Elon Musk 30 July 2021 Starbase interview with Tim Dodd

[FutureSpaceTourist]

https://twitter.com/erdayastronaut/status/1422664182659420168

Take a tour of @SpaceX's Starbase factory with the ultimate tour guide, @elonmusk! It was INCREDIBLE to pick his brain for over 2 hours while walking around checking out Starship hardware! He even made some design decisions IN REAL TIME! Enjoy part 1 of 3!

Join me as I take a tour of SpaceX's Starbase facility with Elon Musk as our tour guide! This is part 1 of 3, so stay tuned, there's a lot more coming!

If you need some notes on this video with key points, check out our article - https://everydayastronaut.com/starbase-tour-and-interview-with-elon-musk/

Need a rundown on Starship? I've got you covered with our "Complete Guide to Starship"
youtube.com/watch?v=-8p2JDTd13k

00:00 - Intro
02:02 - Conversation Starts
06:18 - High Bay
28:23.- Grid Fin
33:55 - Raptor V2
39:53 - HLS
40:45 - Stage Separation / Hot Gas Thrusters
48:00 - HLS (again)
51:44 - Outro

Edit to add:

Part 2:

Join me as I take a tour of SpaceX's Starbase facility with Elon Musk as our tour guide! This is part 2 of 3, so stay tuned, there's another one coming!

If you need some notes on this video with key points, check out our article - https://everydayastronaut.com/starbase-tour-and-interview-with-elon-musk/

Need a rundown on Starship? I've got you covered with our "Complete Guide to Starship"
//youtu.be/-8p2JDTd13k

00:00 - Intro
00:45 - Tent 1 // Raptors
05:00 - Failure and the Space Shuttle
08:35 - Launch Escape Systems
10:50 - Tent 2
13:00 - Heat Shield Talk
16:20 - 1st Orbital Test
26:26 - Tent 3 // Nose Cones
37:40 - S20 Nose Cone // Reentry
51:00 - 69.420

Part 3:

Join me as I take a tour of SpaceX's Starbase launchpad with Elon Musk as our tour guide! This is part 3 or 3, so if you haven't seen parts one and two, definitely start there!

If you need some notes on this video with key points, check out our article - https://everydayastronaut.com/starbase-tour-and-interview-with-elon-musk/

Need a rundown on Starship? I've got you covered with our "Complete Guide to Starship"
youtube.com/-8p2JDTd13k

00:00 - Intro
00:40 - Exclusion zone, Florida and Oil Rig Platforms
05:00 - Walking to the Orbital Launch Table
06:45 - On top of Orbital Launch Table
12:40 - The urgency of making life Multi-planetary
18:50 - Final thoughts
19:35 - Outro

[FutureSpaceTourist]

Key takeaways / notes on Tim’s website:

https://everydayastronaut.com/starbase-tour-and-interview-with-elon-musk/

Includes some interesting stats, such as each grid fin is roughly 3 tons … but Elon hopes to halve that!

[Giggleplex]

Key takeaways / notes on Tim’s website:

https://everydayastronaut.com/starbase-tour-and-interview-with-elon-musk/

Includes some interesting stats, such as each grid fin is roughly 3 tons … but Elon hopes to halve that!

A few typos in the article but the solutions they have come up with to reduce components is very clever! Interesting in seeing how well they'll work in practise.

[Stan-1967]

Sounds like stage separation will follow the model of Starlink deployment? ( at around 41 minute mark)  Right before MECO they will rotate the entire stack, giving each stage different rotational inertia, and thereby separating them without mechanical pushers?  Elon mentioned it is a complex sequence.   I would think you want to start the rotation so that SS can start its burn as soon as possible, but then SH may have to complete a upwards of a full rotation to start the RTLS burn in the right orientation. 

Sounds exciting.

[Davidthefat]

"Automate. An important part of this is to remove in-process testing after the problems have been diagnosed; if a product is reaching the end of a production line with a high acceptance rate, there is no need for in-process testing."

Explains why some of the Raptor engines don't look like they have been hotfired.

[StevenOBrien]

That was fascinating. Some interesting things:

Musk said that almost none of the failures that occurred on the test flights were on the list of things they were anticipating to fail.

If I understood correctly, he wants to use the ullage gas venting as RCS instead of using hot gas or cold gas thrusters at all. This is already the plan for the booster, and he seemed to agree during the interview that it should be done on the ship too.

He doesn't want the added complexity of separate nose-mounted landing thrusters on the lunar variant of Starship, and is confident that they can convince NASA that the main engines can be used for landing without disturbing the lunar surface to the point where it would cause the landing to fail.

[Davidthefat]

"Additionally, Musk restated that he believes everyone should be a chief engineer. Engineers need to understand the system at a high level to understand when they are making a bad optimization. As an example, Musk noted that an order of magnitude more time has been spent reducing engine mass than reducing residual propellant, despite both being equally as important."


You know, not gonna lie, I like this Elon fellow. Having worked at both big and small aerospace, a lot of the sentiment I got from big aerospace was the whole "not my department, not my problem" attitude." Certainly not the case for everyone, but certainly heard that more often in big aerospace.

[sparks]

First part is interesting because it shows you how he's taking his Model 3 manufacturing lessons and deleting every part not necessary on Starship/Booster.  His design philosophy from Tesla is fairly well known, but you can start plotting a path towards 1000 Starships and the complement of boosters to go with them. Whether you like or dislike him, got to love the ambition in space.

[abaddon]

"Automate. An important part of this is to remove in-process testing after the problems have been diagnosed; if a product is reaching the end of a production line with a high acceptance rate, there is no need for in-process testing."

Explains why some of the Raptor engines don't look like they have been hotfired.

I'm sure the engines are still acceptance tested.  That would be end-of-process testing, not in-process.

[steveleach]

"Automate. An important part of this is to remove in-process testing after the problems have been diagnosed; if a product is reaching the end of a production line with a high acceptance rate, there is no need for in-process testing."

Explains why some of the Raptor engines don't look like they have been hotfired.

I'm sure the engines are still acceptance tested.  That would be end-of-process testing, not in-process.

Depends on how you define "the product". They could mount them all on the booster, ship it out to the launch site and test the whole thing on the launch mount. If that testing passes 99.9% of the time then any time spent acceptance testing individual Raptors could be a false economy.

I don't think that will happen, obviously.

[xvel]

troll alert

[HVM]

Wow that was good stuff

-Devil's advocate mode:

Somebody complained that the booster separation systems seem to lack springs. -No need says Elon, we just use the main engines to steer rocket to such a pitch-rate that stages just fling out of each other. Also no need for strong thrusters as booster is already pitching to a boost back attitude...

Something, something... thin line between genius and crazy man...

Lunar lander Starship: NASA proposal was just to win competition with right numbers. Actual Moonship -we will wing it, ullage gas thrusters or main engines -who cares; we test it with regolith simulant...

(xvel is psychic)

[1]

New raptor performance parameters from Elon. Raptor chamber pressure currently pegged at 30.2 million mousefarts. Should be able to squeeze out a couple hundred thousand more.

[Oersted]

-Devil's advocate mode:

Somebody complained that the booster separation systems seem to lack springs. -No need says Elon, we just use the main engines to steer rocket to such a pitch-rate that stages just fling out of each other.

Brave words coming from the CEO of the company that had the Falcon 1 stages re-contact and ruin the mission. However, this is exactly the bravery needed to reach the necessary optimization, and just shows how far SpaceX has come.

I always thought the HLS thruster ring was silly. Just do a few unmanned landings on the Moon with the main engines and see how it works out. My guess is that it won't be more problematic than the LM landings.

Fantastic to follow Elon around Starbase, though I have the feeling that Everyday Astronaut is a bit out of his depth here, but great that he got the interview.

[Nascent Ascent]

Boy O Boy.  I surely hope and pray that Elon stays healthy as possible. We can't afford to lose him at a young age (like Steve Jobs).

[Stan-1967]

Wow that was good stuff

-Devil's advocate mode:

Somebody complained that the booster separation systems seem to lack springs. -No need says Elon, we just use the main engines to steer rocket to such a pitch-rate that stages just fling out of each other. Also no need for strong thrusters as booster is already pitching to a boost back attitude...

Something, something... thin line between genius and crazy man...

....

An interesting variant to the novel stage separation scheme (IMHO) would be to attach a tether between SS & SH so that it behaves like a "de-spin" mechanism on a traditional spin stabilized rocket.  The tether detaches when it reaches the end of it's length. 

At MECO Starship will have much more mass than SH, so the center of rotation is probably going to be physically somewhere within SS, so at separation, SH will act like the expend weights used to de-spin some rockets.  This would have the side benefit of reducing the angular velocity of SS while it executes its ignition sequence.  This maneuver could get dicey if too much angular momentum was transferred to SH, as there would be risk of re-contact with the aft end of SH if it rotated 180 degrees before SS had sufficient separation. 

Sloshing propellant will be fun to deal with in this new scheme.

[MATTBLAK]

Boy O Boy.  I surely hope and pray that Elon stays healthy as possible. We can't afford to lose him at a young age (like Steve Jobs).

Yup - let's hope he has a food taster and bodyguards.

[disconnector]

Losing Elon has to be a risk factor that SpaceX is trying to manage.  He's one of those people that is single handedly changing the world.  Between Tesla (EVs, energy storage, and solar power) and SpaceX (let's make humanity multi planetary) can you name another human that is effecting so much movement in the future of humanity?

He is literally driving this forward by the force of his personality and desire to stand on Mars.  Whether you like him or not you have to admit - he's an amazing human being.

[NaN]

The "rotate the stack during separation" concept is not quite as dynamic as people are imagining. Recall that the skirt places the interstage on the ship rather than on the booster - this means the normal bell-contacts-interstage scenario is eliminated, reducing required separation distance. You still want to avoid the ship's exhaust impinging the booster at point-blank range... which a modest spin rate would allow. Upon separation, the stages would start rotating independently and the rear of the ship would slide the opposite direction of the front of the booster, providing lateral separation very quickly even with a low spin rate (less than 5 degrees per second).
It may not completely eliminate some short pusher system, but it's not a crazy idea.


The video was very interesting though I wish Tim had had more time to add subtitles and the like. Musk was throwing out a lot of terminology that folks wouldn't understand unless they were already closely following -- so the video won't be very accessible to a general audience. Likely he will provide some less-raw summaries or deep dives in a week or two. I'm really looking forward to the other two installments.

[Hog]

"Manufacture, not design, is the hard part. "  Mr Musk.

A big "heck ya" to Elon from all the manufacturing engineers in the world.   It's one thing to cobble up a prototype,  now building one thousand of them- "and yesterday!"  That is quite another.
.