Starship Receives License for Launch! | Countdown to Launch LIVE

and here we [Music] go we have propulsion continues to be caral r68 chamber pressure looks good probably enough water tow fly it's orange my oh my [Music] God in the big bag 343 unfolds to go indeed we rise together back to the moon and Beyond messing be fighting in the flare [Music] correct we don't need any [Music] more good a good afternoon everybody this is lon sbon here on behalf of NSF and this is our show called countdown to launch and this show was initially kind of aspirational when we first began it because we're covering all the things that are happening ahead of the next next orbital flight test of Starship and now it looks like we're getting a little closer uh to an actual launch and an actual countdown to that launch which we are very excited about and joining me as always are some experts to help us understand what's going on there's been some pretty big developments but first let's introduce our two experts on the call here today we have Trevor snck how you doing Trevor actually be launch week which is super stressful but super exciting yeah it is a very stressful time for the NSF team because there's a lot to cover and a lot to follow and I know you you both have been losing sleep uh keeping track of everything but I think our viewers will appreciate everything that's been going on here and joining us also is Alex Romera who in addition to being an expert on Rockets has become an expert on the United States government bureaucracy as well and you'll find out why in a minute how you doing Alex well I'm doing I'm doing uh I guess I guess yeah uh we're losing a little bit of sleep here with all of the developments but definitely fine at least and I think we should kick things off with h a tweet that Elon made a couple of days ago where he said that everything should be in place for uh the launch license which we've been waiting for now for months essentially uh everything should be in place by the end of the week for an actual launch of Starship and so far as the licensing is concerned and Alex I'll start off with you because what was really holding things up was the US fish and wildlife service where there was a number of things that they had to evaluate before they could give the FAA the clearance to issue the license and I know there's a 500 page document that came out just recently that I know you've read cover to cover what's in it and what did they have to do to get approval here I actually haven't read it cover to cover uh is definitely a it's a 505 page document it actually is basically uh split between five different links and everything it's it's crazy but um yeah so it is pretty much the resolution of the environmental side of the review of the license for the second flight of a Starship so this is what we were waiting for now the last thing that we're sort of you know hoping to get maybe in the next few hours or even tomorrow is that license modification to be approved and you know right off the door with will get you know that final approval to get that Starship launched hopefully no earlier than Friday at at 7 uh am Central Standard time that will be hold up there we go 41 hours and 18 minutes from now so we actually have a countdown clock going and it's an actual countown to launch oh yeah and and I want to put up a a chat we just got from uh Nick Dart in our chat room which you can by the way you can chat To Us by hitting us up at NASA space flight with the at symbol before that he says before the hype train gets too carried away the FAA has not yet granted the license I guess Trevor that's true right we don't have confirmation that the license itself has been issued is that right yeah that is correct the launch license has not been issued yet however like Alex was saying we are expecting that uh today or if not today probably tomorrow um the as Alex mentioned the Fish and Wild Life service submitted their report and then the FAA is just now tying everything up crossing the final eyes or crossing the final te dotting the last eyes um so last time by the time they got this environmental assessment and by the time they issued the launch license was around an hour and it's already been several hours today so it could be literally any minute that we get the launch license so it could happen right in the middle of the stream and if it does we will let you know as soon as we know and Alex I wanted to talk about this environmental assessment because on the first launch there was some crazy stuff that they had to calculate one of the things and I thought this was a complete joke from Elon in an interview that he gave with Lex Redman the other day but he had said that they had to calculate the probability of Starship colliding with whales or sharks in the ocean uh that is true right in the first runaround of this this uh this report yeah so that that was for the first flight uh we had another read evaluation and the fishion wildlife service was involved and this sort of what we've explained the last few days that the the whole deal with that is they did an environmental assessment back in 2021 2022 it came out I think it was June 13 2022 and the thing is that covered a set of activities a set of of things right but for the for the first flight there were things that they were doing during that flight that were not on that uh environmental assessment so they had to do what is called a RAR evaluation to be able to introduce studies that said you know it's okay or it's not whatever right in that case it came out as it's okay you it's still all within bounds and everything and so for the second flight all of that that they had already done with the sharks and the whales and whatnot it's already done you can put it you know uh sort of like you have the original environmental assessment you have the new re reevaluation you staple into it B basically right and so you have it all joined together and now that's done but for the second flight there was a new thing which is the water delage system now that water delage system is a new thing it introduces an extra component there and so the whole thing with this is like okay well let's look at this if you know it it it goes out of it goes out of Bounce or anything like it and so they needed to do that R reevaluation it came out today and just as we expected it says it's okay bro you can continue using it it has a certain limitations we may go into that a little bit later but definitely it's it's okay for use on the second flight now the only thing that we're waiting again is that like license being modified one of the basically one of the points on the license said for the first flight only and that is sort of that pesky little thing that needs to go out or be you know modified maybe saying for the second flight or something like that but we'll see and in reading it it seems to me Alex that they were concerned where they where they had to study was uh the amount of potential desal ization of that much water getting into the environment when they when they turned it on for launch and for those not familiar with this uh one of the things they added to the launch complex there was this water Deluge system that uh dampens the sound but also helps with fire suppression and how many gallons Alex are we talking about here it's it's crazy how much water comes up out of that Deluge system right um actually said it says it on the document maybe we can show it the one uh that is from page one to 100 it is the very first document we're goingon to start showing the documents now love everybody yeah because the thing with this is these documents were released basically a few hours ago I've tried to you know go through them quickly and some people have been talking about them so I I've took some of those comments and that's basically what we're going to look at here is just you know on air we're going to look at some of these comments the very basic first uh part of the document it just talks precisely about three 158,000 gallons uh of non-contaminated water will be pushed from the ground tanks oh did we lose Alex there yeah I think we may have okay so what he was talking about was what about 350,000 gallons of water coming up and then it has to go somewhere right and so that was their concern right yeah so there are kind of uh two concerns that they were worried with first of all it was the desalination which you were saying which even though 350,000 gallons of water sounds like a ton uh you know in a wetland it's really not that much and I think there was even an issue uh or a statement in the paper in the conclusion that said uh the total amount of water that they expect to be released in a year is less than a single rainstorm uh in Bach chica so in in that sense it wasn't a huge deal and the other major thing that they were worried about is right the water that is used in the duu system is potable and that means that it's been treated for human consumption and obviously us humans at least I personally don't like getting infections and I think most humans would agree with that assessment uh so we treat it to basically kill all of the bacteria and other stuff that could live in the water so I think there was some concern that as we release a bunch of that water into the environment what damage could we be doing to the ecosystem and it sounds like the fish and wildlife service have has determined it's not a big uh effect if it there is an effect at all and for the data nerds out there if you dive into that document you can see they actually did measure this because they have of course been running that Deluge system for some of the static fire tests and just for regular tests as well and they were able to confirm that there doesn't seem to be a significant environmental impact to that water being released at such a high volume each time they they set it off and what also struck me Trevor was that they put a cap on how many times they can use this in a period of time so I think they limited the number of times they can activate the Deluge system to 30 in a year I think was the the time frame on that I may be mistaken about the exact time frame but it certainly limits how many launches they can do because ahead of each launch you know SpaceX likes to do a static fire to make sure all the engines are going to ignite when when when expected to ignite and so that is going to count as one against the 30 uh do you think this would limit what SpaceX wants to do because I think the vision here is that this is going to be like the 747 of spaceships it's going to be launching and Landing constantly so is that something that can be changed or modified later yeah so in fact this already does seem to be a slight modification from the initial environmental assessment that we got so the right 30 launches or 30 times they can use the day system in a year roughly corresponds to you know 10 to 15 launches somewhere in there given that they obviously need the day system for static fire and launch so throw in a scrub launch attempt or an additional static fire or whatnot and you know I feel like three per launch is a pretty safe um guess so that means they can launch on the order of 10 times per year however the initial environmental assessment only gave them clearance to do five orbital launches uh from Starbase every year oh we have Alex back yay here he is here he is and then uh so this is something that can be modified and something that is almost certainly going to be modified going forward that we'll see once SpaceX has more data and uh has a better understanding of what the environmental consequences are they can apply for some modification to this license which will allow them to launch more than that uh number of times uh Additionally the other thing to consider is Right SpaceX has said several times that long term Starbase is just going to be the developmental side and that they're going to leave the operational launches more toward the cape and whatever so long term there may not actually be the 747 like launches from Starbase like you were talking about they'll probably leave those more for the main launch pads which will be at the Cape Canaveral and maybe vanenburg and wherever else they decide to launch from and Alex do you think SpaceX and welcome back by the way uh do you think SpaceX would will have to go through a similar process with the fish and wildlife service for for the Florida Launch location or or is things a little different there given that it is kind of an active Spaceport so space already has an environmental assessment for the LC 39a Starship Launchpad so the question will be what what are going to be the differences that they need to introduce basically that read and reevaluation once they want to launch from from LC 39a not only before the launch but also before any launch license is granted because we know that they are in the process of well in in the process as in we know for a long for a long long time that they've been trying to get that launch license for LC 398 but not in a hurry as well so they have not completed the launch site they have not completed anything about the vehicles there at the at LC 39a so at the end of the day it probably is right now down to SpaceX completing all their stuff and then going to the fa with the data being like this is what we want to do this is what what our plans are and now please tell us if we can get the launch license right so the whole deal comes down to whether they they are basically doing such a huge change that they need a a r reevaluation and this sort of change that basically Strays off from that environmental assessment that they did and for the record that environmental assessment happened before the one at starb that happened in 2019 the the one starb happens uh happened on 2022 2021 and 2022 basically it was a process during those two years so the one 439a was was finalized in September 2019 so since then there's been many many differences that will have to be accounted for so we'll see what what happens but I definitely predict any sort of uh read and reevaluation so there's going to be some more steps here before we're in the fully operational program but I guess they really have to get this thing off the ground and orbiting on a regular basis and assuming if they do that they have to get it to land or be grabbed by the Chopsticks also now Alex while while you were um off for a second we did talk about the water delu system and some of the things that had to be investigated for that were there anything any other things in the environmental assessment that stood out to you that you felt were interesting yeah so it pretty much talks about the components for example here in the very first Pages it talks about the water storage uh system the Press tank basically they have these um pressure tanks that they have um basically it says uh it's a storage tank pressure rized with nitrogen gas at 3,000 PBS per square inch I don't know the conversion of that to um two bars but definitely uh could could be translated to that if we if we could have someone in the back channels or something but um yeah so then there's the pumping system and pumping Network control system and VES and the water containment basically a small retention uh Pond that yeah they say most of the water applied during the luch operations will be captured by containment structures within the vertical launch uh area and it talks about the retention areas with within the vertical launch area which refers to the orbital launch uh site uh total capacity of of 276,000 gallons and there might be additional uh pawns constructed with a potential capacity of 30,000 gallons so that is basically the part that is very interesting because that is the the key of people are are converting that into the pressure in in the in the chat I'm see 206 bars 200 bars a lot of pressure basically right but and soer in our back channel has given us a whole bunch he's got 300 PSI 20.6 he's got yeah 26.8 so there you go we got uh we got all the conversions going on 3,000 3,000 yeah 20 all I know is what my car needs so good on that one and so the so it's it says at the end uh these containment structures also collect storm water within the vaa uh water captur by the containment structures and meeting water quality quity standards established by the Texas commission Environmental Quality will be used to refill the water storage tanks to minimize the amount of portable water needed to be trucked in so basically right now the water is taken from Brownsville it is portable water basically the one that one will drink and things like that and then it goes out and basically we did a whole video of how you know the route that it takes from the Brownsville uh locations it goes down the highway for and arrives to the to the launch site and so basically this uh this water is not you know taken out of the gulf or anything this is why they needed to do these sort of uh assessments because you're not putting the the the issue with this is that you're not putting rain water because people were like okay but you're putting water that is equivalent to rain and it truly says that the amount of water it is pretty much what we what you would expect from a small rainfall right in fact right now if you know if you go out there to Starbase right now next to to the orbital launch Mount there's puddles of water everywhere because we had incredible rain uh in the last few days out there a lot of uh rain that were truly truly bad for for the status of right now the the basically all of the stuff around the the lone site it is completely floated I mean not not completely but you know what I mean it's flooded right it's it's a very wet it's an area of wetland so you're gonna have a lot of water coming from the sky and on the ground right right but here the problem was but they're not using that water they're bringing that water in from some other place right so you have exactly it's not that water it's not water that is already there but it's portable water which has other kind of of chemicals because it's treated it's it's something that you know it might have chlorine or things like that it it it might have certain pollutants in it and then you have to mix it because then it goes out it mixes with the exhaust of the of the engines there's reactions and things like that it's heated so it's like okay what's going to happen right so this is what it what it was all about and at the end of the day it's like okay well it's not that big of a deal but now it's on paperwork that now it's 55 Pages document like God right if anyone were to what's in there right right exactly if anyone were to be like oh no you didn't do your due diligence whatever and like official Wildlife will be like what what are you talking about they will be completely outraged because they did their their due diligence here and now if anyone wants to complain they have the documents to to show it so there it is I guess Trevor this now that this is done and we had the assessment that was done for the prior launch it you know we're on trying to get to launch two here but presumably if they don't change anything launch three should be a lot easier from a regulatory standpoint do you think that's the case yeah that's correct so um all of the environmental stuff stuff assuming like you said no major uh pad changes especially to the delu system between launches 2 and three uh it should be fairly minimal paperwork however the one major asterisk on that is if there's another anomaly which frankly it's flight two the chances of there being an anomaly is very very high um you say excitement guaranteed and also potentially other things guaranteed right yeah um so that would mean that they would have to uh conduct another investigation report with the FAA which is of course something that SpaceX would want to do anyway because when you have a mission failure you know you want to go look what caused this how can we fix it how can we go make sure this doesn't happen on our future Vehicles so they'll do the similar thing that they did with the FAA this time come up with a list of Correction uh corrective items submit it to them say this is what caused this uh anomally here's what we're going to do to prevent it and um so on so they'll probably have to do that again however chances are right I think it was 63 items this time and in the future it'll probably be fewer items since less will go wrong so the investigation should go quicker than that and I have a question here from Nathaniel Kern in our chat who says is there any indication that this launch license is a one-time only or could it be a Perpetual license and I guess to what you just said it's more more than likely that they'll have to submit some reevaluations here to get the next license do you think that's the case or do you think they could roll this one over if there's not too much to do it'll almost certainly be just for one more launch again uh I think once SpaceX has a successful Starship Mission that's when we'll probably see them start to allow for more than one launch at a time pending you know any anomaly investigations being closed out uh if they do have an anomaly after that and I guess Alex this is probably hard for the FAA to wrap their heads around because th the typically when we think about space Vehicles when they launch there's there's usually some degree of certainty that they're going to get to where they're going to go um spacex's approach is you know to be simp to simplify it is just keep blowing it up until it gets to where you want it to go do you do you think that's been a challenge for The Regulators Who Who Are You know when you look at Artemis versus this Artemis only you know only flew once but it flew perfectly on that first launch because they spent so much time making sure it would get to its destination here quite the the opposite do you think that's holding things up too well surely there's there there's a lot of things that that you know moving pieces basically as you mentioned you know with Artemis with SLS things are pretty much done on the first launch they are completely uh like any major modifications take a a much longer time so they try to get these designs nailed down from the from the onset and so it is it is obvious that these radical changes from one lunch to the other you know these changes at the end of the day they need to be going through paperwork as usual and things like that and so of course it could it could be part of the of the issue and that's sort of the the point that a lot of people are making that and the SpaceX themselves are making that it's not just that the regulations are bad that you know oh you need to remove the regulation right it's more that the regulations or The Regulators sort of uh better said in that way need to accomodate to the new age where a lot of companies it's not just SpaceX you see a lot of other companies I can site for example AVL um they it's it's a much smaller rocket their rocket is just basically a one ton two orbit rocket it's much smaller but they had a similar issue in which they had to to basically redo the the design of their orbit of the launch Mount and things like that the flame deflector that they had and it took like they the they flew on J on January and it is now on November when they finished the when the fa finished the mishap investigation and now they need to introduce all of the the recommendations and everything so they are in the step that Starship was in September so actually Starship went even faster than a rocket that is one ton to orbit right it's like that's something y that is and more recommendations and more failures yeah we also saw that right uh the last new Shepherd flight ended with an anomaly and that investigation which is for a suborbital vehicle took significantly longer than um the FAA and SpaceX did for Starship flight one so they're moving a little quicker there yeah yeah I'll go I was gonna say I'll add on to what Alex was saying to kind of answer the question and that um the way that a lot of these investigations work is they look at what what is the chance that uh someone could be injured from this launch event and it needs to be below some threshold I can't remember if it's one and 10,000 or one in 100,000 something like that so in some senses the FAA doesn't care about the approach that the launch providers taking whether they take the SLS approach of let's get everything down perfectly or the SpaceX approach of Let's uh you know mess around and find out uh for them they just say we need to be confident that there's going to be no harm done to the public and uh it's up to the launch provider to meet those uh requirements they've set out that said I believe it was around demo 2 NASA released a statement talking about what it's been like for them to work with this you know completely different um way of you know building and fail built test fail that SpaceX does and they said that they've learned some very good lessons uh and of course one of those was Dragon had an anomaly uh about a year before demo 2 where the entire vehicle blew up on the Launchpad during some testing and normally for NASA that would be a horrible look but for SpaceX that was like you know we didn't expect this but we learned a lot and we implemented from it um right so I'm sure if NASA was able to learn a ton from SpaceX I'm sure similar lessons have been learned by the FAA right so they're kind of changing the regulatory environment as they as they roll forward Alex you got some more in this document you wanted to show us right yeah indeed so um I'm actually looking through it uh as we as we go through so just to to get prepared you can see there a map of the of the sort of how is the situation at the at the launch side and so it talks about the multiple retention retention basins that they have there so the big blue one that you can see sort of near the the red circle that's the the main the main one the main one for the water that is the one that is used for the water now the one that is orange it is used you know when they when they chill down the booster engines and they basically have to collect the oxygen the basically there's gases oxygen that that comes out from from the from these uh from these engines and so it is taken from it it is collected and then dumped into that other Pond that is the one on the red on on the orange uh area now it could be that maybe they can also you know that that other Pond could also collect some of the runoff water it could be it will probably turn into ice cuz it's uh it's called Uh gases oxygen but also probably partly uh liquid at that point and then there's a smaller one little one that is yellow there they call it retention Bas in C holds about 11,000 gallons it's is still a lot but it's not like it's tiny compared to the other two and it looks like it is pretty much next to the to the or oral tank farm so that's interesting cuz we I I didn't expect that place to be called a retention basing or anything like it but it's it's interesting it also shows you just by the way how much how many multi multiple disciplines there are in space right you think of of working at SpaceX as you need to be a rocket engineer but you need to be a civil engineer you need to be an environmental engineer you know there's all these different uh career paths that I think if people are interested and want to work in space are we there's a lot of ways to get there right are we having keving art here cuz he's he's writing on the on on the document but yeah yeah that's that's Kevin he's signing it off he's kind of name on there we have sign off from from Kevin there we go right y the doc Kevin's approval for launch Kevin Kevin signed it off by the way Kevin Kevin Michael Reed is in our is is our uh producer in the background helping us produce Today's Show and he's doing a great job so keeping it keeping it keeping it fun go ahead um so what are we looking at here Alex yeah so this is basically the the summary of the operations of the of of this system and so it talks about uh the D system will be activated during each ignition event on the over launch pad including engine ignition test and vehicle launches basically when they do a static fire test or a launch then they activate that that's easy and everything each launch is associated with an estimated two static fire engine test probably like a main one and then a bug up just in case they need extra data we had that on the on this uh booster because the first one had an abort in basically as they were doing the the ignition they had multiple engines shutting down early and so they went out they tried to fix the the issue and then they went they they went back to the orbital launch Mount And Fire the engines this time for full duration there were still two two engines that shut down early but that basically uh met the test commit criteria I would say probably not the technical term but I will make that up as we go but definitely you can see that it's just laying out what this system is all about uh talking about the there's a Planned there's an second orbital launch M that is planned but it obviously says uh this design is not yet final the construction of the additional overall launch mod will not affect plan operational Cadence so basically um these overall launch Mount since it's still way down the line they're not really accounting for this no Del system is planned for the existing sub launch mod we knew that I I guess we will already have seen a lot of work on that on that location and the Del system May operate up to 30 times per year year so that is what a SpaceX says people are saying well this is what the fish and wildlife service are are saying that they they are good for this is this is basically what SpaceX told the fishion wildlife service and they were like okay well we're we have up to 10 launches per year right so we're going to have two static fires and the launch so we have three operations three times so that we're going to activate the Del system per per operational launch and so that's the way that you know if you do the math three times times 10 it gives you right 30 30 right exactly 30 activations right look live right yeah looks like the cherry picker's out again I can't believe how high that thing goes uh and are they doing tile inspection what are they doing there maybe Trevor can I really yeah so I think you know uh I guess this is a good time we can kind of go into now that the regulatory side is mostly complete depending the final launch license being dropped hopefully later today or tomorrow what else is left to do and part of that the main thing is going to be uh the final arming of the flight termination system ahead of launch and we expect them to go into that before uh full stacking later tonight or so or actually we don't really know one probably very soon so that's going to be step one is to arm the flight termination system and then I'm sure there are going to be some final inspections that they want to do on the vehicle um they they could be inspecting heat shield probably Plumbing uh and hot staging ring and all of that stuff that they seem to have been kind of tinkering around with however we're not 100% sure but all of this seems to be a pretty good sign that they're going to go into stacking for a launch attempt on Friday and Trevor they've been stacking and destacking this thing now about half a dozen times probably more than I think we've seen any Starship configuration I could be wrong but I think to me it seems like they've been doing quite a bit of uh stack unstack taking the hot staging ring off putting it back on uh and this is all being done at the pad and you think about uh how any with any other vehicle space shuttle emis or the SLS it it's not as easy to do it on those systems as it is here and I'm guessing that's part of the efficiency that they're trying to gain here yeah absolutely so the last stack which what I guess was about little under a week ago at this point uh from liftoff liftoff of the up ground yeah to being set onto the booster was and uh everything being uh aligned and everything I believe was 46 minutes which was significantly shorter than some of the previous Stacks which have been almost double that at closer to an hour and a half so SpaceX is very clearly starting to learn the ins and out of the system they know what when they need to pause how to align all of that stuff so yeah it's been awesome to see if you want to do a rapid reusable rocket right 45 minutes from uh you know to to restack it to get it to go up again is pretty I think pretty pretty good so it's it's kind that's been something I've been really uh kind of interested in because you know you look at this as like oh my gosh they destacking again but it you know in shuttle days that was a big deal you had to bring it back in and and bring it back to the VAB and and go through all this uh work but here it's just another day at the office so it's it's pretty cool hey should we acknowledge some super Chatters here we've got a a big Hue so let me uh say hello to some folks I want to thank uh Gary meski for a $25 Super Chat thank you very much for your support of our efforts here and uh this is great because countdown to launch is actually counting down we have a a a an estimated launch counter here because we expect Friday um to be the day we'll have some questions about that in a minute um gerera with a $20 Super Chat uh to purchase a used Tornado Intercept vehicle TI to convert into danger van block 2 Trevor or Alex maybe you could uh inform the viewers about danger van one what happened to that I know what happened to it but you can go Trevor uh sure um it got hit by debris during the first orbital flight we we had parked it near the at one of the locations obviously with no one in it um knowing full well that there was a decent chance that it was going to get hit by debris and sure enough a very very large piece of concrete hit it so hopefully we don't have any repeats of that dis launch yes and uh the video is is quite compelling and I believe danger van is still in its current condition so um maybe maybe it'll make another appearance if they can get it to turn over uh Joe has a$ five dollar tip from our uh NASA spaceflight store at shop. nasaspaceflight.com I believe is where you can get the tip button I believe I may be mistaken but uh we made his day so thank you very much for that and we appreciate your support uh Nick with a 10 pound or $243 Super Chat no question just here for the puns we will try to deliver on the puns our pun Master is uh On Assignment today but hopefully when he comes back we can get a few more for you uh musical wolves a frequent chatter here uh sending bacon to the fa a to publish the license a little bit quicker any any little bit helps I'm sure SpaceX would appreciate any gift of bacon although you don't want to bribe the US government probably not a good idea even bacon I think would be considered that um we have a flawed perspective here reading glasses fund for Alex to read the FWS report cover to cover I just got glasses I don't have them on right now but they do they do help so uh we we' be happy to supply those to you if you need it but that would mean you have come back glasses oh do you okay so there you go you got I already have glasses so maybe we'll get them for Trevor yeah oh yeah look at that they're a bit dirty cuz I I have them here only for oh you have contacts all right so we all have H adjusted Vision so I'm already blind all right and we've got a bunch of uh gifted memberships here so I'll put these up as we're as we're talking but um a bunch of red team memberships getting gifted out to fellow viewers of the channel here so we're in good shape there thank you very much for that um LM Mayo this is a good question um who has a 32-month pad rat member Milestone are we still thinking Friday because we don't have a license yet we can't launch without it um Trevor is there gonna be any kind of issue here fight actually we're gonna have the two of you fight over this one so go ahead I mean all indications so far point to at least a launch attempt on Friday you know I think whether when they go into a launch attempt if it actually Launches on the first try is kind of a coin flip it seems pretty 50-50 to me but right now right we see them preparing for final stacking operations we obviously are expecting the launch license to be dropped either today or tomorrow um Elon said that uh everything should be ready as of as of the end of last week uh it seems like they the weather which we'll get into here in a little bit is looking pretty good for Friday so as of right now I would say it seems very likely that there will be a launch attempt on Friday and we have a question from Gus F who's celebrating a 28-month Capcom member Milestone Alex there's a time frame for launch here in addition to the date but first of all why don't you uh respond to uh Trevor do you think Friday's the day and if so what's the time time time timeline for it in minutes well I I think we might get the launch license by by Friday the W the launch window is a 2hour launch window that opens at 700 a.m. Central Standard Time and you can see on the top left corner of of the screen well sort of because it's bit uh almost to the center you can see a clock at the top of the screen right that clock is counting down to 7: a.m. Central that is the opening of the window for Starship we're not sure if they're going to be targeting the opening of the window or maybe you know maybe in the middle it'll all come down to how they are in the Readiness for the launch sometimes they might need a few more minutes a few maybe an extra hour here and there so maybe it's at 8 central something like that but definitely with 7 to 8 9 um excuse me within within the window from 7 to 900 a.m. Central Standard time on Friday that will be the window for that launch so 2our window starting at 7: a.m. and Trevor why is there a window for this it's not like they have to meet the space station somewhere is there a reason for having this very somewhat narrow window of time yeah I think um there are kind of two main reasons for that the first is SpaceX seems to really want to observe the re-entry during the day um so this is a good window where it's both light out in Texas and in Hawaii where there may be a re-entry of Starship emphasis on May uh Additionally you just you need to have some time frame to coordinate with the FAA because the FAA needs to release the notice to uh Airmen wait why do I think it's not Airmen now um whatever notice to a missions now air missions thank you I knew they had changed it I couldn't remember to what uh and those need to be for a specified amount of time because right you don't want to have this uh you know flight closure TFR over the area all day and same thing for the notice to Mariners uh but you are correct that orbital mechanics wise given they're not even completing an entire orbit around the Earth they are you know there is no physical reason why they couldn't launch at any time and and I think that that reasoning and uh that and the lift is driving away so it looks like we're having a little bit of activity down there they're getting ready for a stacking operation we'll have to keep an eye on things there and I guess they're not stacking so long as there's people around is that right Alex you don't want to lift that up underne one of the things that they are that they are waiting for right now you can see there's a a crane well now we changeed The View but there's uh like a small yellow crane we actually call it the the Vive cuz when it moves it does something like this so it's like it's ping or something and then there's also a lift uh it's an orange lift so the the orange lift and the uh and the crane both are going to be working right now to remove one of the it's like a a protection plate that they put on the on the connector on the quick uh quick disconnect Port of the ship that basically is used to protect it while also being used to pressurize the vehicle so it's normally called The Press plate because it's sort of a a short version of all of that explanation press plate is the plate that covers the the the quick disconnect Port of the vehicle and you know at uh at the same time it allows them to be able to plug in all of the pressurization systems so now they need to remove that once they remove that they can lift the vehicle because obviously you won't you wouldn't want that that plate to be there once the vehicle is on top of the booster and you need to connect the quick disc umbilical cuz otherwise the plate is going to be in the middle in between right so it's it's also very heavy so you need a crane to lift it that's why the little yellow crane is there you canot take a few guys you know and and take it off cu the other option will be like okay well if you need to remove it why not remove it when when it's on top of the booster right it could be done the problem is it's too heavy so they need to use the the crane to lift it otherwise you know it will be very easy to just get a guy and remove it once it's on top of a of the booster right and and looking at this shot here you know you see the uh the tiles on on the underside of Starship and clearly those tiles are there so that Starship can survive re-entry and we talked a little bit about the fact that if everything is successful the uh Starship will re-enter the atmosphere somewhere near Hawaii into the and and end up in the Pacific Ocean uh and in order to know whether or not that heat shield works you have to measure it and we have a question here from Doug Ramsey a $50 Super Chat uh so thank you very much Doug for your support of our efforts here and he wants to know are there sensors inside the payload Bay or somewhere around those heat shields to detect where the perspective failure might occur if one because I'm sure they want to know if that heat shields works that's part of this this Mission Trevor is that the case yeah absolutely I remember it was in one of the star base tours that Tim da did with Elon where Tim asked the question of like will there be cameras or something like that to observe any failures in heat shields and he said there won't be any cameras however they will have sensors where they'll be able to detect where and when and how uh the heat shield failed I'm not sure what type of sensors those are um I imagine it's you know some uh thermal imaging stuff and other ways to determine temperature of the skin under but that's a pure guess but they're definitely observing the heat shield during re-entry and you certainly don't want to go through all the effort that they made here to not study that part of the vehicle which is a very critical part of it so um I'm sure they will have some kind of measurement and I'm sure we will hear about it uh as the mission progresses here apocalypse thank you go ahead oh I was gonna make the the my only comment is that I also see a lot of people talking about well but what if the vehicle makes it through re-entry and and splashes down why are not to recover in the the ship right because it's like what they're doing is it's it's not even going to attempt any Landing un burn or anything like it it's just going to be splashing down hard at terminal velocity on the ocean if it even goes through your entry and I'm like well the reason why they're not recovering and inspecting the the heat shield tiles and everything it's because if it survives re-entry well you know it survived right it's like right kind of defeats the purpose you could in theory in the future you know recover it and see for refurbishment and things like that for refurbishment purposes but for just figuring out if it works or not if it gets to that point it already worked right and they have probably now 15 other Starships almost ready to go at this point they just keep cranking them out so if anything they they have to get this thing off the ground and off the lot because they they're running out of room I would imagine right they keep making new Starships um I want to thank apocalypse cow for 10 red team membership donations thank you very much for that one of the best things about our community is that if you hang out in the chat room long enough somebody may actually gift you a membership which gets you all sorts of cool stuff here on the channel um Noah has a question here a store message and we'll talk about the store in a second because there's some cool stuff in the store um Noah was wondering um assuming Starship survives re-entry big assumption why do you think they are not attempting the flipin burn right because that was something that we saw Starship do in some of those early atmospheric tests where it would come down on its belly and then flip so why are we not flipping yes I guess I got ahead of that question before yeah I was gonna say just like Alex was saying they've already gotten the data they've already landed ship 15 um was it sn5 yeah I think it was sn5 boy that feels so long ago and so they know that once they're you know in that belly flop position they're able to do the kick and burn and land so on this flight they just want to know can we get through re-entry and if they get to that point then that's a ridiculously huge win for the mission to begin with there's no reason to try the final part of the burn right there you go so uh and they they know it works so I don't know if our our if if Kevin is ready or not but I thought maybe this might be a good time to talk about the NSF store at shop. nasaspaceflight.com and we have some new items available so we have that mission patch we've been talking about right the uh High defin embroidered uh patch for this orbital test flight to that you can get in the store but we also have some knitted items available there as well and these are um going to be available kind of on a limited basis because all of us at NSF have to uh knit them with our knitting needles um but we will have those available there in the shot now is the high definition embroidery of the patch and one of the cool things there's the knitted items too some really cool space stuff for the winter um I have winter coming it's getting cold out where I live so this is great stuff look at that sweater you can you can own the ugly sweater because you know that's not even that ugly for an ugly sweater I think it looks pretty nice you got some some dragons on there it looks like with some parachutes all of them working knitted sweater ERS shop. nasaspaceflight.com and one of the best parts about shop. nasaspaceflight.com and I've said this on every stream because I think it's a very good strategy is if you have loved ones in your life and you're someone who's really hard to shop for like me if you put the computer with the store on in front of your loved ones just have it casually on they might get you a knitted beanie like that knitted by one of us um sort of uh that you can uh take home with I don't think anyone wants us to be knitting in I don't know you know I mean I I I I would love one knitted by Alex so how many have you made so far Trevor you would get some massive pile of yarn that kind of looks like something for me like why did I buy this that's why we're missing sleep right we're we're needing them getting away with the elves uh getting ready for for the holidays here but these are some really cool cool designs here so shop. nasaspaceflight.com and again when you buy something in the store and we're live you can actually leave a store message as you're checking out uh which we can put up on the screen as you saw us do a few minutes ago there so pretty cool stuff so shop. nasaspaceflight.com for all of your merch that you might want to uh show the world that you care about space now uh we have a weather report so let's assume that everything happens on Friday the weather is still a factor so we do have a weather report uh from Adam uh who can um inform us as to what the weather is looking like for a potential Friday launch I don't know if Kevin is ready we can uh roll that weather report and hear what he's got to say so let's take a look at the weather conditions for the next Starship flight fortunately the weather is improving over the next few days as we have a ridge approaching our region but that shortlived as our next storm system is approaching Texas let's take a deep dive down into South Texas on Friday and see what the conditions look like so as we look here we're looking at the wind profile file a loft so from the surface down at the bottom all the way up into the atmosphere one thing that SpaceX noted last time was they looked at directional Shear directional Shear would be this wind right here which is changing direction with height so think of the Starship going up and the wind hitting at different levels as it's going up that's something they pay attention very closely to but this is weak so this is within their threshold yes the winds do increase with height that's a Twi as Starship goes towards the Gulf of Mexico now for us viewing everybody wants to know what's the weather is going to be like is it going to be cloudy Sunny well this computer model right here shows a 57° dupoint with a 63° temperature that means right there at the surface that the temperature dupoint spreads just enough that we should have clear conditions all the way up now another model makes it look just like flight number one flight number one we had a little bit of ground level fog some lowlevel clouds this model suggesting that could be possible that we could have a little bit of that fog that slowly Burns off as the daylight comes up because once you warm up that surface temperature it'll allow that fog to burn off or even the lowlevel clouds that typically come in from the seab breeze to burn off that is possible but we'll look with time and see if this changes as models progress cuz right now it's a 50/50 split we'll probably end up having maybe a little bit of a couple patchy clouds but last time it burned off just in time hopefully it'll do the same on this next one we'll keep you updated all right so the weather is looking like at this point it might be doable for Friday morning so we will keep an eye on that and of course if you want to know if it's launching you come here to NSF and we'll be covering it live uh as it as it happens and we'll have a lot of leadup to that as well so we'll have a lot of a big tired crew here after the week is over with um so in case you're just joining us we've been uh this is the countdown to launch show and what we do on this show is basically countdown to the launch of the orbital test flight two for Starship and the big news of the week has been that the environmental document all 500 pages of it are complete and things are moving forward we're just waiting for that launch license to get issued at this point and Alex has been pouring over the document with his glasses on and he's been kind of giving us some analysis as we've been going here so we have another page of the document Alex that you thought stood out so let's uh let's take a look at that yeah so it is pretty much the the same portion that we were talking about here um right after that uh because we were sort of looking at other stuff from ship 25 and everything as they prepared that that lift but um one thing that that really stood out for me is basically the amount of water that there you know that SpaceX will use depending on the amount of basically on on whether they do a static fire test or a launch and so it says it is estimated that approximately 72,000 gallons of water will be used for each static fire and approximately 132,000 gallons of water for each launch event so it seems like they use more water for the launch perhaps because they expect maybe the water dele system to run for longer after lift off or something I don't really know to be honest but uh for the purposes of the analysis it is assumed that 358,000 gallons the maximum volume of water available in the tanks could be used so they basically said okay imagine for some reason that we just run the whole tank farm for the water Dage system dry right we we use up all of the water what could happen and so um that is that is pretty much what they what they use for this it also talks about the 3,000 gallons of the detonation SU water uh that is the fireex system that is the one that I I liken it to the to the um to the roofies on the space shuttle the space shuttle had the sort of um sort of fireworks kind of thing uh at the bottom with the Sparks and everything uh before engine ignition that what did it was burning off hydrogen in the in the air before engine ignition so that you know there will be no explosions or anything the fire system does the same but instead of fire it basically throws a lot of water and a lot of nitrogen and those disperse and move away from the environment that methane uh you know residual methane uh in the air as well as oxygen so that basically neutralizes and avoids the potential for any explosion or any fiery situation there so that uses about 3,000 gallons apparently um it talks about the peak flow rate between 100,000 gallons per minute and 260,000 gallons per minute I think that that's already approaching the rates of you know Del systems that we see on other Rockets like SLS or or spatial right don't really have the numbers for those though so if anyone has it in the back channels or anything uh be feel free to to put those but they they look like a lot uh to be honest the the next thing that is interesting to me is on the next paragraph I just did a quick Google by the way and apparently sls's uh flow rate is 1 .1 million gallons per minute o well okay okay I was off by by 10 uh by 10 times that's a drenching right there well yeah that's that's a lot okay we'll wait it see and it seems to me Alex as we're going through this it it seems to me that that this seems like the kind of environmental review that you kind of need right before you let loose all of this water into the environment that came from some other place and is this the total focus of of these of this document was just on that system yeah so obviously we're not going to go through all the 505 uh pages of the document just just to let that be clear we got a lot hour Friday we can get it done right but this is sort of the key points the key points are usually in the first few pages and then the next ones are like a lot of uh words about you know the birds around the sides and the nests and things like that but these are sort of the the key points where it explains what assumptions it has made uh it is very important that that you know it accounted for more water and still it said well you know it's okay right because it accounted for 358,000 gallons and yet the the water Del system actually only uses about a third of that um about yeah 132,000 gallons of of of water for uh launch events so obviously it is good that even accounting for triple that that amount it still is like okay it's good so that's good one of the things that that is interesting for the for that last paragraph before they sort of you know uh the the the the next thing they basically um make make a partition of the types of water that we can see uh in this event where they have Overland flow uh push out vaporization evaporation condensation etc etc but before that that last paragraph before that event uh shows that based on uh yeah here based on model and collected data from the Deluge test most of the water prior to engines is startup and following engine IGN engine shutdown will be collected in the retention areas or pushed out a 92 % of the water will be vaporized uh when the engines are on so 92% once the engines are on only 8% of that water will remain as liquid that is a lot of water that that turns into vapor and the vapor is actually I think it kind of explains that later that there's vapor and then condensation so we actually made a the the video that we made about the delage system actually went a bit into this that when you look at from from the from the top down and you look at how it looks like on the basically how all the the vapors and everything the vapor is technically transparent so you actually only see like it's more like translucent because it has uh you know dust and things like that but you can actually see through it and when you go out outside of that of that cloud of vapor it has already condense cuz it has had the time to to cool down and now it turns into a cloud of condensated water so clouds are droplets of water now it is already uh very little drops droplets of of water so it goes into detail of that separation between the vapor of that oo look at that you can you canot throw at me that view cuz it means that we're going to see a stacking soon that is the quick disconnect arm have him pulled out from the tower okay so we may stick around for a little bit and see if we get a stacking here yeah all right yeah so generally that means we're on the order of 30 to 45 minutes from ship movement generally generally right and uh but yeah that's a good sign and I guess we have to wait and see if they close the pad area down before they do that but so so what what just happened here for those that don't know what you're talking about yes the arm that we see on the left that's the ship disconnect that just moved out from the tower and that needs to move out of the way for them to pull bring the ship up bring it over and set it down and then later that ship disconnect will come back in uh and attach to the ship and once that happens we are hopefully in launch stack and the vehicle will not move again until it is under the power of its 33 Raptor engines well hopefully 3 three hopefully on Friday all right so we'll keep we'll be keeping an eye on that as as things are going here uh and it looks like we're getting closer to the final stacking at least for this this Starship and this Starship once it launches both parts of it we will not see again um but of course the plan is for both parts to be reused in the future once they figure out how it all works which is why it's important for more launches to happen on a more regular basis and that's kind of the the basis of of the document that we've been reviewing today on the show that Alex has been going through is to try to understand in this case kind of the ground system component and what impact on the environment it might have anything else that we got to cover on that Alex and know we got interrupted by our our view of Disconnect there Alex is like I got 20 more hours of presentation yeah right let me ask you while we're while while we're talking about the ground systems here you know all of this was done because of what happened on the first launch where uh our our own danger van got destroyed by concrete um which I along with many other things and there's concrete spewing all over the place it was it was it was quite a a scene um and I'm sure that was not the intended uh outcome uh on the first launch so this this water system that required all of this environmental review uh is designed to not only reduce some of the vibration but also the concrete from flying up into the engines which might have been cause of the engine shutting down this might be a fight question for the two of you but are are we anticipating now with all this pad work that's been done the steel plate the water that's coming up from the bottom uh 92% of it which is going to get vaporized by the 33 engines are all of these engines going to work this time and will danger van survive a second visit fight go ahead want to start with Alex okay well um I I I'm I'm not sure if it'll work or not to be honest but I'm H I have hopes one of the hopes that I have is that even if because one of the things that they did not only they did install a basically a huge Deluge plate underneath of the overall launch M but under that plate there's also a whole new foundation so basically what I'm trying to say here is that even if the plate itself fails that new Foundation May resist the firing of the of the Raptors and so we might see a lot of molten steel if it were to fail but it'll be much harder for those Raptors to be able to dig into the ground and being able to you know create a crater as the first flight did so even if the water Del because I frankly think that at this point whatever fails is just a matter of tweaking in the sense that maybe he needs more water Maybe needs more pressure of that water like more gallons per minute and things like that right that that it it's pushed out much faster but I I think the the whole deal is pretty much something that that is meant to work it is just a flame trench reshaped into a flat blade and you know the the trench in this case is like six holes across the the orbital launch Mount legs that these uh exhaust Can can skape through I've talked about that many many times that I think the build a flame trench is not really the solution because at the end of the day you still have to deal with a flame diverter it's a big metal piece and then that big metal piece needs to be cooled down so this is the same problem it's just a different shape must work it it should work so so your prediction is less damage how about you Trevor yeah uh I do agree with that I will note though that you ad mentioned that on the first flight there were the concrete could have caused damage to the engine section and Elon on a what is it an X space about SpaceX now that sounds um he had mentioned that there was no evidence of the concrete having shot up into the engine bay and having done damage he didn't say it was impossible he just said there's no evidence to point to that so I think um that probably won't help increase the the engined ignition rate however what I think will be a big help will be they've obviously done more testing this time and they were able to get all 33 engines at least ignited even if some of them did temporarily shut down then on top of that they've drastically reduced the amount of time that the booster will be sitting on the Launchpad so we're uh between those two things I don't think to answer your question that all 33 engines will be ignited I suspect will probably like 31 or 32 I hope they don't lift off with fewer than that and then I would be quite surprised if there was anywhere near as much damage to the pad this time but hopefully um you know hopefully they've done their homework this time got it so some optimism there so I want to acknowledge that we're gonna go back to page five of the document I believe here in a second but I did want to acknowledge a couple of super chats here on Don rub rub rotum I hope I got that right uh $20 Super chat and he says the statement May op this is back to our our 30 water Deluge system operations per year uh he says the statement may not be permissive but merely acknowledging expected use and he's a lawyer and he thinks that the entire paragraph is declaratory and not prescriptive or mandatory which means that they might have some wiggle room if they decide to activate the system more frequently so perhaps they had to come up with something just to declare yeah we'll do 303 that that is correct yeah okay so there that is how I interpret it as well so we may not have um as many restrictions as we might think there so should we go back to the document Alex because you had some more stuff to share and the document we're talking about is um this is the document that basically encompasses the the environmental review of what happened uh or what will happen down at Starbase and one of the things that was holding up the launch license was that the US fish and wildlife service had to sign off on this complex before the rocket could launch again and what we've discovered in going through this document Alex is that a lot of this has to do with the changes made at the pad and what impact those have on the environment I think where you wanted to come back to is uh page five I believe yeah um for those at home with with their bingos and everything you can you can already punch the one about space shuttle because we're going to talk about the space shuttle here actually talks about the space shuttle and SLS as well cuz uh one of one of the sources of potential contaminants here it's not just the water that you know gets all of the exhaust and everything but also there's there's ablation from the engines and it talks precisely about that ablation and then it says the Starship uh super heavy uh plume when in contact with the steel diverter Co ablade up to 190 pounds of a steel per launch relative to launch systems that use different solid propellant systems with high metal content like the space Shadle and this space launch system the metal from ablation associated with the Starship is extremely minimal and then it goes into a huge talk about you know what was the amount of metals that came out of the of the Space Shuttle and the ones that come out from from the SLS rocket because the srps they're right they're pretty one of the components yeah one of the components is aluminum right and then they also up blade a lot of metal from the from the launch Mount systems and everything that kind of that metal stuff right I mean I I I think that yeah this is far cleaner I guess if you look at it way and I I I can just remember all the stuff that I had to clean off my cameras from a couple of those space shuttle launches and all that is getting just buried into the soil so this is this has got to be cleaner right and so it it basically on the next it's like two or or three pages that goes into this but the next page if we can go into that I'm most interested on the penultimate uh paragraph it's actually a big paragraph there where it talks about the samples that they did did and so SpaceX sampled the dele water used during the August 6th and August 25th 2023 static fire testing events at the bokach Chica Launchpad so it talks about the potential traces of arsenic barium fluoride and nitrate that were present and basically that it is pretty much the same as you will found on portable water so it means that those probably came already from what uh came uh in that water that was put in the ground tanks it also talks about potentially some residuals from the fabrication of the plate also being present on on that on that water system you can imagine that eventually over time those residuals are not going to be there because they're all going to be pushed out and so you know residual rust in the water holy tanks as well and Associated pip piping because OB obviously you know some of those tanks they are not at the utmost cleaning uh qualities or anything like it right in the tank is going to come out right right precisely and so it it goes into that and then just at the end it it goes it shows like analytical result from water Deluge sampling and you know for those that are Geeks about that I'm not a geek of of chemistry I'm more of a physics guy so uh good luck to to you all but basically you have a huge table with all of the units and everything uh detailing all of the potential uh chemicals that they found on the water so very interesting and they have even if you if you look at that same table one interesting thing is they compare that so they have the two sampol right the the two static fire test and at the left hand side the First Column is precisely the portable Source water so they compare what they have put on the tanks with what comes out from the delu system you know all of these samples that they take and that is very interesting cuz that is an AB test right like what we put in in and what comes out came and then we see the differences in concentrations and everything what things may have been introduced into this so that's a very thorough and this is a SpaceX doing it this is not even the fishal wildlife service they did it themselves probably PR precisely because they were expecting this sort of uh paperwork to be needed so that's you know that's a great work that that they did there I'm looking at other stuff yeah they're talking about the um basically system I bet you this cost them a for to do exactly yeah yeah and and it looks like uh just to cut in here for a second it looks like a uh we have a crane coming down I'm assuming under control um down at Star base so that's another Milestone perhaps which crane are we looking at there Trevor go Trevor yeah that's the LR 11,000 right Alex okay I the numbers always I get confused by it but yeah that's the LR 11000 that's what they use um to bring ships on the suborbital tank farms and just kind of any big work they have to do around either the suborbital launch site or the orbital launch site and why this is a really good sign is because this crane seems to be entering the launch configuration so when SpaceX conducts a launch out of Starbase I believe they also did the same for the suborbital um launches they kind of tilt the crane down um just so that you know it's kind of more out of the way yeah so this is yeah yet another good sign that they're probably going to be going in for a launch attempt on Friday the next big step as we were just mentioning a few minutes ago is they seem to be preparing for uh a full stack with the ship kit quick quick disconnect moving out and then we'll see if the ship 25 gets lifted onto booster 9 here shortly and Trevor they also have to activate the launch abort system too or arm it yeah so this is um a kind of a confusing subject because there are so many phases to SpaceX actually uh arming the abort system to the point where it could terminate the vehicle in flight so the first phase is obviously installation of the charges which uh Jack got some amazing photos of the other day and then the second stage is once those charges are installed they have some pins in them and with those beautiful red tags that say remove before flight so what they do what those are for yeah we all we all have those as keychains that's what it's for okay yeah so they remove uh these pins which then somewhat uh allow for the termination system to be activated but not fully because the next stage is the ship quit disconnect has a FTS inhibitor uh on it which means that while the um the ship disconnect is on the vehicle it is inhibiting the FTS from activating and then finally I'm sure that there are tons of software um blocks that prevent the uh flight termination system from going off before they're in flight so it kind of depends what is your definition of arming if you mean pulling the pins then I the pins will be pulled today if you mean the system could detonate the vehicle right now that will not happen until uh a launch attempt right you don't want your rocket being so easily blown up on the pad right so so all those safety controls are intact there and there is a a lifespan or or you know the it's kind of a perishable item so you can't have this the this these explosives just sitting there forever there's a certain length of time in which they're they're good is that is that right I know that was an issue with the Artemis launch recently yeah I think the Artemis launch was the bigger concern was over the batteries on the flight termination system where they have to be recharged um and there was no way to charge them at the pad which seems like a little bit of an oversight to me yeah fixable item yeah however I don't think SpaceX has such limitations and I don't think the plastic explosive explosives that they use um have any limitations to them like that and Jack's photo was pretty neat they had a bunch of uh technicians walking out with the explosive strapped to their backs so um lots of faith in in what they were carrying don't don't trip don't trip um so we are looking at Star base right now um we did see some progress towards them getting ready to lift uh Starship onto the booster although I don't think we're quite there yet for a lift I don't know if you all have seen anything that I'm not seeing but yeah they're still removing that press plate you can see there that that activity going on that crane next to the lift the lift is basically the the few guys working on that press plate trying to remove it and then the crane goes in and lifts it and removes it and once that happens then they can move away and get ready for for that lift to happen the last time that they lifted this thing it happened very very quickly after that press plate was removed so maybe we're okay uh let's let's do a bit I'm gonna do a bit um maybe less than one hour let's see less than an hour okay oh come on fight Bo yeah you guys are pretty optimistic today so let me hear hear what Trevor has to say I mean like we were discussing at the start of the show they've really started to understand uh lifting and stacking of these vehicles so I'm going to agree with Alex that I suspect we'll see lift start within the next hour or so all right team one hour so we'll see where uh where we end up on this and as we're waiting um Alex has been dutifully um reading through all 500 pages of this environmental review which actually has has been way more interesting than I anticipated and I think for you as well um and I think where we left off and so we'll continue kind of going through this and again this was the document that was why it was taking so long they had to do this assessment of everything that they changed on the launch uh Mount there so that they could reup their environmental certifications and because they're putting a lot of water into the environment uh they needed to make sure that that water would be safe for the surroundings which is a large part of what this huge document uh is all about and I think Alex you said there was some interesting stuff on page uh for 15 yeah 14 and 15 so both it's sort of like a same same part of the document and so he talks here the changes to Habitat from the previous anomalies and so it talks about the what what happened with the with the pad following engine ignition and liftoff of the April 20th test flight it became clear immediately that the pad deck under the launch M had Su stay anticipated damage hilarious so did danger exactly and so he talks about the the debris and everything but one one thing that is that is really interesting to me is the the list that that that have their sort of the um mitigations that SpaceX put into place uh yeah well Kevin here is is circling uh that the debris and dust were expelled into the air and deposited in uh in the vicinity of the Launchpad and in approximately a 1,000 acre area so that's that's a lot of a lot of land yeah yeah yeah we we see we we're seeing it Kevin I'm seeing it I'm also looking at at my own thing here so that's why I cannot yeah right but for those who are like me and have absolutely no idea what 10,00 acres is that is four square kilometers yeah that's a lot Prett big area yeah yeah and I can see why en agency would not be crazy about dust and concrete getting spewed over that area four four square kilometers is basically a square of 2 by two I mean it's it's not that it's basic MTH but you know for those that may don't know about that uh it's basically like that so you can imagine 2 kilometers and 2 kilometers around the Launchpad that's a lot of a lot of L to be honest so yeah that's that's very interesting um so one of the one of the things that I like of this part is the description that it does of those mitigations so it talks about the pat deck Foundation that is one of the things that I talked about that is not just the steel plate it's also what is underneath the steel plate so it talks about the improved depth and robustness of the pad foundation will ensure that the concrete debris and dust seen during the test flight which was principally sand from underneath the earlier pth Foundation that was injected into the air does not reoccur if the pad deck does not fail there will will not be debris or dust which previously resulted from the failure so that Foundation that is a very strong Foundation it is nothing like the one they had that they had before so it should ensure that there no debris kicked up and then the steel plate goes on top and it's like hey I protect further this thing right I protect the the concrete foundation the pad deck foundation and it says the steel plating will prev fracture of the concrete pad deck foundation and is substantially more survival than the phone dag that was basically the earlier sort of concrete layer that they had was a special uh refractive concrete that they had uh on top of the Foundation Systems basically all of the big foundations that they had before but it was not enough so now they have uh reinforced that and so I guess that stattic and the static fire that that that was conducted previously um you know in between the launches after the Deluge system and the and the steel plate were put in that static fire was probably very important not only for understanding whether or not the booster was going to work but also whether or not this these these changes of the ground systems were were impactful yeah that's correct and we actually had some visual indications then that the system seemed to be doing its job but the dust cloud was significantly reduced and it was more just significantly cleaner of a firing than booster 7 static fire and lot of that dust was just the surrounding sand and not something that came out of the foundation so that that's that's encouraging yeah but some of it uh at least right with booster 7 was actual erosion of the concrete where um and this is one of the subtleties that SpaceX mentioned during the first flight is that they were expecting the concrete to erode and what that means is just small bits of it being taken out to become a giant dust cloud what they weren't expecting was for the concrete to actually break and for those giant chunks to be thrown everywhere right and and the erosion of concrete in a flame trench is something to be expected we've see that at Cape canaver all the time there constant maintenance on those concrete areas to to keep them from crumbling apart but no one expected that level that happened on the the first launch attempt so yeah I mean 80 Mega Newtons of of thrust or whatever Starship is is very much thrust for concrete to handle it's ridiculous amount of force yeah that is an understatement and you think about it too it's an escalation because they don't light all 33 at one so you're holding the rocket down you're launching them in segments and that that level of thrust just increases whatever pressure is already it's already under it gets even more as everything lights up before they they let it go so it's uh yeah it's got to be pretty tremendous there so what else we got in that document Alex yeah so just the well before we go into the document I probably should mention the Press plate has been removed from the vehicle so we're going to be awaiting the lift this is I I've also told Kevin the back channels that this is the last document because I've looked through the documents the last uh page of this document in particular that is interesting it goes later into you know the piping plover the birds and things like that that is the thing if you're an environmentalist and everything uh props to you good job definitely uh looking forward to to to reading that but I'm not read that today there's another document that we might uh talk about later uh some people have already uh talked about that on on the chat because I I'm reading it and has things about the hot staging ring and things like that so we'll see but this one uh so basically the last part is how he explains that the water cooling is just as sort of like an an added thing so it says while the primary mitigation for dust and debris is a steel plates SpaceX will implement the water cooling system as an additional measure so it's something that is additional and precisely what it says is that this system has implemented in combination with the steel plates and improved foundation will have a secondary but important benefit of further mitigating dust and heat while enhancing the reusability of the redesigned pad system so this is what I talked about before that you could have a flame trench right but you will still need something to divert the the the flames and once you have something that is directly underneath of the flames you need something to be able to to basically you know cool it down and so it is very important to have a water system to make it be reusable and so you don't need to be refurbishing it every now and then right and perhaps that's this open design that they have might allow them to to have more frequent launches without as much maintenance but we'll find out when they I let this thing off and when when we had the last static fire Trevor that wasn't a very long duration was it it was what couple seconds of every I don't remember the exact dur duration but I want to say it was around four or five seconds I'm hoping someone in the back Channel remembers um the exact and on launch day we're holding down for probably actually probably about that length of time and then they release it right so it's it'll it'll be a similar thing although there's still going to be significantly more impact to the to the launch uh base there and if I'm not mistaken the static fire was not at full thrust yeah so that's another huge difference between them the static fires are conducted at 50% thrust uh which is the absolute minimum um that rapor can fire at and launch uh for the first and second flights it's thought that is closer to about 90% throttle um they're still reducing the throttle a little bit to just increase performance on the or to increase the survivability of the engines they don't want to be you know running them at 100% throttle when they're still having anomalies at 90% um but yeah to your point the way that Starship right now lifts off is actually Slightly bizarre because the launch clamps are released ahead of time and so it's just sitting there and as soon as a Thrust to weight ratio of the stack is greater than one to one the stack lifts off and uh so it's not there's not there's not what we have with shuttle where we have explosive bolts that let go this this actually just goes up on it on its own when it has enough thrust yeah at least for the first flight it was that way and we're expecting it to be the same for the second it's very Poss like obviously long term that's not going to be the case they're going to ramp up the engines to 100% thrust make sure they're all healthy and then release the launch clamps uh however um so be anyway that all said it's expected that time from engine Miss to liftoff is going to be on the order of 4 seconds on this flight which is about half of what it was on the first flight interesting well we'll we'll see what happens hopefully in a couple of days and we're still waiting on confirmation of that launch license which we expect at some point uh very very soon there's not much left to get approved to get the stamp on the license so we just uh we're just going to kind of wait it out so we're waiting out two things and we don't know if they're going to happen while the stream is going but but obviously the first thing is the license um which is big one and also a big one is getting the Starship stacked into its final configuration so that it can launch potentially as early as Friday and we'll see what goes on there um here I got a couple of questions from the chat we can take while we're waiting to see what happens down there at Starbase and by the way we've got live footage that you can see right there um of uh of of ship waiting to be lifted and and we have breaking news the license has dropped so that that's that's one last thing we have to wait for I was actually looking it yeah oh you do okay let's let's hear about it Alex we'll put it up as we can I'm opening it as we go all right and this means now that um we could probably we'll have it up on screen in a second um so now that the license is issued um they can launch potentially on Friday provided they get the the rocket stacked and everything is in place so all of all of the things that we've been waiting on are now done um the license that we've been speculating about when it might be issued is now issued so the government is satisfied that SpaceX has met its obligations for the environment for flight safety and now um the path is clear so that is where it is at and our countdown clock and the name of the show there it is now has much more relevance so we are indeed counting down to launch um and there it is and I can't read that small but uh you can see what uh what is issues there now I I my screen is pretty tiny here so I don't know if one of you can see it better this is only for a single event is that right uh yeah it says one issued November 15 2023 uh rev one effective November 15 of this year so as of now yeah that is basically what it what it is showing it is the second if we can go to the first uh to the first uh page yeah I'm seeing it Kevin let's go first you know first things first if you see the digital uh signature you can see that it was signed today at basically 2:55 and 41 seconds p.m. Eastern uh Standard time so that was about an hour ago more or less so it was signed about an hour ago it is already out and that is the date on that signature the minus 05 is just basically the the uh the Eastern Standard time uh time zone and if I can read the bottom part of the authorization here because this is important as to what they can do uh so they have been authorized for pre-flight ground operations which is using the Starship super heavy vehicle that that that would be a good starting point uh they are able to use that vehicle at the SpaceX Bach chica launch complex in Bach chica Texas now for flights using the flight Starship super heavy vehicle from Bach chica launch complex to the Gulf of Mexico and Pacific Ocean location specified in its applic again this is a they call it an orbital flight test but it's not going to conduct the full orbit it's going to orbit enough to know that they did they could orbit longer if they wanted to but it's going to get ditched in the ocean uh for the orbital flight Test 2 mission only unless this license is modified to remove this term so to the question we had earlier of whether or not this is a Perpetual license it is applying only to flight two although they could remove the term it seems like on item four there provided nothing signif ific changes and Alex back to you for a second because what really was holding this license up was this environmental review and why it needed to be reviewed was because of changes at the pad which have now been changed presumably there's not going to be huge changes to come after this maybe there will be um but it's possible that we may not have as many weights between launches in the future here yeah so um one of the one of the changes that we were looking for this launch license was either that fourth uh line there to be either removed completely or they just modify to show the second test flight uh we we went ahead all the way to the to the last part Pro like we we just went to to the last part like a like a teen trying to get to the last page of the book but but that's how I that's how I read them show the uh but basically this is sort of the the the last part that we were sort of looking for this is the paragraph the line that we wanted them to to change this is the same license for all inance and purposes but uh what it modifies is that instead for of Being for the first flight only now it says for the fir for the orbital flight test two Mission only unless the license is modified to remove this term so um or well I guess uh it could also be modified to just say anything else I guess um but definitely something interesting to to take into account that this license only affects basically only uh pertains the second launch of a Starship We will need another modification of this license for the third flight where it either again it removes that line or it says for the orbital flight test three Mission only so you know that kind of stuff a lot of people sort of think that these licenses are always perlight but generally not and if you look at the ones from Falcon 9 and Falcon heavy and other vehicles they don't have these kind of restrictions it is very likely that these restrictions are probably sort of a measure or or a testament of how this is a test uh flight program where each flight is going to be a little bit different they need a little of different paperwork uh each each one of them but for example for the for the Hops for the uh 10 km and 12 and a half kilm flights that they did they need they had just one single license and the only thing that they needed was an approval for every single flight and so um you can make that similar to you know you have a a pilot's license for example so you in general can can fly right but y it depends for example on the vehicle that you fly on and also you need approval from ATC for every single flight that you take off and so the license sort of covers both the you as the operator of the vehicle and the vehicle flying that you can fly that vehicle and then the ATC part will be sort of that approval per launch approval that you need and so this is a vehicle operator's license that is basically what it covers and so in the future perhaps that term will Disappear Completely and will not have upper launch kind of thing right and I'm sure there there'll probably will be some qualifiers on these for the the short term at least especially as they experiment with full orbits and then uh land or I what are they going to call these things they're not quite Landy they're going to get grabbed um grabbing uh as they come back down so so if you're just joining us what we have on screen here is the launch license the long awaited launch license uh for this second orbital flight test which I'm sure SpaceX hopes does get to orbit this time um so this is now done all the reviews all the paperwork is in everybody's satisfied uh and the next step is actually stacking the rocket for launch which we are awaiting uh we don't know when the stacking is going to take place but certainly SpaceX is now pretty much in a countdown phase at this point Trevor right this is this is it yeah absolutely so if we can go back to the live stream at the site right now we've seen a few more preparations take place actually in the last few minutes uh another one of the cranes has gone down and it looks like there's no longer lift up on the ship which could be a good sign that stack is uh very imminent um so right it definitely seems like SpaceX is a go for a launch attempt on Friday right we have the launch license now so the final step is going to be pulling those FTS pins which may have done been done already we're not 100% sure and then uh stacking this ship 25 on top of booster 9 from that point um SpaceX will begin their internal countdown which uh you know will be releasing weather balloons to get a good idea of what weather is going to be to start preparing the the tank farm and all of that for a launch attempt which is no earlier than as you can see at the top left of our display uh 39 hours and 46 minutes from now um so obviously we're going to go live about eight hours before launch and I think that's probably about when spacex's uh countdown for the day starts as well where they'll start um clearing the pad um you know making sure the road is clear and a few hours later starting the uh spin up of the tank farm for loading of methane and liquid oxygen onto the vehicle so we're very very close right finally so and it was funny because we when we started the show people were wondering when's the countdown like what what we launching today and we've gota wait a little bit but now it looks like all this stuff that was happening behind the scenes and that's one of the things that uh I I think frustrates a lot of us who follow this closely is that a a lot of this was between SpaceX and Fish and Wildlife and between SpaceX and the FAA and now that we have this report it's become a lot more clear to me exactly what the holdup was which was getting again all of this um added feature set if you will to the launch complex approved by the environmental Regulators to make sure that the additions did not harm the the local environment and hopefully now that those changes are made uh this may not be something that will be as um slow of a process in the future because uh I know I don't know if Trevor Alex has any insight but I am sure SpaceX has not stopped building boosters and starships and all those buildings there so how many how many are on the lot right now oh boy um right we have booster it's like the it's like the end it's like the end of quarter for Tesla they've got cars everywhere want to get them out the door right so what do they got yeah so we have booster nine on the Launchpad obviously then booster 10 has underwent quite a bit of testing and probably has engines if not is into engine installation booster 11 has gone through cryo testing and I think booster 12 is has gone through testing I could be wrong about that but it's definitely fully stacked and then I believe is it 13 that is in stacking right now um so it looks like they're probably on the order of uh three boosters that are fully stacked uh for the uh upcoming flights and then ships I believe we have four or five at this point wow so there's quite a few there and I wanted to bring up a a Super Chat that came in earlier I apologize for not getting to it sooner but I think now that you mentioned how many ships there are uh yaser St Felix with a $10 Super Chat thank you very much for your support of the channel I was wondering does SpaceX have a physical model for the interior of Starship because as as many of us know on the chat here Starship is is not only a a rocket that will launch from Earth into orbit it's also a ship that will land astronauts in on the moon for emis 3 and you need an interior to support life this this Starship of course has no interior is there a model for this have we seen anything like this Alex or tror no unfortunately we have not seen anything for this however we know that it's being worked on and uh for hls and whatnot but at the end of the day it's just not a priority right now for SpaceX right you need um you need a vehicle that's able to get to orbit before you can start caring about one that can get to orbit with crew on board so for now SpaceX is just focused on let's get a vehicle that we can get to orbit successfully that we can recover success sucessfully and that we can event um you know in the upcoming flights show that we can do transfers of large amounts of cryogenic liquid oxygen and liquid methane on orbit after that I think is when SpaceX will really start caring about the uh crew design of Starship and what we're waiting on now is is the lifting perhaps of of Starship onto the booster um so if you're just tuning in the launch license the long- awaited launch license from the US uh government has been has been given to SpaceX so they are go for launch and you know we are go for shopping at shop. nasaspaceflight.com the holidays are coming Hanukkah is like in like three weeks and Christmas of course at the end of December or December 25th and you know what there's people in your life maybe you that need some highdefinition embroidery and we've got these great Patches at shop. nasaspaceflight.com to commemorate uh this upcoming launch and these are kind of limited in quantity so you may want to get yours you know before Friday because you know that's when it's launching um so we've got Patches we've got this awesome logo that uh is on other stuff as well so you know water bottles all sorts of merch we got 2024 C calendars with all sorts of great photography from the NSF team uh all over the United States here tracking rockets look at those great pictures you got the Cyber truck I mean who wouldn't want a calendar with a cyber truck on it to a rocket you get that calendar for the next flight of a Starship for the third flight cuz obviously this one is you you have the the clock at top for the next one but for so one after that you can take that calendar and many many flights maybe yeah there you go and it's funny whenever I see that picture of the cybertruck in the rocket engine it's like elon's all of elon's toys getting moved around there um here is our by so we've got some new stuff and the new stuff is the knitwear so you know I when I used to be employed as at a job um I I would have we'd have ugly sweater day in the office oh boy I mean I would totally walk in with that I mean I don't even think it's that we probably should have that on here on NSF like one one day that we oh joined together not to interrupt you Alex SpaceX just tweeted targeting Friday November 17th for Starship second flight test a window opens at 7 a.m. Central Time there you go and I bet that the website has also being updated yep it has been updated I'm checking it out now yeah there you go so so that all the pieces are coming together launch license issued SpaceX has uh has given us their official uh goal for a launch time and and it looks like they're going to try to hit the beginning of the window that would make sense because they have two hours to get get Starship off the ground in that time um they do have some experience with it no I'm I'm I'm reading through it doesn't seem like there's anything very very different it's only just that they added the a two-hour launch window opens at 700 a.m. Central Time so basically the same thing that we were talking about before that you know that clock that you see up top that is coming down to the beginning of the window that 7: a.m. Central Standard Time uh beginning of the of the window 2hour launch window so you could run all the way to 9 a.m. uh uh central time you can see that tweet there you go Y and and net means not no earlier than so it won't be earlier than that time so but but you know what we'll be earlier than that time NSF because we're g to be coming on hours before um and of course NSF has cameras that run 247 because we always want to keep an eye on what's going on over there so um you will be a able to tune in at any point in the middle of the night even depending on where you are it could be in the middle of the morning or the middle of the afternoon depending on where you are in the world of course but um you will be able to tune in and get our coverage long before SpaceX does their own coverage because we have cameras there uh this camera you're looking at here is our camera we've got cameras and people keeping keeping them working down there in Texas and what we're waiting on right now is the lifting of Starship onto the booster and uh this will be the last time we that happen although it looks like we still got a crane doing some work there so that means it's not imminent does it that's that's a that's a lift I think so they're probably working one of the things that they do is once they remove the plate they cover the ports where all the the the fluids are going to come through so they cover that so that it's protected during the lift and once see those things they can remove once the the ship is on top of the booster and they go up the tower they deploy one of these uh sort of platforms that they can pull up to to the vehicle and then they remove those covers because those are simple covers that you know anyone can handle and remove it themselves but the plate is very very heavy that's why they need the the little crane there at the at the bottom of the of the Tower so yeah the crane seems like it has moved away so that's that's a good sign okay that's a good sign we're getting closer to it so we'll keep an eye on things and we don't have an estimate as to when it's going to be lifted up but we do now have an estimate as to when it will lift off which is Friday at 7 a.m. Central Time was was that a pun I guess not close enough um somebody can hit you lift my spirits up there you go that perfect well done well done and I see one interesting question in chat by the way um okay which because SpaceX also has a starlink launch scheduled for Friday and they actually originally had two for Friday and now one of them has been pushed to after Starship just asking if it's likely that both Starship and Starship will launch starlink and Starship will launch on Friday and I think we can pretty safely say absolutely um yeah Spex has the teams to support multiple launches at once and I just think the poor vandenbberg team will not have that much excitement for them that day with Starship a few hours later right that'll get a little more coverage there but that's a sticker that's this I still have there we go y saved perfect yep and uh yeah so if you're just tuning in um the fa license has been issued and we are now awaiting the final stacking of of Starship and um here's a question from uh clag House of G gria let me put it up on screen here um I'm getting everything wrong today because I can't I didn't I need my glasses now I can't see my screen time um is there an app showing Spa uh Starship trajectory well is there there's an app I mean technically it's called YouTube you can watch our video that we did perfect I think it was last week or this week time is blurred right now in my brain but we did a video recently about the timeline and trory because the SpaceX published a whole timeline on their website we also had all of these notices uh you know notice to to Mariners to our missions things like that so we we had all of that that already told us what was the trory it is pretty much like the one for the first flight but we still talked about that on that video so do check that out if you want to know the full detail of not just the trajectory but also the timeline what's like what's going to happen uh on Friday right that's that's a very important thing to to know as well and while we're waiting for the lifting here Trevor if this mission is successful and I think there's some confidence that that a lot of the things that went wrong in the first flight they've they've kind of figured out here uh so let's assume for a minute we're successful um what's mission three like is it going to be the same is it going to be a longer orbit what do you think after this that's a really good question so I think first of all we need to Define what does successful look like on this Mission because um right there's no payload to deploy where you can be like the payloads in its correct orbit therefore it's a mission success or whatever um so as we've said repeatedly on NSF live streams this test is very or this flight is very much about testing the booster and the second stage is just kind of uh on top of that a fancy nose cone uh where if they make it through stage separation and on to Second Stage everything from there on is pretty much a win uh in my opinion and I would suspect SpaceX has the uh same goals so if they make it all the way up through stage separation um through starship's burn and through re-entry then in my opinion it seems very likely that flight 2 could be a little bit of a different um p uh flight profile and I believe it was earlier this week if not late last week we actually saw some FCC permits for a slightly different um launch profile of Starship where I believe it would complete what two orbits around the earth or something like that Alex so it'd be closer to a threeh hour um launch before splash down um so my guess is that would is that's where they would go next is just for a little bit more time in space uh to go over a full orbit yeah I really now please go ahead well uh one of one of the things that I will say is that ironically I have a full spreadsheet of FCC permits at a SpaceX files with the fal Communications Commission that you can see the other agency involved on all of this there's many agencies involved the FCC I think it's sort of the easiest one to get licenses from because they they get licenses every single time but then the fa they're uh gives the confirmation that they have the license authorization for the second launch of the SpaceX Starship super heavy vehicle uh the fa determine SpaceX met all safety environmental policy and financial responsibility requirements so basically they said you're good let's launch let's light this candle so that's pretty much how it is so turning back to the to the FCC I I have this big I I once did a big screenshot like zoom out on that spreadsheet and try to fit it all on my on a screenshot and it didn't it didn't fit and you couldn't read anything on on that there's many many permits that SpaceX has filed with the FCC and the problem is in the last month we have we have had so many things going on that I have had no chance of looking through them but I am aware of that of that FCC permit now that FCC permit though it is so they file differently from a launch vehicle perspective and then from a communication PA's uh uh business point of view the one that you know contains all of that wording about you know splashing down the in the Indian Ocean that is coming from space exploration Holdings so the the company as a whole is space exploration Technologies Corp but the basically the the spin-off sort of thing company where a starlink is under that is uh space exploration Holdings so this is basically star link the company under uh basically starlink is it is saying hey we want these terminals that are located in both the booster and the ship so both vehicles have Starling Conners on board we just want you guys to you know allow us to to be able to use those in Communications so on the one hand you have a SpaceX uh as the launch company with its own uh license and then the starlink sort of uh business also asking hey we want these these antennas to be able to to be permitted during during that flight so it it is not specific to the third launch of a Starship and that is what I want to to let clear here that these sort of licenses the sort of permits that they have since it's two different uh sort of um businesses and Enterprises they are not uh one to one in fact that permit starts sort of around February when we know that SpaceX is targeting the third flight ASAP basically as soon as possible so it could be for flight four it could be for flight five they definitely seem like they might be changing some of the the profile or something like it it didn't look to me that it meant that it is going into orbit and then re-entering or something like that it could also be that they just doing a shorter uh trip around the earth instead of going all the way across they just you know burn maybe for one second less and they splash down in the Indian Ocean instead of the Pacific Ocean but that basically is the tldr of the whole thing that right it is not technically for for flight three because it's a separate thing and it could be for any other flight apart from this one but it does give a window into what they might be thinking about for future missions and and getting those those approvals ahead of time from the FCC for um for the communications on those and and one of the things in my other my other hat that I wear in reviewing consumer Electronics a lot of times you can see what companies are up to based on their F FCC filings because they have to get those in ahead of time so this is a parallel I think to some other Industries for sure um let's go back for a minute Alex to some of the the launch license differences I think um we may have some information on that have you been able to look and see what what's different about this license versus the one they had before yeah so the good thing of this license is that on page two they already tell you what is different so that's a good thing thanks very convenient so so it says there you know it it has the the first revision zero that's the original one issued on April 14th that that's basically it there's no difference because it's the original isss and then it says um they they have added uh basically revision one rev one to every single instance where it says you know this is the the launch license uh number and everything uh the one that I'm interested in is on the fourth there where it says order A1 the four point it says um edit paragraph six additional measures SpaceX must comply with the conditions in the November 15 2023 read and reevaluation of the 2022 programmatic environmental assessment for the SpaceX you know it's it's a whole thing I'm not going to say the entire thing but you can see there uh that is what what is saying is that the re reevaluation that we were uh that we're going to feature but you know they dropped the license we're gonna talk about that later if we if we have time because we also have the the ship 25 lift and everything we have a lot of things going on right that's what happen we were actually talking about that in the back channels that what what we talking next and so yeah uh so what it talks about that once the fishing Wildlife service did its thing then the the fa was able to finish the re evaluation report and again that is just summarizing what the officient Wildlife service said and saying look this is all of the basically a summary of all the things that we that we're uh looking through these are the things that may change for the second flight there's some changes uh uh exposed there on that document as well the bottom line is all of the things that are going on there SpaceX must comply with those conditions as stated on that document so basically this license it is good as you know as SpaceX as as long as SpaceX keeps within those bounce of the original programmatic environmental assessment the one done the reer evaluation done for the first flight and the one done for the second flight as long as those three conditions are are meant then straight ahead we have that second launch um that's well go ahead uh Trevor yeah I just wanted to say real quick lift is coming down from the ship so this could be good indication that the ship will begin lifting momentarily well okay maybe not momentarily but soon like sooner than it than it would otherwise be so there you go yeah I see it I think I can see it backing away there so that's a good shot yep there we go and they've gotta obviously clear that entire area um because you don't want people underneath that safety is important we need someone here playing beep beep beep it's sping away right right and I'm sure it's making that noise we'll have to uh get get get one of those uh football microphone things with with the the dish here yeah we do have and actually when you watch the live streams that we have set up we do have audio on many of those too so you can you can hear all the sounds that go on at Star base and there's a lot of noise there it's it like there's pressure venting and it's a it's a pretty it's like a living organism there of all sorts of things going on um but there we go so we're looking at um this is our NSF cameras down at Bach chica Texas and we have a launch license in hand we have a countdown presumably um at 7 amm central time on Friday and so SpaceX needs to get this uh rocket uh lifted and paired up and a new feature of the rocket which we haven't talked about today is the uh the hot staging ring and there's a lot of uh speculation in the chat about what might happen to that staging ring that's this has not been tested in Flight yet it looks pretty strong it can hold the the whole Starship on top of it um how do you guys feel that that stage ring is going to hold up in Flight Trevor maybe yeah go first Trevor so I think it's probably going to hold up well like right these are forces that you can very easily simulate on the ground right you can just know that the vehicle is going to be accelerating at what approximately 3 G's so 30 meters per second or so you know the mass of the second stage is whatever so therefore the force through the inner stage will be 30 times whatever that um mass is and uh that's right you do that on the ground test with some margin so I think that'll be fine uh the one thing that we haven't talked about yet though was in the fish and wildlife report earlier today we actually learned that at least for now the hot saging ring is going to be Expendable um and it says hold on let me pull this up larger um SpaceX proposes to add an in stage super heavy consisting of a Ford heat shield um it is made of stainless steel and is approximately 30 feet in diameter and 6 feet long weighing approximately 20,000 lb for some missions the forward heat shield would be jettison between 30 and 400 km offshore in the Gulf of Mexico uh SpaceX would not recover the Ford heat shield as as it is expected to sync um so I think that was that's a pretty big change yeah that is a pretty big change and I think that was yeah we're working right now on trying to to get that on screen see you mention it too quickly we wait for for Kevin to show it on screen sorry Kevin and while we're looking that up and while we're looking that up um Alex the hot staging ring has been removed and put back on numerous times what do you think they were doing to it it is very likely so one of the reasons why we think they removed the the the hot stent ring the problem with the hot stent ring though is it covers the top Dome of the vehicle and so that top Dome is basically it it it houses a lot of very important uh parts of the vehicle such as the great F Motors and the avionic system systems and things like that those systems cannot be on on any other place basically other than that place cuz the rest of the vehicle is just tanks and then engines on the engine section you could maybe put something there in the engine section but it will be a bit weird to put there to be honest and I have some additional news here Gage is on the ground over there in Texas and he heard a claxon and said all Personnel to exit the orbital pad and when that warning comes out that typically means the Starship is not lifting off but but is being lifted up so I think our our lift here is emminent imminent um so we'll keep an eye on what's going on there sorry to interrupt you Alex yeah so um I I think I pretty much covered everything with that uh Kevin it I think it's the the earlier uh page I wrote a page on the the back CHS for him uh the previous one there we go that is the interesting part and this is is this is the Environmental review or the reevaluation we're looking at this is the re reevaluation okay and so it talks there about the the so the first part it talks about the background of why this needs to be the case why this needs to be done it talks about the water Del system it says pretty much the same as the as the um basically the report from the efficient Wildlife service it's a summary of it of it uh it's not the entire thing because it's a the whole thing is just a 45 page uh document it's not 55 Pages um but yeah you can see there it also talks about the debris from the uh from the April 2023 launch that is obviously what we uh sort of look at before where it talks about um some of the debris where extended sou uh to of this area approximately 20 acres um but yeah um all right yeah it is not expected to happen during future launch operations because SpaceX has reinforced its launch pad foundations with thicker concrete additional piles and steel plates so that is again a summary of what of the what what the ficient wildlife service was saying this is sort of you know uh a summary of all of that we that we have already gone through before if I see anything else I might uh say hey this is this but we're waiting for that ship to to be lifted so probably we'll have to to refocus there cuz I think we' we've already gone through all the documents to be honest right and it was a lot to go through but it was good I I think it was great to be able to see what we were looking for that's the claxon that's the claxon so that is uh that sound means uh lifting but not launching is happening very soon here so we will keep an eye on things we've got our camera there focused in we'll see it very slowly lift up um and while we're waiting for lift up not liftoff lift up um we did get uh couple more questions about the the hot stageing ring and its performance and we actually here on NSF just I believe today uh released a video all about the hot staging ring so if you are interested in that uh definitely check out our YouTube channel where you can find an entire video and learn all about the newest feature of the Starship stack which is the hot staging ring and I now we're hearing an announcement so that's the I can't really hear it too well through my earpiece here but it sounds like they're telling people to get the heck out of here yeah it normally says something like that and it repeats it and it's yeah now the time it takes now so there was a there was a question in the chat about how many times um this uh Starship has been lifted up um yeah so ship 25 I believe this is it has been this will be the sixth time it is resta seventh seventh time this has been stacked and and restacked more than any other rocket we did talk about this earlier in in the video but or the live stream um but maybe we could we could just bring it back to that point um they've been getting much more Adept at this process because we've seen this now again six other times um the time frame it takes to get this rocket put back together is a lot smaller than it used to be and Trevor wants to pick yeah I was actually um just pulling up one of our uh other commentators in the back Channel earlier today posted all of the uh the dates of the stacks and how long each one took um so the first stack of booster 9 and ship 25 was on September 5th and that stack took about 75 minutes the second stack was on the 27th of September and that took about 80 minutes um then stack three was on the 10th of or the 16th of October and that took 65 minutes uh it looks like he didn't get values for stack four or stack five which happened on October 20th and November 1st respectively and then stack six was the last one which set the record of uh 46 minutes to stack and then it took them also like 47 minutes to daack so as we see even with uh booster nine the uh stack time has decreased almost in half from about 80 minutes to about 45 minutes uh and we don't have data for the ship 4 stack or sorry booster 4 ship 20 stack or the booster 7 ship 24 stack but those were even longer right so they they've been dramatically cutting the time and and that's to be expected right I mean they're understanding these systems better and also um at some point this this this Starship uh stack here wants their desire is to launch it like you would an air an airline where you're flying constantly so the the shorter you can uh close that duration of time to get everything stacked the better um and so we heard the claxons down there at Starbase and we are just waiting for the lifting to commence here and we expect it would be about 45 minutes Trevor from where we are on the ground to the top of the the booster right yeah um of course it could be a little bit longer than that you know maybe last time was just especially smooth they could have to work through some issues but yeah about 45 minutes at this point and I think you want to make sure you get it right this time because there's a this is the one that that counts yeah I mean like you've been saying I don't know we've probably said it too many times but this yeah if everything goes well is the final stack before launch and the next time these vehicles are separate is after either an anomaly occurs or stage Separation on hopefully Friday's flight right and Alex this this stack has been out in the weather now for months um do you think that has any impact on anything know we saw some tiles popping off earlier but well I don't I don't think it's been too too bad to the to the stack in the sense of um withing other vehicles that have been very worse I'm thinking of booster 7 for example it spent a longer time out there it is true though that at the end of the day it's this this stack is still launching I think booster 9 was was completely fully stacked uh around October of last year um and so it's been 13 months of this vehicle being stacked and the ship it's it's actually even L older uh it was on September 2022 so it's 14 months uh in 13 months basically for the ship and the booster to be completed and since then that's when they were created they have been pretty much out there for for a long long time I do not think it's that much of a serious uh issue and it doesn't look like they are that worried about the heat shield tiles though so we'll see right yeah it doesn't really matter too much much on this flight um provided where it's going to end up although I think you want most of them probably working there so um so Trevor we we've been hearing this claxon sounding for a while how long does it typically take them to clear the area I'm sure they must have some means of figuring out that there's nobody around yeah I'm actually not 100% sure how long this normally goes on for yeah um but like we've been uh saying now that the Press plate is removed and they're done with all of the ship on the uh or work on the V especially the ship is where they were working on last it should be very soon so my guess is we'll see lift start within the next 10 minutes or so um right and then we're we were just talking in our back Channel um that one thing that we were speculating on some of our previous streams and our very own Alejandro correctly correctly guessed was that they had pulled FTS pins the other day after uh installation because Alex had said he thought he saw one of these small remove before flight tags in the hands of one of the workers um I saw that I was I was here dening that I was right about that and you showed me on screen um so Alex thought he saw this and we were like okay maybe they pulled the pins we're not 100% sure but since they didn't really do any work on the FTS now we can say confidently that those pins must have been pulled the other day um so now props to Al first of all but now FTS is ready for uh this launch attempt and you know as we've been saying the pad seems to be slowly getting ready with them putting the cranes down the launch license is ready SpaceX is confirmed that they're go for Saturday or Friday at um 7 am. Local so everything is looking good right now yeah because because as you mentioned uh back when they installed the the charges they basically had done the churches first in the morning and then they came back on that afternoon and they were up there and were zooming in on on them working and I I swear that I that I that I thought I saw them basically one of the one of the people had one of the red tags those uh removed before flight tags and the thing is ever since that happened we have not seen them coming back to the flight termination system boxes or at least I haven't seen them to be honest and you know it's also been tough to see anything in the last few days cuz it's been um quite a wild weather out there but I can also assume that perhaps in that weather no one went up on their lifts uh to check on the flight transmission system especially to to pull the pins out of the out of the charges so seeing as they haven't done that since then it's most likely that what I saw as you know someone with one of those tags actually was one of the pins in that the rest of the other pins were were also removed as well so yeah I guess you know I have to keep a look on these things more often yeah right and and that flight termination system is a little more robust than the last one which didn't seem to work all that well yeah precisely um we we sort of thought so this is interesting because the the train of thought that we had originally because have on the on the flight the flight termination system the old one is still there but then they put something else like an extra box like a ring up the the vehicle and we thought that it was extra charges so that they were going to put the the old ones in and then they're going to put more boomy stuff on the on the vehicles and the interesting thing we found out once they install the actual charges is that the old parts are not being used there they haven't installed any charges on the old box so it's just not being used it's just there because it's a leftover from the design but it's not being used now the chart that they have installed though they are larger so they are located a little bit higher on the vehicle and they are larger so perhaps just by locating them in a in a more place that might be might be more Su susceptible to explosions if you if you poke it with that with that explosive then maybe that's what they're hoping for to to achieve with this so yeah pretty much that's explation and I'm sure they're hoping not to use it this time um but rather have it come down on its own but it was uh you know clearly somebody was pushing the button hoping that it would it would go boom and it didn't so um that's that's a that's an interesting thing because actually this one is an automated system so in theory it should activate itself so once push button exactly once the vehicle detects that oops I'm going off of course right it's this is not going well I'm going boom uh whether there's an actual button on the ground that someone pushes it's unknown one thing is is for sure though on the official documents it says autonomous flight or something automated flight termission system something like that or flight safety system the point is it says it is autonomous so whether it has a manual backup or something we don't really know Falcon 9 uh does have a completely autonomous system as far as I'm aware they're there are no manual systems on the ground like there's no person with a big red button uh to push precisely because one of the reasons to have the autonomous system is that you can avoid having a person in the ground pushing the button right exactly and that's something that ESP if you have astronauts on board right and it's also tough because you have to make a decision to to push a button and potentially um end somebody's life and can see having something automated might be better is that a new view it look kind that sounds like a new view right doesn't sound to you like it's new so if you are just tuning in um you are hearing claxons and that's that's not nothing to be worried about just SpaceX letting people know they're going to be lifting a rocket and you should not be standing underneath it um and the reason why they're lifting the rocket is because they now have a launch license so this this rocket is is uh cleared for takeoff or cleared for liftoff uh which will happen um we hope Friday at uh 7 a.m. C central time and you can run your your clock calculator to figure that out but we have a countdown as you can see we are 39 hours and 9 minutes away from the opening of the launch window on Friday for orbital flight Test 2 that SpaceX hopes will um get to a higher higher plane of existence perhaps than they did the last time and I think uh from all the changes that have happened both on the ground and on on the ship itself I think um I'm feeling pretty good about it they're pretty good at at learning from their their prior mishaps um and so I think we'll be in good shape there um we do have a bunch of super chats here and some gifted memberships so I want to thank uh John let me put this thing up here John Deer for five red team memberships thank you very much for gifting those apocalypse cow earlier also gifted five red team memberships we have a $248 super chat from Smurf fet Finch thank you very much for smurfing us up today we appreciate that I watched The Smurfs with my with my little ones recently and like every other word is Smurf out of them like that's their their favorite verb um Mr space repair $499 Super Chat was wondering if the pins had been removed which we did talk about and they we believe they have indeed been removed because they wouldn't be lifting if they were still in and if they are still in then they've got some explaining to do and we also have a bunch of gifted memberships from uh da Swanson here from Tim W and from joris uster Holes so thank you all for your contributions and your support of NSF and we're gearing up for a big coverage event which is the the second orbital flight test and again the uh FAA license has been issued we've been talking about all the things that were required to get to that point and if you rewind later you you can hear Alex's great analysis of the environmental review of the reevaluation uh and now it's all done so they have everything they need to launch this rocket and get this thing off the ground finally after all this time um and you know it's amazing how much work Trevor has happened here over that length of time because you know it looks the same as it did before but it's all different yeah um I mean the dented the dented tanks are the only evidence of the prior launch so yeah it's truly remarkable how quickly SpaceX Works um you know I joke around with some of the others U behind the scenes a lot that SpaceX is really really good at breaking things and even better about fixing them and I think this is a prime example of that where you know they broke a lot on the launch side after that first flight but they learned a lot and uh made improvements the pad and come back even stronger in a ridiculously quickly a ridiculously small amount of time like it's been what seven months um just under seven months since the first launch attempt and since then they have a completely new pad for the most part right they installed the water daage system um in the steel plate with all of the foundation work that Alex was talking earlier and then they have um 63 corrective items done uh on the vehicles the themselves and you know some of those were also on GSC so yeah spasic just worked incredibly hard and it's remarkable that they're back where they are just seven months later for a second flight yeah it looks looks looks like a never happened so it's uh it's a great uh a great a great amount of work that happened both you know for the rocket and on the ground and again I just think it's amazing when when something you don't really appreciate about about the Space Program both public and private until you visit some of these places and you see the extent of the engineering that goes into everything and just about every discipline of of engineering is at play here civil engineering environmental engineering as we learned a lot about today um and of course mechanical engineering and Rocket engineering everything you can think of happens here and as this this program continues you're going to have life support and and all sorts of other things that go into making a successful space program work here but um what we're awaiting right now now that we have an FAA license in hand or at least SpaceX does we don't have a license to fly but they do um and if it was it was up to Alex Alex would be just launching every every 25 minutes with something right like why not just uh button it's just exciting that now we can once again say that starships were meant to fly that's right finally after all this time and like I said I think it was great to have this discussion about um what went into this because you know there you know yes it took a long time yes there's a lot of red tape um but you can also understand some of the environmental concerns legitimate ones about really the centerpiece being the amount of water that was getting dumped into uh the local area there which they were able to rectify and hopefully um now that's been resolved it won't take as long to get to the third flight because they definitely have the Rockets ready so I mean there's that but then there's also the safety aspect that it's remarkable how quickly they work through right as we were talking about just uh a few minutes ago the on the first flight after the afts was activated and those charges detonated it was about 40 seconds until the vehicle broke up so frankly SpaceX is really lucky that in those 40 seconds they were just over the ocean when you know no one was there if that was headed toward land or something like that they could have had a significantly worse situation so I'm really glad the FAA also took their time to make sure the flight termination system for this flight will do its job if they need to activate it absolutely hey we got a super chat here from ej2 499 uh could another country recover the ship from the bottom of the ocean there's probably a lot you could learn if you recover to Starship I'm assuming they're not going to destroy it when it gets close to splash down I don't if you know about that Alex I mean they could but good luck because I think the places where it's going to be splashing down it's it's not shallow it's actually very deep yeah um even the go ahead go ahead no say and you think about the you know that that recent tragedy with the small submarine you know they were able to pull up parts of that just because it was it was small but pulling up Starship from the bottom of the ocean is probably a whole another story yeah probably the location you you will probably have more luck going out there and trying to get uh parts from the first uh stack cuz it it basically I I think the water where you know all the de breeze splash down and everything I think they are no more than maybe at 200 F feet or something like that I mean it's still some some uh distance that you have to to to swim um back down but n it's it's it's not you know thousands of feet uh underneath of the of the ocean so it's at least un Improvement right it's much easier now if you're just if you're just tuning in it looks like we're getting more people popping in now the word's getting out so uh yes you heard correctly the FAA license has been issued and uh we have a countdown clock that is operating because we now have the projected or the desired launch time at SpaceX announced shortly after that license got into their hands so we are looking at Friday uh which is you know Friday like coming up in like two days Friday um Friday at 7 a.m. Central Time so uh tune in early because we're going to be uh we're going to be pulling an all nighter around around here um some of some of us are uh and we'll be covering this in detail so if you want to keep up with everything that's going on and what's fun about following our stream is that these cameras you're looking look that great shot we got there uh these cameras that you see are nsf's cameras so we have cameras all over and you can follow everything that's going on here uh as it happens and the best part about following uh what's going on with us is that we have some real experts on the call so Trevor and Alex have been joining me for the last I don't know how many hours we've been at this now um but we've had a lot going on we started without a license now we've got one so that's a big deal and and now we're about to watch a stacking so um so it's h it's exciting so um we are yeah he jokes he's oh he says expert but no you are an expert I'm convinced I was I was making quotes here you can see me but what I say to people is that experts in quote the expertise here at NSF um the collective expertise I believe is enough that if you all if if if we weren't covering this we and we had the money because that's the big part of it is having the money but I think if we weren't covering this and we had the money I think we could very well build our own space program uh with the knowledge collectively within the group and I don't know I don't know L and I would be the guy that would go up just for entertainment purposes you know you could everyone could just watch me uh you know react in Terror as I as I go up theck that that Alex the expert built so oh boy that would be horrible because I don't know anything about engineering right oh you know enough it'll be fine um so now we're just waiting on the lifting of uh Starship here onto the booster and that is the next Milestone and this is the last time that this will occur now this is this will be now the seventh stacking of this particular combination of booster and Starship so SpaceX even though they've had a lot of regulatory hoops jump through they've been making use of the time to kind of understand how all these things work and I see they also have some um around that concrete there they've got some some steel wrapped around it so I'm guessing that's to prevent concrete from flying around if you can see that on the on the shot there so looks like they're they're prepared and ready to uh avoid uh uh damaging our danger van again um so hey Jim kavitt with a $10 Super Chat a big congratulations maybe all you in the chat can congratulate him seventh Grand baby today Sparrow is her name just in time all right what a great day you get an FAA license and a new granddaughter so I would say the granddaughter is probably much higher on the list than license but congratulations to you and that's awesome so another another space Enthusiast has join the world and that's that's a good thing it's gonna be good for the world for more space enthusiasts to be out there um we got a $5 do Super Chat from uh John lamb or $5 a which I guess is Australian 325 is the same camera car ready for test two oh yeah this is this is danger van um so danger van I have not seen danger van I've heard about danger van perhaps one of you has some more knowledge about its current state um will it be going back for Old Time sake or is it uh not movable uh it will not be going back and I want to emphasize the second part of the question is have we learned to park it further away and it was parked there knowing very well that there is a good chance that it could be damaged and turn not those damage but we have yeah I don't know how much I can say but we have Solutions um we have things yeah we have things that's all I'll say before I get but but yeah uh we we park it there at our own Pearl like we just basically that that you know you probably have seen uh pictures of you know the people around and things like that that was sort of the place where media was located so that was something that we did on a pearl um certainly lots of thanks to SpaceX for for that opportunity as always but that was not something that you know oh they left the the the van park there and oh they didn't know there was a launch we fully knew there was a launch of course we knew yep and uh and that and and the video is pretty I mean the video that you got from that was probably worth the damage looks pretty cool it does show you the power that this thing is going to unleash when it launches so hey let's do some uh speculative questions here here's from one from uh uh gabro play um four Monon red team member Milestone if ship 25 booster 9 don't launch on Friday are there backup days is it going to go Saturday what what's their time frame looking like if things don't work out for Friday um yeah so it a lot of it depends on how far into the countdown they get um if they don't start any fuel load or just get into fuel loading but don't do too much then I think a 24-hour turnaround is somewhat reasonable then the question comes turns into do they want to launch on the weekend and you know they have road closures for this weekend and I think they technically are allowed to but it still seems somewhat unlikely um however what we know that can't launch is uh once it hits the 202 then SpaceX is unable to launch from the 22nd to the 26th if I remember correctly uh because of Thanksgiving um so they probably would have a launch attempt on Monday however I also don't think the weather is looking too good for next week uh that all said if they you know get down to t0 and they lose a decent amount of the uh propellants then it is about three days between launch attempts so they could launch again uh on Monday right and that's that's a big factor here is that they they don't have enough storage for all the fuel they need on site uh yeah have two launches right like you need you're going to lose fuel in the process right so you have to get all that all that fuel back it looks like we might have some lifting going on by the way oh yeah yep so we have a lift small Gap there already yep yep and Gage is saying that lifting has begun so it looks like there is uh some lifting going on so we will keep our cameras trained on the lift here and while we do that we can keep talking as as we await uh this is actually my favorite shot because it's like you could it always goes slow to start right but yeah there it goes yeah and sometimes the uh the Mirage effect kind of makes it look like it's moving when it's not but that's definitely uh that's definitely a lift there awesome yeah so the next time this ship moves will hopefully be under the power of all 33 engines on the first stage that will be exciting we've been waiting a long time and then hopefully under its own six engines right exactly hopefully right right and you know what's funny is is that it feels like this was so long ago that that orbital flight test one happened but it really wasn't all that long ago so um in fact um we are seven months to the day from the last stacking of ship 24 on booster 7 it happened on April 15th 2023 and we are on November 15th 2023 so seven months between both events and the 17 we on the same yeah the 17th was the first launch attempt as welled in April and then that's one got turned into a wet dress rehearsal and then they ended up going on 420 notoriously right SPX of course they did that's right of course they did that was a goal right um and and you know and it's funny by SpaceX standards launching every seven months is is not their usual Cadence so I think that's why it feels like it's been so long plus we've been following this so CL is it me or there's something attached to the ship at the bottom yeah I was that too are they for real cuz this happened also in the last stacking of of 24 are they for real leaving something plugged in or something I don't know like it kind of looks like but I don't know um I remember last time yeah last time they we caught we CAU that um basically in the middle of the of the lift um we saw something basically flapping on the bottom of the of the vehicle and so it was like oo maybe they need to to daack that so they it was almost all the way up and then they stopped and went back down they removed it yeah right keep an eye out looks like it's still going up so whatever it is no no it looks like it it's something that is on on the front Okay well there we go yeah yeah yeah but now this angle yeah now it's cruising awesome hey we've got a I got a a super chat here another another um another new baby is joining the uh NSF family here um great day for babies Smurf fat Finch please do a shout out to my partner finchy we just found out that we're having a baby and he's watching right now awesome congratulations that is great yeah congrat two exciting things in the day and there's there's nothing more fun when you have kids then shopping for NSF merchandise at shop. nasaspaceflight.com you'll find all sorts of great stuff there um while we are lifting here um Juan Lamers has a super chat question um second flight was to be a suborbital flight with a third one being an actual orbit the launch license States orbital flight Test 2 mission could we see this launch actually going for orbit I don't think so Trevor do you I mean I think the whole non orable thing is just a little pedantic and not very enlightening in my opinion because if you really wanted to be pedantic about it you know it is in an orbit it just has a Pary that's below its surface like you know we're in an orbit right now and our par and apy are just you know below uh its orbit um or below the surface however um to the will it actually go into orbit we know that it won't and that's just because SpaceX doesn't want that risk on this flight um they want as soon as the vehicle is uh in orbit or you know at its apogee they don't want to have to conduct a deorbit burn or something like that because that just leaves room for there to be uh error they just want it to automatically come straight back down into the atmosphere and going back to the whole why I think it's somewhat of a boring argument thing is because it is so close to orbital velocity like they could do a puff of an RCS Thruster and probably be pretty darn close door but it's within meters of second that make up um the orbit that they're going into which has its uh apigy or sorry Pary just below um in the Earth's atmosphere and uh it's apog and pery both being above the atmosphere so it's just such a small amount of thrust that it's very obviously nothing no reduced challenge for the vehicle it's just in case something go wrong let's not lose a Starship in orbit and have it come in uh uncontrolled right they want to push their lucky let's get one step at a time as they say and get it figured out and although these these starships are not cheap I think the cost to make one of these um is not as significant as it might be an SLS or something like that so they can afford to uh have a couple of more flights to get this get this worked out and you given what we learned today so for those of you just joining um we got a launch Li well we didn't SpaceX got a launch license and I feel like we got one too we've all been waiting so patiently for it um so SpaceX is cleared to launch on Friday now so all the pieces are done all the paperwork is done and I I think it's kind of uh fitting here that they they waited until that launch license was confirmed to begin the final stacking so this is the seventh and final stacking that you're watching right now of this uh Starship onto this booster and what's going to happen on Friday is that the stack together hopefully uh will lift off the pad and we'll have a first or second orbital flight test and SpaceX of course is hoping that this one will be successful and uh once it launches that'll be the last time we see this one um because it will be uh left in the ocean following its Mission but at some point in the future uh these starships are going to come right back to where they started and that's going to be really fun to watch so this is um for us here at NSF Starship is the gift that keeps on giving so it will uh continually provide us with a lot of uh things to talk about about and to learn and I'm sure SpaceX is going to learn a lot uh as uh this this program continues and what'll happen on Friday is a an orbital test in the sense that the Starship will launch from Texas it will as a Trevor said it'll be just about in a position where it could be in orbit and it will then um basically ditch itself in the water near Hawaii and that will be a successful Mission um according to the parameters although SpaceX learned a lot on the last one and sometimes it's good for things to go wrong early so that you can identify those problems and fix them which is largely what I think you could equate to the first launch and yeah I mean I would going back to like we were talking about earlier I would imagine that internally the expectation is not to reach Splashdown it's probably just you know we want to reach stage separation and ignition of the second stage everything past there is just a win right because that's right that's where things went went arai on the first go around so um actually maybe we could talk about that Alex or Trevor um what did not go right on the first mission I mean no I don't think anyone expected this the first mission to be relatively successful but um there was a lot of failure points maybe we can start at the ground and work our way up and again we we use the word failure in the sense that that these are things that that went wrong that they are learning from and have changed well there were certainly sure go can take that if you want there there were a lot of things that that uh that failed there were also a lot of things that did go right so um for example the the fire the fire system did work but then things like you know multiple engines not uh surviving the the asent portion then also the ones that did survive got a lot of uh debris from the ones that did explode cuz the engine shielding on the booster was not really that good and so definitely lot of improvements in that area not just Raptor reliability but also if one were to go off uh you know go all exploded bits and and Christmas uh you know just because I'm seeing the Christmas uh thing there on the yeah on the corner you know these things that you put on the on on the trees and everything to basically like litter kind of thing yeah so that that was basically the Raptors during the first flight of a Starship right at least some of them and then they affect the the was nearby so we don't want that and that's one of the upgrades that booster 9 has compared to booster 7 we have a whole video about all these upgrades but that is one of the the most serious ones there was also a lot of fires the actual cause of the so there were not only you know Raptors uh failing but the cause of why uh Starship eventually uh veered of course was just because the the connections to the engines were severe uh were severed excuse me uh due to the fires that that occurred during the during the flight on the on the engine section and so uh the way that they are mitigating that they are putting a fire suppression system on the booster it has two big carbon dioxide tanks on the side uh covered by one of by two of the chines and they basically are the fire extinguisher of the vehicle you know how how the the Wally movie uh that's basically booster 9 and future boosters as well where they have their own fire extinguisher and they're basically diffusing that CO2 into the engine base so that all of the all the potential gases methane and gases oxygen exits through some of the vents that are on the bottom of the booster so those are generally the major issues that happened there was also the the flight termission system which we uh talked about before they have new uh larger Chargers and in in a different location speaking of different location this is a camera on a different location yeah I did that that that Segway oh my gosh but yeah uh so they have revamped a lot of systems that failed during the first flight so hopefully those issues do not reoccur there might be other new issues cuz the ship never got to fire its engines and never got to fly right we've seen them flying exactly so we've seen them flying on closer to the ground on the Hop test uh in 2020 in 2021 but uh we've never seen them flying all the way to space and that B Street trajectory so that will be a new thing and hopefully they figure out new things to solve new issues to to fix or they'll figure out that you know they did a really good job and they don't need to fix anything in which case well we'll we'll all be happy either way excitement is guaranteed that is the the that is for here and I'll tell you what it is moving quick um this time um it's not launching of course it's being lifted but um this is uh this you know i' I've done a few of these stacking streams and they don't usually move at this pace so it looks like they're getting more confidence about um how quickly they can get these things stacked and um what you're looking at here is uh Starship getting lifted up onto for the last time onto the booster and when that's done um then all the pre-launch stuff occurs we have a launch license in hand if you rewind um our stream today you can get a a little bit of a education about all that went into the documentation to get to this point where we have a launch license that is uh ready to go so and then Friday as you can see we have a countdown clock as we have some good confidence here that that's the launch time provided uh everything goes to plan so yeah we're almost to the top here Trevor yeah this is really quick and the other thing that I noticed uh in our slightly wider angle shot um is the crane uh the LR 11000 is now completely flat so yet another sign that the Launchpad um is being prepared for flight on Friday and is it and so uh this is the last uh the last lift and it is almost in place so I guess it goes up to the height and then it rotates over yeah it actually overshoots it a little bit and then um goes over and then it'll slowly set it down and then it's the final stage that takes a little bit where they're doing the final alignments and whatnot right and that's that's the it's always the last couple inches that that take the longest but uh you want to make sure you get it right now I remember uh Alex a couple of weeks ago we were watching one of these actually think one of the first stacks of this H booster combo one of the one of the stacks one of the six um and we noticed that the entire stack shuttered a bit once they settled everything down is that a normal procedure or a normal part of this when they yeah I mean sometimes it's a little bit more subtle sometimes it it's a bit more dramatic but overall you know as as long as things go uh in the right way I'd say uh the wobble if it's not too much if it's just a little bit even if it's a if it's basically something that we can perceive well maybe it's not that bad maybe there's some leeway there uh no pun intended there's some leeway there on on how much the the whole stack can can wiggle right and we do uh we we do always intend puns on this channel especially if your name is Sawyer that's right that's right pun toen yeah and um we have a couple more uh super chats we'll take some more questions too as we are waiting uh the stacking here the final stacking of this combination of booster and Starship SFS inverted wants to know can't wait for the launch would it be smart for them to do another static fire on ship 25 again it feels like it's been months since they tested those probably not right now that it's stacked no yeah the the time for such tests are definitely in the past at this point um the next time those engines are ignited will hopefully be during a launch on Friday and you know I see the question a lot and we get it of oh well why doesn't SpaceX want to try to validate the hot staging ring by conducting a static fire uh you know while it's on top of the booster and the answer to that is right SpaceX wants to collect that data in flight for several reasons first of all uh the physics is completely different at sea level versus um at the altitude that it will separate at because of density being significantly lower higher in the altitude um so the way that the plume will expand out of the engines is completely different um Additionally you know you don't want to do that kind of testing next to your gsse and Stage zero that took you years to build and seven months to refurbish uh you know that's testing that you'd rather have fail in the atmosphere when and you're just blowing up Vehicles instead of blowing up vehicles and gsse so exactly so it probably would be a little risky to to it wouldn't be a real true test to do a static fire on top of the stack there right it's not how it's supposed to work so yeah looks like they are kind of pausing here for a moment or two okay now we got something moving there from the right uh looking at here that's a quick disconnect umbilical okay and well the arm in in complete yeah that's the be there right now yeah so this is something that they have been um optimizing over every single stack where they've tried to move that uh quick disconnect uh arm um so it needs to move away so that the Chopsticks are basically um Can can lift but you know once the Chopsticks are past the the height of the of the arm you can see there that that view is is actually a really really good one to to see that now the Chopsticks are way far above the the quick disconnect arm and so we can just basically roll it in all right and we have and I I hear my in my ear a little uh a little elf in the in the workshop has said that we have a surprise so I don't know what the surprise is there hey look at so we got we got uh we got somebody in the field here so this is great so what's going on over there uh oh we lost his audio don't we lost his audio we'll get his audio back here moment he's not just in the field he is the field himself he is the field this is you can see that he live because behind him you can see the the full stack uh approaching yeah what an awesome shot um that is great that is great do we have audio let's see I'm not hearing him yet this was a zoom call I'd say you gotta hit your mute button but um okay there we go now you hear some noise can you hear me they just started a leaf blower it's [Laughter] perfect yeah they're Ling it hopefully uh this is the final final final Final lift fingers crossed we are hoping that as well um I do want to let the U the uh production team know we have a little bit of an echo on you right now let's so we can get that straightened out we've also got a thing to reveal what whoa what is that whoa say hi guys I'm busy he's he's busy he's busy but so what and what is that no joke we got a lot of questions about what the replacement for danger van was well danger trailer actually we haven't named it yet but there you go it's actually it's a safe trailer yes it's a it's a trailer that will keep you safe from danger so we have a new production facility out there so that is that is awesome what's the vibe out there right now what are you feeling what's what people I mean it is absolutely packed out here like the number of cars I don't know if you can see them all going by behind me but it's ridiculous like there it's like a party atmosphere it feels like you're at a music festival but for Rockets everybody is super stoked and you know we got the license we got the fish and wildlife to sign off so ideally Friday 7 a.m. the window opens baby let's do this let's kick the tires light the fires and send it and the camera we're seeing here is from so these images we've been getting have been from the trailer so this is hopefully what we'll see on uh on launch day that is awesome and it is exciting it's you know it's like I think and it and it doesn't feel we were talking earlier it doesn't feel like we were waiting seven months for this it felt longer than that um and I'm sure you've been following this down there all the time what what's what's it been like for you um waiting for this moment here for this final approval I mean I'll be honest with you Lan today has been a scramble to get everything working and uh I've just I've just barely been able to pay attention so every now and then I'll look at my phone and be like oh they approved the thing great I don't I haven't really had time to process yet gotcha and you know one thing I might help our viewers here too I think a lot of us you know just watch I've never seen Starship in person myself um can you comment on on the scale of this because you know it looks big obviously when you compare it to people standing next to it but but how big is it know a simple question but I think it's I I mean it's absurd I think it's really hard to get a sense of scale even when you're photographing it um the best way to do so is Hey look it's almost stacked the best way to do so is generally to try and get a shot with a person in it but even then it's still kind of hard to wrap your head around it but yeah I mean biggest rocket in history what what what more do you want it's huge it's utterly and indescribably huge and when it lifts off even if you're miles away you you feel the ground shaking you feel the bass in your chest it's just it's it's utterly an incomprehensibly massive that's the best way I could do to describe it and hopefully it's going to launch so frequently that everyone will have an opportunity to experience it if they want so uh that is that is awesome and we're just awaiting now the the final stacking here and you know what strikes me about star base is the fact that when you where you are is just on the road right like this is what you see from the Road and when we think about you know the Kennedy Space Center everything is so far away from what the public can access you're in a public access here it's just right there the car is going by on is a public road um and that's part of the reason why we have these views so certainly something to be very thankful for and you know I've said it before and I'll say it again if you have any ability to get out here and see it while it is the way it is now do it because it's not always going to be like this I'm not saying they're going to close the road or anything like that but walls get put up I mean there's a there's literally a wall being built behind me right now I see that um yeah so you know it's a very special place and not only that it's a very special point in time in history this is only going to be the second time they ever do this and there's only one second time I guess I don't know I supposed to be more eloquent but that's what you got well yeah and you know what what we hope is that it'll be the first time that that this rocket will be proven as a means of getting into orbit which is hopefully what they will achieve on Friday when this lifts off I'm assuming you're going to be there yep I'm going to be here about four miles away from the pad um I I've rented many thousands of dollars of equipment I have many thousands of dollars of equipment NSF has a whole bunch hey it's us say word I'm the other way I'm the other way talking you show the trailer yet show them the trailer did you show them the trailer tra trailer I haven't seen it let's see it I want to see this trailer the trailer like this is no deploy I think it was less than 30 minutes yeah I don't know if they can hear me can they hear me can you guys hear everybody can hear me we can hear you you sound great you sound like you're in the next go sorry I was basically like trying to make sure they could use it uh but instead of the van y'all we decided that we needed something that we could rapidly deploy for live streams and so is that view I think that's a different view we actually have the live stream trailer that we've put together together and we didn't just go out and buy one off the shelf and spend everybody's money on it we built it from scratch so it had everything that we wanted but uh they should have access to some of these feeds right now that actually looks like might be one of them yeah yes the from the trailer it worked it worked it's alive itally took us like from the time we parked it it took us less than 30 minutes to get it ready we thought we weren't going to be ready for the lift and the trailer was so good to go we got it leveled we got it deployed it's all stabilized and turned on and we've got two cameras on it right now but it can support a ton more cameras it's got point-to-point radios it's got LTE it's got starlink um what else can it do it's you need to take some what he wants me to hold does itacon I don't even know here y'all can see the rocket in the background that's what we do um yeah anyways I can't hear anything y'all are saying because he just ran away with the H so if you need me to stop talking everybody just go like this keep going keep going we good oh okay I got to keep talking from line uh but we we are out here y'all Jackie is here I'm here Sean is here we've got more people coming in I know Max just landed um we've got the full stack about to happen here we got the license that apparently dropped while we were driving the trailer out um took it easy on Highway 4 cuz Highway 4 is pretty rough but we were pulling the trailer out here when the license dropped and they got that thing starting to stack and we were able to deploy our live stream trailer now this is going to be on the SpaceX designated live stream area for lunch we've just got on the side of the road right now um is that a view from I gota like keep looking I think that's a view from the trailer right now that kind of looks like it yeah yeah and you can see they're almost fully um translated over yeah they they've almost got it lined up this is where sometimes it hovers for a little while right and there goes it just jumped yeah so now we can really see how close it is looks we lost audio yeah yep we lost them there we're good it's the thing of the live streams you know yeah that's what that's the beauty of live of live uh streaming and live TV it's it's always uncertainty going on here but that is our new trailer and there's dos and having spent a week with DOs and Kevin um with all these awesome equipment stuff that they do it's amazing the amount of of in amount of things that get invented for this purpose and this looks like yet another uh amazing piece of gear for the NSF team here this is what happens when you live this is what happens when you let D play with his toys yes exactly but but it always it always works and that's the beauty of it so uh so I'm impressed it's amazing and uh I hope I'm sure it will survive now is that a solar panel on the top or is that a concrete protector solar panel it's a blast Shield solar panel it's a blast shield and a solar Jack I have a question for you was I correct in seeing that you also have two cameras on your face yeah I have I have cameras well I don't right now but I did have cameras on my face yes I could live stream to Instagram in theory he had the smart glasses for those yeah so yeah I don't know this is just I like utterly insane to have out here it's so incredibly capable like we're joking around a little bit but this thing is a beast that's amazing who needs a truck when you have when you have an awesome trailer I think it's going to be great so is this serial number two or something like it how are we calling ITN 2N three yeah can you hear us now thumbs up if you can hear us yes we can hear you um hey massive thanks to Daniel and Andrew weeks in advance Daniel and Andrew came down here multiple times they're two of the folks that do a ton of work with us um but they came down here weeks ago we have pictures of this trailer and it was just a frame it was a old welding trailer and the welder got all his welding equipment off of it and it was literally just a rusty frame with two wheels on it they were kind of inflated and Daniel and Andrew came out here and they turned this trailer into a fantastic platform for me to come and install all the cameras and Telemetry and the uplinks and all that sort of stuff so I I cannot say thank you enough to Daniel and Andrew you've seen them around their star Base Ops they're all over the place um they really made this come together so massive thanks to them for helping us get this out anyways that is awesome it looks spectacular I can't wait to see I've already seen some great imagery out of it and and you just pulled up so I think it's going to be awesome launch day on Friday where we're going to have this trailer fully armed and operational um and we've got starlink LTE we've got everything I mean this this is going to be an awesome event for everyone to tune into and that's why on Friday which is as you can see we have the no no earlier than time which is the opening of the window on Friday um 38 hours from now um tune in because uh we're going to be starting early and you're going to see a lot of views from us that you won't see from SpaceX because they their stream starts much later than hours so we're going to be um very very early and everyone's geared up and ready to go for a Friday launch now that we have it in hand there hey Jack are we and Jack and D Are we almost stacked here or what oh wait there's the star link yeah it was already a Lim of chaos look at that we're now here I guess I'm in the middle now so I have all the power uh right no I'll for those who may just be joining us Adrian got a very uh working very hard behind the scenes for an article overviewing everything that's happened with the fish and wildlife service with the FAA with the launch license and all of the regulatory side of things so is now been published on our newssite npace light.com um so I'll spam the link in chat a few times so if you guys are just getting here kind of want a written overview of what's going on make sure you check out the article Adrian just wrote and we've got some great stuff to read some great stuff to watch and there's and there's a lot of there's a lot of homework you got do for more stuff look out for more stuff because tomorrow I'm GNA be working on this tonight but tomorrow we're gonna have a special edition of this week in space flight so look out for that and I think we're going to come back tomorrow also um we're going to stick around for a little bit longer until we get stacked here um but we're going to be back uh again tomorrow for an update I'm sure there's going to be a lot more news to talk about um we did get a few uh super chats here as we were taking a look at the new trailer and we'll kind of overlay these as we wait for the final connection point there um Josh zero wants to know the launch window for Friday is 7 am correct me if I'm wrong here Trevor 7 AM to is it 10 a central Time 9:00 am. so two hour window 7 am. to 9:00 am central time so very short window but we'll be on for hours before that so tune in because there's going to be a lot of excitement they got to fuel the thing I mean there's gonna be a lot going on so check us out um here at NSF uh let's see um I believe we're going live uh seven hours beforehand if I yeah because there's a lot of things going on before it's not just the launch itself there's the whole process of closing the road evacuating the whole place you know there's there's there's a ton of things that that that we're going to be covering in right from the beginning so definitely tune in to that cuz there's going to be a lot of things to discuss yeah so midnight um central time through well after launch is when we'll be live on W or well after scrub so we'll be here please join us all right here's a question that we I think we covered earlier but Eric wants to know about the van it's not fixed yet so that's why we got a trailer so um but we we'll we'll up people on the B at some point I think it's it's part of the family so uh we definitely want to do that um Patrick West with a $100 tip thank you very much for your contribution and we greatly appreciate it everyone is I can tell you um as as a new guy on the team here everyone has been working exceptionally hard to bring this coverage to you you saw the effort that Dawson and Jack and the team have put into getting that trailer ready those new camera views that we've got um the things that we operate on a regular 247 basis to keep an eye on things at at Star base here and um all of your support is greatly appreciated because we're in this together we're a community and uh every every contribution even just viewing what we do is important to uh keeping this this uh effort going and it's a big effort it's not just video we have the live streams we got the recorded videos we got a lot of great educational content on Starship and of course we've got all the written articles um that you can find at nasaspaceflight.com and um gerah here with a super chat says best danger van window is no window I think that's a good point the concrete can go right through so uh there you go um awesome um here's a we I think we're just about stacked here gentlemen what do you think yeah it looks like it needs to be align still but the Gap is definitely getting smaller and this is when it's going to be a lot slower as they slowly align it and then SL it down and we'll look we'll probably see that that little wobble again when they get everything settled in there but uh it's it's crazy and we were talking a little bit ear earlier about the scale of this and blazemonger is lifting a yeah that Gap is almost gone now yeah maybe on no yeah wow they're getting pretty quick at this I see a drone flying around there too I think we may see a something coming on YouTube not from us but the maybe SpaceX is using that to manage to look at the the Gap here as it's going um but blazemonger says lifting a 15 story building onto a 24 story building no big deal and that's really the scale of this I mean these things are the size of buildings and big buildings and they go in into space I mean you think about the the power that that requires it's crazy it is crazy um so while we're waiting here for confirmation um John H wants to know what is the last possible point that Starship could abort the launch sequence because Trevor you were telling me earlier and we're not stacked yet we're getting close um but uh what is the last possible point that Starship could abort the launch sequence because you were mentioning earlier Trevor that that it's not being held down it's just being held down by its own weight so I'm guessing the last possible point is the point in which the engines are delivering enough thrust to lift off yeah so I should emphasize that that's what was done on the first launch attempt we have every reason to believe that the similar thing is going to be done on this launch attempt um which would mean that the last abort situation is probably around t+ one t plus2 seconds before the liftoff is scheduled um so I believe liftoff is t plus 3 seconds for Starship I'd have to pull up the documents to make sure of that um so yeah my guess would be around T1 T2 somewhere in there and we are 38 hours and 19 minutes to the beginning of the launch window on Friday and what we're waiting on now um is we're actually watching the stacking the final stacking of this uh this combination of booster and Starship and this is the seventh time that the two vehicles have been mated together here um and this was uh probably the fastest one that I've seen so they they've got their all this time is they they've used I think for their ground operations here quite effectively and we'll keep and by the way I see people in chat saying lift off is t plus 2 seconds so yeah t0o T1 then somewhere in there would be my guess somewhere in there is when it lifts off thank you for the slight correction and that's why we've got such a great Community here not only can can the team that that um does these streams can build a rocket I am sure many of our our folks in the chat room can probably build one too um question a lot of the people in our chats do actually build them do actually build Rockets exactly so so when when it's time for Alex to build his rocket maybe we can get a few of them in there to ensure that I make it back um because that that would be important by the way if you're G to put me in one of these things especially when that Alex builds I want to come back um when it flies this is a question from Ryan hamstra who's a 28-month Capcom member uh this might be a good uh fight question uh when it flies how far do each of you think it will get stage separation is the biggest risk in my humble opinion uh I think if the ship lights it will make it to orbit so so Ryan here is predicting it will make it to the orbit that they're or the partial orbit that they're trying to do uh Trevor what do you think are we going to get to orbit here or what or orbiti is um so I'm kind of conflicted because I don't think it's going to make it through the end of stage two burn however I think it's probably going to make get through stage separation and in my opinion once the engines are ignited on stage two the mission is you know all of the hard parts are kind of done and the reason why I say that is just because SpaceX has a lot of data with um firing engines on ships already from the suborbital test flights and then also you know it's a little bit easier to simulate just a long sustained burn on the test stand um so I feel like I don't expect it to go all the way but I also o think it's probably going to make it past stage separation and I definitely don't think it's going to make it through re-entry if it makes it that far so there's your prediction I think that's that's a pretty solid answer there and Alex what do you think are we going to get all the way through here or what I do hope that we get uh at least through hot through hot staging I you know one one of the things that I really really hope is that we get at least a full first stage flight and first stage burn and then we'll see if the hot staging mechanism works or not I'm hopeful that at least if they get to that point maybe the ship Will Survive and maybe it's the booster the one that doesn't but we'll see we'll see what happens um we see what happens I think they have a good chance of completing the first stage flight with all of the you know all the the like the fire suppression system all of those measures that they have put in place the fire suppression system the uh the the improved engine Shields so hopefully we get to that point but we'll see we'll see what happens I think uh stage separation will be an exciting point in the launch that's my prediction one way or the other um Astro canucklehead here says how will each of you measure success and we talked about this earlier um you know really success doesn't mean getting all the way to low orbit or you know that's the goal but they learned a lot on the first mission that's going to make this one more successful right so I mean that that's something I think Trevor is the case here right yeah absolutely I mean at the end of the day right this is just a test flight and the point of a test flight is to G gather data about your system as Jack always says more data more better so of course the further they get into the flight the more data they'll end up collecting however even if it fails at you know t plus 10 seconds or something like that they'll still gather data it may be not the result they're wanting but they'll still learn from it and at the end of the day that's what will measure success is how much were they able to learn from this flight um in terms of flight Milestones I think the internal expectation for data gathered is SpaceX would like to at least get through stage separation um and attempts stage two ignition and that would be the goal here so we are waiting for confirmation the stacking is uh still stacking so we don't have confirmation that we are stacked although it's looking more stacked than it did when we started so we're we're getting closer uh to uh this this rocket being uh this Starship being ready for its uh its debut on Friday and again the launch window opens at 7 a.m. Central Time Friday and as you can see from our helpful countdown clock up there that is 38 minutes and 38 hours and 14 minutes away so it is uh here before you know it and we will be here much earlier than that about seven hours before if not even earlier and of course our 247 cameras are running all the time so you can tune in and see what's going on at starb it's going to be fun to watch those cameras there's a lot going on now this is this is crunch time so um hey we got a couple of two related super chat questions that I think might be good to answer together uh the first one here from Steve is about the clamps for the ship um are they remotely activated to secure it to the booster or do workers have to go up and manually lock it in is it I mean it's is it like one of those St together models it's remote it is completely remote yeah the the whole thing just basically those pains have little clamps or like hooks inside of them and those those hooks are able to to connect they are not on the ship by the way they are on the on the booster side the booster actually has I guess two pair two trios of pin and and hooks because the hot stag ring connects to the ones on the booster and then the hot stage ring itself has those beans as well cuz you know the ship at the end of the day also needs to be connected to them so it needs to have on the bottom it has interfaces that connect to the pins and hooks at the top of the booster and then the top of the hot stage ring has the same connections to be able to connect with uh with ship 25 on top so that is pretty much uh how it works and we have a related question here um from weex about the hot staging mechanism and how it engages the ship and I would I would suspect your answer there is is pretty relevant to this question too right yeah precisely uh we have a whole video talking about this and sort of where the pins are located and the hooks that are inside of them and many other things related to the to the hot stageing definitely check that out but you know it's it's a very simple mechanism because they don't need to to weld anything and frankly if they had to to weld it in place if you think about it we were talking before how they have these systems on the top door of the booster right below that hot stage and ring the hot stage ring has a shield on top so there's no way to access that that uh that forward Dome that top Dome of the booster cuz again the booster is just a big it's actually two big tanks joined together but it's just tankage engines at the bottom and you know so and so where do you put the the rest of the of the things at the top there's a little bit of a space left on that top Dome that's where most most of the systems like aonic uh the the grit fin motors for example are located bunch of other little things as well are there because again there's not a lot of places that you can put these things in fact some of the the you know the composite overwrap pressure vessels that you use for things like engine relite and things like that they have to be put on outside of the vehicle the those uh strikes or chines that we see on the on the sides of of the booster those are there PR precisely to house those tanks as well as the the the fire suppression system tanks the carbon dioxide tanks so definitely it it it's something that you know they cannot fit anywhere so they have to put it outside and in the meantime they also get those aerodynamic features on the vehicle so yeah it is very very interesting that you know it is very easy to to remove got it and we are waiting on confirmation of stacking and we're getting there so we will let you know once things are stacked and this will be we hope the last stacking of this uh combo of uh booster and Starship in preparation for the big launch that is happening on Friday and that countdown clock you've got now this was when we started the show today this was a speculative countdown clock now it is the countdown clock to the opening of the window so we are about 38 minutes and 10 38 hours in 10 minutes away not 38 minutes folks hope we not 38 minutes away yeah no 38 hours from now we will be much so what what we uh what we and it was funny CU we started this we had no launch license and an unstacked rocket now we've got a launch license and a stacked rocket and if you rewind later you can go through and see everything conf from SpaceX that they're tell Friday exactly we got all of the above so one clear indication that we're going to get that this is just done uh with a stacking it's probably going to be a few minutes until anything of this happens so we'll see what what what goes on on but it is basically the just just as I said before they have these sort of covers on the quick disconnect port on the vehicle and so they need to go up there and remove them before they connect the umbilical to the to chip 25 to to the vehicle on top and so uh one of the things that we're going to see over you know maybe minutes or maybe to the next hour we don't really know right uh it kind of depends on what's their if if they're in a hurry or something right but um the next thing will be basically workers going up the tower they're going to go to that quick discon arm and we're going to see them there's there's like an actual Crank that they have to basically uh you know rotate and everything to be able to pull out it's like those uh old cars that you had to to to roll the windows down and everything it's really interesting and so exactly so that re basically uh deploys the sort of uh sort of movable uh stand or something like that allows them to be able to reach that quick disconnect port on the vehicle and so they can remove those those covers on on those ports on those you know where all of those umbilicals connect to once they do that they can go back down the umbilical connects the vehicle and we have full stack ready to go awesome we'll stick around for a little bit longer here as things are progressing so it's uh We've definitely made some progress again since we started earlier today uh Bob Filmore gifted US 10 red team memberships to other members of the chat so thank you very much for that and we got a nice note here from Eric liell I don't know if I if any of you have the answer to this question uh can't wait till Friday can you tell us if the SpaceX goat Lo logo is still on the launch Tower lot is that what I'm reading yes any of you have the answer to that question Trevor I have absolutely no idea what this is referring to oh come on Trevor I'm disappointed we will have to research that so to explain a little bit what that means they had a uh some sort of goat uh logo on the top of the tower it was both at the bottom and also on the quick disconnect umbilical there's like a little goat uh or at least there was at one point I'm not fully sure if it's there or if they removed it I think the one the bottom got removed at one point might have been but the one at the top I don't really remember to be honest um maybe one of our photographers if they are out there and they are listening to us grab a photo and see what happens I don't know they're going to grab it either way because they're gonna be looking at the at the full stack so go for it go for it and speaking of photographers we saw dos and Jack out there a little bit earlier with our new trailer um with multiple cameras and multiple connectivity options on it and we also saw dos with a starlink antenna on his head too so he's uh he's ready to go so we're we're excited for the coverage that we'll be able to uh bring to all of View and we'll try to get some uh more pictures of what we're seeing out there also want to thank Oscar Oscar seagull for a $20 Super Chat here thank you very much for your support of the channel here uh inm hos wants to know is there any place where Starship wouldn't fit many places um I think to some degree this is why Starship is is kind of out in the open like this right there's not a lot of structure around it Beyond a relatively small Tower and the fact that this this rocket is continually worked on at its pad and continually stacked and destacked um as we saw over the last couple of weeks right that's a kind of a unique feature of this yeah and I think you know to answer the question is there any place where Starship wouldn't fit and the answer is like you were saying many and that's the entire reason why Falcon 9 is 3.5 meters in diameter is because then they're able to easily transport it over highways and whatnot uh without needing some of the like super oversized cargo um escorts or whatever so that's why it's built here is because they couldn't you know transport it easily across a road in the United States and I think basically any country and then it would also be incredibly difficult to uh transport something so large over barge so that LEDs SPX to the conclusion that the easiest way is to just have the production site so near the launch site got it yeah and it and it speeds up the process and it's uh they're super as we saw they're getting a lot faster here getting it uh getting it worked on so we have a bunch of new members here who I'm going to acknowledge here in the chat as we roll through here and uh I want to also thank Brian O'Neal Who became a pad R member and then immediately upgraded to launch director so thank you very much for your support there um Amber who's a femon ccom member wants to know what would happen if the second stage doesn't light for some reason and I I guess Alex that was exactly what happened on the last one I guess that's when the launch abort goes boom right yeah so um if the second stage doesn't light for whatever reason there might be two things going on so it could be that the vehicle just doesn't stray from the sort of range of locations that it could be dropping off and so in which in which case maybe the flight transission system doesn't activate cuz it it seems like to me at least this kind of system will only activate if they have um like if they if it actually stays off from things like the not Mars and and the notice tour missions and things like that if it Strays from there from the safety zones then I can understand why blowing it up but if it stays on Cur on curs basically on that on that area it probably makes more sense to just keep it in one piece so that there's not a lot of debris uh raining down because if you think about it you exploded at at altitude and now all of those debris come down and they come they can come down exactly and they could come down outside of the safety zone right so that's something that we probably uh like if you put yourself in in that position it it's probably something that is not uh something that um I don't know that that we that won't will not want and so I think in in the case of it it falls down it doesn't light but it still is during you know within that area it might still go down in one piece unless it is broken by you know aerodynamic forces or something like that which may happen to be honest yeah I think that's actually a really important point that I know I was confused after the first flight test and also when like Firefly had their um on their first flight they had to terminate the vehicle and I think there's generally a lot of confusion around it of what exactly are the parameters that uh afts looks at to terminate the vehicle and it seems that the uh only parameter that it looks at as Alex was saying was is the vehicle in the preallocated corridor if it's in that Corridor it's perfectly fine even if it's having an anomaly however the second that it leaves that Corridor those Chargers need to detonate and uh explode the vehicle so it's not like it's looking at oh engines are underperforming so let's terminate the vehicle it's just is it in this Corridor yes we're good if it's not no we're not good and sometimes even um at one point I I remember them saying that it is it is better in the sense that um relative to a human controlling it from the ground because the computer itself knows whether it needs to correct or not or whe it even can correct it um because if you can imagine a human on the ground the human doesn't really know what the rocket is going to do whether it's going to correct or not what it's doing right uh sometimes Rockets do you know do have the capability to correct their own issue right um and so that is something that is also involved here the computer self knows whether it can correct and if it reaches a point where you know where that correction cannot be executed or something then it knows that it's going to violate that violate that that safety point and then the def flat system activates and that is a very important uh difference with human operated uh systems where it's a bit more up to the operator whether it's going to detonated or not and you might even consider the delay of the person making that choice of whether doing it or not the computer just knows it and just goes boom so that's that's safer in that sense as well a lot of different ways to to uh guarantee excitement it sounds like guys so that's uh that's gonna be fun uh Russell Hanigan 9999 Super Chat thank you very much for your support of the channel we'll put you up on screen there and then I have two questions here gentlemen from uh folks asking a similar question uh one comes from Richie Mason here at what t+ Mark do you think the mission will finish let's say everything is guaranteed to work um and again he reiterates the excitement guaranteed uh and Isaac here wonders what's the gap between hot staging separation and mo which I would assume would also be when the mission successfully concludes if we can get to Moo on on Starship so have at it gentlemen I'll start with that Trevor um so the time between I'm pulling this off right now hot staging and um or ignition of the ship engines and booster M so at t plus 2 minutes and 39 engines is when most of the engines on the first stage shut off and I believe it's all but three right Alex that's what you okay yeah so that's what Elon said it is also it is also true that he said that like um three or four months ago it was pretty shortly after the flight so this PL schol also have have changed by now to be honest right so um and and it also might depend on how many engines are still running at that point is there probably going to be a few a few shutdowns and I'm thinking but it it will be very weird if we have a very clean 33 engine burn all the way to to Mo we we'll see we'll see that's that's part of the excitement yeah so booster ma with most the engines t plus 2 minutes 39 seconds and hot staging is 2 seconds later at t plus 2 minutes 41 seconds um and then it's t plus 2 2 minutes and 53 seconds that the booster boost back burn will begin so it'll be uh very quick uh six uh series of events for the vehicles to be together to separate and then booster to start heading back to land and one last question here from uh Ed El bagal won wants to know would St would a crude Starship have a flight termination system and does acrude dragon and I would say the answer of course is uh yes although dragon I don't think has the uh termination system Falcon does but any rocket needs to have a termination system if it goes off track and part of what they design Dragon the United States they do United States at least right yeah some of other countries not necessarily important um but but in the case of dragon what happens is that Dragon when it when there is an anomaly dragon has an automated abort system that will get that spacecraft away from the rocket so that if that flight termination system goes um it's it's far enough away and one of the one of the fun things to watch and dos had some great video of this uh was that flight termination test where they purposely introduced an anomaly into Falcon 9 which uh had the abort system take over Falcon 9 exploded likely from probably from the aerodynamics but also perhaps with uh the flight termination system and and and everything ended successfully there so yeah I believe NASA and SpaceX said that the flight termination system was not activated on um the inflight abort test that it was purely aerodynamic that caused the vehicle to I'll tell you what though it looked it looked pretty cool it did look very cool speaking of crew Dragon we loveon you love crew Dragon St the question yeah for crude Starship like Lon was saying I think the answer has to be absolutely and at the end of the day you know I know this is a hard conversation to have but if you're headed toward a populated area you know would you rather have some big anomaly where you you are over a highly populated area and could injure you know thousands of people or just the people on board and you know let's just hope that this is never a situation that comes up but you know SpaceX will have to have some anomaly plans for that yep that's an ethical consideration and on that note um let's review where we've come from uh so far today so um so we when we started this show I don't even know what time when we started the show we had no launch license and and a rocket that was not ready to be stacked but we did have an environmental review um we now have a launch license a stacked rocket and a launchtime so um if you were just tuning in all those things happened right while we were on on stream here so um what we'll be looking at is Friday Friday Friday um and actually late depending on where you are late into Thursday night uh we will begin our coverage of the launch of this Starship orbital Test 2 and and uh we will be following it from the very beginning including all the live streams that we do 247 anyhow all the way through uh to the end of the mission at least uh as far as we know where the mission will be um so tune in uh and set your notification Bells we're going to have a lot of coverage leading up to it also um so all of us will be back in one capacity or another to uh keep you posted on all of that and we've got a lot of people to thank tonight because we have a bunch of people um behind the scenes um so I want to thank Uh Kevin who's been operating today and doing a great job uh introducing some cool stuff for us to look at today uh Gage J LSR and Ryan and dos of course and Jack who was out in the field as well uh all these folks are gearing up for a very busy uh week here as we are preparing for the launch on Friday and of course I want to thank Trevor and I want to thank Alex for uh your contributions today I learned a lot I always learn a lot when I come on these streams with you guys so um so thank you for uh a lot about Water Systems yeah and uh you can find their work on our YouTube channel here and also at nasaspaceflight.com so I I think now that we've got a stacked rocket I think we're good to flight in in 37 hours yes so set those notification Bells hit the bell and we'll be back before you know it and on behalf of NSF this is lony and thanks for tuning in we'll see you very soon bye-bye and here we [Music] go we have off propulsion continues to be normal R 68 chamber pressure looks good prob tow [Music] fly he go down nominal down off again off it's orang oh my God oh my [Music] God 343 unfolds to go inde we rise together back to the moon and Beyond if meth be igniting in the flare correct y you de we don't need any more of [Music] these

Channel: NASASpaceflight

Views: 351,525

Keywords: Livestream, spacex starship, elon musk, spacex news, starship spacex, starship launch, spacex launch, boca chica, spacex starship update, elon musk spacex, spacex super heavy, spacex live, starship live, starship rocket, spacex rocket launch, raptor engine, Booster 9, Starship Stacking

Id: DB_FzncBgq0

Length: 209min 45sec (12585 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 15 2023