to put things into perspective. How much of an improvement is needed about 10,000%, 10,000 fold. <Laugh>.

That's what Starship is intended to do. Be 10,000 times better than the current state of the art. Wow. So.

Orders and orders and orders of magnitude. It's a lot of orders of magnitude. But it is- we're not breaking any laws of physics. It is possible to do that. Should we, uh, can we see up at the top or is there anything to see up there right now? Not really anything to see. I mean,I think we probably shouldn't take pictures of the inside.

Not that it's super interesting, but <laugh> But I think we gotta be cautious about like pictures of the inside. Where's the lifting points on this one now? You can see the lugs up there. I mean, I'm not, we need to move those lifting points. Those are not in a good position.

<laugh> So you don't wanna have lifting points where the heat shield tiles are. We need to move lift points to, where the heat shield tiles are not. Are you still hoping tocatch the Ship too with the arms or what's the, I mean, you are right? How are you gonna catch it, I guess, like, are you gonna do the same thing with the tiny little nubs? Like, like the Booster? Uh, yeah, I mean, it'll be very similar to the Booster with... Now in the case of the Ship because we need to have heat shield tiles that go more than 180 degrees, a little more than 180 degrees.

We'll have to have the catch points kind of like flip out. But it'll otherwise be... Stays in the, in the leeward side. It's gonna be the leeward side the wind. Like you'd have to, I mean you'd have to have heat shield tiles pop out or have something that's in the leeward side that swings out. One of the two.

And you can't just have the... You can't catch 'em by the nose fins. You sort of could. Well, like what you're seeing there that doesn't have heat shiled tiles will need to have heat shield tiles. So everything's gonna have heat shield tiles. You see a,

like a steel part at the base of the, but that'll have to have tiles on it. What if it's, if it's attached, if the mounting point would be attached to somewhere on the leeward side of the flap and the flap could rotate more than 180 degrees, it could get in line with this- it could be the same mechanism that does the quickie thing could be just the flap itself. Um, I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. If the catch ball thing is on the leeward side of the flap and the flap can go beyond 180 degrees...

Oh, that's man. That's not the problem you want us to try and solve. Like a huge challenge we have is the hot gas seal. Oh, right. You'd move that more.

Over, over center of that. Like frankly, thething we need to do, I think is move the forward flaps more towards the leeward side. This is a major internal debate, but there's a massive amount of optimization possible with the foward flaps. They're in the wrong position. They're the wrong size, wrong position, wrong location. But they will work. Yeah. They're a start <laugh>.

Yeah. They'll work, but they're far from optimal. What are the under those one heat shields, do you see the little, those, like yellow puck things? What are those? Are those special or something? Just like temperature sensors. Oh! Uh, I think so either temperature or radio. I'm not sure. So either the antennas or temperature sensors. Well, what else is new since the last time we were out here? Well, we're building the Mega Bay.

What got your gears turning now? No, just there's a, I mean, there's a lot of improvements to make with the Ship and Booster design. But anyway, right now the important thing is just to get to orbit with you know, some reasonable payload. And then, we have a whole series of improvements that we plan to improve the performance, the payload to orbit.I really am not a fan of our forward flaps that like every time I look at them, it drives me crazy 'cause they're so suboptimal. Well your rate of innovation and your rate of iteration, those will be different sooner than, rather than later I'm sure.

Yeah. I mean, it's, there's a potential scenario where we can delete the forward flaps entirely. And the Shuttle doesn't have forward flaps.

And that's because you're using dihedral control to control mostly pitch, and you can still do a little bit of yaw and roll with just a pair. So, Huh. Um. Cause it's mostly about your center of pressure, right? So your center of mass and center of pressure, it's a sea-saw. So you can just think of these things like the- you've got a sea-saw and your center of pressure, like the winds, the air is hitting the vehicle.

You have a center of pressure. It's like, where's that air gonna push the vehicle? Like, if you add up all the wind pressure, if you're like pushing it with your finger, what's the center of that force gonna be? And then you've got your center of mass, which is similar thing, but for mass. You've got these sort of two sea-saw things, center pressure center mass. If

you have big forward flaps and big rear flaps, you can have a much more variation in where your center of mass is gonna be. And also what your angle attack can be and how well you can control the vehicle and different mock regimes in the face of like a lot of wind shear and wind buffet. Because there was that again, Soviet, like I don't remember what it was called, the mole or something that just had a dihedral wing on the back was supposed to be like a mini shuttle for them, like a two passenger shuttle. The Buran, you mean? What was that? The Buran? No, not Buran. Nope. It had foldable wings and they basically,

the only things those are fixed, they weren't dynamic, you know, so it's not like they controlled its pitch, but it basically had a, really, was supposed to have a really high angle of attack during initial ascent. And then the back flaps just folded down. And, but that was to extend, basically have actual lift and, and do a horizontal landing. It wasn't necessarily like a dynamic link, but the idea was that you could control your overall, you know, pitch almost like, you know, Virgin Galactic's Spaceship Two that folds in half, you know, how it can change its, its whole center pressure and everything just, you know, in a single thing, but it's not, again, that's not dynamic. It goes from one mode to mode, one to mode two, you know, and same with that Soviet one. But yeah, there's, you know, that probably becomes a lot trickier when you are trying to be dynamic and when are trying to actually pinpoint control your landing. I'm sure that...

The thing I was like really counterintuitive about the Starship is that it's not an aircraft it's falling. Yeah. So, we're just constantly trying to break as opposed to an aircraft that is an aircraft is trying to generate lift and fly horizontally. We are trying to generate drag and be as draggy as possible when we fall. Yeah. It's

a very different optimization than an aircraft. So yeah. Yeah. It's about, about four times usable area of the High Bay.

So it's only a little bit taller, but it's a lot wider and deeper. And so we, we have a lot more positions for product manufacturing, the Booster or the Ship. So if you, if you have a production line, you need a lot of stations essentially for a high production. So this is intended to have a lot of stations.

Is some of this getting replaced by another building that's like over top of some stuff or is it...? We are building a permanent building, a permanent factory building and replacing the tents. But the High Bay's...

We're building a, we're not building a building to encompass the highway. That would be insane. But we are going to be building a factory, a permanent factory building and replacing the tents and we're start the factory building from that side and kind of build and gradually replace the tents. With a large, permanent building. And that's actually currently in the works, I guess. So you're still, you know,

there's a lot of speculation obviously with how quickly Florida's ramping up that this might be slowing down, but that doesn't seem to be slowing down too much if you're building and building out here. Hey, by the way, I'm Tim. Hi. Hey, nice to meet you. Awesome. Yeah. Sorry, what was your name?

Andy Krebs. Okay, cool. I was engineering for the non fight hardware. So I do the High Bays and the factory I'm responsible for those as well as the launch pad. Cool.

Stage 0. A lot of the stage zero stuff. Because the ground systems are, ground systems, especially inclusive of the tower are at least as complicated as the Stage One or stage Two. Yeah.

So. Should we go check out Stage 0? Uh, sure. Thank you, Elon, for all your generous time and thank you, Ryan Chylinski for helping shoot and capture this incredible conversation.

And I owe a huge thank you to my Patreon supporters for helping make videos like this possible. If you wanna help me continue to do what I do head on over to patreon.com/everydayastronaut, and while you're online, be sure and check out our awesome merchandise shop, where you can find shirts like this, the RD-171 shirt and lots of other really cool stuff 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."

2022-05-17 08:34

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