EP: 1 - Starship Flight 3
Update: 2024-03-21
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In this episode Tim answers some of your questions about Starship Flight 3.
If you want your questions answered, just use hashtag #spacewalkpodcast and we’ll take questions from there each episode, but we’ll also be taking questions from our patron supporters, YouTube members and X subscribers as well as a thank you
If you want your questions answered, just use hashtag #spacewalkpodcast and we’ll take questions from there each episode, but we’ll also be taking questions from our patron supporters, YouTube members and X subscribers as well as a thank you
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Transcript
00:00:00
Hi, it's me Tim Dodd, the already asked not to welcome to episode one of Spacewalk.
00:00:05
We're about a week out from SpaceX's third full stack launch of Starship, and we have a lot of questions from you about how it went.
00:00:13
So, I figured now would be a perfect time to talk about Starships, third launch.
00:00:17
*Music* Episode one of Spacewalk.
00:00:38
Wow.
00:00:39
Yeah, this is only what I do for a long time.
00:00:42
Sorry if you hear stuff, this is again kind of the whole point of this whole podcast, is it might not always sound great.
00:00:48
I'm going to be walking around today.
00:00:50
I'm actually on my way home from Texas, finally, after the first or after that.
00:00:54
It's the third Starship launch, so I'm actually at the O'Hare Airport, working my way back home to Iowa.
00:01:00
So, if you hear stuff, that is why.
00:01:02
And yeah, again, this is, I guess, you know, I'm tucked away in a fairly quiet place right now.
00:01:07
It's just way too noisy when I'm walking around, so today's Spacewalk will not be a walk.
00:01:11
It'll just be a wall on the go.
00:01:15
But we, again, I'm recording this almost a week out from the third Starship full stack test.
00:01:22
And man, oh man, there's just so much to talk about.
00:01:26
It was, in some ways, it was so much better than I thought I'm so glad to see so much progress.
00:01:33
In other ways, the failure of the upper stage and the lack of its ability to, you know, properly maintain orientation is a pretty big bummer because that is not only nest necessary for reentry,
00:01:46
but that is also necessary for any just normal mission, any, like even if this was not a reusable vehicle, being able to maintain attitude once on orbit and the ability to re-light engines is a big deal.
00:01:58
So I really hope that gets figured out on the next one.
00:02:01
We'll talk about that here in a little bit, but actually yeah, we'll start with this one.
00:02:05
This is a question from Tommy McCormick over on Patreon.
00:02:09
Again, we will be grabbing some questions from you guys, supporters on Patreon, YouTube, and Twitter or X.
00:02:16
We'll read some of those.
00:02:18
We also have some other questions that I pulled from just from Twitter as well.
00:02:22
And you can use hashtag #SpaceWalkPodcast and that will help us find questions and topics to talk about for the upcoming episode.
00:02:29
So, so let's answer Tommy's question here.
00:02:31
It says, "If, as I think you speculated, the Starship's thruster collected ice and may have caused the slow roll and entering the atmosphere at the wrong angle, what would the solution be to this problem?
00:02:42
Is this a new issue because SpaceX's design or a known problem already solved on other spacecraft?
00:02:47
Can they use heaters to prevent ice or will it be a different type of thruster we need it?"
00:02:51
Yeah, the thruster.
00:02:52
So don't forget, they aren't really, okay, so so far there is some confusion and confusion on my part too.
00:02:59
I know that there's that famous video, I guess, now with me asking Elon Musk that question about the, you know, you're only going to use this on the booster, right?
00:03:09
Where I'm asking him about, you know, the hot gas thruster system.
00:03:13
And I don't know if I'm wrong or if he's wrong or if we're all wrong or what, but my understanding of a hot gas thruster is it has some kind of reaction,
00:03:23
some kind of heated reaction, an exothermic reaction, and then it's not just, you know, the reason I say this is the gas inside of the old tanks is still really cold.
00:03:34
Yes, it might be hot when it comes, you know, some of it is coming through the engine, through heat exchanger and through the regen channels of the engine.
00:03:42
And then the gas is pumped back into the, the tanks of the, of the Starship vehicle.
00:03:48
So yeah, at some point it might be relatively hot, but in general it's really cold.
00:03:54
It's, it's close to crowd-genic.
00:03:55
And so when you're just venting a single gas like that, it's not having a reaction.
00:04:00
And I think by definition it's still a cold gas thruster.
00:04:03
So I know there is talks about doing like a proper methilox hot gas thruster where they're actually combining methane and oxygen.
00:04:11
We have not seen anything like that to date.
00:04:14
Will we, I don't know.
00:04:16
Is this the whole point, like did Elon just say hot gas thruster because it's hotter than a normal cold gas thruster or like what, what I don't exactly know, I want to get more details on it.
00:04:26
And that's kind of what I like about, I guess this whole podcast thing is that I'm going to just be doing this kind of stuff where I'm telling you kind of where I'm at and my knowledge base.
00:04:35
And I hope that in the future we can get some answers to this kind of stuff.
00:04:38
So I think though the idea is to not have to use any reaction thrusters, any reactive thrusters for RCS, you know, reaction control thrusters ironically.
00:04:50
I think the main idea, the whole point of these alleged thrusters and the alleged gas control system is that starship is unique in the idea that the entire spacecraft,
00:05:00
like two-thirds of it is full of alleged gas.
00:05:05
And as it stays in space, you actually have to vent that anyway.
00:05:08
You're going to have a boil off.
00:05:10
You're going to have to release that gas.
00:05:12
And every time you do that, on a normal spacecraft, if you just vent it out of a single port, you actually have to correct for that.
00:05:18
So say it has a, let's say you have a normal oxygen tank that's venting oxygen once it's an orbit.
00:05:24
If you have it venting out, you know, in a non-symmetrical way, just a single port, you would have to have RCS if you were trying to maintain attitude.
00:05:31
You would have to have RCS react in the opposite action.
00:05:34
So you're actually not only venting gas, but you're also wasting your reaction control.
00:05:39
So the idea is if you can use your venting gas to control in these moments, then it's free.
00:05:47
It's essentially free, you know, free energy in the sense that it was going to be wasted and expelled anyway.
00:05:53
So how does that actually look?
00:05:55
What does that actually look like?
00:05:56
Well, what if you don't need to do a maneuver?
00:05:57
You can vent them at the same time, you can have two vents open opposite each other and cancel each other out.
00:06:03
You can also, you know, kind of store it up.
00:06:06
There's some wiggle room there in the total pressure of the olig system.
00:06:09
So, you know, a starship can likely handle anywhere from, you know, we'll say 5, 6, 7, 8 bars.
00:06:17
And by the way, that was, you know, one bar in chamber pressure in the olig pressure and a tank that big is a lot of pressure.
00:06:27
So that's actually a lot of potential energy.
00:06:29
If you even have it raised just a tiny bit, you can store it up for a little bit, but obviously you have to keep it within safe rooms.
00:06:35
So it is an interesting thing.
00:06:38
It's a really interesting control scheme.
00:06:41
And I'm really curious how this will work out for the next one.
00:06:45
What fixes they can make my speculation is that it seems like either they didn't have enough control thrusters or like one was either stuck open or stuck closed or something was happening that was just making it so as it was trying to correct an orient itself,
00:07:01
it just wasn't, it wasn't accurate.
00:07:04
It was not working as intended.
00:07:07
So that's my current speculation, which then means it was not able to reenter in the correct attitude.
00:07:14
It was not able to reenter in a stable orientation with the heat shield facing reentry.
00:07:20
It was still tumbling as it was coming back into reentry and it was going to be reentry no matter what.
00:07:24
This is also why it didn't re-light the engines.
00:07:27
So as you likely know, they were hoping to do a Raptor engine re-light test on Flight 3.
00:07:32
They did not, probably because it was tumbling out of control.
00:07:34
They couldn't subtle the tanks.
00:07:37
So the question is, will they figure this out?
00:07:40
My assumption is, of course they will.
00:07:42
Will they have to make changes?
00:07:43
Maybe.
00:07:44
Is it something they can do with software?
00:07:45
I don't know.
00:07:46
Is it something they have to add additional hardware, heaters or whatever?
00:07:49
I don't know.
00:07:50
Is there a thing they have to totally change and do a typical dual prop, like a hydrazine system?
00:07:58
I don't know.
00:08:00
Where we're at, I wouldn't be surprised if they fly this exact same thing again.
00:08:04
Maybe add a few more ports.
00:08:06
That's something they can do relatively easy with Starship.
00:08:09
It's just kind of welding new ports.
00:08:12
It's not like other vehicles where it's, you know, it's like, well, we built it.
00:08:17
It's totally done.
00:08:18
This is like, well, we built it.
00:08:19
It's still a canvas for future expansion and future changes.
00:08:24
And that's half the beauty of using stainless steel.
00:08:26
Half the beauty of this entire editor of program is it's not necessarily a huge deal for them to just, you know, we'll tack on some new thrusters.
00:08:35
You know, we've seen them literally just weld in like new steel, a different set of CO PV tanks and change out different systems on the fly, especially like star hopper and the SN days you saw that happening all the time.
00:08:47
We hope to see that less and less as this vehicle gets closer and closer to being, you know, actually operational.
00:08:54
But it wouldn't surprise me at all if it does change.
00:08:57
And how big and small if it's noticeable, we have yet to find out.
00:09:02
And hopefully we find out soon.
00:09:04
But this is on that topic, AJ Tonkick, or sorry, @ajtoncek on Twitter asks,
00:09:16
do you think Starship could make it safely to the ground if it loses a few heat shield tiles?
00:09:20
Could it theoretically reflown?
00:09:22
So on that note, assuming it reenters, you know, has proper orientation through reentry and its heat shield is facing the correct way and the flaps are working and it maintains orientation,
00:09:36
I 100% suspect Starship can fly and make it to the ground safely, missing a handful of heat shield tiles.
00:09:44
The reason I say that is because we saw not only the space shuttle do that exact thing, also the brawn shuttle do the exact same thing with many missing heat shield tiles.
00:09:53
And the important note here is their heat shield system was protecting the aluminum chassis of that vehicle.
00:10:01
So the fuselage of the shuttle and aluminum alloys.
00:10:05
Starship is stainless steel, which in general has a lot higher melting point.
00:10:10
You know, another big weakness of the shuttle was, you know, this leading edges of the shuttle were reinforced carbon carbon.
00:10:17
And when it had a foam strike during Columbia, unfortunately it just poked a huge hole in the actual wing.
00:10:24
With Starship, even if heat shield tiles are falling off and hitting, you know, the lower flaps, like we kind of saw, I think actually in our high speed footage from our team down at Starbase,
00:10:35
when you see cosmic perspective footage with Ryan shooting on the tracking telescope that we have, which I so mean hopefully we've seen that footage by now.
00:10:42
It's outstanding.
00:10:43
You can see the vehicle going through Max Q and you can see heat shield tiles falling off and hitting the grid fence and stuff.
00:10:49
And it's spectacular.
00:10:51
Now if a heat shield tile falls off of Starship and hits one of those, you know, the lower flaps, I don't think it's a big deal.
00:10:58
I think it, yes, might destroy another heat shield or two or three or four, but the underlying structure there is stainless steel as opposed to the shuttle when it had foam strikes literally could punch holes in the actual leading edge of the wing.
00:11:12
And importantly, the other note is that that is not actually the leading edge of Starship.
00:11:16
You know, it more or less comes in belly first.
00:11:20
Now you don't necessarily want to have exposed stainless steel on the top of those, you know, on the upper edges of those flaps.
00:11:27
But I just don't think it's as big of a deal on Starship as it would have been on the space shuttle or baron or some other similar vehicle.
00:11:34
And again, we have seen stainless steel stainless steel things reenter from orbit in one piece, such as the Centaur upper stage has actually made it to the ground as a single piece before with zero heat shielding and very thin stainless steel.
00:11:50
So do I think that it could have safely made it to the ground if it loses a few tiles 100 percent?
00:11:57
And I'm sure we'll see that.
00:11:58
I'm positive.
00:11:59
We will see Starships come back from orbit missing a handful of tiles.
00:12:04
Now I do have to say flight three had way fewer missing tiles than flight two.
00:12:10
I would like to still see improvement on that.
00:12:12
I would like to see, you know, maybe only a few missing like a small handful, two, three, four, five and not 20 or 30.
00:12:19
I don't really know the number yet, but it definitely seems to be a massive improvement from flight two.
00:12:25
And, you know, I assume we can only get better from here.
00:12:28
So, but that being said, I do think it doesn't suffer as much of a fate, a bad fate if it is missing.
00:12:35
You know, and again, spatial landed with missing tiles, same with boron.
00:12:40
So, yeah, it's so on that, no one I guess here's another Patreon question from Brantley O'Day asking, how do you feel seeing Starships failures knowing you will one day fly aboard?
00:12:53
Now this is a pretty common question and it's a, I guess a completely understandable question.
00:12:59
I have personally segregated the differences in my head between this test vehicle and my eventual ride with Dear Moon on Starship,
00:13:09
you know, this is, we're not used to seeing this.
00:13:13
We are not used to seeing the iterative design process truly played out in front of our eyes.
00:13:18
A lot of the stuff would typically happen behind closed doors where a company or a program is trying something over and over and just blowing stuff up and seeing what works and what doesn't.
00:13:28
SpaceX is very public about this.
00:13:30
They talk about it all the time.
00:13:32
We've seen these vehicles go from the most simple rudimentary star hopper, you know, just little tiny hoppery can with a Raptor engine stuck on, you know,
00:13:43
water tower with a Raptor engine stuck to it, to a lot more advanced rocket now with 33 other world's most advanced engines running simultaneously flawlessly through a cent.
00:13:54
You know, it's in my head, we're just not even anywhere close yet to the actual vehicle.
00:14:00
We will see a lot of progress.
00:14:01
We need to see a lot of progress for us to fly and that's where I'm looking at milestones.
00:14:06
I'm not looking at these individual flights as like, oh no, or oh good, or oh bad, oh that's going to be me or anything.
00:14:13
None of that because it's just completely different.
00:14:15
And you know, in fact, you have to keep in mind that our mission requires orbital refueling.
00:14:22
We can't Starship cannot get to the moon and back without completely refueling or at least partially refueling, mostly refueling in low Earth orbit.
00:14:32
So we will have to see that demonstrated, which also means we have to have a rapid flight cadence.
00:14:37
Starship will have flown dozens, if not several dozens, 50, 60, 70, 80 flights before we fly on it.
00:14:46
So, you know, we expect to see Starship launches.
00:14:48
We expect to see refueling launches, we expect to see human landing system.
00:14:52
We expect to see other human flights before us, including Jared Isaacman's for players three.
00:14:57
There's a lot that we should see happen before, before Dear Moon.
00:15:03
And again, trying to predict when that happens, I have no idea.
00:15:06
I'm just looking at milestones.
00:15:08
The next milestone I want to see is getting to orbit.
00:15:11
The next milestone I want to see after that is deploying payloads.
00:15:14
The next milestone, actually, no, here I'll go in order.
00:15:16
The next milestone I want to see is this exact flight profile, reflown, and reflown perfectly.
00:15:22
Where the raptor engine relights, the payload door operates perfectly fine, which there's some questions that I'm either not, that cycled properly.
00:15:30
I want to see reentry and I want to see it belly flop in one piece.
00:15:34
I also want to see the booster, relighting its engines on the next go, which I think is mostly a relatively easy software fix flight control.
00:15:44
It's kind of a PIDs issue, which would be, you know, kind of how quickly the proportional integral derivative is what PIDs stands for, a PID device, basically,
00:15:54
how much it's reacting to things in the speed of those grid fins.
00:15:59
How are they controlling?
00:16:00
I'm sure now they have a lot more data on it and going, oh, these overreactor to these underreactor to whatever.
00:16:05
And hopefully they will get a really good handle on that in relatively no time.
00:16:09
I expect by the next launch, the booster should maintain proper control, not have sloshing in its tanks or whatever happened to actually cause the raptors to not relight.
00:16:19
It's a lot easier for the booster to relight because it is slowing down and it is decelerating.
00:16:23
So therefore the liquid should be at the bottom of the tanks, it should be a lot easier to relight an engine in those circumstances.
00:16:30
So I expect to see that and then I expect to see a full orbital attempt and then I expect to see, you know, I expect to see starlings deployed.
00:16:39
Then I expect to see just a lot more mouse ones like that.
00:16:43
I expect to start seeing refueling a tanker put up and things preparing for the human landing system.
00:16:48
Once the human landing system is launched, then it's really game on.
00:16:52
Then I will be thinking, wow, they have life support, they have refueling.
00:16:56
They obviously have like orbital and reuse figured out and you know, at least recoverability of the booster, all these big huge milestones, they will have figured out by the time human landing system goes.
00:17:08
So for me, when human landing system launches for NASA, that will be the big, big milestone and that's when I will start, you know, thinking about deer moon more and really will likely be preparing around that same time too.
00:17:20
I have no idea what our training schedules and stuff will look like, but you know, that's kind of the big, big, big milestone for me.
00:17:28
And with one more question, this is from our Discord which is, you know, available through Patreon from Nathan or Enmoling and Discord asking what parts of the Starship design do you think are working better than expected examples,
00:17:40
belly flop and hot staging?
00:17:41
I would definitely say hot staging.
00:17:43
I am shocked that they're two for two on hot staging.
00:17:47
Now at least as far as the upper stage, you know, for the hot stage events, the booster's fared way better than I thought it would have for both of them.
00:17:56
You know, the first one at least it maintained, you know, main state intact.
00:18:00
The second one, it really had a clean boost backburn.
00:18:03
But the, both times the Starship upper stage looked like it was clean running right from the get go.
00:18:08
No big deal.
00:18:09
And that's really impressive to me.
00:18:11
So I would definitely say that the hot staging has gone from, and it's not that crazy.
00:18:17
Again, we've done this before, Soviets, you know, did it all throughout Soyuz and Proton and the United States did it with a Titan II rocket.
00:18:24
Like it's, it's not that crazy of a thing, but at this scale, it just feels different.
00:18:29
It just feels like holy crap.
00:18:30
And with reusable rockets, you just don't think about lighting an engine on top of the other rocket while it's, you know, while they're attached.
00:18:37
Like it's just, it is wild.
00:18:39
It is crazy.
00:18:40
And, you know, that's a, that's something that I've been really impressed with.
00:18:45
Otherwise, I think the other thing that's going better than I expected, the fact that the last two flights have had 33 Raptor engines running the entire ascent on Starship on the Super Heavy Booster is amazing.
00:18:55
And then especially on this last launch, seeing clean shutdown of all six Raptor engines.
00:19:01
And even the shutdown for the boost backburn on Super Heavy, I mean, Raptor's impressive.
00:19:06
Raptor went from, this is a cool engine to, okay, this is a legitimate engine.
00:19:13
This is a real engine capable of real work, capable of doing real missions, capable of absolutely nutty numbers.
00:19:22
So I'd say, yeah, Raptor engine and the hot stating are the two things that have so far for the Starship program been going better than I expected.
00:19:30
So, you know, maybe next week we can talk more about, or whenever we do the next one.
00:19:34
I don't know, we're not necessarily scheduling these every week, just kind of the idea is just to pop in and make an episode.
00:19:40
So maybe for the next one, if you guys want to hear what things I don't think are going as well as expected, maybe we'll save that for the next one because I feel like we kind of touched on a handful of those, we'll save it for the next launch.
00:19:51
Maybe in the next episode we can talk about whatever you guys want to talk about.
00:19:54
That's the beauty of this podcast.
00:19:57
So be sure and leave your ideas or questions by using #SpaceWalkPodcast, all one word, wherever you can even tag me on Instagram at something and I might be able to find it there,
00:20:10
you know.
00:20:10
So if you see a story topic or something, just use the #SpaceWalkPodcast, we'll look for it.
00:20:16
But of course, if you are a supporter, be sure and look for the link, we will be pulling some kind of priority questions from our supporters as a thank you.
00:20:23
So if you want to join, the best way is patreon.com/everydayastronaut and yeah, and you know, the other thing with these podcasts, since this is a new podcast especially, the biggest way you guys can help is simply to leave a review,
00:20:37
give it a star, a thumbs up or a five-star review or whatever you think.
00:20:41
If you want to hear more of this and that will help, you know, Apple and Spotify and all these, whatever you're listening, if you can just leave a review, that makes a huge difference and will help us, you know, right now if you search #SpaceWalk on anything,
00:20:52
like you won't even hardly find it because it's hidden behind, you know, all these like other dead podcasts or podcasts that talk or mentioned #SpaceWalk.
00:21:00
So if we want to get easier, you know, help other people find this a lot easier, leaving a review would be a huge help.
00:21:07
But that's it for episode one of #SpaceWalk with me, Tim Dodd.
00:21:12
Thank you so much for listening.
00:21:14
I hope this is, you guys have been asking for something like this, just a more casual format.
00:21:18
This is about as casual as I can even imagine.
00:21:21
And hopefully it's just something nice and easy that we can produce with very little effort and throw up and just get out there for you guys more frequently than, you know, our fancy, fancy production of all of our other videos.
00:21:34
So yeah, that's going to do it for me and Tim Dodd the everyday astronaut.
00:21:37
Hope you join me on my next #SpaceWalk.
00:21:39
Goodbye, everybody.
00:21:41
[Music]
00:22:02
[BLANK_AUDIO]
00:22:12
Great pod cast, well done Tim