SPACE HANGOUT: All Things Starship IFT-4, Boeing Starliner, Sierra Space Dream Chaser

hey hey welcome back to Over the Horizon we're going to try a new format today we're going to uh try and get a Roundup of everything as as much as we can there's so much happening in space this year um it's going to be a watershed year but we're going to look at it week by week we'll try and get you the highlights um so this is kind of the first attempt at it on Over the Horizon and with us is the OG Scott Walter we also have uh Ben Ben inou who's inway from NASA JPL and of course ozan Bellic uh it's great to have you guys back together it's been a while uh lots to talk about um so let's focus uh straight away on what we're looking at this week we're going to talk about Starship if4 a lot happening on that front Boeing star liner there too and the Sierra space Dreamchaser Scott and I had a a bit of a chat yesterday about um the bugs and report that SpaceX got out for IFD 3 um we now looking at IFD 4 the window opening on the 5th of June um before we get to Ben's and Scott and ozan's um quick thoughts about where we're headed uh Scott is there's anything that you'd like to add to what we were talking about yesterday well I guess the quick thing is we were just expecting to get a launch date and then we got a bit more information that was unexpected there were two items that jumped out at me and I just want to ask ozan do those two items jump out for you as well and do you know which ones I'm talking about well I don't know maybe it was different the first one was like the reason why the the attitude of um of of the Starship in in in orbit why it was kind of not they lost control of it and it had to do with the thrusters being clogged and I'm like or the valves being clogged like wait a minute how how do you get that clogged and whether you had some thoughts about it because I was speculating I I heard beforehand that that that's what had happened yeah and the same thing with the land conflicting information about why that's happened so um I don't know if we'll ever get the the full story but and it seems like they partially fixed the filters for the the oxygen intake on the on the booster and they had the same problem so they they partially fixed it there was a problem there and then the other thing is like the jettison of the hot ring like okay what are your thoughts why would they go to the length of jettisoning that considering that it's adding extra complication yeah so I mean it seems like so one thing that's that's been noted is that it's it's not being jettisoned before boost back which makes sense because boost back is basically like a continuous uh burn you don't you don't have the the booster engines completely shutting down uh so it's a smooth transition from from boost to boost back uh so you don't really have an opportunity you can't you can't ditch the the hot staging ring while those Raptors are thrusting um but that's that's the big Delta view maneuver for return to to launch site uh so it's you know I've I've seen some people like an Express uh surprised that they're ditching it so late which is right before re-entry or you know sometime after boost back and before reentering um but it it wasn't surprising to me because I I'd heard that there were aerodynamic and thermal issues with the hot staging ring on the entry last time thermal okay so so everyone knows that the hot saging ring is is an extension up here so it's adding it is it a couple meters TR try remember how how much it is to to the top up there yeah about right so it's adding a little bit of mass it's a couple of tons isn't it so that means so or okay so it's gonna it's going to take the center gravity and move it up a little bit higher which means it's a little bit harder for these grid fins to operate so I mean heating okay that's a surprise that you would be hearing about heating I could say okay yeah I mean that that misremembering or somebody may have misspoken these rumors of okay so so do you think it has some it's not so much that it's too heavy it might be that it's just throwing off the stability of everything adust you know because they designed this thing without the idea of the hot staging Rings being there it's like this is the reason we could put the control FS there and now if you're moving it you're gonna adjust that so yeah it's like come on you can you can handle that Mass to land it's not that you don't have enough rust there's something else going on there okay this kind of also drives with what we've seen with their future plans for an integrated hot staging ring that has the grid fins built in Mak sense that makes sense I I just don't know how they pop that thing off because it's well I guess they already they kind of already have the mechanical latching mechanism in there already because they didn't have it before right so they kind of have that design maybe they're just using that to clamp it on but you're clamping the hot saging ring in basically two areas and I'm just wondering it's like what about the mechanical Integrity of that because you know it's not well it on anywhere U and and then you just don't pop the thing off you've got to literally jettison you got to do something to throw it away to make sure that doesn't come back I'm I'm curious about that because it's possible that that the ballistic coefficient of drag rest of the booster is enough higher than uh like high enough that you're G to get more enough drag to pull that pull so if you on the way down here's another idea go on you want to know what it is yeah yes no no you think they'll do centrifugally they'll just like that's how they're going to do stage separation in the exactly exactly disappointed that they that they didn't continue with that but uh yeah they could do that um I don't know that they will but I I think that there's a good chance that if you just unlatch it it might it just happens to pull up separate on the other hand it's it may not be so clean because you're coming in supersonic so you don't you're not going to have a lot of I don't know how much tail drag you're G to have um yeah and and do you do it you know it's it's after the Boost back which means after the Boost back you're still pretty much way above the atmosphere and you don't have any drag up there so that's one opportunity to do it in a zero drag environment and then the other one when you come back in the dragon the question is whose coefficient is going you get enough separation before you you hit atmo yeah yeah yeah that's fine they won't reconnect but you yeah if you try to use atmo to separate it then I don't I don't know it's that's a little yeah I don't know if it pulls it away faster than the other or it pulls away and then it comes back it's just it's away I don't think it's coming back yeah well yeah hopefully it's not but you just don't know if it tumbles or does something like that whether that sort of changes what's going on and you get those thing you got that whole plate right so even if it tumbles like the smallest cross-section that it has is close to 30 square meters 20 square meters and versus 63 for the bottom of the booster and you know add some to that for the for the grid fins right that thing is like the booster is 20 times heavier or more than that hot staging ring so whatever orientation it is it's in if it's getting any kind of decent um exposure to to air it will pull away from the booster right right and if it starts to get a little bit of an angle then it's really going to catch the inside and then it's just going to be right away it might go sideways but it'll definitely go back relative to the booster yeah hopefully yeah yeah hopefully and and once it's way it should be all right it say those first couple seconds I'm worried about that there's a chance that it bumps into it but uh yeah I think that's enough on that topic we can we can move on reuen yeah no so I just um very quickly Ben and oan if you want to chime in on this so it's very clear from what SpaceX has told us that the key Focus for this is to stick the re-entry um and to just get get Starship back in one piece and they've comp they've kind of focusing it on so much on it so much that uh they're not kind of looking at other things like a restart of of the engines uh they're not looking at the the the uh the deployment door opening and closing they say they've pretty much uh you know succeeded with both both of those with IFD 3 but it seems that like this is really the Focus right if they don't stick it if they don't stick the re-entry this could complicate things a lot further for SpaceX yeah I fully agree with that because I think a lot of the um the economics of the Starship rely on on that landing and reuse there's so many refueling flights that are are going to be needed for some of these more ambitious missions that if they can't get if they have to build a new rocket every single time they need to fly a tanker then there's just no way any of these are going to work so I I agree with that and I think it's a you know a big challenge for them um so my take on that is that they've I think that they've got substantial changes that they need to make to get relight to work I that's the only reason not to try relight uh the door maybe I I could see them being satisfied with the door um but and and waiting on having Rel before they try flying starlinks um but I I think the only reason not to relight is is if you think that it's going to fail because that's a key thing that you you need to demonstrate regardless right um and it's it's not something that prevents you from doing other things if you think that you have a decent chance of success okay fa fail in what way meaning that it ruds or it just doesn't start either one of those it there's been some SpaceX communication that makes me um wonder if they're afraid of embarrassment in in some areas okay um the way that they've expressed some things or you know left some things um unsaid it um yeah I I think that whether you have a rud or a failure to to relight it would yeah I mean I think that red be more on real quick the um the relight is a failure on the vacuum engines right the vacuum Raptors not the atmosphere be the sea level Raptors that they would be relighting as far as I know at that point the efficiency is not that critical and the sea level ones are the ones that give you thrust recor control and you it's easier to light one than to light three at a time um okay so if you're going to write light light the vacuum Raptors you have to light all three um but they could just light one or two se- level Raptors and have um two or three degree of Freedom attitude control with that and that's what I imagine that they would do for orbital insertion and other orbital Maneuvers that are high enough Delta V that you can't do it with RCS MH which I mean this is something that they need to be able to deploy starlink that's something that they need to be able to do tanker Revo Artemis needs it starlink needs it right they they they got they have to get to it at some point but I think that the current that the ship that they that they're going to fly does not have the hardware ready for that so they're they're trying to make the most of what they have that's that's my guess um it's almost like they're going for the the biggest ambitious goal that actually has a chance of succeeding yeah or or you know I think they're going to try to get further with it right they didn't get good data out of the last one because the orientation was uh was off um they want to see how just how well the TPS does I don't know that they have I I think that their chances of actually making it all the way through a re-entry are under 50% I would love to be proven wrong I think it would be great data either way right to be able to do a controlled re-entry that's not tumbling uh and and see how far they get and and where the hot spots are if they can get that information that's going to be really useful uh for the program uh as far as huh why why are you at 50% I'm at below 50% below 50% yeah because of the the thermal protection system like it's really hard to get it right the first time and I don't think that they've like it's clear that they're not following a an engineering path that highly values getting it right the first time and this is this is one area where there's so many opportunities for failure that it seems likely that something will give out right it could be a flap actuator that overheats it could be um some hot spots where you get breakthrough heating some tiles falling off in critical areas all kinds of stuff that that could happen that could cause it to you know not make it through re-entry and I think a real life Monte Carlos simulation they just like put whatever parameter could be crazy and they'll just break everything well in the in the report they did talk about that uh this when had that rotisserie that was kind of going on there so they were Exposed on the protective side and the non-protective side and they said they had overheating on both sides and I was like well wait a minute I understand on the unprotected side was getting overheating but how are you getting overheating on the on the protected side do you have any theories on that do you think it was just conduction of the heat coming around from the unprotected side or was it a failure of the of the protective system I I think the the the orientation it could have messed it up right if you're coming in tail first or nose first for parts of of your entry phase and you um a you're not going to get lift and you're you're not going to get enough lift and you're going to end end up in more of a ballistic trajectory that's going to put you in a steeper um descent than you intended right and that's going to cause greater heating because you're going heting okay higher Atmos sooner and and B the orientation itself could uh cause some spots that were expected to be covered enough to not be covered enough uh even though they are covered right like if if you're hitting the um like if if you're hitting the nose or the or like the flap edges head on instead of at an angle that could that could cause excess heating okay so um Scott could you just for those who didn't uh you know tune in our discussion yesterday maybe could you just spend a minute um taking us through the big takeaways sorry before we I do wanna go there and hear what Scott has to say but I did want to address this whole like does does spaceex need refilling and I actually think that that um in some ways it would be easier for them to meet both Artemis and starlink goals if they dropped second stage reuse temporarily mhm um that's I know I realize that's a controversial opinion among uh SpaceX fans and and like I do appreciate that they're like U Allin on full reuse and I think that they we do need to get there eventually but I actually don't think that there's a rush uh I you know if you go to partial reuse you can practically double the performance of of the stack the Artemis Landers them are going to be reused anyway so right yeah yeah same with SLS I mean and they can build these Stacks fast enough that I mean if if you only need eight tankers or or and you can reduce that tanker count as well if you get less ambitious on the on the Lander I mean just reduce the number of barrels I mean the number of ring SE sections well remember you're bring the tanker back then there's also you need fewer tankers if you don't have to worry about bringing them home exactly yeah yeah yeah you can I mean you could be yeah so so what do you think is a compelling Factor Why are they choosing the Ruth thing well I mean this is I I think they're trying to get the Mars I think they're they're not just trying to get the Mars I think they're trying to get humans to Mars in large numbers and that's what you need full reuse for there's no market right now that requires the no hang on so the level of launch cost reduction that it that necessitates full reuse they can already hit an order of magnitude better than Falcon 9 with partially reusable Starship like this is something that they can do within a year or two or or three if they if that's the direction that they want it to go because they could get to roughly Falcon 9 cost with 10 times the performance with the Expendable upper stages using Starship infrastructure and and and Hardware um and that is like they're already killing it right on launch there's there's there's nothing that needs to fly right now um that that needs anywhere near the launch cost that they're aiming for of around like 10 15 dollars a kilo um the only thing that needs that is you know large scale human infrastructure and and human trans Transit interplanetary and Earth to Earth and you know a lot of people think that's a pipe tream but I think that that's that's legitimately what they're gunning for yeah but there is a business model there is an existing you know business case to be made for let's say a non-reusable Starship right because the the global launch market is so huge and remember you've got starlink to get out there and we we're looking at the next gen because if you want to get video calls from like sat to phone video calls across the world then you need to expand the staling constellation and there's a lot of work that's still to be done on Earth before you get to Mars so I'm kind of confused about you why you feel they they think prioritizing taking humans to Mars takes precedence over the Earth business models well I think uh so that's I mean that's very it's a very philosophical question that people have been asking of Elon for a long time um and he has his justifications and uh he probably believes them um yeah I mean if you don't keep your eyes on the on the prize then it's very easy to get complacent they did not need to do starlink they did not need to do uh Starship they could have they could have been sitting pretty on Falcon 9 right do you think the starlink was really like his I felt like that was his uh fundraising effort to get toor absolutely absolutely the technology it's just a yeah how do I get funds to do things um yes right the subscription model at scale like that but it's more than that I mean he he he could have come up with you know some other business that just raised a ton of money that was absolutely not related to space but the thing is that this is a way of making a lot of money that also required to use a lot of rockets with a really high Cadence Yeah so basically that gave you the engineering that and that was like the brilliant part of the model and I didn't see Starling coming out of you know it came out of left field for me it's like holy cow I was like oh brilliant idea it's so obvious now but at the time I wasn't expecting I just thought oh they would pour capital in there and I think o ozan is kind of right is that if if you're looking at Mars and you're coming up with a certain architecture and now that you got that architecture you're trying to build it and justify it for all these other things when it might not be quite right based on the time frames the cost structures and everything else ideally we'd like to have everything that's reusable but it may be that it's too time prohibitive right now if you want to get back to the Moon in a certain period of time so mights have to go back yes right where's the priority exactly I the priority is building that capability to put payload up to orbit at 10 15 kilo and like on on the surface of Mars at you know 10020 dollars a kilo that is that is the goal right homor assign is is like in service of that this is your homework assignment for next week it's like you know really come up with a completely reusable tanker you know no no grid fins on it just throw away all the Raptors you know the minimum amount of raptors you need to get yourself into orbit you change the size of the boosters a little bit and then how many tankers does it take because you know right now they're saying what maybe eight tankers would you get it down to four Poss it's gonna be 15 yeah yeah I've heard those weird numbers in in there around there but but four and 15 is yeah because you don't need the header tanks anymore because you're not even thinking to come home you don't need the heat protection system like all these things you just absolutely don't need yeah that you just one big tanker on up there that you know who knows it may be a very different kind of launch Cadence and then maybe you change because right now they're stretching the Starship right because they're trying to reuse the lower booster bit more because of of reusability but now if you like you turn that equation around it's like who wait a minute you know maybe the booster gets a bit higher and then you get into like Tor Bruno and and that maybe this thing actually goes into Leo want to have that discussion I mean if you want to expend the booster sure you could you could also just have be semi- reasonable you could do rtls you could do you could land those boosters I'm pretty sure that you can land them on their existing Dr sh Fleet with some minor modifications really you think I yeah I think we something similar a while back too okay it's not it's not too heavy right the deck has to be able to support the amount of fire that you bring and then it needs to be about like 60% wider but that's not it's not that hard to make legs long enough because you've already got a little bit of an advantage from having it's already sitting pretty wide right right um so slightly longer legs obviously a lot beefier you know 10 times as massive and uh they're Landing with enough Precision that there's room on there and it can support the weight I'm pretty pretty sure it can support the weight uh so it's just a matter of you know maybe you a little bit of deck plating to so that it my class is actually in Marine engineering Naval architecture and like I have huge fears that scream in my mind when I think about like changing the mass and actually the height because then you're changing the the CG on the vessel you have stability problems on the ship I and I know the cost of building ships is actually lower than pulling inservice ships out and refitting them so I would think that they would probably just build new ones they could build new ones yeah but I I do think that like the the landed mass of that thing is about 5% of the mass of uh of the of those barges and th those barges are I can't remember how how wide they are I think they might be like 150 200 feet wide they're big yeah they're definitely big so I don't I don't think that you have a lot of tip over risk probably not um I I would have I would have to know a little bit more about them um you know you know like a sailboat if you think about it you have this because you have this High moment of immersion on it you have this you know heel that goes down below the surface of the Water by another 20 feet or so that's got a big massive amount of concrete at the bottom to counterbalance it and still if you look at the America's Cup boats they flip over um my worry would be like if you come in at an off angle with the a much heavier much taller rocket you would have a s effect yeah would it would it flip I I don't know but um do they would they need more of these drone ships to land on if there were certain land Starships on them probably I think they should they would would probably just build new ones or yeah they I ones but I think that like this the the the shape of the underside of those deck barges is such that it's it's not it's not like a a a like a probably flatter it's definitely not a racing yeah yeah yeah it's probably flatter or bottom but um you know I've even seen videos of some of the catamarans flipping over and I just yeah there's some of the um I think there would be some uh some analysis that needs to be done before you to start doing that it might be possible but it might be cheaper to now you worried about it after it lands or you worry about when it's underway because you did put the wing Kel underneath there and that that give you stability but you got to be moving for it to work if you're stationary that that kill doesn't really help much at all except it's really deep yeah unless it's really deep but you know it's it's really the the the forces that are generated as you're moving through the water that helps you generate that stability stage one Landing yeah you have to add legs to it so so okay so so no cheating here ozan it's just like it can't have legs so it has to be returned to launch site and you know just really thinking about is like you know what would be the cargo difference of I want to do a tank forget the header tanks just do a a full um just fill up you don't need to stretch it just fill the whole thing with propellant it's but it's going to be out two kilotons it's going to Stage a little earlier um you can keep the same Raptor configuration that you already have we should talk a little bit more into you you mentioned somewhere between four and 15 tanker flights um yeah you know I think an interesting subject to talk to a little bit uh and I think you know a lot more than I do on it I've just seen you know the the most recent NASA report that came through that said 15 um yeah and admittedly I didn't read the entire thing but it's interesting how that number has grown over the last five years or four years yeah what are your thoughts on that so it started with 14 right and then at some point we heard it could be high teens and then we heard a 10ish then we heard 15 earlier on we heard four to eight from Elon um there are just so many variables sure that impact it which Raptors you use whether or not you use Raptors for certain phases of flight or you use the hot gas thrusters do you even have hot gas thrusters or are you just using Raptors um how much to do the various components way that you are going to take be taking to it to the moon like the crew cabin okay let's break this down for a second yeah this this is the tanker and this is also the Lander they're basically the same thing as far as size but they configured a little bit different so the Lander has a big cargo bay up in here so that's a lot of stuff you bring the moon which means you've got about that much actual propellant Mass down here and it's got just enough propellant Mass to get it up into low earth orbit and then it's just sitting there basically stranded because it's empty and it needs a refill so now we're going to start sending cargo tankers on up there and the cargo tankers basically if it's going to be completely Expendable means that whole thing is is gasoline all right that we're bringing it up there so if it's 15 tankers it means by the time that thing gets up there it's so fully depleted it barely get anything in there so that that's what I'm trying to understand is like how can we get up there and then suddenly have like no cargo um is is that ratio just seems really weird to me yeah in that you know H how can a cargo tanker just not have what's needed when you finally get there I mean you there must be a more efficient way of doing it not having to have 15 launches it seems It's like calling a family car a tanker and using that to deliver gas to your gas station almost you know like yeah that's what it almost seems like it's it's it's it's so by the time you get because I understand you're getting up in the orbit and you're bringing some cargo with you but if your cargo is actually the fuel yeah then it seems like you should a decent job getting up there it's hard to believe that it's got to it's expending that much when it's going up and part of it understand it's because you're thinking of returning it's really heavy you get all this other stuff if you make it and in that case yeah I could see why the numbers might be really high because you're really stretching the margins but could there be other things in that can we somehow get in a low enough orbit and then you have some other mechanism that raises the orbit you know get that Delta V up there something more efficient getting to orbit getting to orbit is the hardest part of the job and it is most efficient to uh refill as as close to the lowest possible stable orbit as you can get away with it also offers better M mod protection MH um slightly higher uh boil off concerns uh but just to get the orbit this this thing needs to put in over 6 kmers per second of Delta V with roughly 3 and a half kilm per second effective exhaust velocity so whatever you do most of your propellant most of the propellant that that's that that it starts out with is going to be depleted by the time that you get there now getting there with good enough Mass fractions that you can return is indeed very difficult as shuttle Pro proved like it wasn't even trying to it did it didn't even try to uh bring back its uh propellant tanks right and even so it's its payload was uh you know like a quarter of its dry mass or a third at best right um this thing is trying to do better than that with full reuse and and bringing back its tanks and and quick ref so it's a huge challenge I agree that if you were staging higher it would be easier um if obviously if you weren't uh if it was Expendable you you know that would shift right so you might be able to get 200 tons of propellant up there with like 60 ton uh with a 60 ton second stage or something like that or you know higher higher numbers for future upgrades so I think that when it comes to Artemis there are a couple of there two big areas one that that really impact performance one of them is just how much propelling can you get up there per tanker that's that's the big question and some people have said uh 80 tons 100 tons we know that the first prototype uh you know we've heard murmurings of 40 tons 50 tons I don't think that that's that would be applicable to a tanker variant that would hold two kilot tons of propellant start out with should be able to perform better um but you know it could be a low number um but we've also heard that they they want to eventually get to 200 tons you do not need you know 15 200 ton propellant runs in order to get this thing to to the move right so that's that's Factor one uh Factor two is just uh what is the efficiency of that Moon route and the biggest element of that is your U your Lander mass and both your tanker performance and your your Lander mass or sorry both your tanker performance and and your Landing efficiency are dramatically impacted by you the underlying dry mass of this of the Starship that you're You're Building all this on top of right so if you if that increases by 20 30 40% that cuts in that that both increases uh the amount of propellant that you need by about that much and also um reduces the propellant that you can get per tanker so it just kind of has this uh compounding impact that that can dramatically increase the number of refills that that you need so early variants with with the mass growth that has happened that they didn't want but that seems to have happened yeah I mean I think if they can get get it under 15 right but it's theoretically possible to get to four and I say the final question on that is what fraction of the propellant can actually transfer from one vehicle to another because it's not like gasoline where you just like siphon one guy's tank over to the other I just imagine there's like a lot of leftovers that it's like that's it you know it's how do you get it done over in zero yeah I mean if if it's you should be able to get it down to residuals right so all of it in theory but then you also need to expend some of it to for the transfer to to have that um basically artificial gravity uh for for settling so that that depends on just how much you need how much how much uh acceleration you need uh for a clean transfer and how how fast you can do the transfer MH all right so we've gone down a bit of a rabbit hole there interesting absolutely so I'm gonna I'm gonna stick around for another five 10 minutes yeah you better okay so listen for for for those who uh who looking now at IFD 4 Scott can you just give us um like the big picture of you what are the top three things that we we should be looking out for with if4 what's the target okay the main thing is they've trimmed out let's say all the excess fat and they just want to prove that they can get the thing up there and bring both pieces home um so they're really focusing on that uh with a couple of changes like we talked about they Jing the ring they're not going to be doing anything else in orbit they're not going to try to open up the payload bay doors or do a full trans fuel transfer or anything else like that they've added some additional attitude control jets on there for redundancy because of the potential blockages that or clogging that they've been getting uh in in the RCs thrusters which is a bit of a mystery so I think that the main thing is they've decided to not be overly ambitious uh and just go ahead for that so it should be very similar to if3 um except they want to make sure that they hit all the goals and now they are probably not going to land in the Indian Ocean they're going to they're going to belly flop out there somewhere but they want to be able to come through the atmosphere intact and actually have it rud on impact in the Indian Ocean I don't think they're going do a soft landing and in the Caribbean they want to do a softw waterer Landing of the booster and then I believe it then sinks right after that they're not going to do a recovery okay well um let's move on we've got uh a lot of other things happening and um boing starer it's we don't know where it is on the horizon yeah while there they were like hours apart you yeah on one of the the um the launch sites they had them like a couple hours apart and now we know in theory Starliner might go before um Starship but what do you think are the chances those on I genuinely don't know uh I think a a 5050 um I think both could be delayed further right now it's it's looking like it's they're aiming for the first second and then the fifth I don't know what the what the time on the fifth is probably later so if they if they end up if if they miss the first and the second then then it might be later uh but also they might just find something that uh does away with their flight rationale and then they have to pull it in and then I think if it's later than the fifth then they're looking at uh well I don't know how much time that they have but there is a concern that uh there's some their components that that would need to be that would require yeah so so I think the uh what the flight termination system usually has expiration date on it which might be to like the end of June or something like that but it's going to be like aremis all over again you if it's sitting out there too long they got to bring it back in and then check all these components so it's it's this compounding problem that if they don't really get it going quickly and of course the one thing about Starship is that they're still waiting on FAA approval so that's why that fifth is kind of conditional but it could be also conditional in engineering the thing that's just seems so strange about what's going on with Starliner is was like this innocuous kind of helium leak that it seems like oh they should have patched it up and been ready to go within two days and it seemed to be a lot more than that and then they started discovering all these other problems some absolutely unrelated it's like well wait a minute you're discovering that now you should discover that before you were like an hour away from actually launching this thing so kind of reminds me of their first orbital test flight where it's like yeah there was this one thing you knew about and oh by the way there are these other issues that you never you didn't notice um interesting way to to you know present that yeah and I I just don't know what else is gonna pop up you know between here there there have been so many cycles of okay now Nas's looking at it and it's not just up the Boeing and it's gonna it's gonna get good now and it doesn't seem to end which yeah I mean I've walked in on projects that were that were in that were done a certain way and getting them to not be a certain way always required 10 times the effort that management hope yeah yeah and remember the scrub had nothing to do with Starliner right yeah the first one right the first one yeah yeah yeah this this scrub with the hydrogen leak was really something completely unrelated to it my understanding wasn't it uh more of a u Ula problem yeah there was there was Ula scrub there then there was the helium one was the second scrub after that um yeah and the interesting part is the drama that's popping up from their valve supplier you know and uh oh yeah shifting blame yeah there yeah the valve suppliers you know um released a a public statement urging NASA not to launch it um you know boing in the meantime is saying like shut up everything's fine uh it it's just very interesting um and I don't know I I think the value of of it of Starliner itself is probably in question especially considering that after this they won't be able to launch on Atmos fives anymore anyway um so is this really like yeah you know how should we just call our losses you know call the couple billion dollars spent on this a loss and then move on with our lives yeah I I think the the only thing I I would pick up on that Ben is that the reason for the Starliner is it has the capability to reboost ISS which is something you cannot do with dragon so that's like the one advantage it has over it but that goes into the next thing and that is um Sierra Nevada is it Sierra Nevada that the Dreamchaser is does have a capability so it does sort of make sense that if that's coming online and you're really sure it's going to be coming online the only thing is that do they have a launch vehicle that's the problem isn't it good question oh Sierra Sierra yeah oh yeah vulcan's Sierra's going up I I don't think that there's a concern there but uh I don't know that dream Cher is going to be ready mhm I mean it's it's ready to attempt a flight Starliner was ready to attempt a flight four years ago and then all these issues have come up since then like we don't actually know what state dream Chas Chasers right like everybody loves Sierra and I'm rooting for them too but like we don't we don't know how good that vehicle actually is but I will say that that vehicle we've been waiting for that vehicle for literally 20 years that was announced in 2004 MH that's why it's called a Dreamchaser it's it's beautiful and it will offer awesome capabilities but I don't think that we this this is just a cargo a cargo transport vehicle right it's not for for now originally it was supposed to be a crew vehicle yeah then it got there were some concerns and it got turned into a cargo vehicle uh and there's a version two that's supposed to be a crew vehicle that SI wants to develop and blue origin has actually basically baselined for orbital Leaf okay cool all right so um just uh you know I I can't help but wonder how much the Boeing Starliner uh test launch is Complicated by the fact that you have two humans that will be on both that uh that spacecraft M you know it's if if it was just a a you know a spacecraft going up with just cargo of course it would be a different um risk profile right you can't go wrong with I mean it just it's very difficult to recover from from something from an accident where where humans are involved yeah I guess that's yeah just look at how Boeing is doing with their recent human involved accidents yeah yeah devastating for them they can't afford another one now now ozan I'm gonna ask you a piece of trivia here regarding Sita Williams do you know where she went to high school I I think I heard you say that she went to your high school is that right high school and do you know what the the motto of the high school was what what or the mascot of the high school I don't I don't what was it it is and always has been the Rockets that's cool oh way before you went there and I think it's because we actually have Nike sites or former Nike sites in Needum that was I guess to protect Boston from thermonuclear annihilation so I think that's where the term the Rockets came from so yeah she graduated years after I I was there but I was just kind of surprised that wow someone from my high school made it into space and it wasn't me well that's awesome all right well um I think it's it's a been a good first attempt at um a kind of a Roundup a weekly Roundup it's it's been fun it's been a lot of fun um let me just uh pull up your social media profil people can know where to reach out to you this is Scott on X Ben and of course oan and um you know we've got a lot more uh we could have packed in a lot more but I think we it's better to start slow and not bite off more than we can chew and maybe next time we'll talk about this so much to talk about with the Orion heat shield maybe we'll talk about that mil helicopters uh and the infrastructure worlds also and of course um you never know what happens next so till next week at least for now we'll have to wrap this up thanks guys it's been wonderful having you it's been good good being here

Channel: Over The Horizon

Views: 234

Keywords: over the horizon, sierra nevada, siera space, dream chaser, beoing star liner, beoing

Id: WMgzpyWHw78

Length: 44min 5sec (2645 seconds)

Published: Sun May 26 2024