X Spaces: Starship flight-test debrief for subscribers April 29, 2023 In a subscriber-only Twitter Space, Musk debriefed the first integrated orbital flight test of Starship, taking questions and explaining what SpaceX learned from the launch.
In a subscriber-only Twitter Space, Musk debriefed the first integrated orbital flight test of Starship, taking questions and explaining what SpaceX learned from the launch.
Transcript Host
Yeah, it has. That was very exciting to be in Boca Chica. You always, you always live up to your. Your promises about exciting times with SpaceX.
Yes. You know, punctuality is not my strong suit, but I do it deliver in the end.
Panelist
Excitement was guaranteed and it was delivered.
Exactly. I mean, so, yeah, we just get right into it. So I think probably people have enough time to get on or hopefully. So, yeah, as basically the outcome was roughly the sort of what I expected and maybe slightly exceeding my expectations, but roughly what I expected, which was or hoped for, I should say, which is that we would get clear of the pad with minimal damage to the pad. And I'm glad to report that the pad damage is actually quite small and looks like it can be repaired quickly and that we would also get significant in flight data, particularly with respect to the pressurizing of the tanks with the propellant liquids, which is called autogenous pressurization, as opposed to say Falcon 9, which uses helium pressurization. But helium is in very short supply and extremely expensive, so it's way better to essentially pressurize with the liquid form of the oxidized raw fuel. So that actually looked quite good. And we also went supersonic, so that was no problem at all.
But the. So I'm going to throw obviously some good news items here. The vehicle structural margins appear to be better than we expected. As we can tell, the vehicle is actually doing somersaults towards the end and still staying intact. So that's also good. And yeah, so overall I actually feel like that was a great flight. SpaceX team did excellent work, we made a lot of progress and I think from a rocket standpoint and pad standpoint, we are probably ready to launch in six to eight weeks. The longest lead item on that is probably requalification of the flight termination system, because we did initiate the flight termination system, but it was not enough to. It took way too long to rupture the tanks. So we need a. Basically a much. We need more detonation cord to lines up the tanks at altitude and ensure that basically the rocket explodes immediately if there's a. If flight termination is necessary. So requalification of the. I'm just guessing here that requalification of the much longer detonation cord to ends up the rocket in a bad situation is probably the long lead item.
Host
What was the time lag?
It was pretty long. I think it was on the order of 40 seconds. Ish. So quite long. Yeah, so now the rocket was in a relatively low air density, so the aerodynamic forces that it was experiencing would be less than if it was at a lower, you know, lower down in the atmosphere. And so the aerodynamic forces would have, I think, at a lower point in the atmosphere, aided in the destruction of the vehicle. And in fact, that's, that's kind of what, what happened. When the vehicle got to a low enough altitude, the atmospheric density was enough to cause structural failure. But I mean, this is obviously something that we, we want to make super sure is solid before proceeding with the next flight. Let's see, I'll go through a bunch of notables. So we, we actually, at Luftorf, there were three engines that we didn't. We chose not to start, essentially, or that hit, hit aborts that. And so we actually lifted off with 30 engines, which is the minimum number of engines. Those engines did not explode, but they were just because the system didn't think they were healthy enough to bring them to full thrust. So they were shut down. Then at T +27 seconds, Engine 19 lost communications concurrent with some kind of energetic event that liberated the outer heat shield from the engines 17, 18, 19 and 20 area. You can see this on video, actually. And by the way, if people have like, basically think that maybe something different from this occurred, that'd be interesting to. Because I know some people have looked very closely frame by frame at video, but this is the SpaceX best assessment after a week. Anyway, so something bad happened at T +27 seconds because Engine 19 lost all communications and some kind of explosion happened to knock out the heat shields of engines 17, 18, 19 and 20. And yeah, so. And the visible fire seen from the aftan starting after this event and continuing through flight. The rocket kept going, though, for at T +62 seconds. We see additional aft heat shield damage near engine 30. However, the engine continues to run. And then at T85 seconds is where things really hit the fan. We see Engine 6 with loss of communication to thrust vector control. And roughly from this point onwards, we lose thrust vector control of the rocket. So we lose steering at T plus 85 seconds.
Panelist
And was that engine six that kept trying to relight too?
Panelist
Was there one? One looked like in footage, like it just kept attempting to relight, Relight, relight over and over, which is pretty wild to see. I don't think I've ever seen that before. And it was one of the center Ish engines.
That's interesting. Okay, we do have relight logic in the center engines, but not in the outer engines? I believe so. So basically, landing engines have relight logic. The perimeter engines don't. So that's entirely possible. Although if the engine is detecting significant issues, it should not be going into a relight cycle.
Host
What's your best guess as to what caused the initial engine issues? And then I guess it cascaded after that. But what do you think happened?
I think we don't know with certainty. Obviously, the rocket stayed on the launch pad for a while, and we did generate quite the rock tornado at the base of the vehicle. And our first guess would have been that the rock tornado would have caused potentially significant damage to the engines. But at least we actually do not see obvious. We actually weirdly do not see evidence of the rock tornado actually damaging engines or heat shields in a material way. But it may have, but we have not yet seen evidence of that. So for the next flight, we certainly will be taking off faster. So for this flight, we were erred on the side of kind of babying the engines and just sort of gently sort of starting each engine one at a time. And there were quite. The engines on Booster seven were built over a long period of time. So each engine was a little bit of a unique item. And, you know, whereas the engines on Booster nine, which is next, are much newer and more and more and consistent and really with significant reliability improvements over Booster seven. So I think we'll see a much more robust engine situation with Booster nine. The heat shield, or I should say the shields, which are both of force and heat shields around the engines for Booster 9 are much better because they weren't retrofitted for Booster 7, we kind of retrofitted heat shields, whereas Booster 9 is designed in, so they're much stouter. Will you be doing something with the Raptor Chill System on Booster 9 differently than what you did with 7? It kind of seems like that was like an expendable part of the pad, essentially, with having all of those hoses rip free. I'm guessing that's something you would like to avoid having to replace every time in the future. Yeah, over time, we're definitely. It needs to be like a rapid, rapid reflux capability, so there can't be any extendable items. Over time. It was actually just good, good to get this. This vehicle off the ground because we've made so many improvements in and Booster nine and beyond that. We really just needed to fly this vehicle and then move on to the much improved Booster nine and later ship designs. So the thing we want to make sure of probably most with the next flight is that we do not have that any kind of central nexus that controls that affects multiple engines is extremely robust and with, you know, extra shielding so that we don't have a sort of a single point that can take out multiple engines. And for sure we don't want a single point that can take out thrust vector control, which is engine steering.
The range of detail we can go into here is like sort of level nine rocket wizardry all the way to how do rockets work?
Reporter (Reuters)
Understood.
Can I try again? I can confirm that we have all been doing a massive amount of speculation out here and I guess one of the big points that a lot of us have been wondering is related to stage separation. So I guess the two part question, like what actually triggers second stage ignition? And also the second part of that question, did ship 24 attempt to light its engines after the destruction of Booster 7? No, it did not. When flight termination is executed, it's executed on both. So the ship, the ship currently does not attempt to save itself. Arguably, maybe it should. That's a good point.
Panelist
Yeah, it's crazy. It looks like the engines lit after the booster let go and after the
Panelist
Like there's what looks like engine ignition. Pretty wild.
That is. That has not been reported to me in the data reviews that it's not impossible, but it's not been reported to me. That is certainly not what the ship should be doing after a termination event. So. The big things that are important for the next flight are ensuring that thrust vector, we don't lose thrust vector control. Sort of isolation of thrust vector control, which with the Booster nine is a lot easier because we use electric motors to steer the engines as opposed to hydraulic actuators where you've got a common manifold between the hydraulic actuators. So if you lose hydraulic pressure, you can lose multiple engines. Essentially if you have some kind of failure in the hydraulic system, the electric actuated engines will be much more isolated and not have like a single event failure as long as they did not lose power or comms.
Host
Elon, since you've gone ahead and excavated your launch mount a bit, I assume you're going to go ahead and put in that the steel grid and the water deluge. Do you think that that will fully address the issue of the wider than expected debris field and are you expecting any pushback from environmental and kind of community groups that this, that this event did put debris where it wasn't expected?
Yeah, we're going to be putting down a lot of steel I mean the debris is really just, you know, basically sand. So it's not like, not toxic at all or anything. It's just like a sandstorm essentially. Basically a human made sandstorm. But we don't want to do that again. So we were going to be putting down a very strong steel sandwich that basically a water jacketed sandwich that's two layers of very thick plate steel that are also perforated on the upper side so that you have what is basically a massive super strong steel shower head pointing up. And then the water pressure coming out of there has to exceed the pressure of the engines. Thrust is exerting on the, on the steel plate, on the, beneath the launch stand. So which is all doable and being done. And so it should be much, much less dusty and we should not have a rock tornado with the next flight.
Reporter (Reuters)
Hey Elon, it's Joey from Reuters. Why couldn't you install that before this launch? Was that a technical reason or a regulatory reason?
It wasn't ready. So it's not like we expected. If we'd expected to dig a hole, we would not have flown. So the reason we would not expect to excavate a hole, we'd done a static fire of the booster and that had just resulted in fairly modest erosion of the coal high strength concrete at the base, which is called fondag. It's a sort of special, basically the strongest, highest temperature form of concrete that you can get steel reinforced and everything. And so it, we thought, we thought it would be fine for one launch. We would erode some amount of the concrete. But that it would be fine, we certainly didn't expect to effectively what looks like like when we went up to full thrust probably shattered the concrete. So is it possible that the base layer failed first and not the actual vondag layer on top? It is. So we are getting into some amount of speculation here, but it's one of the explanations and one of the more probable explanations is that when we went up to full thrust that the, that we may have compressed the sand underneath the concrete to such a degree that the concrete effectively bent and then cracked. That is a leading theory. So as we definitely want to not have that gain and pondag was never our long term goal, we thought it would just be fine for one launch. We'd erode some fondag just as we did with the booster static fire. And then for the next launch we were going to put in the sort of steel, mega steel pancake. This thing's a beast. It's like
Reporter (Reuters)
why the steel pancake over like a flame trench or something like that.
Well, you can do it either way. But the. And that's. There's different schools of thought there. The important thing is that you have a regeneratively cooled, like wherever the flame is hitting that, that is regeneratively and evaporatively cooled. So what you'll see is quite a big steam cloud, but not a dust cloud. So the, you know, so, and we've run sims, you know, both. Both ways. And you could do it both ways, but. And they both work. The acoustic environment is worse with the flat plate, as you might imagine. But the payload is so far up in the. It's like, you know, Your payload's like 400ft away from where the plane, from where the plume is impinging. So it's so far away that the acoustics are actually not that bad in the payload fairing. So we don't have to worry too
it being too loud in the payload fairing. And yeah, so it can be done either way, but this is one way and we're pretty confident this will work. And we're going to extend the steel out beyond just underneath the rocket because we want to make sure we don't sort of dig up concrete elsewhere. And then we're going to connect the load of the sort of massive steel sandwich underneath the launch pad into the launch mount legs so it can take that load intention as well as compression. So anyway, I think we feel pretty good about that. You'll see it come together in the next month or so. But like I said, that actually does not currently appear to be what prevented the rocket from getting further than it did. There was. There appears to be perhaps a flame path somewhere within the vehicle structure that as some of the engines failed, there may have been what appeared to be like a flame path to a piece of avionics or control system that knocked out the thrust vector control. So once you knock out thrust vector control, the rocket no longer has steering authority.
Panelist
What things do you think went better than you expected and what things went worse than you expected?
It was pretty close to what I expected, at least for this flight. It was pretty close to what I expected. So,
Panelist
I mean, getting past Max Q was a pretty big deal. I was actually quite shocked. I don't know why. That whole, the fins and the flaps up front and all that stuff, especially starting to lose control authority with TVC going out, that was pretty impressive that the thing just kept, you know, chugging along and punching right through. So that was my big one. If it Made it through Max Q. I was going to consider that a pretty big milestone for sure.
Yeah, definitely. That's for sure an important milestone. And it got pretty close to stage separation. So if we had maintained thrust vector control and throttled up, which we, we should have because we needed to compensate, we'd lost too many engines. So we needed to, we should have throttled up the remaining engines to make up for the missing ones. But if we're not lost, if we throttled up the remaining engines and maintained thrust vector control, we would have made it to staging, which would be cool. So yes, that's our goal for the next flight is make it to staging and hopefully succeed in staging and get to orbit. So I think, I think we've got a decent shot of getting to orbit with the next flight.
Panelist
Did the, did the booster command separation? Like, did it actually try letting go of starship and it just couldn't because of something or did it not even get that far in the program?
No, it fortunately did not get to the point where it would do separation. One could argue that at the point which the booster is kaput, the ship may as well just take off and, you know, keep going. But the, the problem is that we, we have a very precise targeted entry point in the Pacific. So it, the, the ship really wouldn't have the delta blast the capability of reaching that target points. Yeah, you, so even if you wouldn't
Panelist
want it re entering over Africa or something and then just touching down randomly.
Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, so it's, it would only be worth really starting the ship if the ship is able to complete its mission and, and reach its targeted landing point just west of Hawaii.
Host
Elon, would you change the flight profile all and what would you have to do to actually reach orbit as opposed to the 146 miles that this one seemed like that would have been the max altitude?
Yeah, well, yeah, so orbit's mostly about velocity rather than altitude. But I'd say like, I think we've got a better than 30% chance of reaching orbit on the next flight. So I'd say that my expectation for the next flight would be more likely to reach orbit than not.
Panelist
And are you actually, are you going to be attempting orbit or like doing the same profile of reentering over Hawaii and that whole thing?
Yeah, we're just going to do a repeat. Basically the goal of these early missions is just information. Like we don't have any payload or anything. It's, let's try to learn as much as possible and you know, so, and so that's why I would consider this to be a success. Because since the goal of the flight was to learn a lot and we learned a lot, I would characterize it as a success. Obviously not a complete success, but still nonetheless successful. And you know, I always want to frame this, the difficulty of this with respect to the, you know, the sort of Soviet Union Warsaw Pact rocket developments of the past for which I have a lot of respect. Back when Russia and Ukraine were working together, they made great, they did great stuff in space, I have to say. Yeah, definitely. Maybe one day they can return to that much more productive. So like the N1 program is always worth. I always recommend people read the history of the, the Soviet N1 program, which was the competitor rocket to the Saturn 5 US Saturn 5 moon rocket. And that's, that's a point you're talking about like you know, late 60s, early 70s where the, the Soviets were really at their A game. I mean they were just really fantastic. They. So they had A plus players. It's fair to say that their motivation was maximized. Like, you know, success means you're a hero of the Soviet Union failure, you're probably going to the gulag. So it's like so A plus players, maximum motivation. And still the N1 failed. It never restorated. So you know, so those are, that, that's a team for one. You really have to have a tremendous amount of respect for the N1 team. And they did not succeed. So.
Panelist
And it didn't help that Glushko never wanted that thing anyway. He wanted his, he wanted his own mega rocket. Then once Corlea Coraliev died, it was, it was game over for that poor thing.
I mean the Soviet Union certainly suffered a massive loss with Karlov dying. You know, he was there sort of on Brown basically. So that car was awesome. It's like, it's like losing your best player at the worst time really. But, but nonetheless it's, there were so many super smart people in that program and, and they really knew what they were doing with rockets and maximum motivation. They did not succeed. So it's just worth bearing that that the N1 is the closest to starship of any rocket that's flown alone. And our starship is actually a bit more risky in some ways in that we've got a cryogenic fuel. And the thing about a cryogenic fuel is it can gasify and form sort of fuel oxygen pockets and that kind of thing. It's always harder to deal with the gas with a cryogenic fuel than with A fuel that is liquid at room temperature, like kerosene, you know, basically rocket grade jet fuel, which is what falcon and the N1 used. So we've got real risk in that respect. We're running a higher chamber pressure engine that's full flow stage combustion. So it's the most complex and difficult engine configuration. But the one with the highest efficiency and were using autogenous pressurization, which I don't think they did. And so those are things. And our scale is also bigger. So we're about twice the mass and about I think 60% more thrust than an N1.
Panelist
So if you don't mind me asking here, why do you think Starship will succeed using a similar, you know, even not just the multi engine philosophy or anything like that, but just even the general like test by flying philosophy of the N1. Why do you think, you know, there's four flights, the N1 never made it to stage separation. Why do you think Starship will succeed in it? You know, with all the comparisons that are so similar to it?
Well, we do have a production line that if it, if it takes us 10 flights, we'll, we'll, we'll do it. You know, they would eventually have succeeded with the N1. They just decided that it was too expensive to continue and they wanted to do other things. So after they had those failures they, I guess it was probably pretty embarrassing, you know, at a national level. But. I do think that the starship design like. So if you've got a, if you've got a rocket with light engines as we do, if you have extremely good engine isolation so that if an engine fails, it does not cause a failure of neighboring engine or the stage itself, you have a very robust design because then if you lose one of 33 engines, that's a 3% thrust loss, it's not a big deal. But if you do not have good engine isolation and an engine failure can domino to other engines or to parts of the stage, then you have an extremely unreliable design. So that's why with Booster seven, but especially Booster nine, we've gone through so much trouble to isolate the engines. And so if one engine goes wrong, it does not knock out other engines or damage the rest of the stage. Yeah. So I think when all is said and done, this will be an extremely reliable design. But it's absolutely fundamental to achieve engine isolation.
Host
Do you expect HLS to be Starship? HLS to be the long pole for Artemis 3?
No, I definitely don't. I think we will be the first thing to really Be. I think we'll. No, I think we will be, yeah. That we will not be a limiting factor at all.
Reporter (Reuters)
Elon, how much do you expect to spend in this kind of like, you know, prototype development phase before one of these starships actually starts flying real payloads, either, you know, Starlink or otherwise? And how many kind of tests are you targeting before that?
Well, I'm hoping we can get
flights out this year, maybe five. And we should be. I would be. I would be surprised if we exit this year without getting to orbit. I'd say it's not. It's not. It's not 100% probably, but I think we've probably got an 80% plus probability of reaching orbit this year. And pretty. I don't want to tempt fate here, knock on wood, but I think close to 100% chance reaching orbit within 12 months. You know, the thing to bear in mind is like, SpaceX is actually quite good at production, so like extremely, like the best in history of any rocket maker with production. I mean, we're making a Falcon 9 upper stage, which is a large, complex machine every three or four days, so.
Panelist
And a Raptor every day.
Right now, yes, we're capable. We're actually slowed it down slightly because we've got more Raptors than we know what to do with. So we're actually focusing a bit more on the Raptor side on upgrades mostly to improve the reliability and robustness of the engine, some performance improvements as well.
Reporter (Reuters)
And the cost of all this, like, I guess, how much do you expect to spend on all that either this year or before you start flying real payloads?
Well, it's probably be a couple billion dollars this year. $2 billion. Ish. All in on Sasha.
Reporter (Reuters)
And there's a kind of a struggle by other companies to raise funds lately for a number of reasons. And SpaceX has usually kind of been insulated from that. But do you see any kind of difference nowadays? Is SpaceX kind of thinking about fundraising differently and does that affect how, you know, the pressure on this starship program at all?
We do not anticipate needing to raise funding. No, we don't think we need to raise funding. We'll do a standard thing where we provide liquidity to employees who own stock. But to best of my knowledge, we do not need to raise incremental funding for SpaceX. And Elon, you want to be sensitive? Yeah, probably like another five, ten minutes.
Panelist
Okay, cool. Yeah, I was going to say how much time and I did want to get. Be fun to get some new People in here, John Kraft, I know, hasn't said anything yet. And also Mary Liz. So John, I saw you starting to speak there for a second.
Yeah, I have a fun question. So the lean off the pad, was that intentional? Was it more than you thought it might be? Was it related to the engines out and do you expect to do that on like future, more operational launches? No, we're not. It was related to the engines out and we do not normally expect to lean. It should be aspirationally going straight up. So there will be some debate as to. Because you can. So for the next flight, we're going to start the engines faster and get off the pad faster. Like I think we're from start, from engine start to actually moving was around five seconds, which is really a long time to be blasting the, the pad. We're going to try to get that down to about half that time, maybe two and a half seconds. Start the engines faster and throttle up faster and just get off, get off the deck and don't, you know, reduce how much we blast the pad. And then there's a, there's a debate of do you keep the rocket over the pad, in which case you, there's more cooking of the, the base or do you start, do you start moving sideways sooner? If you move sideways sooner, you are moving that big cutting torch across the launch room. So if you can think of this thing like the world's biggest cutting torch basically. And so it like we have big steel plates over the top of launch ring, but I think depending on how close the engines are, they are, they erode that steel at a roughly and I think half, half an inch to an inch per second of high strength steel is eroded by the cutting torch. So you don't want to be too, you want the engines to be too close to the launch ring before you start moving sideways. Well, and with it doing that, what's the optimal.
Panelist
Yeah, and on this one, as it did move across the launch ring because it kind of yeeted out there sideways. Did it torch the top of the launch ring too bad or did it
actually hold up pretty good? It actually held up surprisingly well. So we actually, we're glad to see that there's, there appears to be minimal damage to the launch ring and to the components inside the launch ring. So that's, that's great because that launch ring is, you know, takes six months to build up a new launch ring. We have some spares, but there's a lot of complex plumbing and wiring inside launch ring and that actually appears to be in good shape.
Reporter (Reuters)
I just had one quick question. Speaking of that launch ring, kind of like liftoff conditions topic, why couldn't you wait like a month to install that steel plate for it to be ready? Why launch before that's ready?
As I said, we did the static fire of the booster with the concrete, the pondaging, and we saw, you know, manageable amounts of erosion. So we thought the launch would have increased erosion but would not smash the concrete. So it was not our expectation to smash the concrete. We did not think it would. That would occur. Based on the data we saw from the static fire. If we thought that would occur, then we would have. We would have waited for the steel. The steel was really meant not is intended to be have a launch pad that requires minimal. Basically no refurbishment. That's the intent of the sort of water cools the mega steel sandwich.
Reporter (Reuters)
And was the communications blackout the reason the staging event didn't happen, or was it because it just didn't get to that point and started tumbling before?
Yeah, it just, it just didn't get to what we consider to be a safe point to do stage separation. Now, I should point out, like stage separation itself is a dodgy thing and many a rocket in the past has failed at stage separation. So we're putting a lot of attention on. I got, you know, like I said, I don't want to get too confident, but I feel like it's. We're really quite likely to get to stage separation with the next flight. And so then we want to make sure that we actually execute the stage separation because it is different from Falcon. It's. Yeah. So we want to get through that stage separation, light the ship and complete almost a full orbit. It's actually got. The delta plastic is almost identical to orbit. So we actually could send it to a decently good orbit. But we want to test the entry system of the ship. So test the ship heat shield in the height. So get to orbit and then ideally de orbit with the ship so we can test the how well the heat shield works for the ship portion of the vehicle. Yeah, let's.
Panelist
Let's grab one more. Mary Liz Bender, actually Mary Liz Shilinsky. Sorry, sorry.
Host
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Figure out how to change my handle here, Elon. That launch was so epic. I don't know how you felt in mission control. Maybe you were nervous and paying attention to data. But for the rest of us that have witnessed years and years of Falcon launches and many other launches, I think it's safe to say that was the most epic launch of them all. And I hope you got a chance to really enjoy it. I was actually wondering about that moment in the room with your team, or maybe for you personally, like, how did this compare to the other firsts that you've gone through in the Falcon program with Hopper? Like, how did you feel?
Yeah, no, I was very excited. I thought the SpaceX team did amazing work and this is really one of the hottest technical projects that humanity's ever done. I mean, this, I mean, if you say like fully reusable, humongous rocket, fully and rapidly reusable reliable rocket that of unusual size, This is certainly a candidate for hardest technical problem done by humans. Yeah, it's the candidate. So I think the team's done excellent work on a very hard problem and I think we're actually, I'm upbeat about the next 12 months. I think we're going to get to orbit and then it'll probably take us a few more years to achieve reusability on a regular basis where we bring the booster back and bring the ship back and where it gets. It'll take a few years to get to where Falcon 9 is today, where it is now quite normal for the rocket to land. It'd be weird if it doesn't land these days.
Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, hitting the bullseye of a ship out in stormy weather, if that ship is not anchored, it's literally trying to keep position. It's holding to a GPS position and the rocket's flying to that position and it still manages to hit the bullseye in a storm.
Host
You make it look, you guys make it look so easy. It's crazy every time to watch that happen.
Yeah. Alexa, it's a testament to the awesome team.
Reporter (Reuters)
This will just be on my. Sorry, I just had one more question. There's a lot of opposition from these environmental groups in the area over the debris and I just wanted to kind of get your reaction to that, since some didn't expect the debris to go as far as it seemed to go. And if there is a legal challenge in court in know either against SpaceX or the FAA, how would SpaceX respond and what would that do to the timeline?
Yeah, I think, you know, if you say like, for practical purposes, what was, I think, like, you, you, if you were to say like, like, like at this point, like, you know, look, look, look at an aerial picture of the, of the area and apart from the area around launch stand the tell me where things are damaged. It's actually, I think you can't even see it at this point. So the, it's not like the rocket, you know, uses non toxic propellants and you know, so it does scatter a lot of dust. But it's to the best of our knowledge, like there has not been any meaningful damage to the environment that we're aware of.
Panelist
And to be honest, I was out there at the pad two days after, there's a huge storm on Saturday. Like 70, 80 mile an hour winds. Yeah, it was intense and like I saw more debris coming off the shore from like people's docks, falling into the water and like capsized boats.
Reporter (Reuters)
Yeah, that's true.
Panelist
I did anything more than just some, some you know, bits of concrete which, you know.
Yeah, yeah. I mean to exceed the damage done by a hurricane is quite difficult. Hurricanes, nature, the power of nature is immense compared to. We are still feeble compared to the power of nature.
Panelist
Little tiny miniature hurricane.
We're really tiny. Like I look at starship and it's like, wow, that seems so big to us humans. But, but if you zoomed out and we're looking at Earth from a distance, you, you wouldn't even see starship. It'd be like, I think I see a tiny little dot jumping off of the surface maybe, you know. Yeah, it's like we're like microbes trying to get from one dust mode to another dust mode.
Panelist
Did you see the by the way, like pad footage of how like dark and crazy it got? Like, I mean it, it does, it's crazy because it looks so violent and wild, but you know, it looks like a miniature tornado just for you know, a minute there. But I mean some of the footage is actually terrifying to imagine, you know, if you were. Obviously no one's around it at the time, but it is nuts the amount of power that thing has.
Yes, it's. Yes. And we actually were recently looking at that at the like the, the raptor. The raptor throat we believe is the highest heat flux of any human made object ever.
How does it survive? Somehow that plasma has to go through a throat. How does that throat not melt?
Panelist
That's crazy. And literally how does it. From a massive amount of film cooling and regenerative cooling.
Yeah, I mean it's getting cool regen. It's like getting crazy regen cooling. And like we're flowing, you know, liquid methane at extreme pressure, you know, 11,000 psi through, through the, the jacket at. So it's ripping. And then you combine that with foam cooling and the best thermal barrier coatings we can come up with and, but it's still shocking that we do not vaporize the throat of that engine immediately. The heat transfer is so insane. So. But that's what, you know, we live on a planet with a lot, with strong gravity and a thick atmosphere. So this is what's needed if we're to become a spacefaring civilization and build a base on the moon and city on Mars and, you know, yeah, you know, multi planet species, which is, I think, a super exciting future. And I mean, at a high level, the super cool thing here is that, hey, this thing, this thing kind of works and we're going to solve the issues that are remaining and we'll get it to orbit and we'll make it reusable. And that that means that we have a real path here to get humanity to Mars. That's awesome. That's mind blowing. Elon, I want to let other people talk here, but I did want to say, just on behalf of all of us, that the production work that you guys put on, like the actual show, we all greatly appreciate it. I think that was like one of the most amazing launch coverages I've ever seen. And I think a lot of us were like hoping that you guys were going to give us cool angles and you guys by far exceeded the expectations. So. Yeah, I greatly appreciate that and I think everybody else does as well. Thank you. Yeah, you guys are most welcome. And you know, I just want to say super appreciate your support and always looking for critical feedback and stuff. So support and critical feedback is always extremely welcome. And then thanks for helping bringing the public along for the ride. Because at the end of the day, if the support of the public is essential and it's also about inspiring the public, there are all these things in the world that are reasons to be sad about the future and say there's got to be things that wake up in the morning and inspire you and just be excited about the future of life. And this is one of them. And you guys are key to conveying that to the public. So thank you. You guys are. You guys are doing it for us as well. So it goes both ways. Hey, Elon, just a quick question. Chris from NSF, are you looking to
Reporter (Reuters)
fly with Booster 9 and ship 28 for this next flight? Are you still deciding that one? Because I know 25's at races, isn't it? I don't know if you're going with 25 or 28.
We've not made a final decision on the ship. That's why I was referring to Booster nine. But I was somewhat. I did not mention the ship number,
good catch there. Yeah, I think we'll probably make that decision this week. But I think we do want to bet on success in the sense that if we get to orbit, it would be super helpful to try to try the orbit and see how well the, the ship heat shield works because we need to maintain control in hypersonic high heating regime, then get through transonic and then maintain control all the way through a very wide array of marker regimes. And so the vehicle actually behaves differently with radically different heating and force at the various, you know, coming back from like roughly Mach 23 to 0. So yes, we do, I think we want to have that option. So I think we'll put a ship on that gives us that capability. But we haven't decided exactly which ship number it should be.
Reporter (Reuters)
Hey, Elon, this is Michael Sheets at cnbc. Quick question. On the launch tower side of things,
have you cataloged the damage to the equipment?
Reporter (Reuters)
I mean, it looks like some of
the tanks were hit by debris and
Reporter (Reuters)
there's quite a lot scattered around.
Do you know, can you give us like a rundown of what you guys
Reporter (Reuters)
need to replace versus repair?
We're going to be replacing a bunch of the tanks in the tank farm, but these are tanks that we wanted to replace anyway. So the. We're going with more of the vacuum jacketed kind of giant hot dog looking tanks as opposed to the. So yeah, vacuum jacket, a giant hot dog tank. So those are in the best shape and those are what we want anyway. So some of the tanks will be, will be. Yeah, probably removing and replacing with the hot dog tanks. The tower itself is in good shape. We see no meaningful damage to the tower, even though it did get hit with some pretty big chunks of concrete and. Yeah. And then like I said, we'll be installing the big water jacket and steel sandwich thing under the pad, doing final prep on the next booster and ship, and hopefully be ready to fly again in a couple months. Once again, excitement, guaranteed success is not. But I do think I'm cautiously optimistic. Like I think we've got this time, we've got a better than 50% chance of reaching orbit. So that would be incredibly exciting.
Reporter (Reuters)
Is that, is that steel plate the only thing that you guys are implementing to reduce the amount of debris that gets everywhere, or are there other fixes that you're considering to fix that?
There's a bunch of other things we're doing. So there's going to be a lot of steel plating. So not just underneath The. Directly underneath the rocket, but also extending beyond that and. And also tying the whole structure in together with the legs. Those legs go down very deep. So. And then just in general, we want to have a launch pad that, over time, requires no refurbishment between flights. And that means, obviously not throwing out chunks of concrete, rapidly.
Panelist
Reusable rockets and reusable launch pads.
Reporter (Reuters)
On the launch site itself, it looks like it kind of slid a little bit off the pad instead of going, like, straight vertical like Falcon does.
Was that part of the profile or was that because the engine failures? That's because. Engine failures. Yeah. So. All right, I better. I better sign off now, but
do another update once we've resolved some of these questions.
The exact configuration of the next flight and. The upgrades to the launch pad and anything else. So probably in about 3 weeks. Ish. I'll do another update and. And kind of let you know what we've learned. As always, I'm like. I try to be like, you know, tell people, like, the good, the bad, and the ugly. So, you know, so that it's like, we would tell you our, you know, dumb things that we've done and, you know, maybe some things that we think are pretty smart and.
Panelist
we appreciate your time, Elon. Get out of here and have a good Saturday night. And thanks so much for all the updates that you gave us. We love all these juicy details. So keep up the good work. We look forward to the next one.
You're most welcome. I try to think of, like, if I wasn't involved with this, what are all the things I'd want to know so that I try to tell you those things.
Panelist
It shows, and we appreciate it.
It's awesome. You're welcome. Thanks, everyone.