Starship SN10 Cryogenic Proof Test

[Music] we have looks good [Music] hello everybody what's up tank watchers i'm jack byer hosting this uh beginning of the live stream today you can see in front of you there's starship serial number 10 on pad a and we are expecting a cryogenic proof test today residents have gotten an overpressure notice which you know might indicate some other testing is possible but we don't think those overpressure notices are necessarily uh good indicators of what's going on maybe more of just a cover the bases kind of thing but as you can see like i said starship serial number 10. look at that vent look at it go so you can see some frost there by the aft flaps and you can see it is an active vehicle right now so it looks like they are currently in the stages of conducting a cryogenic proof test so that is why we are live today and that is what we are hoping to see and as always on the stream we've got michael baylor running stuff in the background pulling all the various steampunk levers michael what's up i'm doing well and if something is wrong let me know in chat we totally were in a rush to get ready because this test started up quite quickly but it looks like chat is saying 5x5 and good audio so that is a good start so far excellent yeah i forgot to do the whole dos thing of saying uh can you hear me five by five i mean five by five in chat uh but great i'm good to know that you guys can uh they can hear us and i do believe we are getting another feed spooled up from of course mary who is out there boca chicago is this is this that feed michael yeah that is mary's feed nice yeah you can see it's just a much better quality camera much closer view the flare stack it has some venting coming out of it right now on mary's camera and that's really interesting behavior we've started to see lately from that that flare stack it no longer flares seemingly it just vents and petitioned to change the name to vent stack um but yeah it looks like you know like i said tank farm is active the vehicle is slightly frosty you can even see just barely there's some vapors coming out from the aft from underneath the aft section there so that is indicative of liquid nitrogen having been loaded onto the vehicle as part of this cryogenic proof test yeah and people are asking why don't we think it's a static fire we'll hear the science you can see right now there is no very little venting from the tank farm the methane recondenser is not on and we are seeing frost on starship for static fire normally we would not see frosting and venting like this this early in the countdown sometimes we see a little bit of frost at the bottom during a static fire but they don't put much repellent into tanks or aesthetic fire so right now we're gonna see most likely if this goes like previous cryogenic move tests we should see the tanks get quite frosty because they put a lot more ln2 in for a proof test then propellant and fourier static fire test yeah that makes sense and those periodic vents that we're seeing uh they look a lot like what we like to call uh pressure maintenance venting where sort of you know as the liquid nitrogen in the tank is heating up they want to maintain you know whatever pressure that they are they need for testing and so periodically they will vent a little bit of that that gaseous nitrogen off and sort of keep things in the in the corridor that they're they're wanting it to be in um sort of i mean it in a lot of ways it looks similar to when they do that they test the the test tanks like 7.2 there you can see on the right side of the screen because again it's that's all cryogenic proof tests and here's yeah there's another one of those vents that's not a depressed vent that's not um you know the classic double depressed vent that we always look for when they're doing static fire attempts or flight attempts that looks like there is warm or that there is liquid nitrogen in that liquid oxygen tank and it is warming up and they are periodically releasing some of that pressure but that is a proof test right it's like a giant steel balloon and they are hoping to you know make double triple sure that that steel balloon can hold pressure and this is how you do it with a whole bunch of liquid nitrogen and uh and yeah so if you guys have any questions don't forget you can at nasa space flight in chat and that helps us see your questions with some nifty software that michael put together and i will bring up the host panel right now so yeah if you guys have any questions let us know i see kevin asking is jack finally home in la or still in texas i am in la but we will see for how long i mean we sn10 is ready to go but good question there kevin and uh really quick a couple super chats colin cleveland thanks for the two dollars they ask will there be heat shield tiles on both sides of the flaps i think with 10 and 11 we see some tiles on the leeward side on the back of starship that isn't subjected to re-entry heating which is an interesting placement for that i'm curious as to what's going on there because our understanding is that there won't be heat shield tiles on the the leeward side so good question colin i'm not quite sure how that's all going to play out at this point it looks like they might just be testing attach points yeah i think it's hard to say for sure i mean i think on the space shuttle you had a little bit of wrapping of this thermal protection tiles around the edges of the wing sort of yes plasma probably kind of hits the wings and goes around both sides of it but the flaps are probably going to be folded back more than they are like they're probably folded back in a steeper angle than they are in the space shuttle if i had to guess during re-entry so i'm not sure how much of that would be needed on starship it will be interesting to see how much or how little the back side of the flaps have their own protection tiles but on starship sn10 you can't really see it right now because the aft flaps are folded back but there are actually heat shield tiles on the left most app flap on the side opposite of the re-entry side so that's kind of interesting i'm not i think those are probably just a test to see how well they stay on i'm not sure because they're necessarily indicative of the final placement of thermal protection tiles on the ash flaps but it will definitely be interesting to see where and where not the flaps end up being needed on future starships yeah excuse me the tiles not the flaps and that honestly that makes me immediately think of the space shuttle because you brought it up michael i swear i'm not chris b i'm jack b um but no the space shuttle utilized multiple different thermal protection materials right it wasn't just tiles they also used that reinforced carbon on the leading edge of the wing and they also used thermal blankets on various portions of the vehicle didn't experience quite as much heating as the you know the underside of the vehicle so that makes me immediately wonder if if and what we will see in terms of starship multiple different types of thermal protection system will they only do the tiles will be tiles and perhaps some sort of thermal blankets on the leeward side or or you know what is going to be necessary there because we it is we do know that the stainless steel can can take a lot more heat than say like aluminum that the frame of the space shuttle was made out of but very good question from colin and i just have more questions now um john sweet thank you for the five dollars they say am i calculating this correct starship payload volume is the same as the interior volume of a i don't think it's that much i think the payload volume of starship is like 1100 square feet or cubic feet or something like that last time i remember that being calculated i think 47.50 is way way way way high but thank you for the support there buddy michael pierce thanks for the new membership kd thanks for the 20 pounds and say hello you guys are awesome you're awesome katie for helping us bring this content to people around the world thanks for the 20 pounds it's a lot of money richard thank you for the five dollars praising us thank you for the praise i will bask in it they say nsf what what love what you guys do and always appreciate your commentary and your efforts provide accurate info as possible keep it up yep we will do what we can we don't want to string anybody along we don't want to make stuff up if we don't know something i think there's virtue in saying we don't know you know we're not just going to make stuff up and lie to you moldy space thanks for the two dollars they say merry fan club here here multi space and wow robert hobson robert hobson with a hundred dollar super chat says i'm working and can't think of anything witty to put here apologies don't don't apologize bob hob and thank you that's you are a legendary level supporter am i making am i making up levels now you are a legendary tier supporter uh which i guess is now a thing and i yeah don't be don't ever apologize for not putting something there we'll find a way to waffle and dither about whatever you put no matter what for like five minutes you know us but seriously thank you bob hobb you are a key member of the of our of our members and of our supporters so thank you so much and brandon magruder with a new membership awesome thanks to the new membership buddy let's see i'm going to go through some of your questions here danny that's a good question danny asking think we'll see some reaction control system testing during cryo like we saw for serial number nine that's always a possibility i mean a lot of these tests i think spacex has used the terminology as risk buy down which strikes me in a lot of ways is like corporate speak but in truth you know you do the tests to to make sure that the things that you expect the vehicle to do it will actually do when it comes time and it's actually in flight so testing that rcs system the reaction control system is not something you know we can say definitely won't or definitely will happen it's always a possibility it's always a treat when you get those i mean with star hopper they were doing it i think i caught like four or five separate ones just in the time that i was there for star hopper so they do like their rcs tests and so do i dyu what's asking when jack and kayak oh man kayak i do need to take that to boca one of these next times let's see north carolina cars asking do you think they will make a pad c okay spacex and naming isn't always the most clear thing i would argue that the orbital pad is pad c but it's different than the suborbital pads so maybe it's like pad a1 i don't know i don't think they plan currently to make another suborbital pad i think a and b are sufficient for what they are doing but well we do not you know we don't have any you know too much insight into that other than say faa documents and stuff like that we haven't seen any requests from spacex environmentally or faa or otherwise to put up a pad c but good question yeah and john sweet following up with that first question about the the payload volume 3 800 cubic feet or 1100 meters cubed oh so it was meters is what i was thinking basically the same pressurized volume as the iss which is just madness for a single vehicle in a single launch looking back at the vehicle now you can see the vent stack which is what i'm going to call the flare stack now is going it looks like it's frosty do you see that michael yeah it's it seems to have a lot of liquid nitrogen or at least i don't know if it's liquid form as it's going into the stack it's already a gas by that point but in any event very cold nitrogen flowing through that stack right now yeah indeed my vehicle is venting a little bit is that one of the trivents that's pointed at us right now i don't think so i think that's a smaller event we see above it but i'm not positive okay yeah that makes sense very cool james deuce asking when hop we don't know also you don't need the h in there just w-e-n when hop soon yeah very soon jonathan asking does spacex have to submit public plans or get consent for what they build at boca yeah i do believe that they have to submit uh environmental assessments and they have to tell the faa what they you know any modifications to their plan so i'm not quite sure if there's like a um hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy like the planning's been in the basement for the last four years or whatever you just had to go look at it i don't know if there's anything quite like that but spacex does have to get approval for what they are building rowan asking where is das uh das is working on more robots robot factory is an action scrambling to beat sn10 so that we get more uh improved hardware out there for sn10 saddas is in a race against time looks like sn10 is coming along quite quickly we already saw three raptors be installed so if the cryogenic proof test today looks good because the aesthetic fire later this week followed by launch in the coming days after that so not far away in the best case scenario from a flight test of sn10 so that is why doss is scrambling to get some robot upgrades done in time for sm-10s flight test yep and good thing i mean spacex is not slowing down or resting and neither is das and the robot factory i mean i'm starting to think michael that this is going to be the pace that we're just going to see from here on out i mean just look that sn 10 or sn11 the other day got its nose cone in the high bay uh i we might even be depending on if there's any delays or say that when they do a static fire with 10 they have to do a raptor swap or any kind of minor delay like that to ten's flight i bet we see two starships on the pad again i mean i think chris b tweeted that the other day it's it's crazy the pace that they're going at and uh yeah no slowing down in boca chica so no slowing down with the robots on dasa's part we thank him for it let's see we got amy asking do we know which raptor failed on serial number nine i don't think we know like specifically what serial numbered raptor was the culprit there just one of the two landing raptors let's see do we know which raptor engines have been installed on serial number 10 where did that go where did that go there we go uh i think raptor 50 which is a relatively new one raptor 39 which we saw installed briefly on serial number eight before being removed and presumably repaired and then a third raptor which i don't think we got eyes on the seal number on that third raptor but it does have all three raptors which is quite you know they very quickly installed those three raptors on there so i think is 39 the first rapper to be installed on two different starships i don't feel comfortable saying definitively but that sounds right to me i do feel like maybe one of the raptors that no i think that's the first time that's happened i can't recall that having happened previously and of course there is one raptor that is not marked so it's possible the other raptor on sn10 right now also could have been you know like i think 46 or something was uninstalled on sn9 so perhaps one of those raptors could have been repaired and installed again on sf10 yeah i do wonder if we start seeing starships land if they will start reusing raptors you know whenever whenever they start sticking landings i don't necessarily think that they will reuse an individual starship given that they have so many in production um but i could see them reusing raptors but it's just you know one of those things we're gonna have to wait and see right a lot more activity for the tank farm now yeah the vent stack is really going andrew's inventing behind it too on the you're sorry hopper but yeah by those white those horizontal white tanks you can see there's at least one vent that is pretty vigorous i mean look at that it's you can see it's the column of vapor is rising up almost halfway up that weather station there on top of that black vertical tank to the left of starhopper yeah look at that the view from the uh one of the robot cameras there if you go back to the raptor part briefly you were just mentioning jack you know elon has said in his recent tweet where he had three priorities for starship and one of them was enough raptors for the super heavy booster to launch something into orbit so perhaps they will be trying to conserve as many raptors as possible for the starship test so that they can start building out a fleet of raptors to install on a super heavy booster yeah i mean i'm i'm super curious how that how the first super heavy boosters are going to play out how many raptors will get installed on them um what how many what's the minimum number of raptors necessary to launch a full stack even if the even though even if the starship doesn't come back or you know or just burns up on re-entry just to try and get it kind of get the feel of how it's so many questions on how this test campaign is going to proceed but totally could see them starting to reuse raptors at some point and i do find it interesting that in that list of three items that elon gave none of those items was raptor right like it was other sort of infrastructural type things and and to me that says raptor is not the long pole in all of this it was raptor in terms of production not raptor in terms of technical is what you mean yes yeah so perhaps you know raptor vacuum and i don't know if we're going to see the raptor boost variant i don't know if that's so elon said the outer ring of super heavy raptors would be a special variant of raptors optimized for more thrust instead of they would basically sacrifice gimbal capability in favor of more thrust but i'm not sure if there's you know more the higher thrust bearing the raptor i'm not sure if that's required to reach orbit or if they can just use the current version of raptor to reach orbit i'm also not sure if you know obviously the vacuum optimized version of raptor is optimal for in-orbit maneuvering of the starship vehicle but spacex at one point was planning to first just use the sea level raptors in space we're only the sea level raptors in space and they are going to use the sea level raptors in space to steer even with the current starship plan so i'm not sure if either of the vacuum optimized raptor or the thrust optimized version raptor are actually required for the first orbital flights obviously those versions will be wanted in the future but this may not be the wrong items that elon is most concerned about in order to make orbital flight possible yeah it's interesting that the raptor item was make more raptors basically not necessarily make raptor more reliable or make raptor better in some way it's just they just need to start making more of them which is uh very interesting they do seem to still be having some problems reliably starting up the raptors we obviously saw that with one raptor on sn9's flight but we also saw a pre-launch board with with a starship s and age that was caused by the raptors not starting up properly so really getting that ignition sequence down is going to be critical for them but not one of elon's top three priorities maybe it's in the top five yeah i mean if you think about it it's a full flow stage combustion engine and you have three of them and you're starting them in a staggered startup and even just one you need very very very precise timing to get the turbo pumps spun up and everything spun up just right and then doing that in a staggered way with three separate raptors it's got to be tricky but i still i think you know igniting a raptor versus the raptors reliability itself to me that says you know maybe the raptor itself is fine there's a problem with with those uh sparking ignitors or whatever that they use to to ignite it um and if we're not using triethyl boring the teb that you know that green flash that we always see with falcon 9 we are just using i think space spacex just uses on starship just a simple like sparkler style igniter if i'm not mistaken so perhaps some more work needs to be done there or maybe it's something to do with timing in terms of turbo pump startup or spin up but but yeah i'm i i don't think raptor is uh is necessarily like in a bad way i think raptor is is meeting expectations i mean it's just a matter of getting them started up right right yep and if you look at starship right now we're not really seeing that frost line increase much that's the next thing we're looking to see on our timeline but right now that frost line is holding towards the bottom so keep an eye on that but it seems like the tank form activity is definitely picking up there's not a lot of increase in frost if anything the frost has gone down slightly over the past minute or so so we'll keep an eye on that but here's a question i'll go for it hit me with the questions with what i was going to say as you did that so go ahead jack nice uh here's one that i think i know the answer to but i'm not positive john asking do the turbo pumps require helium to spin start i think yes but i'm not positive do you have any insight into that michael yes we do we see a lot of copvs in the outskirts of starship and a few times you've gotten the photos of it so it seems very possible to me um i'm not entirely sure on that and i think they might try to they might be trying to move away from helium as much as possible in terms of the long-term you know use of the starship vehicle you know you don't want to be having to refill helium on mars but you can avoid it so yeah i'm not sure if that's something they want to do long term or not but we have seen some copvs on the bottom of the starships perhaps that's what those are for yeah and if they're using it now like you said it's not necessarily doesn't mean they're going to use it always but it's it's an iterative design system right they're gonna they're going to get it working with what they can and then they will move on to the harder problems i mean i'm sure autogenous pressurization is a challenge and autogenous pressurization combined with starting up the raptors combined with you know not using another gas like nitrogen or helium or something to spin up i mean it's there's a reason i'm not a rocket scientist it just hurts my head it's a hard hard problem and i'm glad there are a lot of smart people at spacex working on it but good question from john there you can see a little bit of condensation forming on the top left side of the liquid oxygen tank on starship right now which of course they're using liquid nitrogen for today's test most likely because they want to use an inert gas in case something were to go wrong it's just a premium test when we say the liquid oxygen and the methane tanks we mean that liquid nitrogen is being put into what would be the liquid oxygen tank and the methane tank for a static fire or flight test of course for today's test a liquid nitrogen is what we believe is being used in both tanks so the liquid oxygen tank on starship is the lower tank so it goes from about just below that frost ring is where the thrust puck which is kind of the bottom bulkhead of the liquid oxygen tank is and then the liquid oxygen tank stretches up towards the top just about where that upper condensation point is on starship right now and then the methane tank you can kind of see this kind of lighter cutouts on the on the tank section above that that's the methane tank and above that is the payload section and the nose cone so two tanks sort of in the middle of starship are the places we're going to look to see for us form today let's see what else we got here cody young asking can you explain the purpose uh where'd it go oh geez cody young asked can you explain the purpose of the cryotest versus just loading it like they would for static fire or flight well that's kind of what michael was just talking about is if something were to go wrong if this big steel balloon were to pop during this test you don't want to have a whole bunch of liquid oxygen and a whole bunch of methane just wafting around mixing and looking for an ignition source that is not a good situation as we saw with serial number four so the purpose of a cryo test like this is to verify that all systems and all pressure you know holding um parts of the vehicle can in fact hold that pressure and you use an inert gas or liquid like liquid nitrogen so that if something actually does pop there is no big danger of explosion deflagration conflagration whatever you want to call it detonation any of those things not going to happen with just boring old liquid nitrogen so that is the purpose it's just a safer way to pressure test the vehicle at the appropriate temperatures because the liquid methane and liquid oxygen are all similar in temperature to liquid nitrogen they're all cryogenic liquids let's see what else we got some good questions from everybody today yeah lots of people are asking when hop and chat i'm guessing people are still you know joining the stream as we school up here for the previous test and we'll answer it again we're not sure exactly when to launch what happened we still need to see the proof test be successful hopefully that item will be checked off today then you've got the static fire test which we expect we expect them to only need to do a minimum of one static fire test although we thought the same with sn9 and sn9 ended up doing something like six static fires so we'll see what happens with the static fire but in the best case scenario only one static fire so that could happen wednesday thursday or friday given the road closure set up and posted and then once the static fire happens within a couple of days they could fly that's the best case scenario of course the more realistic scenario is that things may go wrong and they may need to do multiple static fire attempts perhaps the faa could come into play again the faa probably won't be too much of a challenge if spacex does a 10 kilometer test play exactly like we did with s9 but if spacex tries to go higher say to 20 or 30 kilometers then that would be an entirely different faa approval process that they would have to go through again of course the faa will also be looking into the sn9 launch and making sure that anomaly has been taken into consideration for s intense fight so i again i don't expect the faa to be too much of a challenge especially if they go to 10 kilometers again but that is one thing to watch as of course is technical readiness that starts your best intent so long story short let's get to a good static fire and then we will try to tell you when the hop will happen but as for now it is pretty much up in the air let's see rough rider show with 4.99 thank you rough riders they say so they can proof test without the thrust simulators now uh also what do you think they will do with seal number 11 if serial number 10 aces its flight maybe a higher flight all right so i is there a difference in terminology michael between a cryo proof and a cryo proof with the thrust rams i have not heard one yeah i can't think of one off the top of my head i haven't seen eagle on tweets something different for each type so yeah so to if you guys don't if you're not familiar there is there have been cryo proof tests where they install a a thrust simulator on the on the mount on the on the sort of sort of orbital mount there underneath starship and it consists of three hydraulic rams that push on the thrust section on the little aft bulkhead there to uh to simulate the force of raptors pushing on it during flight and we have i don't think we saw that for serial number nine and we're not seeing it for seal number ten obviously there's raptors installed on there and you can't have the thrust simulator on there when raptors are in the way so as this is just a cryo proof without needing to to use the thrust simulator um perhaps they only need to do that when they are validating the design of a new bulkhead type or a new thrust puck type and since we already know that those those items in particular worked well for seal number eight and seal number nine uh they don't need to test the specific thrust rams on seal number 10 but they are still doing a cryo proof which is interesting and what do we think they will do with seal number 11 if seal number 10 aces its flight what do you think michael i think higher flight is a reasonable expectation if seal number 10 lands yep i think i think sn11 going higher is definitely possible i'm also interested to see what the plan is for sn10 now the current indications have seemed to indicate it's going to be similar to sn9 but at the same time pardon me wonders you know the terminal velocity of a starship falling is going to be the same no matter how high you go this is going to come in higher and have to slow down more the higher it goes so the actual you know final 20 seconds of flight might not change too much no matter how high you go it's just the other portions of flight are a bit different so i could actually see a justification for launching s10 higher than s9 but i have not seen any indication that spacex is actually going to do that but still still waiting to see what the final flight plan for sn10 is going to be we have seen spacex change plans with flight tests at the last minute before so kind of up in the air what exactly sn10 is going to do but most likely sn10 will do a 10 kilometer test flight as well so then sn11 would presumably go much higher yeah that would make sense and it would streamline things from an faa standpoint if they're just doing the same thing over again and not changing the profile in any way yeah i mean that's probably actually the best justification for doing the same fight again is that if you do the same flight again you know the faa still may have to give a new launch license but all the blast analysis and paperwork for that launch license will be pretty much the same whereas if you go to 50 kilometers or 80 kilometers or however high you want to go for the next test flight that's entirely different paperwork for a lot of key aspects so that kind of restarts the entire process from scratch that makes sense red holly music thanks for the five bucks hellman thank you for the five bucks they say thanks peeps for your excellent coverage here's funds for your production thank you stephanoc thank you for the new membership claire saunders says tq guy thank you guys for the continued i don't think i've ever seen thank you abbreviated as tq thank you guys for the continued coverage i love it when jack's mind is blown and makes me laugh it's pretty easy to blow my mind especially when crazy stuff happens on a regular basis i mean i love the starship program i'm glad you like my exasperated state uh matlin thank you for the five euros so do we know what that ring looking thing that flew away we saw for a frame on the sn9 hop was i don't think so ring looking thing does that ring any bells to you michael you know i think there is something on a scent people saw but i'm not sure was actually indicative of a problem i think one of the things might have actually just been some like vapor or something but i'm not sure exactly what they're referring to if you want to clarify and chat you know was it something on the set but there's something on descent let us know yeah matlin at me or at michael or somebody in chat and i'll see if you can if i understand your clarification there and thank you for the support c a and p railroad thank you for the 50 holy cow they say i missed my favorite live stream crew to chill with haha because it's a cryoproof get it chill uh here to all the live streams i forgot to pay my dues for sn9 thank you so much canp we could not do what we do without the support of people like you and bob hobb everybody that is our a member or a contributor or even just people that like and subscribe so thank you it's it's really fun to do this stuff and cover starship and we we owe it to you all that we are able to do this so thank you leonard brahms thanks for the five dollars they say love your videos guys one question if sn10 and sn11 fail would elon be worried about the flip maneuver thanks go to mars or thanks go mars um i don't i i don't think so but i'm not elon but my gut instinct at this point in the test program is that that landing flip maneuver is just a matter of time before they nail it in the same way that it took them a couple tries to nail falcon 9 first stage landings they'll stick the landing with the starship eventually whether it's sooner or later it's just a matter of time and refining out all of the little bugs that occur while they're trying to do something this complicated and if you think about it a starship landing flip maneuver is significantly more dynamic and i'm just going to say more challenging even though i have no bearing to say that it's more challenging than a falcon 9 landing i mean a falcon 9 first stage is in the same orientation it doesn't need to do any kind of crazy flip it doesn't need to worry about propellant sloshing in the same way doesn't need to worry about the gyroscopic procession of the engines or something affecting the turbines as they rotate from 90 degrees it's just i don't know i'm not a rocket scientist but to me that landing flip maneuver is is basically an a no is not an issue at this point it's just it's going to happen it's just a matter of getting those raptors lit properly uh at the right point in time and space so i don't i don't think he would be worried michael what do you think yeah i don't think the problem has ever been to flip maneuver the problem has been either not pressurizing the methane heterotank properly or getting the raptors to reignite both of which are things that would go wrong if they were trying to land vertically too so i don't think the actual flip has been the problem so far it's been getting those raptors properly firing that has been a problem but i think we also have another person on the call somebody who is as you can tell by their twitter handle is a massive fan of both new york yankees and the new york giants so welcome thomas what in the world did i just get introduced into i mean you got one of those right but nah don't you won't mistake me for a yankees fan but uh how's it going everybody okay i i screwed that up my bad i was did you try this did you mean to say the jet yes for some reason i had in my mind you were jets fan which is even worse uh well i mean the yankees part is insulting enough so you got you have the point of cross that's fired one day i'll introduce chris bergen as a leads fan that's the worst possible thing i could do yeah that's you know risk of being fired from nsf levels today i'm ready to quit i'll try that we've also got chris b notable leads fan and shuttle hater yeah there you go um yeah but you know i'm glad to join the stream because you know i've been waiting so long for something to happen in boca chica it seemed like they'd never do anything down there so finally now that they're doing stuff i'm happy i'm just kidding it's been like what a couple days since i said nine oh man but uh cryo test is what we're expecting today right yep exactly a cryotest not a launch to be clear not a hop not a flight not even a static fire although you never know that's always a possibility but we really don't like static fire today despite the residents haven't gotten that uh over pressure notice it seems like more of a more of a sort of a copy and paste uh sort of situation with that um but yeah so cryo proof test we should see these tanks get fairly frosty if it follows the same sort of flow as for um as for serial number nine's cryo test so looks like we're sort of holding right now and we're sort of expecting a lot more frost to accumulate hopefully rapidly and i mean the distinction of that we did we see the recondenser come online because we believe that would only be if they're fueling methane so if we haven't seen that correct and there is no recondenser activity right now and you can see even the flare stack is now venting gaseous nitrogen and it's all frosty you see it right there in front of those three vertical water tanks right so those are all signs that this is a cryo test not a static fire attempt yeah exactly exactly and and then today's window yeah i think you read my mind i think it's what till 6 pm michael oh okay all right hold on all right hold on i will go to my trustywenhub.com uh yeah today till 6 pm local so yeah in theory they could do a cryo test and then detank every all the nitrogen and stuff and then fuel methane in there and yeah america confirmed six o'clock local too um so yeah in theory i guess they could do a static fire like later today um but obviously we'll have to look for some of the normal visual signs of that yep we're not really expecting it but it's always a possibility things in boca chica as we like to say are fluid and constantly changing so yeah uh thomas liquid i set that one up that's like when i say something is cool during these cryo proof tests right it's like cool but i'm like oh darn it but yeah if you don't mind jumping in here i'm going to step away for a minute and uh deal with some stuff on my end and i will be back in a little bit yeah you got it of course thanks yep you got it thanks jack uh i'll take over some super chats that have come through in the last couple of minutes and some questions and stuff uh daniel with the super 20 super chat thank you so much uh just to cry test yet that's all we're expecting and again like we just kind of covered we didn't see that recondenser come online so it doesn't look like they're fueling methane thus this is probably just a cryogenic proof test um bob brown with the super chat thank you so much uh georgie hello noob here why do we need the flip maneuver why do they do this a very good question uh so basically the general premise is when you're doing a propulsive landing you want to start that landing from as low velocity as possible uh because that way you need to use the less propellant to complete the final landing meter the final any burn uh falcon 9 accomplishes this by kind of sort of side sloping a little bit and increasing its drag ever so slightly although it can only do that so much because it doesn't have the big aerodynamic surfaces that a starship has starship is basically taking that to the extreme since it can come down and land or start landing horizontally it has much more drag in that configuration and thus terminal velocity is way slower therefore when it does that flip maneuver back to the position where the engines are firing in the right direction that is much more efficient because the starship is traveling slower at that point and thus you need less propellant less fuel to complete the final landing maneuver so it's all about fuel efficiency and needing less fuel for the landing burn thomas because before you joined it was a really clear frost line from this camera angle right here and as you can see right now there is no clear frost line on this camera angle if we go back to mary's camera you can still see a little bit of frost but definitely decreasing we do see this happen during proof test quite often where the frost line kind of goes up and down and up and down and then at the end it will finally rise up throughout most of the tank section so we'll keep watching that wouldn't be too concerned about it but just an observation is that frost line has gone down quite a bit yep we'll definitely keep an eye on it but continuing on here a couple new memberships taylor davis thank you so much and joe benefield with the membership thanks for joining on appreciate super chat question here how will terminal velocity on mars affect the maneuver very good question so yeah on earth which is of course where we're seeing all these now uh the atmosphere is much more dense than martian atmosphere and thus your terminal velocity from that sort of what we're calling that skydiving maneuver or the belly flop maneuver is much lower on mars since the atmosphere is not as thick that terminal velocity is way higher thus the flip maneuver and beginning of the landing mode will have to happen much higher in the atmosphere than it does on earth because that terminal velocity will have to be higher and you won't be able to passively slow down as much you'll need that active landing burn to be a little longer than it does on earth so yeah the maneuver will actually look less dramatic on mars just because it'll happen so much higher up it won't be as close to the ground at that point very good question but the same principle does apply it does work the same way it's just i'll can't take quite as much advantage of it let's see got a superchat here from kenneth asking me about something i'm not quite familiar with sounds like an on orbit assembly demonstration that is something that in theory could be supported by starship vehicles but i'm not familiar with that particular demonstration or anything so i'll have to get back to you on that and uh go fly with a super chat thank you so much for your support appreciate it uh and then johan with a super chat love your show thank you so much do you know if the fuel starvation issue from sn8 was actually corrected on s9 was this restart a new problem so yeah that fuel pressure problem on sn8 which likely resulted in fuel starvation um that is we have no reason to believe that wasn't corrected from sn8 in theory s9 didn't actually get that far um although we did see the first engine on s9 startup successfully so it would it didn't there was no apparent pressure problem uh it much looks much more like the sn9 the second raptor engine itself failed uh rather than a problem with the pressure system or anything like that so yeah this looks like it was a separate problem that will be addressed in a different way not a sign of a continuing problem with from the sn8 issue i think we might have another commentator on the line who is a fan of the world famous new york city football club oh my god thank you for saying that michael because i'll get back home for work and all i hear is jack said i'm a legionnaire fan well what happened was i introduced thomas as a yankees fan which of course he's a mets fan oh yeah so i joked if i said you were a leeds fan i would get fired so i did not do that without possibly doing it yeah that's that's not even funny it's just like i'm gonna turn this i'm gonna go and put sulk in the card of the room for the rest of the evening but yeah what an amazing view again it's starship sn10 i'm having trouble remembering which one to say when i'm tweeting because you get into like auto mode where you start tweeting sn8 sn9 sn10 now so yeah it's um it's interesting how fast to turn this one around if they get to the point of doing a static fire this week i mean even if they do it today i still have that in the back of my mind that notice mary got last night warning of determinate team and his 10 minute siren again we all think it's a cryotest today but if mary says siren i think we all go whoa hang on a minute yeah but of course you know are we absolutely sure because i'm just catching up myself are we absolutely sure it's just uh liquid nitrogen right now yeah we haven't seen the recondenser come on so at this point definitely a cryo test but uh yeah obviously they could i mean that we were talking about they also have a long window all the way till 6 pm local time so in theory they could complete a cryo test and then go into a static fire flow um that might be asking for a bit much but it is bokeh chica weirder things have happened so we can wait and see on that that but i think it's more likely that that notice was just kind of a just in case the plans change again or something like that yeah the question i'd ask um everyone who's listening and in chat as well because i don't think we really know the answer to this is how fast can you turn around a starship from a cryotesting with liquid nitrogen into a static fire test with liquid methane liquid auction do they have to really let it detank and depressurize for several hours or i mean can i do it the same day uh i don't think i think so question mark yes you know at like eight in the morning like at the very beginning of a window i'd say maybe but it's already one o'clock in the afternoon that seems too fast yeah and also i think the weather forecast after about wednesday is quite dodgy so there's no rush as far as you know oh let's try and get everything done and try and launch by wednesday because i think that's what bites them in the tail when they rush so yeah i think i think it would be more sensible if they take the approach we think they're taking which is to do the cryoproofing testing today which gets that ticked off that verifies the vehicle can take the pressure then they go into the static fire test campaign knowing that the fact is it's very rare and shouldn't be assumed that one static fire test campaign day will will finish up all that test objectives where they get through the three engine firing the results from the quick look data review they call them is passed as acceptable and they then go to the fa and say okay uh hi faa we're big pals now our way you're gonna let us launch and then hopefully go from there so i think i know elon is quite driven in the way he wants this to be which is a fully reusable rapidly reusable launch vehicle rapidly is the key word there they've got reusability sorted as far as falcon 9 goes they're getting they turn around faster as well with falcon 9. it's always that mythology of trying to increase the pace and i think a lot of us have got especially outside of the community i've got to understand what they're trying to achieve here so that when we've seen these sna and sn9 lose it online then we've got to recognize they've got a lot of achievements in the bag already we kind of ex in fact elon did predict that he actually said in the tweet it could blow up off the pad with sn8 the fact that he got so close to our landing with sn8 has kind of set everyone's bars a little bit high we've got to remember this is only going to be the third ever flight of a full stack starship and to achieve a landing on his legs on landing pad noting that the last two are both failed on the landing pad so they got back over the right area is it's it's what's something i always call calibrating expectations it's something we've got to be careful not to get too carried away with and get too downhearted by the fact they've lost the previous two because the previous two were lost just right the end of their profiles so we're getting closer and closer i like to think of falcon 9 took three attack three actual full of landing attempts before it actually landed so i'm hoping the trend continues for starship and then sn10 is the first one to stick to landing but that is optimistic of course i wrote an article last night about the changes elon wants to implement which will mitigate against what's happened with sn8 and s9 first of all lesson nine mitigated what happened with sn8 which was the uh uh the methane header tank failure the pressurization failure where it it didn't help the london boat at all came down too fast and obvious that's why it crashed with sn9 it was one light one of the raptors not re-lighting and he's looking at the approach of using all three engines to re-light them all three if all three lights he'll deselect the one with the least lever arm which is going to be the one which we in the article in fact i'll link the article because there's a wonderful little diagram from brendan which elon then replied with by saying yes in other words brandon got it right and i will put the article into chat right now there we go and you'll see uh about a quarter of the way down the article i got the card away to 1500 words a quarter of the way down the article you'll see what we mean by the the engine would least live around if all three engines light up he'll deselect that one or stash it will not heal on himself he's not pressing the buttons starship will deselect that engine and they'll under the two good engines if the other two engines one of them has a failure they'll utilize that third engine there and then they've got the two engines for the flip that will achieve the flip and i do believe they'll still stick with one one engine for landing i do believe uh but that is the way of mitigating that and of course with all these starship vehicles and the production site at the launch site they can do this they can they can lose a couple of vehicles and be ready to go again as we're seeing right now that's the crazy thing about this bokeh cheeker situation is that they have so many starships if one fails they've got another one down the road ready to go or even next door on a pad as the case was where they're saying nine and ten so it's an incredible cadence that's allowing them these mistakes i say very carefully to understand the vehicle and get it right it'll pay off in the long run and in short order as well i know elon said that oh we were foolish not to you know be doing that from the beginning but of course hindsight's 20 20 you know it's kind of hard to yeah that wasn't something that a lot of us were talking about ahead of time of like a big risk item so i think that was just elon in twitter mud i don't think it was foolish i think it was a lesson learned and there's nothing foolish about lessons being learned especially with test vehicles and no crew on board you know and the payloads on board you know yeah you're not risking much of anything on these tests exactly yeah so uh let's see here we got some more questions and stuff that we can go through if that works for y'all it does because it's also talking for 10 minutes about certain things no questions you already like the article they'll read the article there we go uh let's see here uh georgie with a super check question do they need to start the laning maneuver earlier um i don't think that's the issue um but though we were just talking about the mitigation is for at least for the assign issue is starting all three raptor engines that way if one of them fails you can complete the maneuver using the other two versus only starting two engines and risking that one of them doesn't work you can't on a moment's notice light up the third engine as a backup a raptor takes you know takes a couple seconds to start up most rocket engines um so yeah that wouldn't be able to react fast enough but if you start all three and they're all working perfectly then it's much easier to shut down the extra one versus waiting to starting up two hoping that they both work and if they don't then starting up a backup engine um it works better the other way so that sounds like the mini creation they're doing yeah there's a quick entry to that the other issue is that if all three engines do light up they've got more thrust than they actually designed a car they can't lower the throttle range down enough to have three engines run at the same time so you'll have to deselect the one engine the one with the least level ramp really really really fast so if we watch sn10 landing flip and achieve with three engines you're gonna see one of those engines literally flame out straight away because they'll have too much thrust that's the amazing thing about this exactly um oh jeez i look up michael's done here's five bucks to tell thomas that the yanks are better than the mets i will how hard disagree with you but i begrudgingly have to acknowledge your super chat thank you for your support and i'll take your money even though you're wrong hey super j here from paulus thank you so much uh go fly with a new membership thanks for joining on uh and here's a question about from jay asking about the sn9 investigation first of all great job guys thank you only you can make a cryotest sound exciting appreciate it we try our best um any news about the faa investigation chris any word on that front of course the fa has to investigate sn9s anomaly just like they would any other uh what do we know about that yeah you know there's a lot of confusion of this faa situation a lot of mixed messages a lot of wording being used to kind of like you know kind of like dilute how it's being done i think the the big take home is the faa has got a job to do and they do it and as much as they may internally be thinking you know we understand what this test program there's no one around it's all right it's safe no one's gonna die um they have to take it seriously we shouldn't be taking it seriously at the same time base x knows what it's doing it's not like they're not like a brand new company who have just basically set up a range in boca chica and said oh fair enough we're going to launch some rockets uh by the way face what we're going to do they've got experience with them with falcon 9 and falcon heavy so i don't i get really iffy about house you know bad this faa situation is i think it's a lot of it's paperwork a lot of it is um posturing on the faa side and i think spacex is just far too experienced from to be making the mistakes that the faa came to institute should we say they've never said it they're just intimate it and a lot of the media reports are picking up on what source they're saying you gotta be so careful resources that you know that even if the source is genuine and is telling what they believe is true they may have misheard certain things and then it gets mistranslated and then it becomes into a food fight in the media so i just basic let's see what happens with sn10 if sn10 gets a launch date and there's no elon tweets about the faa holding things up we know everything has been resolved as far as sn9's situation i'm sure they've investigated it they've got to do it that's their job but it doesn't mean it's gonna be held up for weeks and weeks on end while they keep looking over videos of the explosion and and you know whatever the over pressure was like when it exploded but we've seen videos on twitter and stuff and people and on the um i don't know where it is the amphitheater area across from the water and it's not it's i've seen far bigger shock waves come over than that that was nothing in comparison so i don't think that's a concern uh yeah i'll get too long with little winded about this one again as well so i'll be careful by saying you know let's just wait and see what sn 10's approval process is like can i just really quickly jump in to say spicy thomas fan club what does that mean that means you were very spicy about the the super chat with the the teams the sports balls oh i don't know well yeah because i just had to tweet the reports that i'm a yankees fan are categorically false because now it's showing up on my twitter too i'm all about spicy thomas all right bye one thing we'll add a discussion is that an investigation for an anomaly whether it's a test flight or not is standard faa practice the f8 does not have a choice if there is an anomaly the fa has to investigate so the fact that efa put out a statement saying that the sn9 anomaly is being investigated does not mean anything if the test flight ends in an explosion you can guarantee no matter what faa statement or not as we see starship event for a second there that there is going to be an faa investigation so the fba investigation is not mean you know spacex is never going to be allowed to test flight again it just means that the fa wants to understand what happened so i don't think that's a big deal i wouldn't read too much into it and i don't expect the s9 anomaly investigation to be something that holds up sn10 for an extended period of time i think especially ooh that might be a depressed but or it could be a sign that they're about to load it's probably actually that they might be about to load because do not see much fuss yet but maybe in any case uh as i was saying i think i think the bigger question for sn10 in terms of faa approval will be the test flight itself if sn10 is going to go to 10 kilometers that's the same as sn9 so the faa approval will be similar if sn10 is going to go to 50 kilometers or somewhere else that'll be an entirely different approval process because that changes all the glass analysis and whatnot so i would look into more of is sn10 going to do the same test flight in terms of faa approval not is sn9s anomaly going to be a problem because i don't expect s9 anomaly to be a problem personally i mean neither and i mean especially if it is limited to a raptor issue which i think we're all hoping it is um hopefully that's simpler to resolve and get approved for another test flight yeah quite clearly s9 stayed well within its safety corridor right yeah there's no issue like that had sn9 come down on tokuchika beach or somewhere where it was not supposed to then you could be expecting a much longer faa anomaly investigation but the fact that there is no evidence of any safety issues with it seems to indicate that the fa will probably not have too much of a problem with what happened let's see i'm gonna bring on some more questions and super chats and things like that uh bill schindler with a new membership thank you so much uh here's a question with a question do you think elon will send a test rocket to mars before humans i would say that almost certainly i'm pretty sure he has confirmed this yes uh yeah starship the first time starship lanes on mars there will not be people on board um there'll likely be some cargo on board because it takes a lot of time and energy to get a mission to mars so it'd be a little like it would be the greatest if you could send it with nothing on board even though it will be a test flight um but it'll be some cargo that will be okay if they lose um there's some mass transfer windows coming up and he's going to utilize that i expect he wants whether he'll achieve it or not i don't know but he wants to um send a fleet of cargo vehicles tomorrow at least you know have some staging of hardware there ready in preparation for humans to then utilize it make start making the initial part of the base which will be a propellant farm and things like that so yeah definitely i wonder yeah that's a good question how many uncrewed landings before occurred landing that could be a good question lots lots and lots i mean you know this if he if he's going to try and do what he's envisioning it's going to take a lot of up mass and that's the whole thing he's getting around with the circling around the the frequency you can launch the amount of vehicles you can launch and the amount of up mass with the refilling remember it's not just the yacht-mask it's the refilling the capability of starship and he he wants to do that rapidly and he wants to utilize the windows for transit time so i would expect a fleet how many we don't know all right well we're going to be interrupted quite rudely so because mary just reported in our back channel that vehicles are returning to the pad so what we just saw there was a depressed vent sometimes we see sometimes we see venting like this doing a cryogenic proof test it means they are loading propellant or loading liquid nitrogen rapidly but in this case it appears that vehicles are returning to the pad which means they are depressing and i don't know for sure it's always hard to say you know previously with cryogenic proof tests we have seen more repellent in starship or more liquid nitrogen in starship but we did not really see much frost at all so i'm not sure if this was aborted early or if they're just doing a different type of test this time but clearly you can see on your screen right now of vehicles have begun the process of returning to the pad so i'm not sure if this is a failed proof test or not but we definitely did not see a lot of frost so it's either a different proof test where they pressurized it without putting much ln2 in the tanks or they aborted it early we'll have to wait and see definitely it was way shorter than other cryotests that we've seen on starship vehicles so i definitely suspect of a potential abort here um but so what signs were are we going to be looking for i guess if the road is reopened that would mean they're actually done testing for the day so i guess we're going to look for that yes and another important point is that we did not see any frosting on the methane tank so unclear if that is a major problem or not but it if i had to guess i would obviously say this was an aborted test however i just want to be careful because sometimes things change to starship so i'm not going to rule out the possibility that it went as planned but i mean obviously the most likely indication in this case is that they aborted yeah still venting a bit too let's put out a tweet and see if he'll reply yeah i should do the elon thing i should know i'll uh keep bringing up some questions and stuff charlie you have more news by the way one second so it looks like uh i'm just reading and making sure i have everything correct yes i do uh thursday friday and saturday if i have my days the week correct and i think i do now have temporary flight restrictions for starship sn10 launch so [Music] the answer is no earlier than thursday however given that we just saw a likely aborted cryogenic proof test and we have not seen a static fire i personally would not put too much weight into it but technically speaking sn tense hop is net no earlier than is what net stands for so i net thursday at the earliest again grain of salt a mountain of salt i think but i don't know i mean they do want to smooth out starship operations we'll see but uh i think we're gonna have to focus on this cryo test first and whether it actually passed or if they just aborted it um i mean if they did abort obviously they have lots of time to redo it today even so it's always a good sign when the flight tfr has come out just as the cryogenic proof test appears to have been aborted although again we don't know for sure but it does not seem like that was a successful proof test which means they will have to do it again um all right i'm gonna bring on some more questions and things here while we wait to see what's going on with today's testing uh super chat here from scott if there was ever a starship that could both land on the moon and return to earth with no propellant refill could the header tanks be refilled from the main oh i see what you mean um so if you're not going to do on-over refueling but you use the header tank propellant for a landing and then you want to land somewhere else can the header tanks be refilled i would guess yes i'm pretty sure that the fueling connections on so they fuel starship currently through the bottom of the vehicle through like the thrust skirt there's piping connections down there and that should be just kind of one connection so clearly propellant well i guess i can't assume that because it could be just split between the main tanks and the header tanks there um if i had to guess a starship should be able to handle multiple landings without a refueling in between so therefore there should be some plumbing to allow maintain to uh to header tank propellant transfer i guess we don't know an official answer on that but i would i would be surprised if they couldn't i'll just put it that way uh question here why don't they try to land starship in the water first like they did with falcon 9 is unlikely is it unlikely it would survive it would flow pretty well um so while they don't really have water-based landing facilities to attempt yet they're working on those oil converting those oil rigs for some starship operations but they're not ready yet and the drone ships are reserved for operational falcon 9 falcon heavy missions you're not going to risk really risky landings on those vehicles and potentially destroy them when they're needed to support operational missions so they don't really have a lot of options to keep a starship dry should they land successfully out over the water um so their only way their option then is do you do a soft water landing but then admit that you even if it splashes down the water you're likely not going to be able to re-fly it or get a lot of inspections out of it um because it's going to get soaked in ocean water immediately or do you try to land it on land and they went with the land option just because even landing it on the landing pad we've seen they've had two crash landings neither of them have put any damage on the surrounding infrastructure concrete pad is relatively easy to be repaired so uh i think the smarter decision is the one they went with with it which is attempting landing on a landing pad that's you know removed enough from the rest of the ground infrastructure that it's not actually that bigger risk and i agree with that i was going to mention that the first falcon 9 landings which were war landings were very much to test to reuse to test the landing technique of falcon 9. they've got that sus and you can prove that by seeing how close sn8 and sn9 got to the landing pad in fact over the landing pads they have got the approach started and that was the main thing for the water landings of falcon 9 and now it's just that landing bird so yeah and i am we're working on figuring out what the status of the approved test is right now if the roadblock goes down that would be an indication that they're done for today but mary is saying that the road the roadblock has stayed up so most likely they just aborted a test and are looking to make another attempt given that the road is still closed but we'll keep you all up to date as of now we're going to move our timeline back to the road closed status as it appears they may be recycling this test completely um yeah well stay tuned for more information or signs that anything might be different but i think most likely is definitely a recycle as teams are currently at the pad working some sort of issue likely i got a question here from phobia asking how is raptor development going with starships we got sm15 with improvements is it the same with raptors or is every new raptor better uh chris what do you what is your take on the status of raptor i mean we saw sn9 appear to have its in-flight failure due to a raptor issue so clearly still working out some issues in that program um yeah i i i think the raptors are now set in kind of design but they will be tweaked as you go along just naturally these engines are but we've we've seen this there's some evidence of what the raptor performance is like in in elon and spacex's eyes by the fact that sn 39 is going with sn10 and that's one of the earlier iterations it was literally going to fly with sn8 but it was pulled they've repaired whatever was wrong with it or if there was something wrong with it i don't know it was put back into sn10 now so it's not like they've gone with all the sm50 range with sn10 as if sm50 onwards were like a new version of rap so whether it improves something so that gives me confidence in how raptors performing on a test stand and how they're confident with the engine itself i think the issue is the reignition just for that part of the because number three or three out of the four engines have now re-lighted on that flip so it's not like a fluid dynamics issue it's not like a rapture issue it's probably just an igniter somewhere it's just one of them things are learning about and getting right and understanding in the environment it's in with the flip that this is what they need from the igniter during the flip maneuver to get the before the flipping maneuver to get the relight because it's coming down in the belly flop during that relight which is different to being on a test stand or a horizontal vertical test under mcgregor it's a whole different kettle of fish they've got to learn from this and as far as the future raptors go we've seen from gary blair's flyover pictures they're well into the sm50s now and they're looking to build what looks like a new test down for raptor to really speed up the amount of raptors it can push through mcgregor during testing ready in preparation for the amount of engines they'll need for future starships and especially super heavy when super having these 28 engines they're gonna need to be piling through those raptors and mcgregor at a rate of like you know several a day almost they will need that capability but as far as the design goes i think they're happy with it you know bar in future tweaks we are saying cars leave the pad again so perhaps we may be about to see another attempt and that was a quick fix whatever the problem was i will let our car our car counters and our membership discord tell me if those are all the cars we saw go to the pad return but it looks like that final car has the flashing lights which means it should be the padded clear vehicle so i think we should be good for another attempt at the proof test uh makes you wonder what they actually do when when the cows go to the pot do they take a hammer down there just like there's some tang which has not got a valve stuck somewhere let's go whack and then back and then just leave yeah well percussive maintenance never hurt anybody yeah got got a new membership here from neil's thank you so much for joining on let's see here oh here's a good question from david saying when it flies a real mission do you think the fuel tanks could be smaller because it doesn't need launch fuel saying that it's going to launch on super heavy more space for passengers or free keep in mind i believe the tanks that we're seeing on sn9 sn8 snn are the real size propellant tanks and the reason for that is these vehicles are of course only doing low altitude flights so they don't need a lot of fuel in fact they'd only partially fuel the fuel partially fill the fuel tank excuse me but on operational missions yes you'll be taking advantage of the super heavy booster which will get you a fair bit of the way towards space however you still need propellant to finish orbital insertion um and then depending on where the mission goes you need more propellant to get there so if you're going to a higher orbit if you're going to the moon or mars all of those require propellant um and then of course it needs to land somewhere at some point and then potentially fly back depending on what kind of mission profile you're looking at um so no the fuel tanks that you're seeing on these vehicles are the real size fuel tanks um but keep in mind that those fuel tanks only go about halfway up the vehicle that you're seeing the top half of the vehicle or so is actually an empty nose cone that's where all the payload would go whether that's passengers or cargo um so there's plenty of space for that and plenty of space for all the fuel that starship needs let's see here gonna keep going with some more questions and super chats and things here um here's a good one from cork quinn asking has it been turned on that the raptor that did not ignite properly was or wasn't the raptor they did not replace after the three static fires do we know which engine failed chris no we don't know i think somebody could speculate which engine number it was and then we could probably look back to the installation but the way the installation works it's very hard to work out which one's which and in flight so i wouldn't like to speculate which one it was and if there was any relation to that swap out so yeah i'd be careful to try and trace back its history and trying in a point point shame shame shame engine but you know again is it the engine the igniter is part of the engine yeah sure but it's a minor thing it's not like the engine at itself and you know and basically threw out chunks of itself we did see some liberation of debris and whatever but we don't know if that was from the engine itself it's very hard and very well i should say it's very easy to speculate you know what the issue was but we've not had any official comment from elon just that we were dumb thing you know so that's the only thing he said about the actual failure issue itself with that engine but from spacex's own words on their very rare updates on their website they did actually say did not relight so that's a big key thing there that's definitely got to be igniter related as far as i'm concerned right um but yeah so unfortunately cannot speculate as to why we could speculate but it would be useless as far as which actual engine it was maybe some people who can go back to the footage might have a guess but we do not know if we had that so that has not been determined to answer your question uh super giant here from jamie is it possible for a stripped down super heavy booster to reach orbit what's with the fascination of single stage to orbit of starship vehicles it's not gonna happen i'm sorry chat just i promise you it's just not going to happen ever is it possible i have no idea i don't think i care i care because i'm a big fan of the x33 venture style which was a wonderful sstr which um undeserved was it though because it didn't fly so no i know it was way before it's time it was just before it's time i asked tony tori bruner who worked on it could it be done with today's manufacturing technology he said yes so it was just before its time i don't even think it was before its time i think it was of its time it just didn't get a good enough chance from congress and funding they solved the issue with that main composite tank that was a solved problem um before the the the program was canceled and it got canceled anyways so i'm a huge x33 fan but sorry for the ssto stuff thomas oh i just muted myself but no it's fine it's just i mean if you look look at the starship architecture as it is now the two it's two stages that are both fully reusable that accomplishes the same thing that you're trying to accomplish with ssto it's relatively simple and yeah it's two stages instead of one but it's still fully reusable so i just it's not that bit like it wouldn't be a huge improvement to the architecture if it was somehow an ssto system that wouldn't get you that much better performance or outcomes of the program so it's there's like no reason to be upset that it's not an ssdo i guess is my point um to answer your question it might be but it doesn't really matter let's see here uh matlan if i don't know if i'm saying that correctly but i tried uh could we see robots building a kind of prepared infrastructure before the first humans arrive assuming this is talking about mars uh and almost certainly yes there will be lots of uncured missions with the various pieces of cargo and you will need some sort of robotic interface to sort of begin deploying those kind of things um don't know what that might look like but i think it is safe to say or it would be a good guess that there would be some sort of robotic system that can deploy certain systems and uh start preparing fuel production infrastructure and habitat infrastructure and things like that prior to the first group missions can i just add that i heard that if it's ever confirmed or if it was even true that during the nemo tests with nasa where they simulated the asteroid missions which are no longer in the case they looked in what's called telerobotics which is where they control robots with the time delay vera relay from a state from a albertine spacecraft around mars and they did it on the mars missions rather than just the asteroid missions during its nemo test and the world war basics was taking a great interest in howard teller robotics the delay and controlling robots on the surface would work so maybe that was there's some pre-planning of utilizing the cargo that was landing on mars their starships initial cargo missions via telerobotics with robots on the surface so that that was an interesting little thing which peaked back into my memory there we did see bowie starship venting a little bit a couple seconds ago uh could be i think that's just a sign that they're starting loading right michael perhaps they're maybe just venting out some pressure from the previous test but we'll keep an eye on the tank form we'll keep an eye on the base of starship for any vapors and we'll keep an eye on starship's events itself and hopefully it will not be long until we see the next attempt uh continuing on we got a question here from paul asking about mars launch windows how many are there a year so a mars transfer window the time when a spacecraft can efficiently transfer from earth's orbit to mars is every 26 months so just almost not quite every two years however that's not the same thing as a launch window you could launch several spacecraft in one transfer window um in fact the transfer node usually lasts a couple weeks it depends on the exact vehicle and how efficient it is and how much how much of an inefficient trajectory it can make um sometimes it could last a month or so but so in that time you can launch as many vehicles as you want and they can all transfer to mars in that same window so there's not really there's technically not a limit as to how many you can send in a year um just as long as it's during a transfer window but in between transfer windows is about every 26 months or so and we literally saw that with all these spacecraft that will launch the same time now arriving at the same time at mars yeah exactly i've been coming very convert very very soon i think the next article is in work yes starting tomorrow the alamo probe from the united arab emirates arrives and then the next day the chinese tn1 spacecraft and then on february 18th uh perseverance will make its landing attempt so yeah and they all kind of launched within the same week or week or so of one another and then they're all arriving at the same time in that same order because that's how physics works uh yes so let's see here has anyone there's a question from kevin has anyone talked about how much payload starship could return to earth from a future space industry i tony when crispy is on stream well there you go chris um how much payload could it return i believe its return payload is the same as its up mass payload so about a hundred tons ish i don't know if that's accurate though it might not be because you the landing thruster weight ratio might need to be higher so maybe it's less granted hundred tons is a lot so that might not be necessary i don't i love the idea of down mass by the way thomas i love the idea dalmas i think that's one of the the crowning achievements of what spacex has done with its um with its crew drive with its cargo dragon sorry whereas sickness is a return to a destructive the orbit burn where it is literally destroyed as its end of mission cargo dragon brought it back down splashdown allowed for the time-sensitive experiments to be offloaded straight away at port los angeles as he initially was and then the rest was brought back to mcgregor and taken back down mass is critical it was lost after shuttle they haven't got anything close to down master shuttle yet but they will with starship so it's getting very interesting to me of what stage can do not just launching but returning how will the dow mass capability of dream chaser compare because obviously it's a much smaller vehicle but there's no crew on board so is the cargo complement comparable it's not massive it's it's lit it's a very small pressurized area which is what to be utilizing for what we're talking about for isis down mass of of interest so it won't be a lot with nothing close to shuttle obviously it's gonna be useful though and it's even better if you think about it because if you return to a runway you can literally offload it straight away within an hour sir so you know after saving compared to recovering the vehicle like a cargo dragon from the water and putting it onto onto the ship and then taking off the the time-sensitive um experiments so the crs-2 cargo dream chase is going to be a real changer as far as fast turnaround of the critical iss down mass amount of down mass is gonna be less but it's that critical experiments in the glaciers the fruit refrigerators need to get off straight away that'll be really useful with cargo dream chaser continuing on here got some a super chat here from phillips saying funding for the jack will be able to go to boca i know jack is saying to himself the launch date's no earlier than the launch dates no earlier then doesn't want to get stuck in boca again but appreciate the support got a super chat here asking first in orbit refueling when so when could we see a potential in order refueling test chris do you think that might be a goal of the first orbital starship launch or is it going to be some flight after that my gut feeling when you read the question out was that's going to be one of the last things going to try and achieve because it's so hard it is critical to them though they have to do it they have to make it work it's it's literally part of the architecture i i really think we can easily get carried away we're talking about mars bases and what have you first of all they're going to achieve this landing then they're going to achieve orbital they're going to check out the tps they're going to check out everything works on that they're going to check out the controllability of these different regimes returning from 10 kilometers or 12.5 kilometers is a lot different as anyone's going to say captain obvious here and returning from orbit the re-entry is going to be key how it performs during re-entry then after they've done several orbital missions and i assume with like star links maybe as the first utilization of those orbital missions because it's their payload say is it lost it's it's not grey but it's not you know a big thing for a customer they'll get as many star link launches done as possible to shake out the system and then they'll try the refilling technology which is going to be you know i'm sure they've got it in simulations everything like that they've done everything they can on paper and on computer but in reality maybe next year and i say next year i was kind of like oh we've got to wait a bit longer that's incredible to think that they could get that class if they go for it next year if they go orbital this year and do enough launches to to be confident in the system and then do refilling next year that's huge that'd be amazing so that's what i'm thinking i think that's the last step really in their initial test program it's interesting because since it's so critical to the success of the system overall i feel like they'll want to start testing it even as soon as they can because i mean the sooner you can make any changes to make sure that system works the faster you get to an actual operational vehicle that i can conduct the missions it was designed to do and plus but i think those early orbital missions maybe not the first one but once they're like putting starlinks on board you could deploy starlinks and then keep the spacecraft on orbit and conduct it on over refueling tests you could do both on the same flight so i wonder if we'll see something like that i would think within the first 10 flights or so one of them at least one of them will attempt an ardor refueling demonstration maybe even like the first five um because because like you said it's so critical to get that right so can i just say how crazy that would be though because oh i'm not saying it wouldn't be crazy but oh no no crazy in a good way yeah the fact that they forget we look back on mary's first videos and pictures of what wakachika was it was a tent it was a tent and a and literally hopper as a water tower because it's just like this mold this concrete mold that you're making up with that was a few years ago that was literally a few years ago i i i always preface this by saying i'm not against sls as a vehicle i think it's less than the vehicle is great but that isn't going to launch until about february march next year at this rate now i know they're going to try and do everything they can to launch this year but right now everybody want to involved leslie says february on march is the current no earlier date you know date and i think if the chance spacex could be orbital and even trying to refill by then that would be crazy because sls is a more powerful rocket as as far as pure power goes but it loses it when it doesn't do refilling the refilling is what gives starship the extra boost of the capability and oh you know we should we're sent to shelby i don't do politics by the way we serve to shelby stepping down it's gonna get really interesting next year if starship is proving her worth while sls is doing her first launch and then standing down for a few years before the next launch which is what the case will be that two-year gap between artemis one and artemis ii two years been what it is right now it might be longer you know is where starship could really you know shoulder barge away into this and you know hopefully i want to see both vehicles launching i really do i think there's a real nice road map possibility there where starship does cargo and sls does just crew i know they're thinking about that but if sls doesn't really book about you know her act and prove her worth as far as a vehicle that can keep some kind of schedule then starship is going to be stood there like a big silver marker saying look at me and with no senator shelby to to arguing in a congress and senate or wherever he is and say oh so this is alabama and i like alabama then you know i think there's a real chance that starship could be the heavy super heavy lift launch vehicle of choice for the united states it will definitely be interesting and that honor revealing is probably like you said that big thing and they have a partnership with nasa to work on demonstrating that so it's going to happen at some point and when it does that'll definitely be sort of a turning point as far as we'll start to be successful or not um so hopefully we'll start to see them attempt that sooner rather than later michael should be interrupting me by now because it's actually went venting we can see venting now so there's yeah oh michael you're very kind not to say chris shut up well keep an eye i think the big thing we'll be looking for is for our frost line to start appearing because then we know they're actually loading things but no no vapors in the outskirt right now once you see vapors in the outskirts that would be an indication that some cold stuff is being put into starship but i will actually check the oh yeah there are look at that oh yeah there you go right on cube we'll move up to ln2 loading elements liquid nitrogen if you are not familiar with that but uh they're using an inert an inert liquid which is nitrogen in this case rather than the normal liquid oxygen and methane propellants in order to reduce the risk for the a cryogenic proof test because nitrogen is inert so something goes wrong it is not as big of a deal as if you were to have a potential for a fireball with that oxidizer and a fuel so spacex just going with an inert nest and inert and what's in methane and inert nitrogen uh liquid for today's test and also it should be pointing out that doesn't necessarily mean like a massive overpressure event where the thing pops and you know nitrogen goes everywhere it could also simply be a very small leak which is the purpose of these proof tests is to make sure there's no leaks if there's a very small leak if you're leaking methane or pure oxygen that can be a fire risk if you're leaking nitrogen nothing happens you you end the test you go back to the pad you fix the leak and then you do it again um so it's also not just a matter of oh if it explodes it will do less damage because it's not a fireball it's just a pop it's actually probably more likely to be oh if a leak is there it's much easier to fix it because there's no risk of that leaking substance to start a fire and do things like that so but yeah liquid nitrogen loading based on the vapors at the bottom of the vehicle so they're back into another cryoproof attempt here you have a lot of super chats yes thomas yep i'm getting right back into that right now uh in fact the very first question i'm going to ask someone someone named thomas is asking have you noticed that the tps tiles the thermal protection system tiles on the aft flap are on the wrong side the wayward side i believe i think well there's the wind facing side and the leeward side i think is the other side um i actually haven't seen photos of tiles on the actual flap are there and if they are are they on like the side we weren't expecting them to be yes so there are piles on the wrong side of the out flap the leftmost f-flap as we see frost forming again so that's a good sign oh yep or at least condensation but i have a feeling that's about to be frost uh but yes there are tiles on the other side so we're not sure if that's just for testing the adhesive to make sure those tiles are properly staying on starships flaps or if perhaps you will see some of the like on shuttle how you have that thermal protection system kind of wrap around the outsides of the fla of the wing wings you might see that on starships flaps but these tiles are more towards the center so if i had to guess they are probably probably just testing the adhesive i don't i'm not sure that's an indication of the final position but that is definitely brass forming on sn10 right now yeah just speaking about cps for a second because it's one of my favorite things the evolution of tps testing on staff is is interesting because that's another test objective that we don't talk about too much especially during you know yeah as far as elon disease and doesn't speak too much about it it's it's something where we've seen extra extra patches being put on s11's patch of tps is it's quite huge i again i mentioned the article i wrote as um using one of mary's photographs because mary gets great photographs every single time i mean i could do his articles basically it's 1500 words but i use about 10 images because there's just so many brilliant visuals i'll put it into the into chat again there we can see a real large patch of tps and again as michael said the testing adhesive obviously not getting any closer to kind of re-entry temperatures because it's not getting that high but they're testing how it performs in the aerodynamic regime because you don't want your tiles falling off any shuttle fan will know that it's it's something that i think they're getting close to having a technique where they could have a fully tps windward side of a starship by you know sn 18 maybe something like that especially for orbital attempts so we know they're getting closer to normal pretend when they do that so that's something to keep an eye on they're definitely evolving how much tps they put on these vehicles yeah i think the sn18 is a decent sort of estimate for an orbital vehicle and of course by then they'll need the full heat shield yeah it's possible that they actually want to test that beforehand though so like some suborbital or high atmospheric flight could have a full heat shield complement but yeah we'll have to wait and see um something to keep an eye on each prototype does have more tiles on them so they're clearly progressing there um okay let's see here uh christopher with the super chat is it possible to rotate vertical earlier in the landing maneuver and then switch to the main propellant tanks for landing i'm guessing the mains have more fuel than the headers at that point um i don't know if that's something i mean the fact that they have dedicated those header tanks for the landing propellant um i think indicates that they have enough fuel in those tanks to complete the landing burn um and again i don't think that would address the issues they're having the first issue was a pressurization issue which they appear to have fixed and the second issue on sn9 was an actual raptor engine issue it looks like so nothing to do with the fuel levels or anything like that um so i'm not sure that's a solution to any problem they're actually facing and if i can interrupt you again thomas i'm sorry about this every time we've got a new article on site i'm going to just link the tweet which you can all tweet out as well yourselves it's um from chris g it's a an article about maven so we are talking about topic because it's about mars so it's related so i will put that into chat and it's actually connects to this next question it says greetings from scotland thank you so much uh are there any plans to use air mining in the sabbateer reaction to source propellant in situ at the boko chica launch facility so talking about insight to resource utilization which is a big part of mars exploration basically producing fuel and other commodities via resources on mars is it possible they could do that at boca chica i do not know if they are doing that at boca chica i don't know if we've heard any rumors of that they will but they will have to do that on on mars at some point and elon has said that since they're already developing the technology anyway um eventually starship launches from earth will also become carbon neutral in that sense they will be capturing carbon from the air and using that to produce their propellants their liquid methane so it's possible that that happens at boku chica eventually yes in fact i would guess that it would happen i just don't think uh we have any firm plans for that in the very very near term yet because i think they're still working on that development um interestingly that does connect to the article we were just talking about because as the mars fleet arrives uh in the next couple days and week um the perseverance rover actually carries a moxie demonstrator which is the process of creating uh oxygen and i don't know if it creates water as well i gotta remember but it is a sort of insight to research utilization demonstration on mars on the perseverance rover which is landing on the 18th so interestingly there are already some demonstrations of that coming up on mars and yeah that technology should eventually also be used here on earth um a question here asking what are the dimensions of sn10 so it's the same dimensions as sna and sn9 same exact size um what is the i know the diameter is nine meters what's the height of just the starship portion is it 50 meters yep about 50. okay so 50 meters tall 9 meters diameter i don't know if there are like more detailed specifications about like how tall the nose cone specifically is and stuff like that um that might exist elsewhere on the internet as well but generally speaking nine meter diameter let's see here uh i got a superchat here saying thank you for the coverage and helping to inspire my four-year-old son with the really big rockets thankful for all of you helping us witness history thank you so much thank you so much for the kind words and you're glad glad your son is being inspired as well uh super chat hear from matt thank you so much uh jamie i seen won't they need the super heavy booster for return flights from the mars service uh no so starship can single stage to orbit and in fact return all the way to earth from the martian surface that's because mars gravity is much lower and the atmosphere is much thinner so much less atmospheric drag the super heavy booster will only be needed to lift off from earth's surface all other interplanetary destinations for the starship vehicle will not need a booster and uh michael is this video feed frozen i think that feed you just switched yeah so we'll work on that but luckily the robot army will have us covered uh let's see more questions here uh chris with a super chat what would you speculate the cost that spacex has tied up in each vehicle like sn8 9 and 10 raptors alone are at least a million each or mm i don't know if that means a million or something else do we have any speculation as to the cost of each of these vehicles chris no we don't but we do know that there's a lot of money being invested in boca chica itself the actual facilities we just don't know how that pans out as far as the vehicle cost i think what we can say is the vehicle cost is coming down all the time because they might have putting out they've got the manufacturing hardware there now they've just got the steel coming in so they're literally buying steel and putting it through the process and i think there's just a question now of um seeing how many they can do in succession so they bring the price point down before they start selling the vehicle for operational vehicles uh operational missions for paying customers especially this time with payloads i do think it's infinitely cheap and everything else in its scale that goes without saying so i think whatever the price comes out as internally to spacex per vehicle it will be extremely economically viable thank you and then uh some more questions here how many starships do you think they will have to send to mars before they have sufficient refuel infrastructure to start to send them back i in theory i would think you could fit all the equipment you need for propellant transfer in a single starship if especially if that was the only payload on board the vehicle so in theory if the first starship that successfully lands on mars is carrying the propellant production infrastructure and is able to deploy it successfully that very starship could be refueled and be able to fly back to earth of course we don't really know exactly what that system will look like from spacex so we might have to wait and see for a little bit but it very well could be that a single starship mission can carry the entire infrastructure for refueling at least for that one starship um so i don't know if we're gonna have to send a whole fleet to kind of build this massive infrastructure or if they can at least start with a smaller bit of equipment that can support it immediately and we do see the frost rising now on the liquid oxygen tank and frost forming on the upper methane tank yes i think maybe we can finally move up to the frost increasing status for the first time today i don't it's always hard to know for sure with the proof test but i think you're definitely right it does seem like we're getting farther than we have before and well yeah we'll expect to see those things pretty much completely frost over uh once they're into uh frost holding or once they're actually at the height of the cryotest got a supercharged here from austin sarcastically asking when is this rocket gonna fly just kidding love you guys appreciate it um although we can actually report that flight restrictions indicate in theory they could launch as early as thursday seems very optimistic but we'll have to wait and see but thank you for the support uh cork with a new membership thanks for joining on appreciate it and uh boone saying is that space flight having a mars landing stream and thanks for all the hard work on these streams uh if you're talking about the perseverance stream i don't know i don't know if we'll have any sort of like clean video feeds to share for that if we do fair chance we have a stream but you have to stay tuned what we know for sure is that nasa tv will have coverage so regardless there will be a live stream um whether it's from us or otherwise uh alexander with super chat is the steal from sna9 recycled for future starships um we know i don't know have we seen any starship repurposed from the old vehicles no descriptors it's literally yeah we start with the nurse come for sn8 they the guy with the digger who spent about three hours trying to flatten it enough to get him back in the truck the truck was a contractor a recycling contractor where it wasn't for starship it was just re recycling for whatever uh company does that say it's not they're not reused gotcha uh and then the question here from bryant how do you think they will handle super heavy tests do you think they will be like grasshopper powered up and down or powered and free fall test will they wait until they land a starship so i think the first booster test i mean we from what elon has said he mentioned 150 meter hop tests right so we're looking at things similar to star hopper sn5 and sn6 so the raptor instances don't you know there's no in-flight relight for suit for the supreme boost or anything like that on those initial tests and so of a straight up straight down with a small translation over to the landing pad kind of test i think that's what we're expecting at first not sure if they'll do anything beyond that afterwards as far as like higher altitude flights or in like in-flight relights of the raptors or if they'll then kind of conduct those tests as part of orbital launch attempts which is kind of how they did it on falcon 9. the falcon 9 would conduct a regular mission and then once stage separation occurs then the first stage kind of becomes a test flight and attempts a landing they can do that with super heavy and starship as well they can launch actual starship missions so to that end they will also probably not have to wait to land the starship first i think they can be testing both of those things sort of simultaneously and i think the point to make about 150 meter hop of a super heavy booster which would be crazy yeah i mean imagine the difference between hopper and uh a super heavy booster doing that same 150 meter hop it'd be quite hilarious is that when elon said that it was before sn8 launch and i think with sn8 and sn9's uh achievements so far let's face it their achievements even though they both failed in london it might have evolved since and the other evidence of the evolving path is the fact that there's four vent holes potentially four raptors on bn1 again we don't know what bm1 flight is but with bn2 already been out in the wilds shall we say uh spotted by mary at the production site they may may may go higher with the first launch of super super heavy gotcha and uh matthew with a new membership thanks for the support and uh boom with a super chat let's just take a second to think in five or more years we'll be watching a starship lane knowing it's been on the surface of mars that will be crazy i'm interested by your five plus years estimate because in theory there's a mars transfer window next year and one in 2024 let's be a little pessimistic and say they don't launch one until next year so they launched in 2024 could stay there the minimum amount of time was just a few months and then have a transfer window back would probably be a landing in 20 oh jeez hold on i'm gonna look it up because in theory actually that so that that five-year um thing that five-year estimate might be correct i'm pulling up there's this excellent resource called the cosmic train schedule it's just a interplanetary transfer window calculator and so departing from mars to earth um and we're looking at the launch window in 2024 so it probably lands 2025 and so oh wait no hold on i did that backwards i gotta do earth to mars first so the earth to mars window opens there's one in 2022 and one twenty twenty so if they launch late 2024 they'll land in about june of 2025 so the next return window after that is in september of 2026 landing in 2027 so in theory the first starship landing on earth after returning from mars would be like april or actually sorry may 2027 which is six years so that five plus years estimate could be correct unless they launch unless they're ready to send a prototype to mars next year's transfer window because then you're talking about maybe arriving in 2025 and then you're talking about four years from now so i don't know is there any chance that a starship launches to mars during the 2022 transfer window i i don't know but i will say does we can get fixated on mars and rightly sir but starship is also vying for the hls so there's a there's a very good chance that during the centering period before they do the mars missions if it is that later winder that they could be starship london on mars setting up the first moon the first lunar base and to me that's very exciting it the argument we've been to we've been to the moon before is not really applicable in this in this sense because what we've done before the polar was literally landing on on the moon doing some flag planting bouncing around taking some rocks maybe in the lunar river this is completely different this is a new ballgame this is basically to set up a permanent base on the moon and that is a stepping stone it always has been a stepping stone to mars so this this interim period between when we can start setting up a mars base is all about the moon and i think that interim years will shake out starship for its be beyond earth orbit shakedown to make it operational for deep space missions to make the mars missions more achievable that when you do send fleet to mars they've got a lot of background a lot of history with the vehicle so i'm more looking forward towards the next steps rather than the future big goal and of course after mars they've got even bigger goals of landing on moons further out in the solar system so there's a lot to look forward to yeah and of course they're not hindered on moon missions by those big transfer windows because you can launch the moon kind of whenever you want so it just depends on when is the landing site in daylight um if that's required but of course they could land on the dark side as well so um that's another thing they don't have to wait for transfer windows they can launch to the moon whenever so those missions can kind of come in between the mars windows that's a good point and let's see here guys superchat here from brian saying watching from huntsville alabama with my engineer grandmother who worked on the early shuttle in the columbia era rooting spacex on brian thank you so much for the kind words i'm glad that your grandmother is enjoying this as well we appreciate it and uh a big thank you for her work on the space program as well can i talk for 15 minutes about shuttle now i know you would if i didn't tell you not to let's see here i'm going to uh pull up some questions from the queue here uh here's a good one asking will there be any use for falcon heavy when starship is complete yes yes yeah what do you think chris yes i do because they've said that while starship will be their vehicle of choice if customers required it they would utilize 4k9 falcon heavy so i reckon we'll still have a fleet of boosters i'll see how right now let's face it they're not producing lots of new boosters remember the pictures from the whole film factory floor of these boosters lined up these brand new boosters they're landing them so many times now that they can they can reuse them enough where they've got a a stable of falcon 9 boosters which they can then utilize on missions again and again i think that will always have that stable while customers are still saying we need a dedicated falcon 9 launch we need a dedicated fog and heavy launch rather than being part of a starship launch the price point will be quite will be the question of course it's whether or not if you want to share maybe a a car manifest with a with a starship launch if it's cheaper than launching on your own dedicated falcon 9 maybe that will sway more and more customers towards starship but i think there will always be customers for those rockets and they will keep them going until they their life runs out and if they build new ones and you'll see there's always a plan to keep them going after starship's operational but personally yeah i know for hackner said that while customers still demand it they will keep these vehicles going continue on i'm going to keep the questions going like we said we're watching a cryogenic proof test right now you can see the frost continuing to build up on the side as they continue to pump more liquid nitrogen into the vehicle this is basically a leak check for the vehicle prior to beginning fueling for actual propellants and beating static fire tests and things like that a big key milestone ahead of a flight that could occur later this week um based on airspace restrictions but we're looking at cryogenic proof today which is now after an abort earlier it looks like it's going much better this time around but while we do that i will keep answering some questions uh it's both myself thomas burkhardt we also got chris bergen here on the stream i know we've got michael baylor working in the background and then jack buyer is popping in every once in a while as well not sure if he's on comms right now or not but uh we got the nas space flight team here answering your questions so uh a question here from rob do we know which raptor engines are installed on sn10 do we know the serial numbers chris you might know we do but i've forgotten so i'm gonna check okay chris is gonna go check on that right um it's not gonna be one of them i remember sm sm50 and sn39 but don't know the other one okay so 50 39 which is kind of surprising because that's an older engine and then we don't know we didn't see the number of the third one but we all three are installed yes that's right yeah uh a somewhat related question keith wants to know have they completed the cleanup of sn9 yet so are there still raptor guts over on the landing pad or they cleaned that up yet uh what's the status of that i don't know actually i know that we've seen mary's videos where they're cleaning nail but i don't think if mary can hear us in back in the back channel and tell us if not they've cleaned it all up yet there's quite a lot of debris wasn't this it might take a while but yeah i know the last we saw they were cleaning me up i don't know how far they've progressed to the point where they finished it now hang on mary's typing someone yeah i was going to say we're getting an answer from the expert here yeah i don't i can't answer for her but yeah i mean so i mean the big milestone is once they clear the landing pad then they can proceed likely to an sn10 test flight um and since they have those air space restrictions filed in theory they're if they're not done yet they're very close to being done um but as long as the landing pad is clear if they're still cleaning up other areas as long as it doesn't impose a launch risk or a landing risk uh they could in theory proceed mary says she believes there's still some remains on the pad so their work they're working on it but they're not done yet thank you mary um so they're working on it but hopefully that means they're close to being done because like we said flight as early as thursday according to the airspace closures um so a good indicator that they're almost done but thank you mary and thank you for the question keith uh let's see here uh matland with another question here what resources does the moon have that can make it viable as a possible launch base so there is ice on the moon so you can create liquid oxygen and hydrogen from there um so that for rockets that utilize those propellants obviously most rockets use liquid oxygen these days um so that's useful i think there are actually enough resources to also produce liquid methane on the lunar surface someone will correct me if i'm wrong but i'm pretty sure there's also enough carbon in the in regolith that you could extract it and do insight to methane production as well um i know you could def i know there's water ice so you know you could do hydrogen and oxygen um so between those two of course starship does not use liquid hydrogen so we need to do uh methane production um off the top of my head i'm pretty sure they can do that in the moon as well uh a question here from pernell does sn10 use helium pressurization like sn9 or auto genius pressurization like sn8 i do not know i don't think elon has commented officially on this what i do think is sn8 had that pressurization problem which they solved by adding helium pressurization i'm going to assume that they're not going back to auto genius pressurization already because that was a problem that actually caused the sn8 crash um so i'm going to guess they're still doing helium pressurization on sn10 but we don't have an official answer on that meanwhile it's getting pretty frosty yeah and we did not see so for the previous prior approved tests of sn 8 and sn9 it didn't the vehicle did not actually get that frosty so i'm not sure how much beyond this we're going to see but i wouldn't be surprised if we did not see much more frost than this so yes what i what i'm basically saying is if the frost goes away at this point without a lot more frost i would not be too concerned about it of course the internal pressure can still be high even with not a ton of liquid nitrogen in the tanks we'll see what happens but looking good so far got a question here asking how what actually ignites the raptors so do we know what kind of igniters raptor uses or if there's like a t-tab thing that falcon 9 uses uh what do we know about raptor ignition because that could have been a source of the problem for us and mine it's a sparkler type situation if i'm not mistaken it's it's igniter it doesn't use any kind of additional like teb or anything like that it's just a sparkler like a fancy grill igniter well there you go so there answers your question um a question here asking do they remove the wires that hold the wings in place before this test i believe not all the flaps are still tied down right or chain down well that's what usually is isn't it but i remember mary's video last night showed him play with the flaps so we're gonna wait for the expert to answer here yeah exactly yeah let's go to the source of the mutter yeah i don't know why i'm asking you guys i should just be asking mary i just know for mary's videos the fights are secure so yeah like i said see i know what i'm talking about thank you mary uh yeah so the flaps are still secured at this time uh they'll unchain them or whatever uh closer to the flight test uh here is a good question from cody saying which rockets will starship directly compete with in the launch market once it's operational right now i mean okay i guess you could argue sls to an extent but they might also just end up serving different roles even though they're in the same class of like lyft vehicle i think the bigger competitor of starship might come along if blue origin new armstrong ever comes to fruition because that's kind of because if you look at blue origin is the only other big launch provider pursuing fully reusable vehicles so if you're limiting yourself to that kind of class of vehicle you look at new glenn which is their first orbital vehicle debuting in theory this year maybe next year which is a falcon heavy competitor and then their next step they we know that they have plans for a notional new armstrong design that we don't know much about but would likely be starship class um so fully reusable knots partially reusable and then sort of super heavy lift capabilities um so that would be one if that ever comes up again that might be a couple years down the line um starship definitely has the jump on that just like spacex has to jump with falcon heavy versus new glenn but in theory that could be a competition sls there's a different kind of role right yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna leak smell to information here because i will do that yeah the the new armstrong apparently could be just another stage on you know on top of the um on a new glenn type vehicle where it doesn't really matter it's like a block two sls compared to the block one br block one um there is another vehicle apparently being looked at within blue origin which glorious not talked about no one the source blue origins over this but uh nasa person has seen it and it's got in brackets that the name is it won't give me the name but in brackets it had starship killer huh so that's what they'll play then now to be careful here these people do tend to do have little internal jerks and that's when you get to hear them but that would be a different kind of vehicle i think we're originally seeing what spacex is doing here i think he'd be one of us so don't be surprised if you see a completely new kind of vehicle from the rj in about five years time there may be one of those coming up along the line i'm sure they're thinking about they were looking at crew launch and everything like that so not just new jet new shepard so there's a lot of things to come from large and the thing blue origin is they're so secretive you just don't know all we know right now is new blood and in fact during the last new shepherd launch webcast they did not share new glenn at all they should have been on the show e4 right yeah but nothing i've seen nothing about this humongous launch site and production area they've got a cape canaveral nothing at all i thought why on earth would you not even share that because their webcasts are very custom oriented that's why they go hey it's so wonderful here in this part of west texas it's one that we love it here oh such a wonderful launch they do that on purpose not for us we benefit from watching it but they do the customers because they're trying to sell seats on new shepard and that's why they do it that way that's why virgin galactic do all their fluffy materials because they're aiming at very rich people they want to go somewhere for a second the idea is that the fact that i didn't sure knew glenn it was weird to me because i thought that was a way of showing how big companies are and they avoided it for some reason sir that's variable origin of them they just don't do things the way we expect them to do and they keep everything close to their chest so in that respect their future plans are very secretive as well you only hear snippets i think they will surprise us and just quickly on the current test it looks like the frost is decreasing if you rewind your youtube player a couple of minutes you can do an a b test and compare the frost levels but we often see some condensation on the top of the liquid oxygen on the top of the liquid oxygen tank for whatever reason when did he tank so i'm not sure if that's what's happening but it could be that they are now detanking we should know more in the next couple of minutes as we see the frost change we have also seen on previous tests sometimes the frost goes up and down and up and down so it's possible the frost could go back up but as of now it's possible that they are detangling after a potentially successful test i don't know for sure but you can see on that methane tank right now the frost line is almost gone right uh question here asking which starship do you think will be the first to land i'm going to be optimistic and say sn10 sticks the landing chris thoughts that's unsaid all right there michael any differing opinions uh sn10 jack not on compton objects not on columns anymore okay i hope i'm there for it that's all i got to say that ties into my next question chat wants to know if you're going back to boca chica jack yeah yes probably yes okay cool uh let's see here uh christine how many star ships do you think spacex will send to mars on their first opportunity or the transfer window i i don't i'm tempted to say just one just because you won't know if it'll work or not so if you try if you send two and the first one doesn't work and you're like oh we figured out why it didn't work you can't fix the other one because it's already on the way so i feel like maybe the first fantasy only send one unless they're really confident in some reason that it will work but i don't know i kind of feel like you you only send one the first time maybe that's just me um let's see here a question here what do you guys think the timeline will be for the first crude starship on mars versus the first crude artemis mission on the moon so first artemis landing on the moon is no or no other than the 2024 timeline um no chance of that happening yeah no totally agree but if you but so let's broaden then just think second half of the 2020s is that a reasonable estimate yes okay so let's say that first crude landing on mars let's just forget whether it's starship or not even though i'm not sure any other vehicle that it might be at this point assuming it's a starship that's not happening until 2030s right maybe i mean could it happen before 20 30. this is the problem it's so early it's hard to predict it's really it's it's difficult because when you're worn down by sls delays any schedule you immediately think to the right you're so hype about starship any schedules you meet you think to the left so it's weird how it works but i think the way basics works and the the evidence of how spacex works the way they drive things forward they don't achieve the schedules that elon puts out on twitter but the fact that it puts that pressure on and they don't take the pressure too seriously whether to the point where they make mistakes they they go up their pace but their pace is naturally higher because of it nasa is paying boeing more money for the more delays they have where's the motivation you know boeing charged nasa a billion dollars because they're going to be a year late what kind of how do how on earth do you work on that kind of basis it's literally more profit if you delay what your delivery dates are that is ridiculous and that's got to change spacex don't work to that mentality and that's why i think there's a greater chance of their achievements being sooner than we perceive compared to westley's schedule being realistic which it isn't this 2024 landing was political it always was it was designed to be a bookmark to a second term for presidency that's what it was aimed for that's no longer the case so that's changed and now we're gonna see how much that date sticks because right now that schedule is not sticking i think uh a crude starship on mars by 2030 is a tall order i don't think it's impossible right you can't rule it out yet though well they just started landing falcon 9s in the last five-ish years right five years ago and if you extrapolate five years from now um i mean just just think where we could be and that's not even they don't that would be 2026 2027 time frame five years from now i have every expectation that this system is launching cargo and you know at the very least much much further along in its development cycle than it is right now and we've already seen an acceleration in this development cycle from star hopper and then a year later sn5 and then a month after sm5 sm6 and now we're starting to see starships just roll off the assembly line left and right i mean as evidenced by starship nine and ten both being on the pad at the same time to to underestimate the the scope and and speed that they're going to move at and continue to accelerate i mean it i don't see this pace slowing down from here i see i only see this this pace of development speeding up um and that is the kind of thing that they would have to achieve in order to to get a crude starship on the moon or on mars in a reasonable time frame so i've said it before say it again mars 2030. let's do it yeah well let's look at the evidence sn18 sn18 is out there it's under construction it's out it's production tents we don't even know what's inside of production tents it could be i said 1920. you know as far as bulkheads go and what have you to look inside outside yeah 18 is and and and like you said we don't even know what parts are being built currently inside the tents or say at hawthorne or we don't know how many raptors exist but definitely there's no slowing down here let's see here clearly continues to decrease so yeah i think they're probably complete the test hopefully we'll get some indication of whether or not it was successful from elon on twitter although i'm not sure that proof tests are exciting enough these days for elon to comment on that but most likely the confirmation we will get as if they proceed to aesthetic fire on on wednesday which is the next road closure so no road closure scheduled for tomorrow but there is a road closure on on wednesday and if they go straight to a static fire that would be an indication that the proof test was a success of course they redo the proof test and that would be an indication that it was not a success we will also wait to see if the road opens today right after the teams return to the pad if they do reopen the road once starship has been safe that would be another indication and they're done for today which could be a good sign they still have about three and a half hours remaining in the window so if there was a problem they could theoretically make another attempt today but right now this looks a lot more like the successful crowd test that we've seen already so no but we're not seeing any signs that this was an abort or anything right yeah right okay question here which starship is going to use the new three millimeter thick steel i believe that is part of the sn15 upgrades we think right uh we don't yeah sm-15 is the next major upgrade as elon said we don't know what those upgrades are but it goes without saying that the tested sm 10.2 with the three millimeters and you think that works the timeline for sm15 so yeah i would probably be it'd be a safe assumption csm15 gotcha uh a superchat question here how can starship land on mars with no atmosphere so mars does have an atmosphere it's a very thin atmosphere it's thinner than on earth but mars has an atmosphere um either way starship can land both places with atmosphere and without when it has an atmosphere it does that belly flop maneuver to take advantage of that and then connects the landing burner at the last second a starship can also land on the moon where there is no atmosphere um and that way you don't do a belly fat maneuver it's just a purely propulsive landing which is a lot easier on the moon because the gravity is not as high so you actually need less propellant but starship can land on mars taking advantage of the thin atmosphere and uh neo with a super show what is the timeline for earth to earth starship and is that why the oil rigs were bought we don't know exactly what the oil rigs are for other than therefore starship operations of some kind whether they'll be used for earth to earth flights or for more operational orbital fights things like that we don't know for sure um and we don't really have a firm timeline for earth or starship but i think it was within the next few years that elon said they wanted those first test flights to occur in fact if i go i covered this in an article not too long ago and there might have actually been a date from elon in there somewhere so i'm going to go check that really quick if i can find the earth to earth something preparing yep this one i will try to find an answer for you neil but uh while i do that i'm gonna leave a question for chris here um let's see here here's a good one do you think once starship is proven to be a reliable an operational vehicle will nasa select other providers for the sake of maintaining competition well so if starship's the only sort of super heavy lift fully reusable vehicle will nasa continue to use partially reusable or even fully expendable vehicles alongside that to sort of diversify their launch provider base is that something you would see nasa doing yes i think nasa's got a history of that via elements of that very reason to keep everyone happy as far as contracts go on keeps keeps the redundancy of capability going because you don't want a vehicle basically being starved out of the game and then suddenly the one you're using all the time has a problem and you lost you're left with no vehicles to provide the up mass you need for your missions uh and secondly because of lobbyists you know you're always gonna have people perking the either political class for the funding saying you know we need this kind of money going towards our district what have you and that's where um the likes of ula coming handy but to be fair to ula they've they've never had a failure a full failure and i think that's to their credit they are a lot more expensive but they are reliable and when you're a customer who has a government contract and you know your payload is is not going to benefit from any kind of savings on that you want the reliability and that's where the likes of launching a delta iv heavy still becomes viable for like the nro it's it's those kind of things and i think spacex has got a lot to go there still they've got the the nsl nssl contract from 39a but we're going to see a new structure at 39a by the way which will be the vertical uh capability of mating payloads we're also going to have um all these new vehicles from blue glen new glenn coming online which will be you know competing in the same kind of regime as falcon heavy and i think i just think it's where nasa works i i can't see nasa ever going to stop a rider as a you know as a kind of like the the provider of choice on anything like that i think while other companies have got the capability they will spread out they'll spread out the wealth as such because a healthy us watch industry is good for them and it makes sense so the the long answer to that is well you know that's basically a yes i'm back circling back to that question about earth to earth the most recent estimate from elon which was june of last year says that the first earth earth test flights might be in two or three years and that was of last year so think 2022 2023 timeline for the first earth to earth test flights so hopefully that answers that question from earlier a huge fan of earth by the way i keep saying every stream shouldn't bring the question about earthquake i just keep saying it'd be an ultimate game changer and yes there are challenges yes there are issues with how you know they they can get away with that kind of thing with local authorities especially with the faa you know so there's lots of challenges involved there but if you can set up one route and prove it i think it would just such an amazing thing for somebody to launch from one side to point to the other within an hour that i think it would just strike the imagination of authorities and other countries to say we want this and i think it could be to start something special if they can just prove it so yeah i hope it happens somehow as far as timelines go we got a question here from a felix saying didn't elon say cargo missions to mars in 2022 and accrued mission in 2024. i do remember him saying that but that was a few years ago when he made that estimate i it's i think that was an optimistic estimate at the time and i think that that possibility may have slipped um i'm not sure they're going to be ready for cargo to the to mars by next year again we can't rule it out yet but um i i don't think i think that's an outdated estimate at one point that was the plan yes that's that's going back to what we're talking about about elon's schedules they are extremely tight to the point that they're not capable of doing it because they are just so optimistic but i'm sure i mean he's a business man he knows what he's doing you know he make he brings out these schedules as a kind of driving like a stick saying what this is what i want and then space let's come back like gwen people like that come back to him and say okay but maybe not that soon but the net result is a lot faster than if you never set back on a target that's management that's perfect management and i think that's why he does it a lot especially in public on twitter it's just the driving force behind what spacex is like to set really ambitious targets maybe not achieve them all the time obviously but get so close to them that they're a lot sooner than they would have been if you had no one like elon charge and they were just going at their own pace so i i think that's i always find that a positive already i think you know even on standard time as he doesn't like and i'm sure he doesn't like that i hope he's not listening you know it's already been called out on twitter for by him by that for that by the way so yeah be careful um but i just think it's it's it's a positive thing because we've seen the results i go back to what i was saying about mary's first videos and photographs go back two years you see none of this it's all being built up in in short order compared to anywhere else even blue origin their facility at cape canaveral has taken quite a long time to build it to where it is it's impressive but it's got no rocket out there they've not lost anything from there yet the way spacex do things he's just motivated it it makes you want to you know root for them it really does because they are doing what we all would do if we were in charge of a rocket company it's push push push and go for these big goals you know that's not been done for years i'm a fan of shuttle it was stuck in low earth orbit it was never getting capable of going out of low earth orbit you know this is something that will take us to mars and it's it's inspiring i think i couldn't have said it better chris i mean we all we're all limited by the time scales of human life and as such we want to see exciting cool things happen in our lifetimes and that means quickly because human time scales are not long so to to have a company like spacex pushing as hard as they are with oh look at that vent that's is it a d maybe press frost is decreasing so this could be sort of the end of the test maybe but yeah we we all want to see stuff happen and happen soon so that's part of why this is all so exciting right absolutely absolutely yeah uh let's see here got a question here will star ships always be made in boca chica or are we expecting them to be made at the cape as well i believe we are expecting parallel construction at cape canaveral once that once they get past test flights in boca chica we know they're still playing the launch starship from 39a at kennedy space center so those vehicles would likely be produced at a new facility in florida right yeah i can't pronounce the names of the places so forgive me in the bank but cigarette is it cigarette cocoa something like that c-i-d-c-o that that was initially as elon put as in a competition like a race yeah mark one the mark you know martin things like that so they initially did that set up to be a florida and boko chika race of dual processing flows uh that facility is no longer producing starships it's still active in a kind of small way but it's not producing starships but they have another facility closer to kfc which is that robert's road and that is that's i think that's always within the space center maybe there we go yeah uh thanks to harry strange with this satellite with his eyes on satellite photographs being updated he's noticed there is kind of some some groundwork going on there now so they are building up a facility and we think that could be related to stat well we think it's related to starship it makes sense it is and that starship will eventually go to 39a which has got the facility order kind of like partly built but it's been mothballed for a while so yes this is a short answer to that one but it's it's something exciting because i think wakachika is all focused on boko chika right now once they get these vehicles shaking out and operational then we can keep a very close eye on florida and see how they're going to produce the vehicles roll them out and put them on the pad and what they will launch from florida uh will be extremely exciting because that will double the lodge cadence technically when you've got the extra facility so it's it's very exciting when you've got the boss and dmos as well there's so many things they could do with this this vehicle from the facilities they've got already known out there absolutely i'm gonna go get a couple super chat questions really quick uh boom saying crispy for new nasa admin i think he fails the naturalized u.s citizen requirement but you know uh and who wouldn't be scared yeah you don't want me in charge of nasa it would do it would go downhill very fast uh and i wouldn't be surprised if they launched a starship to mars in the 22 window just to see if they can i i think i could see them throwing like a prototype starship one with no payload on board literally throw a heat shield on it and see if it can survive martian entry and attempt a landing i could see that maybe um but even doing that by 2022 might be a tall order they might not even get to orbit in 2022 if they have some sort of setback right now it's something like end of this year beginning of next year as their first orbital attempt-ish so you know you got to balance that but we'll wait and see uh a tip here from louge maybe greetings from denmark i hope i got your name right uh but appreciate the support and thank you so much glad you're enjoying uh here's a quick question uh it doesn't have to do with starship per se but i know chris will have some thoughts on it will you cover the abl launch from the shetland islands next year i know there's some talk of a new small lift launch vehicle from over in the uk chris yeah the the interesting thing there's two launch sites now in the mix right yeah uk both in the north of scotland once a sutherland right on the top of this in the country and won the shetlands which is the lockheed martin launch which mentioned today um yeah i'd love to i mean jack will laugh at me but it's an eight-hour drive so i will have to stop over somewhere in scotland uh overnight and then do the second leg the next day um because there's no way am i driving eight hours non-stop so but i'll do it definitely yeah and um i don't know about live stream now because i think the internet up there would be horrendous so we'll get dust on the case we'll get we'll ship solo out to you you'll be set up darling there you go oh yeah yeah exactly yes so yeah i mean well yeah i'm definitely doing it so it's a question of what we can you know i'm rubbish with cameras though i'll be literally live streaming my shoes for about three hours well we'll set you up chris we'll we'll make sure you're set up but uh yeah that'll be very cool to see some new launch sites and some other countries come online uh let's see here [Music] uh let's see do you think the next starship test flight is going to ignite all three engines then cut off one using two to the landing or just step back to two engine to do the length um so it sounds like the change they're gonna make is instead of lighting two for the flip and shutting down one to do the final landing they're gonna light all three if they all work shut down the extra one still using the other two to do the flip and then shut down one of them and go back to one engine for the landing the change they're making is just lighting all three at the beginning so if one of them fails they can complete the landing using the other some combination of the other two so i hope that answers your question um are there any missions for falcon heavy planned this year uh yes there is the ussf 44 mission a classified mission for the u.s space force launching on falcon heavy later this year um there is also ussf 52 which i think is still planned for this year um those missions have had that tendency to slip a little bit but um i think there's those two and then possibly a viasat three communications satellite that's going on falcon heavy so i think up to three this year um but at least one i think that first ussf mission is pretty firmly this year um so at least one up to three is my answer for that and then uh can starship take off directly to over from the mars surface yes mars our starship can ssto from any celestial body other than earth basically any moons and any of the other rocky planets mars or well i guess i shouldn't say that because i don't know if we can do it from venus venus is a whole other volume but for mars from the moon um and from like the outer moons of like jupiter or saturn and stuff like that which are some places they've mentioned as future destinations all of those uh starship can handle without any sort of boost or anything like that can i go for the tangent again like i always do please do there's something we're forgetting and that is the launch capability the the provenance technology the tps the the refilling and what have you for crew launches it means nothing let's get the life support system sorted out the life support system for a beyond earth orbit mission is huge it's a massive undertaking we've seen the challenges of the iss every day the iss daily reports mention a oxygen regenerator the water regenerator failing or something like that they have to do repairs all time and they get the resupplies from cargo missions which bring up spare parts when you're on the way to mars you've got no resupply missions it can help you out you're going to be able to repair it there and then in situ and you need a system that's going to work continuously without fault with redundancy all the way to mars back and what have you so it's a lot of work involved life support system working so be cargo missions for a long time to shake out the vehicle and the architecture and then they're going to do a lot of work on life support and i would i would assume a lot of shakeout missions in low earth albert so they can de-orbit and get back pretty soon have a problem but it's it's a major challenge it really is technically orion is ahead of the game on that would you believe because it has a life support system that they believe will work but even orion the first crew mission will spend 36 hours in loth albert shaking out the life support system before they do the um trans lunar ejection burn because they've got to be so careful with this live sport system and that is just to the moon so you can imagine how much work they got to do on starship the only thing i i do remember i don't know if it it's still the case or was ever the case but i do remember some mention paragon saying they were working with spacex it could have been crew dragon but if it was with starship as well they are the world leaders in life support systems paragon so if they are working with those in the background i've got a lot of hope and optimism towards starship's future live support system but there's a lot of habitable car car space in top of starship a lot of space there that you've got to have to support humans riding in it it's going to be a big big question that's not been properly answered yet the life support system for starship gotcha um some more questions here uh let's see according to a wiki there are approximately 129 million things orbiting earth our launch window is getting smaller as satellites are launched you know this has been mentioned once before i forget which company was talking about it but we're getting to some fairly frequent launches especially as starlink deployment kind of ramps up and you're not hearing any uh sort of on-orbit um collision warnings that have resulted in these cola windows [Music] collision on orbit launch assessment or some of that something along those lines the the risk basically the risk of hitting something during launch because it's something already in orbit um that doesn't really come up that often so i don't think that we're seeing a significant impact on that as far on launch windows as far as that goes i think we've seen a little of those warnings suggest that isn't a problem yet right exactly yeah um questioning is it lighting all three raptors just putting a band-aid on the wound lighting all out of fear of one failing does not seem viable i think it is a temporary fix with the permanent fix just being developing a continuing to test the raptor engines and them just becoming more reliable at some point it might not be needed but even then if you can light all three raptors and then shut down the extra one quickly enough that is just a great form of engine out redundancy which starship is supposed to have anyway um so i think honestly they should just do that going forward and probably will because as reliable as raptor gets you still won't ever have zero risk of an engine failure and so to account for that i think this three raptor lighting scenario isn't really a bad thing it's just a smart step to mitigate the risk while they also mitigate it by making raptor a more reliable engine so it's a combination totally agree with that by the way it's i think there's lots of benefits i just want to again stress again the point this is going to be the third ever launch of this vehicle the fact that you know they've got the vehicle to prove it can belly flop under control is huge it really is huge it doesn't matter how many computational fluid dynamics models you've got or how many you know there's there's no history of this they've done something new for the first time and it works they've just got to let the landing right and they're going to learn from the the two failures they've had it's just two and that is always something they perceived was going to be the case because that's what it built from the starships you know you're not going to build all these starships if you think the first one's going to work perfectly well no problem at all he build us started because then when one fails you've got another one coming down highway four and it's ready to go it's crazy it sounds surreal but that's what they've done and it's it's going to work out from the long run so i think just some just a little bit of calibration here that these issues that had are solvable and it's right at the end of the flight profile this is not a vehicle that blows up going uphill this is not a vehicle that nurse dies when it tries to do a belly flop everything else is right it's just gonna get that last final thing right absolutely let's see here get some more questions we're gonna keep on coming thank you so much to everyone who's supporting the stream and sending in questions we love it um who will be going to mars will it be nasa astronauts or spacex estimates or something else so when we're talking about starship landing specifically i think it is a very very safe bet to say that the first crude landing on mars will include nasa astronauts it will also hopefully include international astronauts from other space agencies um and it might also improve or include non-government astronauts but i think the safest bet is that there will be nasa astronauts on board whether or not they're accompanied by representatives from spacex or other just private astronauts as well as astronauts from other government space agencies other than nasa um this kind of remains to be seen but nasa is very involved in the starship program and it's because starship could end up being that first vehicle that presents that mars landing capability and that's just going to want to be involved in that so and spacex will be happy to have them for the record don't you think chris i agree totally so uh nasa astronauts plus perhaps others but definitely uh nasa will be involved nasa will also likely be involved in the first cargo missions they're going to want to have hey we have some extra experiments that you know didn't quite fit on perseverance or stuff like that um but we'd love to fly to mars as well could we stick them on starship and starship we'll say yes because starship is huge then there will be plenty of room too i will add that it's not just the fact that an asteroid is needed because it's so complicated to fly a ship it's not the spacex i mean especially crew dragon it's not complicated it's still complex it's not something i could fly but it's something that you know you don't need two years of training to fly like a shuttle it's you know it's something that is a lot more intuitive and a lot easier to control it's a lot more automated but the fact is with asterisk notes is you've got a different caliber of mentality if you ever speak to a national they are a different breed i i say every time when i talk to friends when i interviewed gene cernan he oh he i i spent about an hour staring the wall because the actual statue of the man coming across a microphone was surreal he just sounds like a different breed of human they're so focused and they're searching well trained i'm sure it's with military pilots as well i'm sure it's the same with them they are just so focused and trained that you want that kind of person on the board with you because if they have problems you don't want everyone around screen with their hair on fire you want someone with that kind of mentality you can say right solve it solve it solve it fix it get everything sorry and that is where a national an asterisk note would come in very handy for that kind of situation also national astronauts are the ones with experience on conducting scientific research which is going to be largely the the point of many early missions spacex engineers are going to be great at operating the vehicle perhaps setting up you know propellant depots and things like that preparing that kind of infrastructure but you're going to go to want to go to nasa to conduct research on that mission so that's another reason i completely agree with you guys let's see here next question uh we have a super chat question here with jeff bezos stepping down from amazon do you expect blue origin to quicken its timeline now that he can give it some full time attention i believe that we have seen that uh so if you're unaware jeff bezos ceo of amazon also founder of blue origin is no longer ceo of amazon he still works there but he's not ceo um and he just said he did i feel today this i think he stole this yeah it's happening q2 at some point um so that hasn't happened yet but it's going to um and he but he said he did that so that he will have more time to work on his other projects which includes blue origin among other things um so that is possible that there might be you know we we mentioned that elon can crack the whip in boca chica and you know try and quicken the pace a little bit if he sees things kind of stagnating too much i don't know if bezos has that kind of sort of can he go crack the whip at blue origin that maybe he has that and i would love to see that um so maybe that's a thing uh but i think we'll have to wait and see i don't know we haven't had a much chance to see that kind of involvement from bezos apple origin per se so we'll wait and see what i've got there is the current person who's in charge of blue origin it's not someone who's particularly liked by the blue origin people i speak to without getting too deep into that not disliked for any kind of bad reason but the fact that he's not very driven so if jeff bezos gets more of a grip on it maybe changes the some of the leadership at blue origin to a more dynamic and more driven kind of mentality maybe they will speed up the pace a little bit and i think with his concentration on this program now be more than on the um the black friday sales on amazon might we might start seeing that now i i personally think that will happen it will be very interesting to see uh question here what is the update with the starship launch pad at launch complex 39a are they still building it we haven't heard or seen anything in over a year uh yes they are still planning to use 39a i don't think they've made any hardware changes recently like you said we haven't seen anything but we believe it's just on hold because all the development work is currently happening where you're looking right now at boca chica um and so until they can complete those test flights and progress on vehicle development um they're not going to pursue more at kennedy space center once starship is getting closer to an operational vehicle then they're going to say okay let's bring cape canaveral online as a second launch site uh second land-based launch site at least for operational starship missions and there's definitely going to be some parallel there between the starship missions at kennedy space center and the human landing system if stars if spaces get selected as a human landing system provider there will definitely be some incentive to fly those missions from kennedy space center in conjunction with a nasa center as far as logistics is concerned so yes there na is still happening you just won't see much until they're getting ready to launch operational missions from there versus a development program which is happening mostly in texas is it better is it things getting more frosty uh well you know i was gonna point that out are there is the frost increasing again okay streaming that we're seeing from this game review i don't think was there earlier yeah it's it's definitely increased but sometimes with a d tank it gets a bit like this doesn't it so it's it's hard to tell yeah if we go watch the vents the tank farm activity is still kind of active yeah let's see if it goes in that line that line we see there has stayed the same it's just the frost that has come below it but if it goes any higher if the methane tank gets a frost line then we'll keep an eye on that regardless the test is still ongoing so we will yeah even from this view though you can see some more frost has kind of come back i think regardless there are still ongoing with the cryogenic test for today um let's see often often when they do tank the condensation forms for whatever reason but okay we're not seeing any frost on the methane tank right now yeah right okay uh question here is to how many project managers does spacex have the amount of concurrent building at boca is amazing uh safe to say a lot yeah at least 150. um if nasa doesn't choose spacex for developing the lunar starship do you think they'll cancel it entirely yes i know my name is the tongue twister louse i don't know if i got it right the first time but you didn't correct me so i'm going to say it again hopefully i get it right but yeah if nasa doesn't choose starship as a human landing system provider which i mentioned before i feel like starship is the surest bet as far as an hls pick is concerned but if it doesn't get selected i could maybe see spacex canceling that particular variant and using a more generic starship vehicle to land on the moon it's possible that spacex might not have the same requirements as nasa does for a lunar lander they might want to have a vehicle that not just travels between lunar orbit and the lunar surface like the human landing system variant does and rather has one with the control surfaces and things like that so it can return from the moon and land directly back on earth so it's possible they move to a different variant of starship for lunar missions so i can see that happening michael spacex is not going to you know build the capability to talk with orion or the gateway right their own starship unless provides funding i don't think what i think is if nasa selects blue origin national team we will see some big space extra at wakachika take a big paint of big tinder paints throw it all over that luna over that mock-up over the nasa luger and right who's jeff on it uh yeah i don't know i they could so they could change what the lunar version of starship looks like um and like michael said it could be that docking interface kind of goes away and it's a all-inclusive vehicle on its own instead of having to talk to another one but uh i don't think that would they wouldn't cancel their plans to fly starship to the moon for sure i honestly think blue origin is actually leading by the way but i think the origins got so many contractors involved i think it's it's nasa's thing we're going back to earlier about spreading the wealth i think that i think they're leading in that respect the only question is how far along development-wise they are compared to starship starship has a taller mountain to climb but i think it's farther along than the truth it's a trajectory like it's like accomplished more but it has a lot farther to go than blue origin slander the origins lander is still ambitious but it's not quite as ambitious as starship and expensive yes it is also it's actually it was by far the most expensive blue origin not starship blue origins proposal was i believe by far the most expensive proposal like more than twice the cost yeah i think blue origin is probably not going to go with the same price for the second round but i imagine it will still be more expensive than starship by quite a large margin because blue origin is building the lander just specifically for nasa's hls program for the most part whereas starship is starship will exist whether or not the hls program happens so i think spacex is just hoping to get some amount of money from nasa spacex is not expecting nasa to fund the entire starship effort exactly at the after starship right now it's getting quite um venting there's still a lot of vapors down there yeah uh snate with the supercharger says thanks guys for all the coverage and conversations thank you so much appreciate it and emily says hey you lovely space enthusiast so glad i have you while everything is locked down keep it up thank you so much emily appreciate the kind words and your support uh greg says just wanted to say thanks you guys rock thank you um you know i i'm checking a message back here in the channel and uh someone is pointing out that we're only 100 subs away from 299 000 subscribers wow all i know how many people are watching right now michael can you see i don't have it up in front of me oh ten thousand and i mean i imagine most of them are already subscribers but if you're not most of them but surely not all of them pushed us towards the edge of 300k we would not complain if you were to click that subscribe button inches closer and if you do subscribe you would receive you know notifications for every time we go live with new book and chica luck coverage as well as daily updates from mary of boca chica production and things like that plus launch live streams from cape canaveral and nsf live every week so if you're into this kind of coverage all i'm saying is that subscribe button's right there and it would probably you would i think you would enjoy it so i'll just leave that proposal there for you i will check back on the subscriber count a couple minutes we are we're on 299 100. there you go all right we're getting there uh let's see i got some more questions here any precedent for them moving directly to a static fire out of a cryo test i don't think they've done that before um so not really we did see them do what three static fires in a single day at one point right so we have seen them rapidly recycle between tests but that's a little different from cycling between the same type of test twice and recycling from a car io test of liquid nitrogen to a static fire test so not really i think especially at this point there's only three hours left in the window they're still wrapping up this cryo test so i think more likely that we'll look for a static fire later in the week and uh here's a question here from a barney saying will starship and super heavy stack fit the height inside the high bay i don't think they could stack them both on top of one another in the high bay i think they'll roll them out one at a time and it'll be integrated on the launch site for orbital flights that's part of the big launch tower at the orbital launch site will need to have crane inbuilt into it to actually put the structure vehicle on top of the super heavy booster you can stack a full super heavy booster in the high bay which is where the height comes from but not the full two-stage stack and gone to text asking the cost per ship maybe 2 million 2 million seems a little cheap keep in mind that you know launch cost is not the same as cost to build this ship the ship can be really expensive to build but if you fly it over and over again the more you fly it the cost per flight goes down so two million is very very cheap i highly doubt of starship can be built for that cheaply um a lunch cost maybe gets there someday we'll see um but thank you for the super chat appreciate it oh and here we go uh it's like lavuk or lavuke uh jeez i it's one of those i apologize if i'm still getting the name wrong but i appreciate your super chat and helping me try to get it close to it what did you say chris thank you for your support and for putting up with my terrible pronunciation of your life of your name let's see here more i'm going to keep looking for some more questions here here's a question do you think starship will ever ever break to lowe's mars orbit to deploy com satellites before landing uh there has been some talk of like adapting some starling satellites for use of communications on mars or some adaptation of starling satellites and yeah in theory starship could perform an aerobraking maneuver to help with orbital insertion i don't know but there are no firm plans for that yet but i could totally see that happening um has there even been a firm decision as to whether a mars entry or even an earth entry from mars uh would be a single pass entry or would they do like an error breaking maneuver pass and then a re-entry has that been firmly as elon said like we firmly decided one way or the other yet i don't think so i don't think so either i think they're kind of still looking at that but as far as yeah so as far as aerobraking before like deploying satellites and then landing i could see that being an option too is there any new information about the vertical integration facility at 39a any hardware in the works yet chris do we have any updates on that sort of vertical integration tower at their nna for falcon 9 and falcon heavy no we we know some kfc guys who who are in charge of equipment going to the pads like pad leaders they call them now spacex is now earning in leasing 39 so as far as 39 internally goes that's spacex but what we've heard as far as equipment going to 39a nothing yet well i think it'll be pretty soon because that'll be next thing we'll see built there i think starship next production level of starship pad will be next after that but i think because of the contracts in the bag they'd start building this massive street it really is a huge structure behind 39a before long and it will be a lot of hardware going to departing trucks and whatever so as soon as we get our word on that wall now but not yet gotcha uh i do membership here m jameson thank you so much for your support i love seeing a bunch of messages in chat about the frost and pointing out something that i perhaps should have just figured out but thank you chad uh pointing out that once they vent the pressure the temperature in the tanks will drop because that's how thermodynamics works so yeah when they start the d tank and actually start to vent the pressurization frost could actually form because it actually does get colder so thank you chad for pointing out the thermodynamics that i should have remembered and uh that explains the frost even though they are likely concluding the test right now let's see yeah i'm actually i just rewinded and the actual frost ring you see at the bottom has been continuing to fade so i definitely think they already tanking we're just seeing some condensation right now right hopefully that's a good test because that will then take him towards what will hopefully be a static fire test in a couple of days time there's no red block for tomorrow's though still i don't think so no uh can starship reach the carbon line on a suborbital hop without the booster i believe yes it should be able to so if they want to test a suborbital flight of starship no booster can't get to orbit and come back but can get to space and come back without reaching orbital velocity so i could see that being some sort of test objective i'm not sure if it will be but uh that yes that is technically possible so that could be a future test flight for the starship program it could even get to orbit it just cannot return in that game you just can't get back which kind of presumably they could do like a 300 kilometer test flight come back or even yeah that's true uh how far off in sn11 being rolled how far off is sn11 being rolled out to the pad would they wait for sn11 to come onto the pad before launching sn10 um sn11 was just moved to the high bay correct yeah yeah eleven was moved to the high bay and the nurse comb was mated on sunday in mary's latest video which i'm gonna link right now because people asked so hey it's now in a high bay floor which means 10 people what days away now from being an integrated stack where they could literally just roll it's a launch pad i think the current launch date for um sn10 is optimistic to say the least so there is a potential of rolling out se11 to the adjacent pad adjacent mount let's just put that video in to chat first of all there you go and um yeah it's crazy it really is because sm15 is in the mid bay sn16 will join it and then you've got just this continual flow starships there's no reason now why the what won't roll sn11 to the mount uh i think with sn10 sn9 it was more situational delay related to the faa that took the opportunity of um saying okay we're not allowed to launch yet let's roll out sn10 but with sn not caused any damage to sn10 during its landing failure which which is what it was i think they've got confidence now in the two two mount system where they can allow for that to happen so yeah i think there's potential of saying 1911 out there before it's intended launches but we'll have to wait and see and we are seeing a little bit of condensation or frost on that methane tank it looks like so we'll keep an eye on that that could be interesting it's always possible they could do multiple proof tests with detanking and then reloading you're going to have like i said earlier we have seen the frost line go up and down throughout these tests before so we'll keep an eye on that frost level right now with that upper methane tank which does seem to have some frost coming back right now i've got a question here for chris specifically do you think we could have had more progress in spaceflight if we had a competition for super heavy lift vehicles in place of sls thanks y'all chris yeah yes because there was it was a competition would you believe it was called the um the racks which were a design uh i came up with the initials for what it actually stood for but it was a three-team process at the marshall space flight center from the augustine committee it was a result of that where they went through three different kinds of variants of heavy lift launch vehicles and the winner was presented as the forward option to continue with it was heavily weighted the competition rules were you had to reuse shuttle and aries one hardware so they had all these rp-1 vehicles like a atlas heavy and delta uh version of delta they had um the starship type vehicles the methane methyl locked vehicles but they could not win this trade study because of the rules of the trade study which was heavily weighted towards the congressional requirement laid out in the 2010 authorization act which said you had to utilize former shuttle and aries one hardware it was hilarious i'm gonna well we'll just go through i'm going to try and find the article which shows you the slide it shows many vehicles one option and the one option was sls so that's what happened so yes it was a trade study but it wasn't a fair one that's in here so what would i mean what could have come from that if that rule didn't exist do you think they would have selected something closer to starship to be developed possibly it's hard to say really i'm just going to try and find the article first of all uh no 2011 i think it was yeah the winning one rack one study in line lh2 core vehicles with solid rocket boosters srbs while this vehicle is based on sd-hlv the teams avoid using such a name given they were only allowed to trade with space shuttle main engines so yeah he was it was um i'm trying to find what rack stood for hang on one second he was at the marshall space flight center as well so they were always going to favor requirements analysis cycle teams there we go under the guidance of the human exploration framework team they were given three teams to trade study these vehicles the actual act rack 2 was winning until the weighted decision behind the fact that rack 2 teams were not using solid rocket boosters so there you go it was almost scandalous if you you could say that but the problem was if a non-alternative to a shuttle derived heavy-duty launch vehicle was not selected if an alternative was selected they would have to spend 70 billions in cancellation of contracts with the aries five areas one areas five contractors that he then lost on the money side of things so the alternative vehicles say starship say starship was around then would have still lost to sls on cost because a starship's cost would have included the payouts of the contract cancellations to boeing that would have been billions and billions so when people start sharing cancel sls you can't do it the contracts were set up where if we cancelled sls today it would cost about 10 billion dollars in contract cancellation fees that's how it was set up the people who were in charge of the contracts between nasa and yes less contractors did it in such a such a bad way that they did it so that it couldn't be cancelled no matter how many delays or how many issues it had it could not be cancelled because it would cost too much the people saying some cost fallacy in our forums don't appreciate the fact that it's not just that it's the fact that if you count less less you're still gonna pay for it because it's contract out for four flights three or four flights so they pay for look at the contracts gone to the european inspiration see for the next two atoms six they've paid for already they've paid for it the service modules up to atomus six if you cancel the ryan today you're still paying to atom six it is it's amazing how the contract has been set up the contractors had nasa over a barrel big time really quickly on st on starship best of 10 you can see that we have seen a lot of condensation on the right side of the tank from this camera angle but on the left side of the tank that lower that lower ring of frost we have been seeing has now kind of faded into light condensation and we're not seeing that upper ring on the methane tank kind of wrap around and form the solid frost so i still know the opinion that they already taken yeah i think i agree with you michael a question here from stephen saying thinking ahead do we know how any future astronauts would escape starship in the event of a launch or landing aboard as far as we know there are no plans for an in-flight abort system for the starship vehicle correct not to be heard of i part of me wonders if that could change it's like a temporary solution but we'll have to see how it plays out i get some trouble interrupt michael for once the drone is flying yeah behind starship right now in the tanks now i mean the only real way i could see it in a flight of board system on starship is if you had like a crew dragon type capsule on your nose cone with super dracos that mm-hmm probably that's probably super complicated and unlikely to happen so maybe not yeah and on that note i'm going to say goodbye because i've got very little time left before i have to get some things done so thank you for having me and welcome chris chris thank you so much that is chris bergen managing editor and founder of nasa space flight uh hopping off of comms for now thanks for joining us chris bye-bye you know what's really stupid the space shuttle i don't like jack's bag oh i'm sorry crispy you know i'm kidding i'm just giving you a hard time i like the space shuttle too jack's favorite rocket i mean i didn't say that on a live stream recently didn't i i think you did so that basically that means it's fact right yep has to be true it's a lot on the internet uh question here are you aware that there are tfrs for the 11th yes we are aware we were mentioning it earlier that adjusts the fact that starship sn10 flight no earlier than thursday as optimistic as that seems of course that's a very much of no earlier than date but yes that we are aware and tracking that it is contingent on the cryogenic proof test today being successful and then likely a static fire test prior to flight as well so we're keeping an eye on it yeah i just keep telling myself over and over again net means no earlier than net means no earlier than that in fact i just tweeted that as like a jokey response to michael and it's got like 300 likes which is insane but i guess everybody's sort of feeling feeling the pain of these this rapid pace uh here go ahead michael i was gonna say i don't think anyone is stealing the i don't think anyone in the world is feeling the pain more than jack who has to drive 48 hours or whatever it is between flight tests yeah and to be clear i have flown before it's not a big deal to to fly there it that does work it does present some challenges though like i don't think i would be able to fit the robot on my on the plane um and and things like that there's things that i bring that i you know would not really be conducive to air travel if anyone is wondering like why don't you just fly um i take a lot of gear also i use the car that i drive out to traverse the beach which is really helpful in a variety of different ways because you know you can't really take a normal vehicle out onto the deep sand on the beach you see i mean i've pulled people out i have pulled multiple cars out from being stuck there on that on that sandy sandy beach so it's like it's it it does take a long time to drive but flying also doesn't solve all the problems although it does work sometimes just to head that question off at the pass also covet i don't really i feel far more comfortable personally um driving versus being in a sort of a sealed tube with other people uh uh actually you mentioned the robot and i know i'm sure dos would have some input on this but uh i know a lot of people in chat ask about can we see kind of what the robot setups look like and what kind of equipment we use we do have some sort of behind-the-scenes stuff in work as far as that goes don't say it's that far a long time it's gonna come out tomorrow but okay yeah all right let me be clear not coming like anytime very very soon but we know we know that you guys have wanted to see that um so we are working on it um it's not gonna work yet though okay we have to work on it at some point okay there you go right now we're spending all our effort on getting upgraded robots to boko tikka for sn10s test flight the current robots we're using the ones you're looking at when we are not on mary's camera or about 300 robots so we can have much better hardware now that we know that the existing system works so we are going to upgrade the robots but that is the current priority rather than behind the scenes content at this point once that's done and we have more bandwidth we can work on behind the scenes content yeah and this will be a little bit of a stretch but if you think of our current robot set up as the suborbital launch pads the the upgraded ones are like the orbital pad i know it's a stretch i'm sorry but in that the up the upgraded robots that das is working on are far far more robust and way better in a variety of ways so that will be pretty cool to get those deployed and like you said all of our really all of dos's bandwidth right now is on that but at some point in the future to be determined when not anytime soon necessarily caveat caveat etc weasel words uh definitely we need to do something like that because i i mean i'm i'm on the same page i want to see the the robot factory i want to do the robot live stream that's going to be awesome i'm just looking around at different camera angles that methane line is getting pretty clear it's always so hard to know what's happening yeah that does kind of look like frost on that methane tank right now they just install one of those like led crawls you know like like a ticker on the bottom just somewhere around the tank farm it's like oh it just just reports whatever the status is how nice would that be let's go back to this angle look like that frost is it wrapping all the way around it's hard to tell you've got the heat sealed tiles on the far left at that level it's interesting that they put that large heat heat tile section right on the bulkhead the common bulkhead between the two tanks i wonder if they're trying to test something related to possibly some slightly different temperatures in that area that would make sense right thermodynamically that those two different areas flex and and stretch or contract or whatever differently due to the slightly different temperatures from either either the fuel or the oxidizer and also just the bulkhead being there um yeah it seems like that would be a very challenging place to have tiles adhere and stay adhered and all of that so it makes sense that that would be why where you put a test patch similarly to i'm really wondering how the flaps are going to how the tiling around the flaps is going to look yeah and i am still going i mean going back and forth on these cameras i think i'm still going to hold my position but they already tanking i'm not really seeing frost wrap all the way around it seems like that frost on the bottom is actually on the bottom of the law of the liquid oxygen liquid oxygen tank i can speak properly is decreasing so i don't think they are loading more nitrogen i think that's just the artifact of the detanking process but i have never ever eaten my words trying to predict what's happening with 100 certainty i can confidently say there's absolutely no chance they are loading more ln2 right now disclaimer that was a joke like with that speculation [Laughter] oh man all learned to um say anything with with certainty whenever we whenever we can unless we're absolutely certain and even then yeah uh let's see uh question here do we know what software is used to test flight profiles for starship guessing it is not ksp i can't rule out the kerbal didn't at least play a small role in starship development but uh no they probably have there's a bit more professional softwares out there i don't think we know anything about what spacex specifically uses but there's plenty of sort of flight simulation and physics software that can be used a little more productively than kerbal space program let us know in chat if you think they are detanking or loading right now wait michael do your fancy thing where you can alright for the next minute polling is open type detanking or type what was this what was the other option loading loading and then at the end of a minute or something michael will look at i'm giving you work i'm sorry you can look at the chat and see it's not hard how many how many of each message uh i vote question mark i don't know i'm not even gonna try chat is like a 50 50 split based on the eyeball skim the fat man the methane tank on this one side looks pretty frosty to me but the the liquid oxygen tank looks like more condensation but it's really hard to tell i'll show the other angle right more one more time so you can make a judgment but i'm so personally of the detanking argument just based on the fact we're not seeing any frost wrapping around the bottom of the liquid oxygen tank like we were earlier so there's nothing yeah i think i'm with you there's no frosting on the methane tank except for a very little bit at the at the start of its but the bulkhead well yeah that's it so chat is totally split i'm going to get the exact numbers but okay that's 3 25 and 30 seconds i'm gonna cut off voting okay all right you got 15 less than 15 seconds chat let us know if you think loading or detanking just type one or the other into chat you have five four three two one cryo i didn't want to say liftoff yeah yeah i was gonna say hold hold hold but nice good stuff all right voting is closed stop stop with the chats everybody wow chat votes for loading by almost double it's like two-thirds to one-third oh well really i'm not sure i'm seeing enough votes i'm only seeing 118 votes for loading and 61. i thought i saw more messages than that so maybe like nightbot or the anti-spam filter was messing with the votes but yeah two thirds scroll by it's it's yeah it seems like had to be more than that i think the anti-spam filter might have gotten involved but nasa space flight in chat says deloading which just makes me grip my teeth so here's a question for jack from chat saying do you think the starship is what nasa wanted the shuttle to be yeah this is like a variation on a lot of questions that we get pretty frequently i do think in a lot of ways starship is like what shuttle should have been or i mean i don't think shuttle necessarily should have been anything too different than what it was uh it served a purpose and that purpose wasn't necessarily just build a space station or put things in space there was a variety of purposes to the space shuttle including national prestige and satisfying the defense industry and a number of other factors that said i do think shuttle in a lot of ways should have never been made an operational vehicle and would have been better served by being a developmental vehicle for a number of years and then moving on to a shuttle 2.0 type architecture and there was a lot of uh there's multiple different vehicles over the years that had been proposed as a follow-on to shuttle but for various reasons none of those came to fruition and now we're looking at what by all accounts really does seem to be um in in many ways an evolution of a lot of the you know philosophies behind shuttle and why it was the way that it was so okay the condensation level on mary's camera angle is decreasing on the liquid oxygen tank so i'm going to continue to stick to my detanking claim yeah i think i agree um and a lot of people asking in chat if the test has been successful we technically won't know that until they move on to the next one so once they stop making cryo attempts and they start making static fire attempts we'll know that it's past cryo or unless elon says something but right now it's looking like they're completing a successful this is consistent with completing a successful cryogenic test yeah that's kind of what we're expecting the static fire attempt could occur as soon as wednesday for whatever reason there are no road closures scheduled for tuesday so presumably they've got some other activities that the pad are working on on tuesday but no static fire attempt until wednesday at the earliest which makes that thursday flight date even more tight that would require a one day turnaround between the static fire and the flight test and that includes like fts installation and stuff like that so to help what days are the tfrs open for again it starts thursday but it's for through when through saturday so thursday friday and saturday although we know that they try to limit beach closures on the weekends so they have a tfr for saturday which means it's an opportunity if perhaps the weather was going to be perfect on that date and they thought it was their only window maybe they could negotiate and deal with the county but it is something they try to avoid so thursday and friday are the most likely options although i think as padre on twitter had tweeted that there's a cold front coming in thursday so weather might not be good for that time that time of the week anyways who's got a pen they're clicking or something who's clicking a pen oh wait that might have been me i thought i was muted sorry how dare you busted i'm actually playing with a prototype moon i don't know i can't i see i can't talk about that sorry i have a little 3d printed prototype thing sitting on my desk uh let's see you got some more questions here um here we go a super chat question here from tony saying close your ears jack how many test flights starship and booster do you think will occur this year assuming no major failures she well i mean at least they could hit a piece of like once a month even like if sn10 flies within the next week or so yep another one in march yep i don't know if you figure between starship and booster one a month you could have upwards of ten which seems like an insane amount right it is but that's kind of the way they're heading they're heading towards a really rapid gains um of course it took a while for starship prototypes to get there so maybe super heavy boosters need to like ramp up a little bit but yeah i mean they could hit as 10 or more this year maybe i don't know that would be my answer to that um when is bn1 going to fly great question i'm not sure they still only have stacked the bottom tank which is the methane tank no that's a lie they stack the liquid oxygen tank first even though it's going on top of the booster so they only have about half of it maybe slightly more than half of it's stacked so far there's a b big depressurization event um but until they're still working on stacking it so i'm not sure we have a good estimate on bn1 um within a couple months maybe but uh other than that we're not sure yeah a message in chat imagine in the future a school field trip going to the moon or mars that would be interesting i'm getting some magic school bus vibes right yeah mrs see frizzle team g tank is clearly claiming victory here but i do i do wonder i do wonder though the way to frost went with previous static fires when we only had one camera or previous amplifiers previous proof tests when we only had one camera angle i think we may have based on what we saw today i think we may have been wrong when we said that all the content when the tank got fully covered in condensation that was evidence of the test happening i think that might have actually just been the detanking process after the actual pressurization test that happened based on what we saw today with our different camera angles and we could you know go around the different sides of starship and figure out where the frost was because we did not see we saw the actual hard frost line was decreasing when all this condensation formed and we have seen on static fire attempts the condensation increases often when they are detanking so i'm wondering if the actual previous cryogenic proof test when we said they were about to do the test if we may have actually been wrong based on the condensation we saw today but now this i mean this big long depressed vent definitely looks like an end of test fit yeah yes and the condensation is rapidly decreasing right now uh supercharged questionnaire does anyone know the changes for sn15 it's already in progress can't be three millimeter steel yet elon said major changes um i think we're pretty sure three millimeter steel is part of the changes or at least that's a very good guess um they've been i mean they have the test tank that's out there which is three millimeter thick um so they've had three millimeter components already made um so it's possible that sm15 has incorporated that even though they're still testing it um i don't know if there are other i mean that's a pretty major change that's a 25 decrease in the thickness of the steel so uh that's a big weight saving measure as far as keeping starship strength requirements where they need to be um i don't know if we have any other good really good bets as to other things some people have said maybe they'll be a more complete heat shield complement to sn15 perhaps a new landing leg design but those have all been speculation um i think we'll have to yield to when mary starts seeing that vehicle kind of gets stacked and assembled to look for some major changes at that point interesting and slightly unfortunate tfr update jack the 1800 foot tfr for testing in boca chica has been replaced by a 7200 foot one so it seems like any low altitude photography flight from an airplane is no longer going to be possible unless you bring a long lens with you well it would still wouldn't be low altitude right but yeah that sounds like uh i mean yeah it wouldn't be low altitude you could potentially get photos above 7 200 feet i think rgb has attempted that but yeah when rgb got pictures of the wreckage from the air that was from 7 200. yeah correct so it's possible it's just not ideal yep um you know i i'm not gonna lie that's a bummer but it's also not surprising to me based on stuff that i've heard and also um you know i i feel like i if you're one of our members or if you listen to all these streams i feel like maybe some of you probably have like oh well jack's about to go on on rant 2a now and rant 2a i guess is it's not always going to be how it how it is right now the way that starship development the way that boca chica is everything about what we know can change at the drop of a hat and if if what you're telling me michael you know going forward is that there's a 7200 foot standing tfr replacing the 1600 foot or 1800 foot whatever it was i mean so be it things change that's that's why i drive 48 hours to get to boca chica to catch a test because we're in the wild west of starship development right now and things won't always be as they are now so you kind of have to cherish and take advantage of things now while we can for sure it makes me really glad that i was able to get up in the air and mary was able to get up in the air um when i was there for seal number nine and look at that vent and that is it absolutely 100 thanks to everybody's support that we were able to pull that off i mean huge huge huge and if if i don't ever get to fly around the build site or the launch site at 1800 feet above sea level ever again oh so be it but at least like i got some really cool stuff while you could i mean two starships on the pad from the air that's for the first time ever like that i don't know how i don't know how much you can top that right so i yeah bittersweet but so be it these things change long story short appreciate all the better chica content we can get when we get it because who knows how long it's going to last and hopefully i mean hopefully spacex is not going to build huge walls everywhere i don't think they could hide everything i no i certainly think we're going to have some form of content for the foreseeable future but what extent that's possible remains to be seen yeah and i don't even think it's necessarily a matter of like oh what if they build a giant wall or something because just look at the they built the giant wall and look at what look at what you're seeing right now we see straight over the giant wall almost to the bottom of pad a so not a big deal um thing is is we've talked about this even on this stream what if starship reaches some operational state or some state in its development where they're like right okay pick everything up and move over to florida or start building them in you know in kate at the cape and maybe they'll still do some work at poca but you know stuff gets moved behind closed doors and that's entirely possible i mean we we don't know what the future holds but i'm certainly glad that the present and the past have been as awesome as they have so far i mean just imagine imagine driving around cape canaveral like with a saturn v on the on the pad being like i'm gonna drive exactly over here and climb up on this specific dune because i've done it before and i know that this dune will give me a good sunset and it's like a hundred yards away from the field like it's just bonkers you just couldn't couldn't do it got some more super chat questions to get through here um hannah aside from firing all three engines on landing do you think there's been enough time to make an other any other changes to the raptor engines to correct for the sn9 landing failure so talking about actually fixing this the main actual raptor engine problem um keep in mind that they're gonna they're installing new engines on the stand or on the vehicle that have been tested on test stands already um so uh if they already know what the raptor engine problem on sn9 was they can then look for that same problem on the other engines and make sure that it's not there so they should have had enough time to do that inspection and figure out um what the actual engine problem was um and assuming that they have done that then they should be able to make sure that is not present on the new vehicle so uh yes basically is the long answer to that uh and then another one here from steve saying is there any rough estimate for the payload that a future double wide starship and subaru might get to orbit so this is talking about elon's mention of a future evolution of the vehicle that could go to 18 meters diameter and i don't think there have been any payload estimates for that kind of vehicle no it would depend a lot on how they scale it up if they scale up the height as well um if it what kind of propulsion system if it uses if it would still be the same type of raptors or if they scale those up even so no payload estimates for that yet how will starships be able to perform pre-flight tests on mars due to time delay and likely not having most of the spacex pad crew and stargate team to ensure flight readiness huh well so if you're talking you're talking about martian launch operations you can program a lot of that to be done sort of autonomously and then the time delay is what 20 minutes or so so you could do all those tests and then hold for 20 minutes or i guess it's a round trip could be up to 40 minutes um before an actual like go command but you can program a lot of those checks in so what you can do is set up the program and if at any point the starship onboard computer sends any set of failures or things that don't look right you abort the countdown and stand down and then the engineers back on earth would look at the data apply some fixes remotely and then do the countdown again so starship can go through the countdown likely on its own at that point and abort if needed um it doesn't you don't need to have direct communication with the engineering teams on earth to actually step in and abort a problem if it arises because starship can do that itself that's how most launch vehicles actually operate all the pre-flight checks are done by the computers not by humans the humans are just monitoring the issues just a reminder if you have questions in chat you can tag us with at nasa spaceflight and we will try to answer them best they can i'm still looking at the queue and trying to pick out any good questions that we can answer here as far as the status update on the actual test it looks like they are detanking and completing the cryogenic proof test for today um it looked to be consistent with a pretty successful test so um but we won't know for sure unless elon says something or they move into the next test which would likely be a static fire test and like michael mentioned we have road closures not for tomorrow but starting again on wednesday so that would be the next day for testing after today unless that changes and there are also flight restrictions starting as early as thursday for a flight so um but that's our schedule update assuming today's test is successful i got a uh message from john kraus photos in chat what's up john thanks for tuning in who's dash oh it's just some photographer from here in florida i don't know if you know ah his name's john krause he's pretty great guy is he any good at what he does uh yeah he's pretty good he's all right i guess he's all right i guess uh shout out to mr krauss there uh let's see oh what does tfr stand for again uh tf stands for temporary flight restriction uh so that's basically an airspace closure to protect any aircraft in the area from starship operations and launch operations let's see here what else what would spacex do if a cryotest fails um well it depends on how it feels i mean if it fails like explosively and the vehicle pops um at that point you're kind of scrapping the vehicle and starting with the next one um as far as if it's just a small leak they can go and repair the leak and then continue testing um all depends on what exactly the failure mode actually is do you think each starship flight will need someone trained on board when flying passengers similar to a pilot and an airplane most spacecraft these days fly almost completely autonomously that goes to crew dragon um even soyuz doesn't have a whole lot of crew interaction i don't think and i think given ker dragons pretty much autonomous operation i would think spacex will have a similar idea for starship so not necessarily needing crew on board that are capable of so-called flying the air spacecraft um all crew on board will likely have to have some basic training on just operating systems in case of emergencies and things like that but that's not necessarily the same as being able to fly the vehicle um as long as the vehicle is still in contact with like ground control they can kind of handle those kind of issues from the ground um so probably not but i suppose it's not impossible that would be a requirement using nasa's view on propulsive landing for human flights as an example how do you see starship getting certified so you're talking about propulsive landing with humans on board for starship uh so the precedent for that is likely crew dragon which was at one point planned to have propulsive landing um the only reason that didn't happen is because nasa said well you would need a couple test flights to prove that that's reliable and said that we don't want to pay for those test flights so spacex wants to go that route they have to you know pay for those test flights on their own and so basically said well we'd rather not do that so could you could we do parachute landing instead which as which nasa would pay for those flights because that's less of a risky approach and kind of already proven on other systems so it's so it's a matter of funding the test flights that actually certify the missions seeing as spacex development is going to continue regardless and all these starship test flights are working towards proving that propulsive landing um i don't see that as a big obstacle for nasa certification as far as putting their cargo or crew on board the vehicle uh musical wolves with a super chat is this amount of cryo testing normal for starship seems to be taking longer than other starships i think this is pretty normal for cryo testing uh do you guys have any thoughts on that yeah the theme is about the usual to me i don't know if we have any actual numbers in front of us right now but i don't think this is actually out of the ordinary for cryogenic testing as far as starship goes uh question here for super heavy why have 26 raptors or so underneath instead of just scaling up the raptor to three times the size thus three times less engine is needed it is a lot easier to have clusters of engines on board than to scale up an engine scaling up a liquid fueled engine is not a trivial task it would be it is much simpler to have just more engines um it also gives you engine out capability because i've and we've seen this with falcon 9 this is part of falcon 9 development too that the if i an engine failures dir it fails during launch the flight can continue using the other eight engines same thing will apply for super heavy if a raptor engine fails the remaining raptors will be sufficient to continue the flight so um yes so there's two benefits to that um scaling up the raptor to a bigger size is not actually that trivial would be a lot of work behind that um very much likely easier yeah john i see your message in chat you can't just scale up a cad file that's not how that works and it looks like the thomas launched tfrs have been replaced by two tfrs which have a minor modification and that minor modification onto new tfrs is to say launch pending off so office is obviously short for authorization so faa is making it clear that they have not authorized this launch yet we've seen some confusion with the public getting confused about if the tfr being posted meant that the launch had been authorized which clearly is not the case from previous incidents but the faa is now making it clear in writing that when they give a tfr it does not mean that the launch has been authorized and the tfrs now say that again launch pending off is what the tfr is not say so that means the spacex does not have a long license for sn10 yet although of course they could receive that launch license in the coming days that's interesting so we'll keep an eye on that but uh still that does sort of indicate at least a potential target of no other earlier than thursday and uh we got a message here from mary that's saying there's a vehicle headed to the pad so that would be another sign that they are actually completing today's test and they're reopening the pad right now as we speak we'll it'll should show up in our camera view pretty quickly i think this is the camera view with the the best spot of the road to the pad right michael uh we have a wider one as well but mary oh we do have some cars there you go there you go had we opened we'll mark that off on our timeline so i mean if i had to guess it was a successful test of course we have to get some form of more definitive confirmation like a static fire attempt on wednesday but we will also check in with mary and see if the road block has been opened if they open the roadblock that would be another good sign that would confirm that they are done for today and mary just confirmed that as well so we will move our final status on our timeline as the active status which is the road open mark so we have completed the timeline for today's test it looks like that is all for today's coverage so comments i think whenever you're good to wrap this up we can do that uh sure thing so to recap after an abort earlier in the day or at least an apparent abort earlier and a brief return to the pad the pad did clear again and it looked like what appeared to be a successful cryogenic proof test um a sort of nitrogen leak test on starship which prefaces an eventual static fire and launch attempt pending more official information uh we don't see anything that would indicate that today's test wasn't successful and uh it was consistent with previous successful tests so uh looks like a successful day of testing and uh schedule for the rest of the week again no road closures tomorrow um so like like some other type of work going on tomorrow but uh a static fire test could then occur maybe no earlier than wednesday and then according to airspace restrictions pending faa authorization the launch could occur as early as thursday again that of course depends on a successful static fire test as well but that is going to do it for today's testing really quick one last super chat here from chuck oak thank you for your support i also want to extend this big thank you to everyone who watches these streams especially all the one who's sitting in super chats and joining memberships uh these streams cannot happen without your support and we are continuing to reinvest that into improving and expanding our coverage um also do we have the member thank you screen to show up on this yeah uh yes you do okay so we'll do that too just a big thank you to our top tier oh boy it's a good reminder to me that i have to get to work to make the font size smaller because oh because we keep running out of room looks like we have room for maybe one more row on the launch director line but not much space so thank you all for the amazing support it was about one year ago where we had about three names on this list so right actually it was less than a year ago i was in march but we started the membership program i think so thank you all for support over the past 11 months thank you so much yeah big thank you to all of those members and of course a big thank you to everyone who simply tunes into these streams and hangs out and puts messages in the chat asks us questions uh we really do appreciate it i also want to give a huge thank you to the team behind the stream of course we have michael baylor handling the production side of things helping out with some questions and doing some commentary as well um i know if i talk long enough there we go he'll put his info on the screen he also of course is the manager of next space flight which is a great app for launch updates and starship updates including if you go to wenhop.com that's where you can see the latest as far as road closures and starship testing is concerned so big thank you to michael for joining us today yeah look at that sweet oh i just talked over michael's sign off but look at that sweet vandenberg selfie i mean come on if someone has a video healthy as their as their pick you know they're legit i think pauline took that photo so thank you to you pauline for that i think i think i need to update it next time go to vandenberg so remind me jack i need you to take a photo or pauline or somebody else take a photo of me next time you go to vandenberg because that is from iridium 7 i think i think that's a radium seven i'm not positive but that's a year and a half old now at least quality stuff uh we also got working in the back channel a little bit also working on the robot factory but i know he's in calm so i'll shut him out really quick das or also known as john galloway the other production mastermind behind the stream so thanks to dos for his support today also got jack byer joining me on comms today jack thanks for joining us photographer and video editor and commentator extraordinaire for nasa's space flight and master fan of the polar corridor oh my god you guys were talking about that earlier weren't you i almost jumped in nope we were not i don't think we were but we can talk about it now if you want no i don't wanna i i hate it too i'm teasing jack about something i also hate so we don't acknowledge the polar corridor on these streams but uh yeah thank you so much everybody for watching and like we were saying a few moments ago to all of our launch directors and uh flight engineers to have look at that methane truck go oh yep some more food for starship sn10 to have to make the font sizes smaller and smaller and smaller like that is is a really really good problem to have and we wouldn't be able to do this without everybody's epic levels of support so i feel like at a certain point we're going to have to make that screen like the end of um like a pharmaceutical commercial where it's like just reads everything out really fast like i'll have to record somebody saying it and then we'll speed it up like 300 x thank you like go through all the names i don't know it's a good problem to have is my point so thank you everybody for all the support thanks for watching until the next one hopefully i don't have to get in my car and drive to boca chica tomorrow [Laughter] thank you jack i also want to give thank you chris bergen joined us on the stream i predicted you wrong yeah i was saving the best for last michael come on i forgot that's what happened i forgot chris bergen was on the stream earlier with some commentary as well he's not on anymore but thank you to chris for joining us and then as michael tried to predict the last but certainly not least the person behind all of our boca chica coverage mary chicago on twitter if you're not following her on twitter what are you doing you gotta follow her on twitter that's where all the latest updates as far as starship go are concerned uh mary of course down there every day doing photography and video of the production site and all of that gets edited up into daily update videos on this youtube channel so huge thank you to mary as always for helping up with the live streams as well and if you like the content that she is giving us as well her and the robot army uh please feel free to subscribe to nasa space flight and we will have live coverage of big testing events like this in boca chica launch coverage from cape canaveral and of course those daily videos from boca chica and lots of other very cool starship content my name is thomas burkhart for nasa spaceflight signing off thank you so much for joining us on today's stream and we will see you next time later everybody thomas wouldn't it be really funny if i said go yankees and cut off the stream [Music] um [Music] let's go mets see everybody

Channel: NASASpaceflight

Views: 414,774

Rating: 4.9342237 out of 5

Keywords: spacex, starship, boca chica, testing, bocachicagal, live, SN5, hop, launch, success

Id: 01j90yvN_tA

Length: 225min 36sec (13536 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 08 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/ArtOfWarfare]

For context, how long was it for SN8 and 9 from first cryoproof until their launches?