'How Starship Will SQUASH Long Haul Aviation' : BUSTED!!

and the star of the show of course brother and sister side boosters landing i was excited starship will be able to carry 1 000 passengers from sydney to dubai in just 40 minutes and starman starman did not steal the show though the boosters did the largest mainstream passenger airplane today the airbus a380 can carry up to 853 passengers however that same route will take you 13 hours and 35 minutes to complete how did you end up an engineer and president of spacex so it currently is on earth but this is uh this is basically space travel for earthlings i can't wait for this residual capability basically what we're going to do is we're going to fly bfr like an aircraft and do point-to-point travel on earth in other words in the same time that it takes one airbus a380 to travel from sydney to dubai starship can transport over 20 airbus a380s worth of passengers so you can take off from new york city or vancouver and fly halfway across the globe in a you'll be on the bfr for roughly half an hour or 40 minutes and the longest part of that yeah it's so awesome the longest part of that flight is actually the boat out and back which is over 20 000 passengers so here's how much these tickets will cost and how starship will make long distance aviation obsolete i mean gwen come on this this this is awesome but it's crazy right like this is never going to actually happen oh no it's definitely going to happen this is definitely going to happen how like i mean so you really believe this is going to be deployed at some point in our amazing future when when do you within a decade for sure yep that's the president and chief engineering officer of spacex how did you end up an engineer and president of spacex telling us that we're going to be flying these rockets like planes within 10 years and that was put up about three years ago now but there must be lots of advantages to flying rockets like planes right so the the first ship the first bfr is going to have roughly 100 passengers and let's talk a little bit about the business everyone thinks rockets are really expensive and to a large degree they are and how could we possibly compete with airline tickets here yeah i'm kind of interested in that myself because elon musk's rockets just like airplanes burn fossil fuels at the same time spacex can take advantage of economies of scale to reduce their net profit margin instead of profiting one million dollars per launch from a few dozen starships they can profit 250 000 per launch from hundreds of starships so airplanes essentially burn kerosene whereas elon musk's rocket burn methane but chemically they're virtually identical but if you think about it if i can do this trip in half an hour to an hour i can do dozens of these a day right and yet a long-haul aircraft can only make one of those flights a day so even if my rocket was slightly more expensive and the fuel is a little bit more expensive i can run 10x at least what they're running in a day and really make the revenue that i need to out of that system what your business model here is to burn 10 times as much fossil fuel as the airline industry currently burns and that's this is assuming that your rockets are going to get the same mileage as it were as planes though spoiler alert we'll come on to this later they don't get anywhere near and will never be able to get anywhere in it that's okay that's certainly amazing and i'm personally invested in this one because i travel a lot and i do not love to travel and i would love to get to see my customers in riyadh uh leave in the morning and be back in time to make dinner seriously you want to burn 10 times more fossil fuel so your customers in riyadh on the other side of the planet can be home for dinner have you considered zoom perspective time your average person just by being alive breathes out about half a ton of carbon monoxide per year it's several times your own body weight of carbon dioxide is how much you breathe out per year a first world lifestyle generates about 10 tons of carbon dioxide now a single long-haul plane flight will generate about one ton of carbon oxide so a round trip two tons that sort of thing so even assuming these rockets get comparable mileage per person as planes though she's talking about generating 20 extra carbon dioxide for each one of their passengers so they can be home for dinner uh and i would love to get to see my customers in riyadh uh leave in the morning and be back in time to make dinner so so we're gonna test so within 10 years an economy price ticket or like a like a thousand couple thousand dollars yes per person to fly new york to shanghai yeah i think between economy and business now a lot of people will say that elon musk has completely revolutionized space flight i mean landing rockets like this is amazing certainly no one has done anything like this before and the same is true of reusability no one even thought of the concept of reusability in space flight until elon musk thought of it and he did all of this while still having enough free time to invent the app electric car the hyperloop and the tunnel and of course no one has ever put an electric car into space before that is an absolute first except no people were driving electric cars on the surface of the moon before i was even born the whole idea of the shuttle program was rapidly reusable space vehicles and landing the rocket vertically that was kind of how it was done on the moon which again was before i was even born but even if you ignored that the dcx program was doing that stuff with rapidly reusable vehicles some 20 years ago in fact a cynical man might look at the starship and say something familiar about all of this something old really really old the first method we call the erect ascent you build an enormous rocket put a capsule on top boom you go straight to the moon the other method we call earth orbit rendezvous you take a cargo ship full of fuel or a fuel depot put it on that booster get that in orbit do a docking maneuver refuel the spaceship we put the pieces together in orbit and either way we go the spacecraft that lands on the moon is going to look like that yes just like that yep the original way of going to the moon was something called direct ascent now the design has some obvious disadvantages it's got a very high center of gravity and you might not have that flatter landing site on the moon and then of course once you've landed if you can land how do you get out of it back in 1916 he realized something that we seem to have forgotten today getting to the moon it's going to be all about weight look at the size of this thing it's gonna be 60 70 feet tall a couple of hundred tons at least do you really need to take all that to the surface no let's see starship dry mass is a hundred tonnes so with a bit of fuel yeah a couple hundred tons and height a little more than sixty or 70 feet more like a 160 feet what i wonder is what if you took along a smaller vehicle lightweight that you just used to land something like this let's see the lunar module was about 5 tons with fuel about 15 tons and the bit that actually blasted off from the moon the ascent module weighed about five tons two tons having burnt off all the fuel which means that since it took two people and about 100 kilos apiece by the time it had burnt off its fuel about 10 percent of the weight of the ascent module always people that means you'd have to have a rendezvous between the two of them in lunar orbit exactly and that's where it got kind of tricky because that's actually pretty difficult to do tom we don't even know if rendezvous is possible on earth orbit and you want to do it around the moon but wouldn't that be kind of dangerous i don't know would it and at the time yes it was impossible you know finding another tiny little craft in orbit that's traveling at about 10 times the speed of a bullet and you've got a dock with it otherwise you die however primarily this was a navigation problem not a rocketry problem one that was eventually solved by a rudimentary well at least by modern standards what is a rudimentary computer on the lunar module now this was no small feed given at the time man first walked on the moon he didn't even have a digital watch but a mechanical one and of course the whole thing wasn't streamed in 4k otherwise people might just be a little bit less impressed by stuff like this the moon was nothing compared to my view of home planet it was it it was the main chance i'd look out the window and there it would be a tiny little thing you know it could obscure it with your collins remained in the apollo command module orbiting the moon the engine to propel them off the lunar surface was a huge exception to nasa's design philosophy of redundant systems everything revolved around reliability all of the apollo burns around the moon were done with pressure-fed engines it was a solitary single one chamber that chamber either ignited properly and got you the thrust or it did not if it did not neal and buzz were dead on the surface because there was no backup on those if for any reason those engines didn't work everyone died so with a pressure fed engine what you've got to do is successfully open the valves and the engine works now all of it elon musk's rocket engines use turbo pumps to pump the fuel into the engines which is great for efficiency but the high flow rate high pressure of those pumps is basically the entire reason why rocket science has its reputation these are the reasons no one has really ever cracked launch failures and to this day they linger in the one to five percent region and that is after over a century of fuel pump research wiki kind of accurately describes the problem as turbo pumps in rockets are important and problematic enough that launch vehicles using one have been caustically described as a turbo pump with a rocket attached which if you think about it yeah what else is there to a rocket other than a giant fuel tank and a combustion nozzle so yeah virtually the entire of the apollo mission was designed around minimizing the places where a single point failure would kill everyone and in places where there were no other alternatives no backups you went for the most reliable engine that you could which is the gas pressure fed engine no fuel pumps all of elon musk's engines run on fuel pumps and there is no emergency abort system a single point failure on the booster stage and the entire rocket and its crew is lost this just wasn't true with apollo they're this very simple but effective system where wires ran the length of the rocket and if there was a break in the connectivity on two of those wires it was assumed that the rocket had disintegrated and the emergency abort system would be triggered with maybe the most famous test of this being the little joe rocket which was meant to simulate a rocket failure which it did very effectively because the rocket failed and as it actually disintegrated the mechanism fired and took the capsule to safety this this was not planned that the rocket was going to disintegrate like this but the notable exception here was the space shuttle which compromised safety for reusability you know if you want to reuse those engines those engines have to be off on the side of the launch vehicle and that limits your abort options but with elon musk's rocket it's not just that a single point failure on the first stage will cause the loss of the entire vehicle and its crew the same is also true of the second stage there is no abort system and these are far from trivial problems i'm not aware of anyone in the entire of space flight who's lit up a turbo pump engine after an extended period of time in space all of the engines that go on spacecraft that go through deep space and have via months before they have to fire again are pressure fed engines they use hypergolic propellants that ignite spontaneously and yeah i think the problem with that is yeah just just just to do the tests or will these turbo pumps fire successfully after they've been sat in deep space for you know the six months travel to mars or something you know you have to worry about things like lubricants evaporating out of the engine or stuff freezing in the engine and so forth but yeah he does kind of bug me the elon musk fans dance a jig like he's just turned water into wine when he replicates something that people did over 50 years ago like take men up to dock with a space station it's not just that people were doing it 50 years ago they were doing that sort of thing around the moon within this strange ship two astronauts and a treasure triple sealed vacuum boxes of rocks and soil from the surface of the moon locked within these rocks were secrets of the ages to be studied and deciphered by the scientists of earth and starman starman did not steal the show though the boosters did yes this would be amazingly impressive if only people hadn't walked on the surface of the moon before elon musk was even born from the planet earth first set foot upon the moon july 1969 50. it came in peace for 30 times he saw the earth rise over the horizon of the moon yeah this probably would have got more people excited if it was streamed in 4k you know not filled in sheehy cam but in many ways this highlights the real problem since we walked on the moon digital video has gone from this i guess you're about the only person around it doesn't have tv coverage of the scene meanwhile rocket reliability over the same period has gone from about well five percent failure to one or two percent failure it's not got easier to make rockets over this time now don't get me wrong space is always difficult and just to get men into orbit is no trivial task but it's not exactly something new these are just tweaks on old ideas and in some cases they're used to sell complete [ __ ] like from the very top of spacex so you can take off from new york city or vancouver and fly halfway across the globe in a you'll be on the bfr for roughly half an hour or 40 minutes then it goes up to elon musk fans who absolutely lapped this stuff up i mean quinn come on this this this is awesome but it's crazy right like this is never going to actually happen oh no it's definitely going to happen this is definitely going to happen how like what and then you get elon musk fans who think that actually no this really is going to happen starship will be able to carry 1 000 passengers from sydney to dubai in just 40 minutes but this time we're going to do something different we're just going to take a look at this from the perspective of fuel economy so even if my rocket was slightly more expensive and the fuel is a little bit more expensive i can run 10x at least what they're running in a day and really make the revenue that i need to out of that system no you see rockets are this thing called payload fraction which is basically how much of your rocket isn't the rocket or the fuel and for a rocket it's typically about one percent so yeah rough breakdown is a rocket is 90-ish percent fuel 10 of the mass of the rocket is just the dry mass of the rocket you know the fuel tanks and the engines that sort of thing and about one percent of the rockets launch mass here's what you can put into orbit now the reason for this is fairly simple to get into one of these long-range ballistic trajectories or to go into orbit you have to go fast orbital speed around the earth is some eight kilometers per second the navy has unveiled a new secret weapon the developers call it a rail gun traveling at seven times the speed of sound as fast as going from washington dc to philadelphia in three minutes seven times the speed of sound uh yeah rail gun speeds are amateur hour compared to orbital velocities you know they're about me and two three-ish kilometers per second low earth orbit velocities about eight kilometers per second and for reference the speed of sound is about a third of a kilometer per second now sure elon musk isn't suggesting that his rockets are going to go into orbit here but to get to the other side of the planet in half an hour or so it's not far off let's just look at what he's got here anywhere on earth in about half an hour so halfway around the world is about 20 000 kilometers and they're gonna do it in about half an hour so it's about forty thousand kilometers per hour ish and there's about four thousand ish seconds in an hour so it's about ten kilometers per second you know the basic you do basically have to get up to orbital type velocities to do this and for those who think that i'm just doing some calculation that elon musk really wasn't promising and you want to hear it straight from his mouth okay there it is in his own animation that he thinks that the maximum velocity is going to be about 27 000 kilometers per hour versus my estimate of 40 000 kilometers per hour yeah you're basically still going at orbital velocities and therein lies the problem it takes a crazy amount of energy fuel to get up to 10 kilometers per second because the energy goes with the square of the velocity so a plane traveling at about the speed of sound has about a thousand times less energy than one of these rockets and you have to put all of that energy to get that velocity into the rocket in the fuel burn which takes a couple of minutes or so and then you've got to lose all that velocity again that same amount of energy as burning all of that fuel and you've got to dissipate that during re-entry orion now at an altitude of 470 thousand feet 900 miles from its splashdown target [Music] guidance officer confirms that orion has reached entry interface the moment of truth for orion for the next nine minutes 45 seconds [Music] and as expected we have reached a loss of telemetry as we enter this uh brief blackout period this is the point in time where orion would be experiencing its peak heating traveling about 20 000 miles an hour some 84 of the velocity of a spacecraft returning from the moon we're four minutes away from the jettison of the forward bay cover at the very top of the spacecraft that will begin the shoot deployment sequence now in the meanwhile the plane is flying through the viscous atmosphere uh you know these people are fairly smart so they fly above about three quarters of the atmosphere where about three quarters of the viscosity of the air has gone now starship says it can take about a hundred tons to low earth orbit the dry mass of the first stage is about 180 tons and the second stage is about 120 tons the propellant weight the first stage is about three and a half thousand tons and for the second about one thousand two hundred tons so the total propellant weight is about four thousand five hundred tons that sort of thing in other words in the same time that it takes one airbus a380 to travel from sydney to dubai starship can transport over 20 airbus a380s worth of passengers between the two locations cool so rough size comparisons the starship is about 50 meters in length while the a380 that this guy wants to do the comparison with is about 70 so these are approximately on the same scale and immediately you start to see the problems airbus has about four to five times more space to put passengers in is the rocket now the entire mass of the rocket is about 300 tons which is very comparable to the mass of the airbus which is about 270 tons ish and its maximum takeoff weight is about 580 tons carries about 600 passengers at about a i'd say 100 kilos per piece yeah it's like 80 kilos for the human and 20 odd kilos for the luggage so that's going to be about 60 tons of people on this plane so it's about 280 tons it's just the dry mass of the plane 60 tons of people that's 340 tons in total which means with a float out of fuel it's about 240 tons of fuel and that will take you halfway round the world so elon musk's rocket right it's going to take a hundred tons of cargo so let's be super generous and say a thousand people although even elon musk's most devoted fans have to wince kind of hard at the idea of about half of the weight of the rocket that's landing being constituted of people starship will be able to carry 1 000 passengers from sydney to dubai in just 40 minutes yeah it turns out this guy was talking complete crap when he says a thousand people elon musk and their pr people say more like 100 people the first bfr is going to have roughly 100 passengers but just for an easy comparison let's say that the starship can carry a similar number of passengers to the airbus so the fuel requirements for the airbus are about 250 tons of fossil fuel propellant requirements for the rocket is about four and a half thousand tons now to be fair about four-fifths of that mass is going to be liquid oxygen which is not a fossil fuel not free either but we'll come back to that later so it turns out about 20 of this fuel on this rocket is a fossil fuel methane so it's about a thousand tons of fossil fuel for one of these rocket trips compared to about 250 tons for the plane so so straight out of the bag it's four times as much fuel to carry a similar number of passengers except if you take spacex's numbers they're only going to take one-sixth of the number of passengers so that means it has about 25 times a higher carbon footprint than the plane hardly a great selling point and now you're going to make up for that by flying these rockets 10 times a day and you're going to really make up the revenue that way but if you think about it if i can do this trip in half an hour to an hour i can do dozens of these a day right and yet a long-haul aircraft can only make one of those flights a day so even if my rocket was slightly more expensive and the fuel is a little bit more expensive i can run 10x at least what they're running in a day and really make the revenue that i need to out of that system oh and precious what comes out today but elon musk offering a 100 million dollars for a carbon capture technology well yeah maybe the best solution would be to um not take as many long distance trips and if you do have to take long distance trips don't take one that burns four times as much fuel and don't take one from a company that is running those fuel burning parties ten times as fast as planes do now i should stress these numbers aren't going to get any better because fundamentally rocket engines are some of the most efficient on the market and even if you bump these rocket engine efficiencies from say yeah 70 to 100 making them perfectly efficient it's not going to change the overall conclusion here because the principal problem is an intrinsic one that within a few minutes you have to burn enough fuel to accelerate the bodies of your passengers up to some 30 times the speed of sound a velocity that make rail guns seem like kids toys then you've got to lose that exact same amount of energy again on the re-entry honestly looked at like this i'm stunned that launch success rates are as high as they currently are even the everyday astronaut who i first came across doing a truly horrific video where he was gushing praise on elon musk's idea of putting cold gas thrusters on a car no even when he is posed with a question would he get on board one of elon musk's rocket ships without an emergency abort system he says so i guess the question should be would i ride on starship without an abort system for now the answer is no i think we should see at least a few dozen flights without crew first we should find the limits in the boundaries you know maybe have some failures or two and only once we've seen starship fly 10 plus times reliably without any failures would i consider getting on one anyway on his video about does starship need an abort system he does okay but constantly [Music] and looks through a rose-colored glasses in playing down the need for an abort system from the 90s on only one launch out of 180-ish launches required a launch abort system actually be used so only about half a percent of flights would see any benefit from a launch escape system at all and for me well yeah that's worth it i mean especially if you're going to go down this we're going to fly starship like planes thing i mean if their rockets carry 100 or so people first ship the first bfr is going to have roughly 100 passengers and you're going to get about one percent on average dying that means on average one person on every flight with starship would die he also includes this clip of elon musk saying what's the best design for a rocket best part is no part the best process is no process it weighs nothing costs nothing um can't go wrong cool so simple is better so so a simple solution for a business meeting with someone on the other side of the world would be a zoom call or something a massively over complicated solution would be to fly fuel guzzling rockets at 10 kilometers per second for a short meeting on the other side of the planet then fly home again because reasons how did you end up an engineer and president of spacex uh and i would love to get to see my customers in riyadh uh leave in the morning and be back in time to make dinner the best part is no part like the my the the thing i'm most impressed with in when i have the design meetings at spacex is what did you undesign but on the subject of simpler is better you know like say for instance having two engines or 40 it's you when you look at the bottom of the spacex booster you just got to think really how much plumbing is involved in getting the propellant into the engines there and maintenance i mean it's bad enough to maintain that the two or four engines on a plane this looks like a nightmare now you might be wondering why people just spam engines like this at all well that's a historic thing that rocket engines take forever to design and get them working properly so when you're building your rockets they tend to be just built around whatever rocket engines you're comfortable you can make and spacex have the rocket engines they're comfortable they can make so you just spam those now it's got to be said that rocketry is a pretty mature field people have been making these engines like this for the best part of a hundred years and i'm pretty comfortable with my prejudices here that the reason that we don't have reliable rocket engines is not because rocket engineers have been sitting around for the last 50 years just sort of saying yeah 102 failure rate is fine until elon musk comes along and says wow wouldn't it be great if we could make rocket engines a thousand times more reliable but anyway i decided to get a second opinion on this and i went to scott manley not only because he's got one of the most awesome names online but i've also never really seen him put a foot wrong so this is what he says i think orbital launch success rate will rise very slowly because there are new organizations getting into the launch business and that will bring the number down well established launch providers trend towards their baseline reliability and this was in response to how much higher do you think the number is going to get the launch reliability in the next 10 to 20 years orders of magnitude ish um yeah very slowly seems to be where he was going with that but twitter maybe not the best way to communicate this sort of thing then of course you have to chewy eyed optimism the answer to what can we do to make rockets more reliable is simple fly them more often fly reusable rockets over and over instead of throwing them away only then will we begin to get anywhere near airliner-like reliability well i'm not even entirely sure about that but i mean maybe the real problem is to what end you only need half a dozen or so flights to the international space station per year or what so you you can fly rockets such that elon musk's collaborators can be home in time for tea no one is going to pay 10 times what a plane costs for what is realistically going to be a 1 in 100 chance of dying and taking people to mars is that on steroids i mean i did a video about what going to live on mars would be like and to keep with elon musk's idea you know of deleting the redundant stuff you can get all of the experience of going to mars by finding an uninhabited cave and living the rest of your life in it no your probability of dying in mars is much higher than earth that's pretty much what life on mars will be like it's going to be hard there's a good chance of death going in a little can through deep space you might land successfully sadly this ain't me being debbie downer either this is captain reality paying a visit i mean even if if elon musk can somehow get it all to work and actually ship people to mars once you land successfully there will be a map you'll be working non-stop to build the base once people get there and the truly horrific quality of life on mars becomes widely known and once you get there even after doing all this there's a very harsh environment to use a good chance you die there no one else will go let alone pay elon musk millions of dollars for the experience i mean if you want to do this properly try selling some robots to mars first to build a stable human habitat and if you can do that then we'll talk about putting some humans into the aquarium i mean all i can really do is leave you with some criticisms of the last reusable space vehicle and you'll see that you know even people who do this routinely can still have blind spots to just how dangerous this can be young and ross were among the astronauts who believed the shuttle was always an experimental craft not an operational vehicle for routine space flight as president ronald reagan declared after sts-4 hawke said in 2017 that before sts-1 he saw an analysis estimating the risk of loss of the vehicle earth 1 in 280 but an internal nasa risk assessment study released in late 2010 concluded that the agency had seriously underestimated the level of risk involved in operating the shuttle the report assessed that there was a one in nine chance of a catastrophic disaster during the first nine flight of the shuttle but the safety improvements had later improved the risk ratio to one in 90. in 1984 reagan signed a directive stating the shuttle would not be fully operational until it could fly 24 missions per year perhaps by 1988 it's a while ago now and in the end it averaged out at about 6 p.m although many astronauts criticized the payload specialist program in part because they did not believe that less trained outsiders were fully aware of the risks of space flight full-time astronauts may not have been either bolden was amazed to learn after the loss of colombia that the impenetrable leading edges of the vehicle he flew for 14 years were less than an inch thick hawk with much experience flying dangerous craft at the united states naval test pilot school said if i knew in advance that one in 25 would fail i would probably think twice about flame 3 as i did after the first 26 flights yeah something tells me that starship's not going to be squashing long-haul aviation so yep that's today's video hope you enjoyed it if you did drop a thumbs up on it if you don't want to miss out on more videos like this make sure you hit subscribe and as ever if you really like the work of this channel you can support it directly through patreon and there thanks for watching [Music] you

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Length: 37min 11sec (2231 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 23 2021