Why is it not moving? - why is it not moving?? My name is Felix, and I’m your host for
today's episode of What about it. Happy new year, everyone! Today we’ll dive
into the reasons why SpaceX has yet
to launch its Starship into space, and we’ll take a close look at a very important milestone
to be done at SpaceX’s Starbase soon. We’ll also dive deep into InSight, NASA’s robotic look
inside the red planet which recently ended its life, sending its final pictures and
findings back to Earth. Stay tuned, and let’s dive right in! Starship Updates And we’re back at Starbase.
Another year has begun, and there’s a lot of work ahead for the
SpaceX team working on the largest
and most unusual rocket ever built. To explain what’s going on right now,
we have to go a few days back. These pictures are from 2022. December 21st. SpaceX rolled booster 9, the next Super Heavy
booster in the production pipeline, down
to the launch site for cryo-proof testing. These jams in the test pipeline
are likely not intended. But they’re not bad, either. Since
Ship 24 and Booster 7, the prototypes still slated for the first orbital launch
of a Starship in human history, have still not flown, Booster 9 is kind of in the middle of everything. The first cryo-proof test went well, and explosions
and major problems are becoming increasingly rare. SpaceX workers pressurized the lower oxygen
main tank and then proceeded to fill the upper
Methane main tank with liquid nitrogen. We’ve seen these tests many times. What’s changed over time is that anticipation
of it holding the pressure. It does. Every time. We’ve not seen an overpressure
event from a cryo test in a long time. SpaceX has perfected the stainless steel
hull construction so much by now
that it seems to work reliably. As of recording the episode, Booster 9 is still sitting
at the launch site on the mobile test stand, likely waiting for a rollback to the
construction site any day now. This is the usual routine at Starbase. Test, check, fix and test again. Hardware-rich development is the term for it,
and it means that we’re seeing a lot of
different prototypes being built, tested, and checked for flaws. Thank you for the awesome pictures
again, Mauricio. You rock! WAI is proud to be one
of your biggest supporters! This video recorded by WAI Cam operator Chief
at the construction site is a perfect
example of hardware-rich development. It is the flip of the common dome
section of Starship 28. 24 hasn’t flown yet, and 28 is already
being prepared for stacking. It also gives a wonderful view of the internal tank slosh
barriers and the holes for the ch4 and lox downcomers. The production quality of these prototypes has come
from outright ugly to this in around three years. A fully reusable stainless steel rocket. SpaceX’s pipeline is stuffed. Here’s
a view from LabPadre’s 24/7 live
cams looking into the highbay. Ship 25 in the foreground and ship 26 in the back,
just being removed from the welding turntable,
used to weld the large ring sections together. It’s done. Next are raceway installations,
flaps, and a lot of detailing. After that, it’s tested, and
then it’s ready for flight. Generally speaking, SpaceX has a growing problem. The prototype production pipeline is churning out
more and more perfect-looking test candidates,
and the launch site is not launching them. Down the road, there are tests but
no launches at this point. And the reason for these delays becomes visible if
we take another look at Mauricios aerial view. SpaceX is still very much busy building
the launch infrastructure. The blast berm separating the orbital launch
tower and the fuel farm has recently
been upgraded and is now almost done. I’m saying almost because there’s
still work going on there. The plumbing is being rerouted. And that last step on the bottom of the berm
is being filled with dirt and will likely
receive a cover when that is done. Then there's the orbital launch and
integration tower or Mechazilla. Its concrete foundation is being reinforced. Likely because SpaceX found damage after
some recent static fire activity. It’s tough to do hardware-rich development on
a 469-foot or 143 meters tall launch tower. You can’t just put a new one
there if you find mistakes. You have to make do with what you’ve got. "Show me what you got! I want
to see, what you got!" But you can do some testing even
with Mechazilla and the OLM. And that’s what SpaceX is doing right now. "I like what you got!" Have you ever wondered what a Starship and Super
Heavy full stack weigh, including fuel? Empty, so when lifting it onto the OLM like here in Ryan
Hansen’s wonderful animation, it’s not that much. Circa 200 tons for the booster and
another 150 for the Starship. Still a heavy weight but not nearly
as much as a fully fueled stack. This hasn’t happened yet. Even though we’ve seen full stacks before,
SpaceX has never fueled them all the way. And there’s a simple reason for it. They don’t know if the Orbital
launch mount can take it. Fully fueled, the Starship stack
weighs in at roughly 5000 tons. That’s right. The weight of around
123 fully loaded semi-trucks. By far the heaviest flying object we’ve
ever built once it does fly. Just as an example. Do you know what this is? It’s the Airbus A380. By far the largest airliner in
the world, dwarfing anything else by a solid chunk. To compare it to a Starship, we need
the maximum takeoff weight. And… drum roll… on an Airbus A380, the behemoth of
the air, the maximum takeoff weight is 575 tons. So, fully fueled and loaded to the brim with
passengers and freight containers. A Starship sitting on the OLM and waiting for ignition
is 8.69 times the weight of an Airbus A380. Let that sink in. And all of this weight is resting on these. The 20 hold-down clamps inside the
orbital launch mount ring. The name is misleading. While one purpose of the
hold-down clamps is to hold the rocket down
on the olm while the engines are igniting, it’s also the rocket’s parking spot. All the weight is resting on these 20 arms. 5000, which is the weight of a fully fueled
Starship stack divided by 20, which
is the number of hold-down clamps, makes a crazy 250 tons per arm. So, two of those arms almost hold the weight
of one fully loaded Airbus A380. Now, that needs to be and can
be tested beforehand. And that’s what SpaceX is preparing for
as I am recording this episode. There is no official name given by SpaceX yet. Hold down clamp load tester? OLM weight simulator? What ever you want to call
it, its purpose is clear. The contraption has two bottle opener-shaped
end pieces on the top. Those will be resting on two
hold-down clamps at a time. The middle piece can be varied in width with that
middle actuator so that it can be hung inside
the olm and onto the hold-down clamps. Once it is resting on the clamps, it will then pull a large amount of crane
counterweights up with its two strong
actuators hanging down on the sides. SpaceX can slowly increase and decrease the load
resting on the clamps at any point in time. All the way up to the maximum weight of
the counterweights, which should be roughly
500 tons, so 250 tons per clamp. Once one pair of clamps is tested, the load
tester then detaches from the tested pair
of clamps, rotates to the next pair, and the process starts over again. This way, SpaceX will be able to test the maximum
carrying capacity of each of the 20 clamps. This way, it’s not being left to chance if
the construction actually holds the weight
of a fully fueled Starship stack. I’ve heard the question several times over the past
few days on my Twitter account, why SpaceX is testing
this now and why they didn’t do it earlier? The answer likely is split into two reasons. Number one is that an empty Starship
stack weighs far less, as said. Around 350 tons. That’s only 17.5 tons per clamp. Secondly, the OLM was not finished yet. SpaceX does this test now as they’ve reached
all the milestones to be able to
test this under the right conditions. Them performing the test now is a sure sign
that SpaceX is very close to launch readiness
now, at least for the ground hardware. Thank you for watching up to here. If you liked the episode and all the work we put into
it, hit that like button, subscribe to the channel, and ring the bell to get upload
notifications in the future! Thank you so much for loving what we do! On we go with NASA InSight’s final breath! From its stunning launch on the 5th of May in 2018 until
now, Insight has kept the science world busy. A perfect example of the importance of robotic
exploration in our solar system. It reached its end of life just before
Christmas on December 19th, 2022. Four and a half years of struggle on an alien world and
insights into Mars we couldn’t dream of before. Reason enough for us here at WAI to give you a
summary of the mission and its milestones. Built by Lockheed Martin Space since May 2014 and delayed
from its original 2016 launch window, the mission
at this point was 2 years behind schedule. Problems with the craft's instruments kept
the team busier than originally planned. A life's work that couldn’t be more daring. Insight's task was to study the inside of another
world by listening to its vibrations and its heartbeat
as it slowly changes and moves deep within the planet. For this, Insight was equipped
with instruments you normally
don’t find on another planet. Seismic sensors to be buried
under the surface of Mars. So much can go wrong, and has in the past. Viking 1 and Viking 2 in 76 both
carried seismic instruments. However, Viking 1’s seismic instrument malfunctioned
and couldn’t deploy, and while Viking 2
was able to deploy its seismic instruments, there was no way of telling if it detected vibrations or
just the wind moving the instrument ever so slightly. And Mars would give InSight an exceptionally
hard time in the future. Insight is a one-meter high and six-meter wide lander
dominated by its two large circular solar panels. It’s a similar design to the Phoenix lander, which touched down on Mars in 2008 with
the goal of studying the history
of water in the martian arctic. Reusing lander platforms is a common thing
in the space exploration business. Proven designs are very precious. It comes equipped with multiple instruments
for scientific research, such as a seismometer with a windshield and a robotic
arm to place the instruments on the surface of Mars. The theory was to listen to the waves of earthquakes
and meteorite impacts as they
propagate through the planet's interior. By listening to the change of the wave
while moving through the planet, the internals
of Mars would become visible. After traveling through deep space
for more than 6 months, Insight separated from its service module and entered
the Martian atmosphere heat shield first. Parachute deployment, heat shield separation. The final approach was propulsive, bringing Insight
down to its designated landing zone. Landing on Mars is dangerous, and throughout
the history of robotic Mars exploration,
many Landers have been lost on approach, never even starting their scientific
investigations. For insight, though, the trouble
was still to come. Mars is an unforgiving place for a robot and
the problems started shortly after landing. Insight is equipped with three
main science instruments. One of them, the heat flow and physical properties
probe or HP3, struggled from the beginning on. NASA’s calculations for the composition of the surface
regolith at the landing site were off. It was supposed to use a self-hammering mechanism,
driving a temperature sensor all the way
down to 5 meters depth below the surface. It couldn’t even penetrate the surface, though. They tried everything. From Pinning it down
to the surface using the robotic arm… To outright just squeezing it
down while it was hammering. It couldn’t get traction and thus never was
able to get meaningful measurements. It was abandoned in January 2021. Another big problem from the beginning
was dust on the solar panels. Every Mars mission has to deal with it, and insight even tried dropping dirt on the panels and
then hoping that this dirt would clean off the dust. What worked flawlessly, though,
was InSight’s seismometer. It was the instrument to bring priceless
insights into the martian interior. It detected over 1300 seismic events
on Mars during its mission. 35 of which at magnitudes between 3 and 4. Here, for example, is a meteorite entering
the atmosphere, exploding and several
fragments hitting the ground. Or this. A marsquake. All this was done to see what makes Earth so special
compared to other rocky planets like Mars. The goal was to find out what was going on
inside of Mars and insight delivered. In July of 2021, NASA published three
essential papers on their findings. And the biggest sensation? Mars has a molten core. Contrary to Earth, where the crust is solid,
the mantle is molten, and the core is solid
again, on Mars, Crust and mantle are solid, and the core is molten. By reconstructing the seismic waves detected
by the seismometer, Scientists were able
to look inside Marrs like never before. We now know that Mars has a not-very-dense liquid
core with a diameter of around 1830 kilometers. On December 19th, NASA officially concluded
the Insight mission due to loss of power. Insight will be remembered as one of the fundamental
science missions about our red neighbor, and science has and will greatly
profit from its findings. Farewell insight. You will be remembered! Learning new things is incredibly important and so
we partnered with Brilliant, today’s sponsor, to give you the possibility of learning
effectively and interactive! Hands down the best tool for learning
I know and leading in its industry. We homeschool our own kids partly with Brilliant! Courses like Scientific thinking,
Math, Computer Science, and logic will make you understand the world and
challenge you to learn new things in a visually
stimulating, bite-sized hands-on approach. It’s not about grades. Help is always around the corner;
at Brilliant, you learn intuitively and with fun. You don’t have to learn for hours, either! Work a little, learn a little. Schedules are for schools. It
adapts to your preferences! To get started for free, visit brilliant.org/whataboutit
or click on the link in the description, and the first 200 of you will get 20% off
Brilliant's annual premium subscription. You learn something new every day, and in
return, you help What about it as well. That’s it for today! Make sure to check
out our WAI Wear merch store! Filled with cool shirts and other swag,
it’ll beef up your wardrobe! And if you want to get even smarter about
Space and rockets, watch this
video next to continue the journey! Thank you very much for watching, and I’ll
see you again in the next episode!
