Starbase Launchpad Tour — Part 3 30 juillet 2021 Dernière partie de la visite du pas de tir orbital de Starbase, où sont évoqués les bras de rattrapage, les plans de vol orbital et la réutilisabilité rapide.
Dernière partie de la visite du pas de tir orbital de Starbase, où sont évoqués les bras de rattrapage, les plans de vol orbital et la réutilisabilité rapide.
Transcription Tim Dodd
Hi, it's me, Tim Dodd, the everyday astronaut. Welcome to part three of my tour of SpaceX's Starbase factory and launch site with the ultimate tour guide, Elon Musk. Of course, if you haven't watched parts one and two, what are you doing? You absolutely have to watch those first because there's just gobs of information. But this one's a little bit different. We actually go out to the launch pad while it's being constructed and watch Elon at work and still get to ask a couple of fun questions. Just like before the YouTube Play Bar is broken up into sections. We have links in the description to those sections too. And of course we have an article version of some of the notes and key takeaways of this conversation up@everydayastronaut.com alright, let's hop in the car and head down to the launch pad. Is is the whatchamac is the blast, is the radius actually gonna change the exclusion zone a little bit when super heavy gets starts launching? When you do the full stack.
Elon Musk
Well, we definitely won't have people. We'll clear the whole area for orbital
Tim Dodd
launches like Stargate and stuff.
Elon Musk
Yeah, well, we might have a small crew, you know, with some shield, you know, like robust, some shielding on the roof and strong glass. But like if something does go wrong with the orbital launch, it will. It's really much more of a fireball than it is an explosion, but it is quite a big fireball.
Tim Dodd
Will you eventually be moving the launch control and everything or is that staying at Stargate at the control center?
Elon Musk
It'll be at Stargate for now.
Tim Dodd
By the way. I haven't. I just got back into town for the first time since the booster's been up, so I have not seen this.
Elon Musk
Yeah, a lot of progress. Team's done great. Insane.
Tim Dodd
God, it's so tall. And that's not even the whole thing.
Elon Musk
That is the full tower.
Tim Dodd
But I mean the booster.
Elon Musk
Oh yeah, yeah, exactly.
Tim Dodd
Yeah. The tower is done now, right? As far as height.
Elon Musk
The full stack will be a little taller than the tower. God.
Tim Dodd
Are you guys working on a second tower too already?
Elon Musk
We are thinking about it.
Tim Dodd
What's the future for Starbase here? Will you guys always be launching from here or what happens when the oil rigs go online?
Elon Musk
I mean, as long as we're able to launch from here without too much operational difficulties, then we'll keep doing it. But it is a bit of a challenge with beach closers. Some people don't want to have the beach closed that much on the Other hand, we got to be able to launch. So it's like, you know, to what degree can we upgrade from here effectively and still let people use the beach and stuff? Because.
Elon Musk
To be determined.
Tim Dodd
So with the oil rigs, though, like, are those. I guess, how urgent is that to get the oil rigs going? Or is that kind of like, you know, we'll get those going and then, you know, it might be two or three years before you actually start using them for launching.
Elon Musk
We're not thinking too much about the oil rigs right now. I mean, they're just. We're demoing one rig just, you know, because we can just send it to a demo. Like, people are really good at demolition and have them do it. So when they. But it's not occupying any mines here.
Tim Dodd
How far out will they. If when you do start launching from there, is it going to be like hundreds of miles or is it like 10 or 15 or something? Something from shore?
Elon Musk
We're not thinking about it.
Tim Dodd
That's. You know, this is all good for me though, because I'm so nervous that it'll be hard to watch them once they start launching from out there.
Elon Musk
Yeah. Right now we're just trying to think about the things that we have to think about. Yep.
Tim Dodd
So right in front of us, is that a. Is that the QD arm? This yellow thing here on the. Sorry, on the right now, is that the QD arm or is that the. Is that one of the catchers?
Elon Musk
That's the qd. We're going up out here. Hey, how's it going?
Tim Dodd
Let me. Let me give it to you something.
Tim Dodd
This one there for you.
Elon Musk
Okay, thank you. All right, thanks.
Tim Dodd
We gonna make it?
Elon Musk
All right, Cool. Hey, Sam.
Tim Dodd
Thanks. 0 Hell yeah.
Elon Musk
Cool. How's it going, guys?
Tim Dodd
All right. Actually, Taylor has a plan as of right now.
SpaceX Crew Member
We rolled this thing over today, so it's all in place. Both frames are in their set location for tomorrow.
SpaceX Crew Member
Tonight we are going to pre rig everything.
Elon Musk
Do you guys mind being on camera or any? It's just a. I can always learn.
Tim Dodd
You're very shy, Sam.
SpaceX Crew Member
Yeah, it's okay.
Elon Musk
It's just an iPhone camera, but all good. Go ahead.
SpaceX Crew Member
Yeah. So tonight we pre rig.
Tim Dodd
We're obviously getting that vlogging.
SpaceX Crew Member
I'm pre rig at all our crane operators get in at 7am tomorrow, get everything finally hooked up. We do our crew task.
Tim Dodd
Launch mount of a big thing.
SpaceX Crew Member
We don't want things sliding around. And we lifted in 11 hours.
Elon Musk
11 hours. Okay, cool. Great. Awesome.
Tim Dodd
Super exciting. You see the. You see that flange that's sticking out from the bottom of the launch mount? Right? It's a te.
Tim Dodd
So right there, it's a T. You want to head up to the top and we'll show you what our game plan is over there.
Tim Dodd
This is you. You're rightfully worried about this, but I think the guys have a pretty good plan. We went over the plan and any contingency planning.
Tim Dodd
All of last night, six welders got all the shelves done for the, for the jack. So the jacks are up there now actually. Hey, bu. You want, you want to go off with us? So those are the jacks on each leg.
Tim Dodd
The jacks that we got. So on top of that column right there, there's some shim plates we believe are by half an inch.
Elon Musk
Half an inch, like so what these
Tim Dodd
guys have done, they added plates where we think we're going to be high and we'll keep the crane on the whole time while we're jacking. And then Robert, you want to talk about the lap plate that you guys have? Sure. Yeah. As we're leveling, we might get some gaps here that are bigger than you'd
Elon Musk
like for your weld gaps.
Tim Dodd
So if that happens, we got some just plates to bridge that gap. So we weld there, weld up top.
Elon Musk
It's a lot of steel.
Tim Dodd
Yeah. And then over here, that little thing I pointed out in the launch mount goes into this alignment. So we got two places here. So we'll be able to go right here that. That lock.
Elon Musk
Oh, great. Okay. Got it?
Tim Dodd
Yeah. So this is key. This was tracked in.
Tim Dodd
Same thing on that side. So we'll get rotation and then our plane will be fixed by the six jacks. But we only need two jacks actually there. I think they're 200 ton jacks.
Tim Dodd
But we have all six, so we can really dial it in.
Elon Musk
All right. Okay, sounds good.
Tim Dodd
Y. And look, I mean we moved in and we had guys right back inside of it going again. It's all bonus time work in terms of fluids routing. And those are the hoods. So when the QD's retract on the hold downs, the top interface, is that hold down hood or, sorry, the QD hood. And so it clamshells back in. It's all through like just a strut. Not, not a, not a dynamic system on its own. The hold down hydraulic actuator actuates a hold down the qd and, and the hood.
Elon Musk
Well as you can see, there's a lot going on here.
Tim Dodd
Yeah, this is what I wanted to bring you up here. We got a handful of guys on pad B right now, suborbital pad, so that we're ready to take a shift. So we've, we've been on this opposite the whole time, but we've got a few days on that. So we want to, we do want to knock some of that out right now.
Tim Dodd
So that we're ready for shift 20 when it comes out here.
Tim Dodd
And then we got a bunch of people on the prop farm. And then tomorrow at 5am when the guys get in, they start rigging and lift at 9, this whole area is cleared. So all the guys that were going to be on the launch mount all go over to the prop farm. So actually some of the guys work tonight is not actual physical work, but prep for the army that goes over there tomorrow. So we can be effective with like 70 people.
Elon Musk
Got it. Great. Well, it's definitely a beehive of activity.
Tim Dodd
That's good. This is super exciting. There's a few things to be worked out. After listening to what you said about contractor stuff I got with our supervisors here and we're trying to figure out what the, what the right number is. And also so since we have all these great individuals here right now, it's also a good time. Like, oh, are there anyone, is there anyone from here that wants to join SpaceX? So we're looking into that. We've incorrectly surged for like six months continuously without looking back into it and looking at the proper headcount.
Elon Musk
Okay. Yeah, if somebody says long term, we should make them long term, not temporary.
Tim Dodd
Yeah, it's easier too because these guys come and go and then contract ends. It might be another company. It's just not set up the right way.
Elon Musk
No, it's better for them than SpaceX.
Tim Dodd
but this logistic plan right now is wild. So we're also running out a lot of parts. So McGregor is shipping us a bunch
Elon Musk
of fittings and seals.
Tim Dodd
We got cape and vanity ready too
Elon Musk
to ship us stuff.
Tim Dodd
We'll back order all those other sites on the stuff we take. But we're just trying to keep like we're trying to keep feeding these guys with parts right now.
Elon Musk
Okay. That launch ring is complicated.
Tim Dodd
Yeah. I do, however, like the approach of having the hold downs on the inside like that where they fold into each other. Like I like that design. However, everything else we need to take a look at just like how thick the steel is to Begin with, we obviously learned trying to bolt in and align some of the lugs. Not the right path. We learned that line boring. As we got good at it, we got really fast at it too. So at least for the next launch mount we're thinking line boring is the better step. Reduction in maximum mass is going to be huge for us.
Elon Musk
Yeah. Yeah. It takes a long time to weld fix. Deal.
Tim Dodd
Yeah. I mean this is going to be a 1 inch well here all the way around. Inside and outside. One pass on the inside and outside. Just, just one weld pass will get us 40 miles per hour on, on booster and ship.
Elon Musk
Okay, Great. Well, super impressive. If we can mount this thing in 11 hours or frankly even tomorrow, that'll be great.
Tim Dodd
We hotwire that crane and then one of our new roads that we did collapsed on us. So we had to find a different route. This morning this crane went in place. We did lose a little bit of time having to backfill but. But that off went pretty well.
Tim Dodd
And, and the 2 like second largest crane in the world. Third largest crane in the world. We have 2 operators for, for that pick. So one, one guy from our team, Dave Wright's going to run the yellow. Giovanni is going to be on the big train.
Tim Dodd
So that they can, they're going to load chair appropriately and get this thing up.
Tim Dodd
This was brilliant because we would have spent four days reconfig.
Elon Musk
Yeah. Like the two things we really need to get good at here are tool stuff and small stuff, as Bill Riley would say.
Tim Dodd
It's also pretty amazing that on a project at this scale you're still measuring things in days. You're still like a day. You know, I mean that's, that's impressive when other people are like minutes and seconds. Yeah.
Tim Dodd
I mean it's non stop. It's not like you're doing that because there's a launch in two days. You're doing that the whole time this place has been developed it's been like down. You're counting every minute and second. So the crane operators, what would you do if there's an asteroid heading to this planet in eight days?
Tim Dodd
That's what they were told today.
Tim Dodd
And who knows, maybe there is.
Elon Musk
Yeah, I mean you never know. I think if we operate with extreme urgency, then we have a chance of making life multi planetary. It's all just a chance. Not for sure. If we don't act with extreme urgency, that chance is probably zero. The rate of innovation is not going to be constant. It's either going to increase the rate of innovation or it's going to slow down. If you look at American access to space with crew, we were able to go to the moon in 69. Then with the space shuttle, we could only go to low earth orbit. And the space shuttle retired. And then for almost a decade, there was no America had no access to space with people. So this is a pretty bad trend. It's trending to zero. We need a very strong trend in the other direction in order to have any chance whatsoever of making life multi planetary. Yep. So that's the reason for the extreme sense of urgency.
Elon Musk
Yeah. I mean, I'll be long dead before you know, Mars is self sustaining, but hopefully the momentum is strong in that direction by the time I die, which probably isn't soon, but. No, no.
Tim Dodd
Sam, what if right when I got to the top, I'm like, oh, by the way, I have a horrid fear of heights.
Tim Dodd
No, I don't, but that'd be funny. That view is amazing, dude. It's huge.
Elon Musk
Oh, it's very impressive. Oh, it's great to see the progress. Nice work, guys.
Tim Dodd
But look at how fast everything came together.
Elon Musk
Yeah, I mean it'd be amazing if we can mount this thing tomorrow, which is looking like we got a good shot at that.
Tim Dodd
We got paving, continuous paving around the side as well. So he keep getting, getting more and more paving going. Got landing pad expansion specifically so we can give the power guys for the
Elon Musk
arms a little bit more room to.
Tim Dodd
To. So what is the current plan for B3? Are you thinking about putting more Raptors up under it still and seeing how it does?
Elon Musk
Sorry for what you offer B3.
Tim Dodd
You talked once about like maybe putting nine up under there or something.
Elon Musk
No, it's. We're just going to focus on four. Like I said, it's a rapidly changing situation. So I mean, think of it like a guided missile. Like a guided missile is going in the wrong direction at any given point in time, but it course corrects. Yep. You don't want to be a super precise cannonball when you don't even know where the target is.
Elon Musk
The overarching optimization is what is the fastest time to a city on Mars and then subset, you know, fastest time to a fully reusable rocket. Subset, fastest time to orbit, basically. So. All of the initial production is simply a learning exercise. It is not. None of the initial ones will be long term. So it's really just a question of like, what knowledge can you learn in the shortest period of time.
Tim Dodd
I mean, I feel like you didn't quite have this Freedom with Falcon 9 when you were developing Falcon 9.
Elon Musk
Actually. Sorry, a car that was there. Yep. No, we did not have the flexibility of Falcon 9.
Tim Dodd
So you had to be a lot more rigid and you had to nail it a lot more when you were developing Falcon 9 because you're flying cargo pretty much and getting ready for commercial resupply. Like you had to pretty much be a lot like, do you think if we could have.
Elon Musk
Technically we did have the Grasshopper program.
Elon Musk
You know, Shannon sort of run the Grasshopper program. We learned a lot. Amazingly. The amazing part is Grasshopper did not blow up. So that's, you know, shocking. But we did blow up a the F9R. Yeah. And ironically that was when I like, I was like telling SpaceX board, hey, let's have a board meeting in Texas and you could see the rocket go up and land. That's the one time it blows up.
Tim Dodd
I did not know that. I did not know that.
Elon Musk
So. Man, it is sweaty out here.
Tim Dodd
Yeah, let's keep going. It'll take more people.
Elon Musk
All right, I'm gonna excite Hope at this point.
Tim Dodd
Yeah. Any last things you want to say to all the people excited about this program?
Elon Musk
Yeah, I mean, basically just I think it's cool too that people are getting excited about rockets and kind of finding, finding out how do rockets work and thinking maybe about life becoming multi planetary and being a space faring civilization. Because the experience makes a future inspiring. It might be the most inspiring thing. It certainly is the most inspiring thing for a lot of people. And so I hope this gives people confidence about the future and, and that humanity will have an exciting future in space and we can make science fiction, not always fiction, but a reality one day. Thanks. I like that.
Tim Dodd
Yep. Thanks, Elon. All right, thank you again Elon, for all of the time that you spent, for everything we got to do and for allowing us to share this with the world. And thanks again to Cosmic Perspective for helping shoot this video and just all the other stuff that they help with. So find them on patreon and on YouTube. And I owe the biggest thank you to my Patreon supporters for helping make videos like this and everything we do here at Everyday Astronaut Possible gain access to some exclusive live streams and our awesome Discord community and lots of other fun stuff by heading over to patreon.com everydayastronaut and while you're online, be sure and check out our awesome web store where you can find shirts like this, the Aerospike shirt, or our new Mars hats, or lots of other fun stuff like our schematics collection in our future Martian society shirts. And just lots of other fun stuff for you or any other space nerd. Head over to 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.