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Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel | Lex Fridman Podcast #356
5 hours 15 minutes 44 seconds
🇬🇧 English
Speaker 1
00:00
And the nozzle, so as you're saying, there's a bunch of different design options, but it's a critical part of this, how you do that conversion. Which is what
Speaker 2
00:08
the inverted is.
Speaker 3
00:08
Just basically like
Speaker 2
00:09
how much can you convert is really like the ultimate game. How much pressure and heat can we convert into thrust? Like that's really at the end of the day, that's what a rocket engine is.
Speaker 3
00:22
The following is a conversation with Tim Dodd, host of the Everyday Astronaut YouTube channel, where he educates and inspires all of us with detailed but accessible explanations of rocket engines and all things space travel. This is a Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
Speaker 3
00:43
And now, dear friends, Here's Tim Dodd. Can you give a brief history of SpaceX rockets? So we got Falcon 1, Falcon 9, there's different versions of those, Falcon Heavy, Starship, and also the Dragon capsules and so on.
Speaker 2
00:59
Well, yeah, Falcon 1 is where it all started. The original intent and the original idea of SpaceX was Elon wanted to try to get something to Mars. He saw that NASA didn't have a current Mars plan and he wanted to go to Mars.
Speaker 2
01:13
So he decided, how do I best do this? He literally wanted to at first purchase a rocket from Russia. Then after a foiled attempt at doing that, he decided that he was going to try to develop his own rocket. And the Falcon 1 is what came out of that process.
Speaker 2
01:31
And he developed a pretty incredible team. I don't know how exactly he stumbled upon the team that he stumbled upon that quickly, but the people that he assembled were amazing. And they built the Falcon 1, which was a single Merlin engine followed by an upper stage engine called the Kestrel engine. Pretty small compared to the things they're working on today, but that Merlin engine continued to evolve into being the power plant for the Falcon 9.
Speaker 2
01:55
They went from a small lift launch vehicle up into the medium class launch vehicle so they could provide services for NASA. That's 1 of the big things they first kind of hung their hat up was they got the opportunity to fly cargo to the International Space Station under originally it was called the COTS program, the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services for NASA, which evolved into the commercial resupply contracts. And that's when SpaceX developed both their Dragon capsule, which is a uncrewed at first spacecraft that can dock to the ISS, and the Falcon 9 rocket that can take it to the International Space Station.
Speaker 3
02:29
And then- The Dragon rides on, it's the thing up top that rides on the
Speaker 2
02:33
big booster thing that launches it into orbit. Exactly, yep. The Falcon 9's the semi-truck, the Dragon capsule's the payload.
Speaker 2
02:45
You know, it's the thing being dropped off basically at its destination. In this case, the destination is the International Space Station. And yeah, so they developed those relatively quickly and became a commercial success before you know it. They're now the number 1 launch provider in the world, launching more mass to orbit than anybody else, launching more frequently than countries, like the entire country of China who's going crazy right now with launches.
Speaker 2
03:13
Granted, China beat them by 2 launches this last, in
Speaker 1
03:15
2022,
Speaker 2
03:16
but prior year, SpaceX beat the entire country of China. I mean, it's nuts.
Speaker 3
03:21
CB. And just like you said, SpaceX still beats China even this year in terms of the amount of payload that was done. So, yeah, the mass to orbit, right? That China had like 60 something, a couple more launches, but there was just like small CubeSat type of launches.
Speaker 2
03:42
Exactly, some of them were literally like 100 kilograms or something, you know, like not large payloads.
Speaker 3
03:47
And so SpaceX customers are different, so whoever wants to send payloads up into space.
Speaker 2
03:55
Yes, but right now their biggest customer is actually themselves with Starlink. 1 of the biggest reasons they've launched so much mass to orbit is because Starlink is designed around the payload fairing and the payload capabilities of the Falcon 9 rocket. So, you know, because they're vertically integrated, because they build their own satellites, because they're building their own rocket, they can literally design a system that's, you know, another manufacturer might have made a more square satellite that was heavier or something.
Speaker 2
04:20
But SpaceX looked at it from a blank slate and said, here's our constraints, our payload mass constraints, our volume constraints. And they made a funky looking satellite. Things like the size of a, you know, it's like a table folded up, which isn't anything I've, you know, really ever seen before. So, but it's purpose built to fit as efficiently as possible inside their fairing and inside the capabilities of that rocket.
Speaker 2
04:40
So therefore, because they're launching those like an insane amount, a dozen, 40, 50 times a year or whatever, they're just putting up insane amounts of mass like we've never seen before.
Speaker 3
04:52
What about the different versions of Falcon
Speaker 1
04:54
9,
Speaker 3
04:54
so we can linger on them? What are some interesting memories to you of the different developments in Falcon
Speaker 1
04:59
9?
Speaker 2
05:00
The very first Falcon 9s had a square array of engines. It had like a 3x3x3 grid of their Merlin 1 engines, the 1Ds. I think it only lasted, I don't remember if it was 2 or 4 flights before they went into this octawave configuration where there's a ring of 8 engines with a center engine in the middle Still in the same diameter that the rocket was the fuselage was more or less the same 3.7 meter wide diameter But the the actual thrust structure changed and 1 of the big efficiency gains was you no longer have you know a corner engine and then like a edge engine and then another corner engine.
Speaker 2
05:34
You can just make 8 of the same kind of part of the octa web, it's called, the same shape. And then your interchangeability and your manufacturability becomes a lot simpler. So that was kind of 1 of the bigger upgrades at first. They kept stretching it every time they like touch this thing, it got longer and like, or taller and taller technically.
Speaker 2
05:54
And then the next big feature that you saw in 2014 would have been they added landing legs to a Falcon 9 rocket, which was, I was at, that was the first launch I ever went to, was actually to see, it was CRS-3, so Commercial Resupply Mission 3, and it was probably their, God, I don't remember what that was, like, their 14th or 15th launch or something, like, pretty early on. And people were literally laughing at the idea of them putting landing legs on it.
Speaker 3
06:19
They just
Speaker 2
06:19
thought it was stupid. They're like, why are they wasting, why is this billionaire Elon Musk guy wasting his time trying to land a rocket? It's not gonna work.
Speaker 3
06:27
So you said the Mars planet was there in the beginning. What about the reusability of rockets? Was that there in the beginning?
Speaker 2
06:35
I think reusability definitely, you know, it's a necessary part of making any kind of interplanetary mission, you know. In order to actually do that just financially, you have to start reusing these things.
Speaker 3
06:48
In terms of the development of the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9, how early on did the goal of reusing the rocket, having the rocket actually land, How early did that goal creep in?
Speaker 2
07:02
I can't speak for Elon and SpaceX, but it was pretty, you know, immediately they wanted to try to recover. And as a matter
Speaker 3
07:08
of fact, I think the
Speaker 2
07:09
very first 2 Falcon 9 rockets and Falcon 1, I think they even wanted to try to recover using parachutes to recover the first stage. And now fast forward, you know, almost 20 years later and Rocket Lab is actually doing a concept like that where they're pulling a parachute after the first stage is reentering and they actually are trying to recover it with a helicopter, it's gonna try to snatch it out of the air. They've actually done it.
Speaker 2
07:33
They've actually done it successfully once.
Speaker 3
07:34
How does the helicopter grab the rocket?
Speaker 2
07:37
With this giant drag line and
Speaker 3
07:38
a hook. Oh, wow. And then
Speaker 2
07:40
it literally just grabs, snags onto the parachute. Wow. And it's pretty amazing.
Speaker 2
07:45
But this is a small rocket. Their rocket's only about a metric ton. The booster is empty.
Speaker 3
07:50
So the rocket releases parachutes really high up. I'd love to see this. It's an interesting idea.
Speaker 3
07:57
There's so many interesting ideas and possibilities. Like SpaceX basically just innovated a lot of different weird ideas just in the pursuit of making things more efficient, reusable, all of that. So basically thinking from first principles how to solve this problem. And so what you find is like you'll get all of these kind of crazy kind of solutions.
Speaker 2
08:18
And with SpaceX, they weren't even getting to the point of the booster surviving reentry long enough to be able to pull the parachutes. Their mass fractions, and that varies. Every single rocket's different.
Speaker 2
08:30
For instance, Rocket Lab uses carbon composite fuselage and tanks, or the same thing. And that's very, very lightweight, has really good mass fractions, and therefore their drag coefficients and things like that, they were able to survive re-entry of the first stage, which is something that SpaceX wasn't able to do at the time. What's the big, I think, breakthrough for SpaceX with reusing the booster is they realized we had to basically slow down before we hit the atmosphere. So they actually do what they used to call a re-entry burn, which I still think is the correct term because it is re-entering the atmosphere.
Speaker 2
09:03
But now they call it the entry burn, and they light up 3 of the 9 Merlin engines, not only to slow it down, but actually even while those engines are firing, it creates like a literal force field as it's falling through the atmosphere. But it also decreases the velocity by almost half, or around half. And then that therefore decreases the amount of, you know, the biggest thing with the atmosphere is that as it gets compressed against the front of anything flying through the atmosphere, the compressed atoms just get hot. And they can get so hot they turn into a plasma, and they get so hot they can just absolutely destroy anything.
Speaker 2
09:40
So they slow down enough that the air molecules don't end up destroying the vehicle on reentry. And then they realize, I think at some point it's probably a similar crossover. They're like, well, if we're lighting the engines already to slow down in the atmosphere, we can just use that same engine to land. And so like, well, what if we just stuck landing legs on it and just landed the thing vertically?
Speaker 2
10:01
And next thing you know is December 21st, 2015, they did exactly that for the first time.
Speaker 3
10:06
They landed. So you were there before that then, right?
Speaker 2
10:09
Yeah, yeah. In 2014. Yep, early 2014.
Speaker 2
10:11
So that, and for me, that was so fun watching, you know, that was like the peak of me just becoming obsessed with this idea. I'm watching with, like back in the day, it was like months between launches, you know? So a launch was like a big idea. I'd wake up at 3 a.m.
Speaker 2
10:25
To watch this landing attempt or whatever, you know? And every, you know, there's CRS-4 almost landed, CRS-5 almost landed, CRS-6, CRS-7 blew up. I was watching that on, I think it was like a Saturday morning, or maybe a Sunday morning, and I remember watching that and watched it blow up, and I was like, oh my god, now what? You know, and It blew up on ascent.
Speaker 2
10:46
It was their first failure. So it was their 18th flight, I believe. CRS-7, the upper stage, had 1 of the bottles inside the tanks that are filled with helium, and 1 of those bottles broke off on ascent and actually just completely overpressured the upper stage. And the upper stage blew up and the whole rocket went kaboom in an uncontrolled manner.
Speaker 2
11:08
And so then they came back with vengeance. When they came back, the first mission back is the first time that they landed a rocket, which was awesome. So the return to flight after the anomaly was, yeah, was landing a rocket.
Speaker 3
11:20
And stuck the landing.
Speaker 2
11:21
Yep, nailed it.
Speaker 3
11:22
Well, actually the first time. So the first time you were there, what was that like? What do you remember from that day?
Speaker 2
11:27
Just, I was surprised at how much bigger the rocket was than I imagined. I was, I originally when I was going down to Kennedy Space Center, I was disappointed that I wasn't seeing like a, you know, I didn't know a ton about rockets. I knew enough to like know what a space shuttle was, what like the Saturn V was, you know, but that was probably about the end of my knowledge.
Speaker 2
11:45
I just remember being disappointed that I wasn't seeing a big quote unquote NASA rocket flying. I was thinking in my head like, oh, I'm going to see this launch. It's probably going to be like 3 stories tall or something. Just some little skinny little stick and some little firecracker and yay.
Speaker 2
12:01
I think I'd almost been pitched that too. I think the people that I was working for at the time, I think they kind of were downplaying it as like, well, it's not a big rocket, it's not gonna be that exciting. But we get out there to the pad and I'm like, this thing's huge. This is not a small rocket.
Speaker 2
12:16
It's
Speaker 1
12:16
70
Speaker 2
12:17
meters tall, 220 feet tall. It's huge. And I think people forget the scale of that.
Speaker 2
12:23
It might look skinny and tall and all this stuff, but it's still a very, very large piece of machinery. It's physically about as large as you can ship, the booster's about as big as you can ship across the country, period, without completely shutting down highways. It is made within those exact specifications of having lane privileges and bridges and everything. It's 12 feet wide, 3.7 meters wide, and it's 45 meters long.
Speaker 2
12:47
So it's like exactly what you can fit with a pretty standard, you know, like before you start getting into crazy amounts of problems shipping the rocket. And it's huge, it's huge. And people just don't understand that. And so when I saw it with my own eyes, I remember just being like, this is so much cooler than I thought.
Speaker 3
13:03
Is it hard to believe that that thing is gonna have to lift off the ground and launch up into the air? Maybe that's the most humbling aspect of it, that something that size, humans have come up with a way to take something that size and launch it up into the air?
Speaker 2
13:18
Yeah, there's certainly a very humbling aspect when you watch it actually leave.
Speaker 3
13:22
Was there a sound to it? Was there like a feeling? What were the different experiences you first remember?
Speaker 2
13:26
Well, ironically, I didn't end up getting to see that 1 fly. Oh. I went home, my camera saw it.
Speaker 2
13:31
I left my camera out there, like a remote triggered camera. My first images as a launch photographer at the time was CRS-3, but I went home, it scrubbed too many times. This is back in the day, they were scrubbing like often, and they'd be like a 3 day, 5 day, 7 day, you just never knew. So I go home and I watch the live stream of it.
Speaker 2
13:48
So I didn't even get to experience my first launch. Anyone that's ever tried to go to a launch can probably empathize because, yeah, scrubs are very common in the spaceflight world. So That 1 I didn't get to see, but since then, obviously, I've been able to attend very many launches.
Speaker 3
14:06
How much do you understand the control involved in the landing? How difficult is that problem?
Speaker 2
14:09
I couldn't tell you a single thing about the code and the avionics behind it, but I can tell you all the hardware that makes it happen, if that helps.
Speaker 3
14:17
Well, I mean, to me, it seems like whenever I talk to people, they say it's not that big of a deal in terms of the level of intelligence and the control. But to me, it's just like when you observe it, it seems incredible, because all the variables involved, all the uncertainties involved, all the, because there's aerodynamics. I mean, like there's different temperatures.
Speaker 3
14:40
There's so much going on with the fuel, with the burning, the combustion, just everything that's going on to be able to perform control at such high stakes effectively, that code is probably not written in JavaScript, I guess is what I'm saying.
Speaker 2
14:55
Actually, no, I don't, if I remember, again, this is well outside of my domain, but they're coding in a common language.
Speaker 3
15:06
It's probably gonna be C.
Speaker 2
15:07
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it is. And that was 1 of the things that was weird is that Elon, when he started SpaceX, was like, we're just gonna code in the most common language so that we don't have to have people learn this archaic, weird thing. And we can just literally pull people off the streets and be like, here, write it,
Speaker 3
15:22
you know? And- Yeah, it's probably C++. I mean, it'd be epic if it was like Python or something, but I don't, I think like reliable systems have to be written in C, C++ probably, which is a common language, which is something, I imagine like NASA engineers would probably have to use some kind of proprietary language in the olden days for security, for privacy, all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2
15:43
Oh, in the olden, old, old days, like they were inventing code and language from scratch.
Speaker 3
15:49
For sure. It's just still incredible that it's able to do that. Like just the feat of engineering involved is truly, it's like 1 of the marvels to observe about these rockets coming back to Earth that they're able to land.
Speaker 3
16:04
Like the drama of it is just incredible to see.
Speaker 2
16:07
Yeah, well, 1 of the fun things to remember too, with specifically the Falcon 9 and the Falcon 9, or Falcon Heavy boosters, I mean it's the same thing basically, they shut down all but 1 of the 9 engines. And even with that 1 engine at its minimum throttle setting, it's still too much thrust to hover. So as this rocket's coming down, if they start a little bit too early, if they light that engine too early, it will actually stop above the ground and will not be able to lower itself.
Speaker 2
16:35
It will literally stop, say it stopped 200 feet above the ground, their only option is to kill the engine and then it's just gonna fall those 200 feet. So it's what we call a suicide burn or a hover slam, kind of interchangeable terms, because your thrust to weight ratio is never below 1. So they have to actually literally be riding the throttle. So what you do is you kind of start, ideally you kind of start in the middle of your window of throttle range.
Speaker 2
17:00
So let's pretend your engine can throttle down to 40% of its maximum rated thrust. You might start at like 70% of thrust in the middle of that window of where it could burn. So if all of a sudden it's kind of coming in too hot, you have room to throttle up.
Speaker 3
17:13
If
Speaker 2
17:13
you're coming in a little too early, you throttle it down. You have a little bit of wiggle room. And it's just amazing how smoothly and how perfectly they're able to still control that thing, even though they're down to 1 engine out of the 9, and they're still riding the finest margin of what's possible.
Speaker 2
17:28
And they're continually playing with that to try to get it, because every bit of fuel they're using and propellant they're using to land is propellant they weren't using to put something into space. So, they want that to be as efficient as possible. So, they're really watching them hone that in and just continue to evolve and edit that and just get it to be the workhorse. We're coming up on 100 consecutive landings, perfect landings, 100.
Speaker 2
17:52
I think they've done like 150 something landings altogether, 160 altogether. But we're talking like in a row without blowing up, which, you know, 5 years ago was completely experimental and insane, and now we're coming up to the point where we're 100 in a row. It's like this is becoming more reliable. And the landing, which is not the primary mission, this is purely for SpaceX's gain, is to recover the booster.
Speaker 2
18:14
It has nothing to do with the effect of getting the payload on orbit, you know, most of the time. And the landing is really only for their benefit and their gain.
Speaker 3
18:23
Long-term gain, like it's a long-term investment in being able to recover the boosters.
Speaker 1
18:28
100%.
Speaker 3
18:29
Can you believe All this was done in basically 10 years. So we've seen this development over a period of 10 years. So like where we started commercial spaceflight at scale to today where it's almost starting to be mundane.
Speaker 3
18:47
Falcon
Speaker 1
18:47
9
Speaker 3
18:48
is able to do.
Speaker 2
18:49
Yeah, I can't really believe it. I mean, obviously, even just in the, I think I'm a fairly fair weather fan, really didn't start paying attention to like 2014. And just seeing what it was like back then to what it's like.
Speaker 2
19:01
I don't watch every launch at all anymore. I'll catch the big ones. I'll stream some of the really big ones. But back in the day, I, like I said, would wake up in the middle of the night to catch these streams, or catch these launches and watch them, because they were such a big deal, and there's maybe only 5 of them a year.
Speaker 2
19:17
And so it was a really big deal. Nowadays it's like, oh yeah, there's literally like 2 a week on average now. It's insane, from SpaceX alone. Let alone, you know, United Launch Alliance, Rocket Lab, any of the Chinese missions, you know?
Speaker 2
19:29
I mean, there's countless, it's insane. It's hard to, really, really, really hard to keep up with.
Speaker 3
19:34
I wonder at which point in the future, the number of launches to orbit will exceed the number of launches of airplanes, like on the surface of Earth. Yeah, I
Speaker 2
19:45
have to admit, I kind of have a hard time extrapolating out that far. You know, there's a lot of people that are like big futurists and really do think about like interplanetary stuff and think about colonizing Mars and stuff. I have a hard time predicting like when Starship's gonna fly, the orbital launch, you know, and That's like imminent-ish, like month or 2 scale time frame.
Speaker 2
20:03
And yet I'm still like, I can't tell you anything about when we're gonna land on Mars or what that economy and what the scale of launch operations is gonna look like in order to do that, because it's just so hard. I wouldn't have predicted where we're at today 5 years ago. It's insane, it's so hard to predict. Yeah, but it's funny because there's so many new companies starting up trying to predict that and it's a really exciting startup culture right now.
Speaker 3
20:30
I think when you make certain engineering decisions and hiring decisions and like what you focus on in terms of both business and engineering, it's good to think on a scale of 10, 20, 50, 100 years. It's 1 of the things that Elon is exceptionally good at, which is asking the question, okay, this might seem impossible right now, but what's the obvious way to do this if we look out 20 years? And then you start to make decisions.
Speaker 3
20:57
You start to make decisions about robotics, about brain and computer interfaces, about space travel, they make a lot of sense when you look at the scale of 10, 20, 50, 100 years. And don't make any sense if you look at the scale of just months. But of course, the actual work of day-to-day is focused on the next few months because there's deadlines, there's missions they have to accomplish. Anyway, returning back to the brief history of space rockets, the Falcon Heavy.
Speaker 3
21:27
So what else is there? So we talked about Falcon 9 and the rapid development there. What other flavors of Falcon is there and how does that take us to Starship?
Speaker 2
21:36
Yeah, realistically, the Falcon 9 evolved more or less, kind of like just got more powerful and a little bit longer and more capable. But nowadays they fly what's called the Block 5, even though it's like the eighth or ninth iteration of the Falcon 9, but they call it Block 5. It's the 1 that has the black landing legs, the black interstage.
Speaker 2
21:53
They have a fleet of roughly 10 or so that are doing the majority of the legwork these days, and they're flying up to 15 times, I think, right now as the current booster leader. They're also recovering the fairings, so the nose cone of the rockets are frequently, if not every time, being recovered. Same with the booster for the most part. And the only thing being expended is the upper stage, And that's kind of where the Falcon 9 is ending.
Speaker 2
22:18
It really doesn't make sense to develop that infrastructure any longer. So they went with the next step, which is go even bigger physically. So they have more margin for upper stage reusability. And that's what we see with Starship and Super Heavy.
Speaker 2
22:33
So the Super Heavy booster, the whole system is confusing. The whole system is kind of considered Starship, but technically the Starship is just the upper stage, which is also like the spaceship, which is also the upper stage. And then the booster itself is considered the super heavy booster. And that's what they've been working on.
Speaker 2
22:50
Publicly it came out in
Speaker 1
22:51
2016
Speaker 2
22:52
as the, at the time it was the ITS, the Interplanetary Transportation System. Later, and I think about 20, By the end of that year, 2017, it kind of became known as the BFR, the big Falcon rocket. Yeah.
Speaker 2
23:07
And then I think it was about end of 2018, they started calling it Starship. But that is where we're at today, and that's what they're working full steam ahead on.
Speaker 3
23:17
And what about Dragon? We mentioned Dragon, Crew Dragon, Cargo Dragon.
Speaker 2
23:21
Yeah, so they went from the cargo version of Dragon that flew about 20 times successfully to the International Space Station, except for that 1 CRS-7 where the rocket blew up and the capsule obviously didn't make it to the ISS. Then they went into the Dragon 2, which has 2 variants. It has a crew variant, so we just call it Crew Dragon, and then there's the cargo version of Dragon 2.
Speaker 2
23:45
And that's just an updated, sleeker, sexier version of Dragon. And ironically, it's heavier altogether, so you'll never see those cool return to launch site landing, the boosters coming back to land for CRS missions anymore like we used to. But they landed on the drone ship anyway. And yeah, that's been flying successfully.
Speaker 2
24:04
That's kind of the, so there's, yeah, Starlink, Dragon, Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and Starship system is kind of the whole, the whole SpaceX world, really.
Speaker 3
24:12
In terms of the spaceships involved, so What to you are some of the major milestones in that history? We kind of mentioned a few. Stick in the landing, is there something that kind of stands out?
Speaker 2
24:24
Yeah, I would say definitely the big ones obviously, like any of the first, like the first flight of Falcon 1, first flight of Falcon 9, first time they went to the International Space Station, the first time they landed a booster, the first time they reused a booster, which is I think about 6 months after. No, it was a year after. It was SES
Speaker 1
24:41
10, 2017.
Speaker 2
24:43
It was the first time they reused 1 of those boosters, and that was a big milestone. Can we even, yeah, we recovered 1, we caught 1. It's like, we got 1, now what?
Speaker 2
24:53
That was the first time they reflew 1. Yeah, then flying humans was a huge 1, DM-2, Bob and Doug for NASA.
Speaker 3
25:01
Bob and Doug, yeah. Bob and Doug,
Speaker 2
25:03
that was incredible. You know, that was a huge, huge step, I think, for SpaceX was flying people.
Speaker 3
25:08
So it's first major commercial launching of humans out into space.
Speaker 2
25:14
Yeah, and not just into space, because there's been people that have done space flights with suborbital hops, but going into orbit and especially docking and rendezvousing with the International Space Station, it's a big deal. Until you really understand the physics involved and the scale involved of just crossing the Kármán line going straight up versus going into orbit. They're just completely different things almost.
Speaker 3
25:38
What about Starship? Are we in a place where we can talk about milestones with Starship? Has there been, or has it just been an epic journey of failure and successes of testing and so on?
Speaker 3
25:53
What would you classify at this point as a milestone that Starship or BFR, whatever the name is, was able to achieve?
Speaker 2
26:00
Well, so far the milestones we've seen, I'd say the first 1 would be the hop of, they call it Starhopper, and it's basically a very rudimentary rocket. But it was the first time they utilized their new Raptor engine to produce thrust to fly something. It first flew literally like 3 meters off the ground or something, like tethered to the ground.
Speaker 2
26:18
Then it flew like 15, and then finally it flew 150 meters. And that was in
Speaker 1
26:24
2019.
Speaker 2
26:25
And that was the first big milestone of Starship. Then after that, we saw SN5, SN6 kind of do the similar 150 meter hops with a little bit more elegant systems, proving out more of their tank building, proving out more of their, a lot of just subsystems. And then the big ones physically were in end of 2020 and early 2021 when they flew the SN8, 9, 10, 11, and 15.
Speaker 2
26:50
What does the
Speaker 3
26:50
N stand for in SN?
Speaker 2
26:51
I think just serial number
Speaker 3
26:52
or start with number. Yeah, so SN, these are just names, numbers, numerical representations of the different testing efforts. They skipped some numbers, right?
Speaker 3
27:02
Yeah. If they scratch a test.
Speaker 2
27:05
Yeah, and lots of times it'd be like literally that they're building, you know, at Starbase and what SpaceX is working on, like the 1 foot is always in front of someone else's foot and like the arm is not knowing what the leg is doing sometimes, right? Yeah. They will have someone working on, you know, they'll just be like, hurry up and build 40 of these tank sections, and you build the bulkhead, and you build the downcomer, and you build the header tank, blah, blah, blah, and all of a sudden, like, oh, we actually evolved that, we don't use that header tank now.
Speaker 2
27:29
So it's gonna go on to this 1. So they'll have like parts of certain rockets built, and it's like, ah, literally scrap it. Like not scrap it in the joke term, but literally just go scrap it. And so yeah, they just evolve and iterate so quickly.
Speaker 3
27:42
There were some epic explosions. I think Starship, something about it, probably just the amount of fuel, just leads to some epic, epic failures. Would you say Starship is the source of the most epic failures in terms of size of explosion?
Speaker 2
28:00
So you can literally measure it in like a yield of explosive power, you know, like you could TNT. Like you can take a look at how much propellant is left over at the time of the explosion. And you know, Starship, what's flown so far, even though it's physically 1 of the largest flying objects ever, just with the upper stage alone, they've not filled it more than like 10 or 20% full of propellant.
Speaker 2
28:21
Yeah. And so it actually hasn't been, the failures have been really epic looking, big visual fireballs, but in terms of spaceflight, they're still pretty small explosions, believe it or not.
Speaker 3
28:33
They could still go bigger. Oh yeah, a lot, a lot. Of course, the test payload of a Tesla Roadster was launched.
Speaker 3
28:42
I forget what year that was. Yeah, that was 2018. That was quite epic.
Speaker 2
28:45
Would you put
Speaker 3
28:46
that on a milestone?
Speaker 2
28:47
Oh yeah, yeah, Falcon Heavy demo is like definitely a big, big, big milestone, yeah.
Speaker 3
28:52
Is that funny to you that there's a Roadster floating out there? Yeah. Do we know
Speaker 2
28:57
the location of that Roadster at this 0 yeah, whereisroadster.com.
Speaker 3
29:01
Yeah? Oh yeah. Is it orbiting something?
Speaker 2
29:03
Yeah, it's orbiting the sun.
Speaker 3
29:04
So it's
Speaker 2
29:05
orbiting the sun. It's orbiting the sun, and its orbit is basically between the Earth's orbit and beyond Mars. So I think of like 2.5 AU if I remember right.
Speaker 2
29:13
So it's beyond Mars' orbit at its highest point, and it's back at Earth, kind of at its lowest point.
Speaker 3
29:18
I wonder if there's a mission where you're going to somehow connect with it once again and place extra things into it. I wonder how challenging that is technically.
Speaker 2
29:27
Oh yeah, it could absolutely be done. The hard thing at this point, because it's on an eccentric orbit, would be rendezvousing with it, because you kind of have to be in alignment with its orbit to really line up well with it. But yeah, I mean, someday I don't see any reason why we couldn't at least send, for sure, an uncrewed, you know, if Elon wanted to just fly a robot out there to check up on it and photograph it or something, like that could be well within the realm of things.
Speaker 3
29:53
Get an Optimus robot up there. So that was the story brilliantly told by you of the rockets for SpaceX. What about through the lens of engines?
Speaker 3
30:05
Can you give a brief history of the SpaceX rocket engines that were used that we haven't covered? So you mentioned it all started with the Merlin engine and a Kestrel engine. Yeah, through that lens, what's there?
Speaker 2
30:18
Engines are relatively small number, which is easy for us. There's the Merlin, and Merlin's evolved throughout time to be from like the Merlin, to the Merlin 1C, to the Merlin 1D, to the Merlin 1D full thrust, and all these other kind of tweaks of the same architecture. Kestrel ended with Falcon 1.
Speaker 2
30:34
They also have the Merlin vacuum engine which is the upper stage engine for Falcon
Speaker 1
30:37
9.
Speaker 2
30:38
Same relative system but just optimized for vacuum so it has a much larger bell nozzle. There's the Draco thrusters which you know you kind of can consider engines, well, they are rocket engines, but they're just small, they're not like the orbital engines. There's the Super Draco engines, which are the abort thrusters on Crew Dragon capsule.
Speaker 2
30:58
And then nowadays they have the Raptor engine and the Raptor vacuum variant. But they've already had 2 versions of Raptor. We've already seen kind of the Raptor development engine. We've kind of seen like a Raptor 1.5, where it's kind of taking hints of the future Raptor.
Speaker 2
31:12
But now we're well within what you'd consider a Raptor 2 variant. And that's really it.
Speaker 3
31:19
Yeah, for the Raptor, maybe I'll ask you that separately, but I like in general, and people, who doesn't know who Everyday Astronaut is, but if you don't somehow know, go check his, your YouTube channel out, You're an incredible educator about the super technical and the more sort of, even the philosophical, the actual space travel. So you go down to the raw details of it, and there's just great videos on the Raptor engine. I think you have 1 on Merlin, and also the actual tours with Elon where he discusses some of those things.
Speaker 3
31:56
On 1 of the tours he says, he's full of good lines, that guy. He says something about the number of fiddly bits. And he's, the number of fiddly bits was decreased between Raptor 2 and Raptor 1. And I think that's actually a really beautiful representation of the engineering efforts there, which is constantly trying to simplify.
Speaker 3
32:20
Increase the efficiency of the engines, but also simplify the design so you can manufacture it. And in general, simplification leads to better performance and testing and everything. So the number of fiddly bits, I'm sure there's a Wikipedia page on that now, as an index, is actually a really good 1.
Speaker 2
32:38
Well, and when you think about it, I don't know of any other company prior that had kind of tried to measure their performance of their engine, not in like thrust to weight ratio or like how efficient it is in specific impulse, but literally in dollar to thrust ratio? How much does this engine cost? How much thrust can it produce?
Speaker 2
32:57
And using that as a trade study instead of just pure metrics of, because at the end of the day, like, okay, if it's cheaper and does, you know, X amount of work, even if it's less efficient, it can actually be better long-term.
Speaker 3
33:09
And so I guess another way, it's not even just thrust. I don't know if that metric is used, but basically the cost of getting 1 kilogram of thing up into space. Yeah.
Speaker 3
33:19
That's basically what they're trying to minimize.
Speaker 2
33:21
Especially, yeah. At the end of the day, that is definitely the ultimate metric, is how much does 1 kilogram cost to orbit eventually? But it's so funny, because space flight is just the ultimate compromise.
Speaker 2
33:34
Every little thing, any variable can just change everything else. So you can tweak so many different things to get to different numbers and conclusions, you know. But even things like on your first stage when the rocket's pointing straight up and the engines are pointing straight down, you're dealing more with the thrust to weight ratio of the rocket. So how much thrust is it producing versus how much is gravity pulling down on it is actually a more important metric than how raw efficient the engine is.
Speaker 2
34:00
So it's funny, and then in space it's kind of the opposite. Thrust to weight ratio doesn't really matter. What really matters is the actual, the specific impulse, let's call it, or like the nozzle escape velocity of the, or the injection velocity of the, how fast is the gas moving, is like the more important number on orbit. But it's just so crazy, because there's all these, I would just love to see the trade studies, you know, when you're trying to figure out, is this more important than this or this or this?
Speaker 2
34:25
And it's like, you change this 1 little thing, and all of a sudden, everything changes. It's just, even the profile, the launch profile, the trajectory of it, I mean everything. Everything.
Speaker 3
34:36
I wonder what that trade-out discussions are like because you can't really perfectly plan everything. So, and you always have to have some spare leeway, you know, especially as you're testing new vehicles like Starship.
Speaker 2
34:52
Yeah, margins are important.
Speaker 3
34:53
Yeah, having a margin, given all the uncertainty that's there. That's really interesting, like how they do those kinds of trade-offs, because they're also rapidly designing and redesigning and re-engineering. And ultimately you wanna give yourself the freedom to constantly innovate, but then through the process of testing, you solidify the thing that can be relied upon, especially if it's a crude mission.
Speaker 3
35:17
How to do that in a rapid cycle.
Speaker 2
35:20
I remember at some point that NASA, as they're leading up to flying humans for the first time for NASA, there's some talk that we're gonna do a design freeze because SpaceX does evolve and iterate so quickly. They were saying that it was leading, because especially at the time it was a mission called Amos 6, and they lost a rocket. They only lost 2 rockets, like ever really, as far as trying to get something to space.
Speaker 2
35:45
For the Falcon 9, sorry. And the second 1, AMOS-6, I mean, that was back in 2016. So it's been a long time. But at the time, you know, they were looking at flying humans in the near future.
Speaker 2
35:59
And it's like, If you guys keep tweaking this thing every time you take it out to the pad, well, there's going to be a problem, you know? And so there is some pressure from NASA to kind of slow down on that iterative process. But that is also why they were able to evolve the Falcon 9 to be what it is today, is because they did just evolve it so quickly. Literally, like 1 after another was never really the same.
Speaker 2
36:20
And we're definitely seeing that with Starship now. Like it's evolved so quickly that you just can't even keep up with it,
Speaker 3
36:27
you know? So there's a fascinating culture clash there. Have you just, in observing and interacting with NASA folks seen them sort of grow and change and evolve themselves sort of inspired by this new developments in commercial space flight?
Speaker 2
36:41
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a lot of, especially like around DM2, there's a lot of talks in the press conferences and stuff where you'd hear people say, this was a big, this is well outside of our comfort zone to work with SpaceX in this manner because we take this approach to things, we're X, Y, and Z in this way, the way we normally certify things. And we're not used to SpaceX like, well, let's just try it and do something, to a point.
Speaker 2
37:05
And so they said it ended up being fantastic. They loved working that way because it was just less paperwork almost and more just do. But at the same time, SpaceX I think even expressed, I don't remember if it was Hans Koenigsmann or someone in a press conference said, well, we really liked having someone just double check us so that we're not doing something super stupid right before we test something, you know? So there was a cool collaboration because it is 2 very different philosophies of development and managing space programs.
Speaker 3
37:34
I wanted to talk to you a lot about engines, and maybe about Starship, and maybe about your own becoming an actual astronaut, but let's just go there before all that and talk about the actual culture of SpaceX and your conversations with Elon. You've toured SpaceX facilities with him, you've interviewed him, you've interacted with him. What have you learned about rockets, about propulsion, about engineering, about design, about life from those interactions?
Speaker 3
38:06
He's pretty transparent, open human being as an engineer, as a leader, as a person.
Speaker 2
38:14
I would definitely say the biggest takeaway I've had from my times with Elon at SpaceX is the idea of questioning your constraints. He says that a lot, but he also does it a lot. There'll be times where you'll see him change on a dime because he's like rethinking of something in a new or different way.
Speaker 2
38:36
And for me, I think we all put constraints on ourselves. We think about our own limits on things that we can or cannot do. And I think it's made me kind of question like, well, why did I say, no, I can't do that? Or just off the top of my head.
Speaker 2
38:54
A good example. So in Iowa, I live in Iowa, half the time or whatever, there's a bike ride across the state of Iowa called Rag Bry. And every year, thousands of people get together and they ride across to Iowa. And it was last summer, I met up with some friends and they're like, hey, do you want to go on Rag Bry this year?
Speaker 2
39:13
I'm like, it's like a week away. They're like, yeah, you want to go? I'm like, yeah. And so I did, you know, without, and it was 1 of those moments where I was proud of myself because it's like, it's easy to just be like, no, you know, I'm not ready, or this is my constraint, it's like I'm not in shape.
Speaker 2
39:27
But like, just question that, you know? And so I think when it comes down to questioning your own constraints, it's yes, even to that level, of like why do you question yourself on what you can and cannot do?
Speaker 3
39:37
So that's for your personal life is really powerful, but a little bit more intuitive. I think what's really hard is to question constraints in a place like aeronautics or robotics or autonomous vehicles or vehicles, because there's people, there's experts everywhere that have done it for decades. And everyone admires those experts and respects those experts.
Speaker 3
40:01
And for you to step into a room knowing not much more than just what's in a Wikipedia article, and to just use your intuition and first principles thinking to disagree with the experts, That takes some guts, I think.
Speaker 2
40:19
Well, you can't have everyone doing that either. You know, like there has to be some humility of knowing that something is a hardened concept and a hardened, you know, like especially, I'm not an engineer, I don't do this stuff, you know, But I can imagine you sitting there having spent 6 years on a type of valve that perfectly manages cryogenic propellants or whatever, and someone walks in and says, why don't you just put a heater element in there? Or something like, because, we've done that 40 times or whatever.
Speaker 2
40:47
I'm sure there are things like that that are very frustrating, but, but see,
Speaker 3
40:51
the thing is- So I don't
Speaker 2
40:52
know what that's like, you know?
Speaker 3
40:53
The thing is, with the experts, they're always going to be frustrated when the newbie comes in with their first principles thinking, but sometimes that frustration is justified, and sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's just stubbornness for failing to acknowledge a better way. And I've seen it both directions, which is really interesting.
Speaker 3
41:11
So you need both, but that tension's always going to be there and there has to be almost like a dictatorial imperative that breaks through the expertise of the way things have been done in the past to push forward like a new way of doing it. And Elon's done that. I've seen a lot of great engineers do that. I've seen in the machine learning world, because there's been so much development, I've seen that happen.
Speaker 3
41:37
Usually when there's like rapid development that starts to come into play. Yeah. And yeah, and I've seen that autonomous vehicle space, brain-computer interfaces that Elon has evolved with, all of it. It's kind of fascinating to watch.
Speaker 3
41:51
What about the actual design and engineering of the engines? Since you've learned about so many different kinds of engines over the past few years, just like what stands out to you about the way that engineering is done at SpaceX or that Elon does engineering?
Speaker 2
42:08
The hardest thing to kind of remember is like how much stuff was developed in the 50s and 60s. You know, the concepts finally being utilized today were already literally done in the 60s. You know, so a lot of the things that SpaceX is doing isn't a novel concept per se.
Speaker 2
42:26
You know, like for instance, the Raptor engine utilizes the full flow stage combustion cycle engine. And that was already developed by the Soviets in the 60s for an engine called the RD-270. And it makes sense. Like on paper, 100% it makes sense because you're basically extracting the absolute maximum potential of the chemical energy in both propellants.
Speaker 2
42:51
And at the end of the day, you have to be dumb enough to say we're gonna try using this thing because it's actually really complicated to do what they're doing. But at the same time, so are rockets. Rocket engines are already stupid complicated, so adding
Speaker 1
43:05
10-20%
Speaker 2
43:06
more pain in the butt during the R&D, if it's in the long, long, long 20-30 year existence or whatever, future of that engine, is that going to be worth it? Obviously, SpaceX said, yeah, I think we can actually develop this Raptor engine. So it's just interesting to see the things that have been looked at, or even reusability.
Speaker 2
43:26
The space shuttle was reusable. It was fully – The upper stage, the shuttle itself, the orbiter was, I mean, that thing was, for all intents and purposes, a reusable rocket. Now, did it live up to its expectations? Not necessarily.
Speaker 2
43:41
So it left a lot of bad taste in people's mouth on the ideas of reusability. So for SpaceX to kind of come back into the room and on the table and say, we're gonna use a reusable rocket, specifically we're gonna do a fully reusable rocket, you know a lot of people are, even still today a lot of people are going, yeah, you're not gonna be able to do that.
Speaker 3
43:59
Even today. Even today? So like long term, you're not gonna be able to reuse at scale?
Speaker 2
44:05
Yeah, but definitely, I think the number of people that are saying that today is a small portion of those that were saying that type of thing 5 years ago. You know, when Elon did that announcement in
Speaker 1
44:16
2016
Speaker 2
44:17
for the ITS. It was very, very aspirational. And people were just like, yeah, right.
Speaker 2
44:24
And there was a large number of people that had the factual reasons to think that and do that. At the time, they'd only landed like 2 rockets or something, when they did that, or maybe 3. It was a very small number. When they announced that, actually, they had just lost, a couple months prior, they just lost MO6.
Speaker 2
44:40
So, they were still this young, blossoming company, and they come in and be like, we've figured out reusability, and now we're gonna go full scale, make the world's biggest, most heaviest, most powerful rocket ever. And we're going to fully reuse it. And it's going to go to Mars. It was just pretty out there.
Speaker 2
44:54
Like it really was. And it's all about perspective. But now, again, we're coming up on 100 consecutive landings of an orbital class rocket that's 45 meters tall, 3.7 meters wide. This thing is huge, weighs 20 metric tons even empty when it's landing.
Speaker 2
45:12
That thing's already huge. So seeing the success of that, I think people are now more like,
Speaker 3
45:16
well,
Speaker 2
45:16
okay, maybe there is actually the opportunity to be fully reasonable. That's definitely probably the biggest constraint that I think has been questioned. That is being.
Speaker 2
45:25
The reasonability. Yep.
Speaker 3
45:26
And then, of course, like the broader 1 of cost, of bringing down costs, that you're able to kind of bring down costs so much that something like colonizing Mars or mini trips to Mars will be a possibility. People don't even, it seems so far out that they don't even have time or give effort to questioning it. But it's the implied questioning.
Speaker 3
45:49
Can you really do that many launches?
Speaker 2
45:52
Actually do it.
Speaker 3
45:53
Can you actually do it?
Speaker 2
45:55
I think it's 1 of those things where you look at the curve. You look at like 10 years ago, that was ridiculous. Following this curve, if SpaceX goes from 2 years ago launching, I don't remember what it was, 40 times to 60 times to 100 times this year is their amount.
Speaker 2
46:10
And if we just keep extrapolating that out, if they maybe not that exponential, maybe it goes more linear or whatever. What's 20, 30 years? The amount of stuff we can put on orbit and the potential we have to do things, absolutely. Now, I don't want to put a time frame.
Speaker 2
46:27
But you got to think we're increasing the number of launches, we're increasing the amount of things in space, we're increasing the amount of payload on orbit, that's probably not going to decrease anytime soon. And therefore, eventually, like, the idea of going to Mars is absolutely reasonable.
Speaker 3
46:43
Let me ask a difficult question that needs to be asked here. Can SpaceX continue its successes without Elon? This long-term mission to Mars.
Speaker 3
46:57
I think the discussion about Tesla and autopilot or robotics or a neural link with brain-computer interfaces is a question wholly separate from the SpaceX question because there's a lot of other competitors doing some different but amazing engineering that Tesla is doing in both autonomous vehicles, semi-autonomy or full autonomy, and obviously in vehicle design and electric vehicles. There's a lot of people that are doing incredible brain-computer interfaces. But while there is a lot of competitors to SpaceX, and we'll talk about many of them, they're doing amazing work, it seems like he's really driving progress here over the past 10 years. What do you think about that?
Speaker 2
47:43
Okay, the first thing I think to remind people is just how many brilliant people do work at each of these companies. Obviously, you know, Elon's had the Some of the best teams assembled ever just incredible people. He knows this He he will gladly tell people and he says it often like the amazing people the amazing teams here.
Speaker 2
48:02
So it is important to remember that. That being said, like there is something to Elon's just super far forward, not taking no for an answer on things approach. And almost to his dismay, I think, he is afraid of the sunk cost fallacy so much that it almost gets to the border of being like, throw out everything before it's even, we've known it or not, but at the same time, it moves the needle so fast, so far. So as far as the question of would SpaceX continue to succeeding and be able to ultimately go to Mars without Elon, the Mars thing, I think, would probably be hard to uphold without Elon.
Speaker 2
48:45
I think a lot of that drive for Mars is from Elon. It is maybe too fantastical for the average person and the average employee and maybe the average CEO that might step in to have a company's mission be to go to Mars.
Speaker 3
48:57
Like it's just- Or even governments. Yeah. Clearly because like you said, the Mars plan was non-existent for NASA.
Speaker 2
49:03
Yeah, still really, there isn't much, you know? So I think if-
Speaker 3
49:09
How many people, and sorry to interrupt, how many people are talking about, it's obvious that we need to become multi-planetary?
Speaker 2
49:16
Right, there's not a- There's the Mars Society.
Speaker 3
49:20
And- Like serious leaders of engineering efforts, or nations and so on. Yeah. Which it does seem, if you think about it, that it's obvious.
Speaker 2
49:31
Yeah, in the grand eventuality, it is obvious. Of human civilization, this whole human experiment we have here, we should be expanding out into the cosmos. 100%.
Speaker 2
49:43
So I think the big mission, if we're measuring SpaceX's success on getting to Mars or not, I think they'd have a really hard time continuing to fulfill that drive without Elon at the helm. Now, I think there's a certain balance and beauty of Elon, specifically when it was Tesla and SpaceX, where Elon will go in, have mild tornadoes around the factory and the engineering, and mix everything up, and things get sometimes just totally thrown together, and totally just get it done just to get it done and start moving in that direction. And then he'll leave and go do that same thing at SpaceX or Tesla, vice versa. And then there's a little bit of a calm where people come back in and they fill in those gaps.
Speaker 2
50:27
I think that's kind of always been a pretty healthy thing, honestly, is like, I think if he is too focused on any 1 thing, it almost is like he'll spin too much, you know, like it's like... Too many tornadoes. Yeah, too many tornadoes. And I think it could almost be like, you need someone to come back in and like, you know, like backfill almost.
Speaker 2
50:48
I've heard definitely stories of like, like, well, probably a good example would be last, what was that last year or
Speaker 3
50:55
2 years
Speaker 2
50:55
ago? 2022, yeah. Was that? Yeah.
Speaker 2
50:58
Or no. 2021, they did the first full stack of the Starship Super Heavy. And they called it the big surge. All of a sudden, thousands of SpaceX employees came down to Starbase, and they just started building like you wouldn't freaking believe.
Speaker 2
51:14
I mean, it's just things going crazy. It was actually in the middle of that first interview I did with him was in the middle of that surge. There was like commotion like you wouldn't believe. You couldn't hardly talk because there's just so much going on.
Speaker 2
51:24
People just welding and blah, blah, blah, you know. Everything they did during that period was basically scrapped Because it was just not done very well. But they got a fully stacked Starship rocket out on their launch pad. You know, and it set, I think at some point you kind of have to stabilize some things enough and just say like, this is what we're doing to catalyze some things and say, now do this.
Speaker 2
51:50
It's almost like do it for fake, now do it for real almost.
Speaker 3
51:53
It's funny, because through that time, because I had a lot, a lot of conversation with him, I think that process was hugely stressful. There was a sense, I don't know where that sense is today, but there's a sense that Starship is going to be very hard to pull off.
Speaker 2
52:07
Yeah, that's still.
Speaker 3
52:08
Borderline impossible to pull off. And that was really weighing heavy on him and the team and everybody. So to have this chaos of development is fascinating.
Speaker 3
52:18
Yeah,
Speaker 2
52:18
big time. And I think they really had to push. You know, if they hadn't done that, if they hadn't done that big push, you know, we might only be now seeing a rocket stacked for the first time.
Speaker 2
52:32
You know, it might be a lot more finished rocket, a lot more high fidelity, a lot more flight worthy rocket finished and stacked, but, and they might not have to walk stuff backwards, but at the same time, like you do have to, in this world, You do have to push really hard to make rapid iteration and rapid change in progress. So it's interesting, I
Speaker 3
52:53
don't know. So lingering on that, another question I really should ask you because of you've seen, you've been in awe of the amazing development of space travel technology over the past few years. What do you think about Elon buying Twitter?
Speaker 3
53:14
So in this perfect balance, optimized reallocation of tornadoes throughout the various efforts in human civilization. Do you think, do you worry about his involvement on Twitter?
Speaker 2
53:29
I mean, personally, I just, I see that as a lot less important than, and personally for me, inspirational than Starship and the work done at SpaceX and Tesla. To me, those were 2 very impactful and really, really just generally uniting, something to rally around, get excited about, rally, and just like a future to look forward to. You know, the idea of we're gonna be building the world's most powerful, biggest rocket ever, and it's eventually gonna be able to get humans on Mars for the first time.
Speaker 2
54:01
And we're gonna transition the world into fully sustainable, awesome, just totally badass cars that do all these cool things. To me, those were like, that brought a sense of unity and a sense of like, we can do this. Personally, I just don't think that a social media, no matter what it is, I don't see that in a social media. And I don't see any sort of politicking as ever anything that's really ever uniting thing.
Speaker 3
54:27
I understand that, I totally agree with you, especially with space, how inspiring it is. I have to push back. I do think the impact of social media, the basic level of meaningful connections of this collective intelligence that we call human civilization through the medium of digital communication, which is social media, I think that can have a huge impact.
Speaker 3
54:53
It could be the very vehicle that increases the inspiration that SpaceX does and all different. The thing I've criticized them a bunch for is like why bring politics into this? So the political divisions that we see on Twitter, feeding them is tricky.
Speaker 1
55:15
It's tricky to sort of understand what
Speaker 3
55:17
is the value of that, what is the contribution of that to this whole effort we've got going on. So that's been a big challenge. But that said, again, this tornado, the number of tornadoes in social media I think is really important because social media has such a huge impact on us as a society.
Speaker 3
55:39
And to have a transparent, have a bit of turmoil, you know, It's like Tom Waits says, I like my town with a bit of drop of poison, with a little drop of poison. So a little bit of that to shake things up I think might be really healthy. I just worry about the long-term impact on the whole Mars project through that. But you know what?
Speaker 3
56:04
This life, 1 of the reasons it's fun is through the chaos, like none of us know how it's gonna turn out and hopefully we try to help each other to make sure it turns out well.
Speaker 2
56:17
And this really isn't like anything about my personal like politics or anything like that, but really just generally, any of my friends that are like, the first thing you hear about them in their day is something that happened in politics or something that some world leader is doing or not doing or saying and not saying, I just don't find that to be the most important thing, really. I know that obviously that can affect a lot of people, that has big real world consequences, politics do. Well, like, I just, and this is just me, I'm such a like, oh, come together, cheerio kind of guy, that I just really think like you need something bigger than bickering about what people said and did and what they voted on and all this stuff to really push humanity forward.
Speaker 2
57:03
Like I, you know, I know that politics and, and there and, and by extracting that social media can affect things like space flight and even our like planetary defense, like being able to defend ourselves against asteroids, like if Politics has their way and everything goes to crap and we don't even get to, you know, yeah, we're not gonna be able to, you know, continue space flight and things like that. But like, I don't know, I just think there's better ways to do it, more uniting ways to do it than, you know, what feels like immature name calling sometimes, you know?
Speaker 3
57:32
Yeah, I think the political bickering that most people talk about, that's on top of most people's minds, is the thing that'll be completely forgotten by history. It has actually very little impact. Yes, politics matters, but like 1% of it.
Speaker 3
57:45
I think most of it is just political bickering, the push and pull of the red team and the blue team, and then the news media that feeds off the division for the attention, and it's just like a fun, athletic event almost with the blue team and the red team. So that you kind of have to have a historical perspective on it. Like most things will not really have a significant impact. And we should focus on development of science, technology, engineering, which is the thing that grows the pie.
Speaker 3
58:20
This is what the economists know well. Just the innovation, the engineering, that's what actually makes everybody richer. This kind of political bickering is just eating the pie.
Speaker 2
58:29
And not just richer, but it improves their lives. You know, we can look at every modern technology that is bestowed upon us today, air conditioning, electricity, internet access, fresh, clean water, running water, blah, blah, blah. You know, 100 years ago, so many of the things that I listed either didn't exist or were only accessible by the ultra wealthy.
Speaker 2
58:48
You know, and it's through the innovation of technology and engineering and education that we're able to have it be that even someone below the poverty line and the most of the developed world will have a good number of those things in their life. And that's just continuing to increase and continuing to get better. So I think, yeah, to me that's, in the grand scheme, more important, but to each their own.
Speaker 3
59:12
Speaking of amazing technological development, You have a few videos on this, but how does a rocket engine work? You're wearing some of the instruction manuals. But for 1 type of it, like what's the fuel, what are the types of different rockets that you can kind of give an overview.
Speaker 2
59:33
Yeah, ultimately a rocket engine converts high pressure and heat into kinetic energy. Like that's the only real job of a rocket engine is to take a high pressure gas, hot high pressure gas, very energized, there's a lot of energy involved, and then literally turning that into molecules shooting in 1 direction, into kinetic energy. So yeah, what you do basically, you know, I mean, the simplest way to do it is to take a molecule, and you can do it in a
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