this episode is sponsored by Squarespace On April 20th of 2023 SpaceX carried out the
first Integrated Flight Test of the Starship and Super Heavy Booster. After years of waiting,
Starship Addicts around the world were tuned in to watch one of the most anticipated inaugural
flights in the modern Spaceflight era. And, just after 8:33 in the morning, Starship officially
became the most powerful rocket ever produced. This was an incredible event to witness
firsthand and the sound generated by the superheavy booster's 33 Raptor engines
is something I will never forget. tThis test flight was a huge success
for SpaceX even though the vehicle was destroyed before it could reach
the point of stage separation. It's been just over two weeks since the
launch and by now, most of you have already heard the details about what occurred
during the aftermath of this event. In particular there has been an unprecedented
amount of attention directed towards the destruction of the blast surface
under the Orbital Launch Mount. As a result, SpaceX has received a lot
of criticism for not implementing a traditional flame trench into original
design of the Orbital Launch Mount. While it is true that a flame trench could
have been a guaranteed method for preventing something like this from happening, that doesn't
mean it’s the only solution that will work. For the past 5 months SpaceX has been
developing a MASSIVE, first of its kind water cooled steel blast surface which they
planned to install after the first launch. Instead of delaying the test
flight until this system was ready, SpaceX made a calculated decision to beef
up the pad using a highly specialized form of concrete which should have been able
to survive for at least a single launch. Unfortunately this did not work out as planned, and instead of eroding away the top layer of the
blast surface, the Superheavy booster appeared punch straight through it like it wasn't
even there. So how did this happen? Did SpaceX vastly overestimate the strength of this
concrete, or is there something we are missing? After completing our analysis, we have
concluded that this idea may have been destined to fail from the start, but not for the
reasons that most of you are probably thinking. In my opinion there was a small, but critical
design flaw that may have been overlooked and if not for this one thing, the results
would have been considerably different. My name is Zack Golden and welcome
to another CSI Starbase Deep Dive Investigation.
[Music] Hey everyone, thank you for joining us!
Before we get started with today's deep dive investigation, I wanted to take a
second to express my appreciation for the level of effort the SpaceX team
put into their launch day coverage. The overall quality of production was amazing,
and the amount of unique camera angles from the drones and pad cameras was exactly what
all of us Starship fans were hoping for. Beyond that, the commentators did a fantastic
job educating people about the history of the Starship program and explaining all of SpaceX's
short and long term goals for this vehicle. So thank you to SpaceX for
putting on such a great show Even though this was repeatedly mentioned during
the livestream event, I think it's important to re-iterate the fact that the main goal of this
integrated flight test was to get the Starship clear of the pad. This means that no matter
what happened after this, whether the pad was partially destroyed, or the ship failed
to reach stage separation it would still be viewed as a success in the eyes of SpaceX.
For this reason, anyone who labels the results as a failure, is simply writing their own
narrative. From the viewpoint of SpaceX, a failure of this mission would have resulted
in a total annihilation of the launch complex. As you all know, that did not occur so even
though there was significant damage to the pad, the overall mission was still accomplished. It
will take numerous attempts for SpaceX to achieve rapid reusability with the Starship, and until
they do we should not expect the launch system to be 100% rapidly re-usable either.
But with that being said, over the past 7 or 8 months SpaceX engineers have been
working diligently to design protective measures that have drastically increased the
robustness of Stage Zero. From what I can tell, these new upgrades that really haven't gotten
much attention have performed extremely well. So after we explain everything that went wrong,
and what SpaceX will need to change going forward, we will spend the second half of this
episode analyzing what went right. There a lot more things that we should be
celebrating here instead of criticizing when we discuss this engineering marvel.
I'm going to be as thorough as possible which means some of this will be things you
have already heard, but a majority of it will be all new information. This episode has
been in the making for nearly 7 months and we have a lot of exclusive animations from Ryan
Hansen Space which will help us along the way. So with that public service
announcement out of the way let's get into this deep dive investigation.
Alright let's begin with the first major detail that I noticed during the launch
attempt. This is a rather large one because it's something that I predicted would not
happen and ended up being dead wrong about. What I'm talking about here is the raptor chill
collection system for the superheavy booster, which as you may have noticed, were
still connected to the engines. For those who don't know
what I'm talking about here, I'm referring to these frosted pipes
on the bottom of the launch mount ring. I was wondering if the commentators would mention
this considering they have discussed the chill down sequence on previous suborbital flight tests
for Starship, but unfortunately they didn't. This was a change that was made after the
Booster 7 anomaly that occurred during spin prime testing on July 11th of 2022. Long
story short, SpaceX decided that they no longer wanted to dump liquid oxygen from the raptor
engine prechill process underneath the vehicle. To prevent high energy detonations from occurring
during the engine spin up and ignition sequence, SpaceX realized they needed to remove as much
oxygen as possible from this danger zone. So instead of venting the liquid gas mixture
underneath the vehicle they began diverting it away from the launch mount.
The solution they settled on, was to connect stainless steel flex hoses to
all 33 raptor engines. On the opposite end, the hoses are connected to pipes that were secured
to the inside edge of the launch mount skirt. From there the 33 pipes are connected to a
circular collection manifold and then liquid oxygen is routed to a retention pond located
adjacent to the integration tower. It was pretty amazing being able to see video footage of
the collection pond from the aerial perspective. Raptor chill down began right around the
20 minute mark in the countdown which was interesting because during most static fire
tests, we have seen raptor chill commence immediately after propellant loading begins.
Anyways as I mentioned in my deep dive investigation on this topic, I didn't expect
to see this occur during the first integrated flight test. Up until the 31 engine static fire
test, I believed that the flex hoses were routed through the side of the opening created by
the missing engine shielding. I couldn’t think of any other explanations for why they would
wait so long to replace the damaged shielding. Because of this, I also assumed that there
would be no way SpaceX would launch this vehicle with 33 flex hoses coming in
through the side of the engine skirt. But when Booster 7 was rolled out to
the launch complex for the final time, we noticed these fittings on the bottom of
the engine skirt. This was my first time seeing them up close which is when I realized
that these were connection ports for flex hoses Initially they just looked like huge bolts to
attach the shielding plates…which is slightly embarrassing that the correct answer was
right there in front of us the whole time. These 33 flex hoses remained attached until T+5
seconds. As the booster slowly lifted itself off of the hold down arms, each of these
hoses were ripped free and then partially obliterated by the outer 20 raptor engines.
As you can imagine, this this also caused all of the stainless steel pipes to be destroyed. While
walking through the debris field a few days later, I actually came across one of these
flex hoses out in the wetland area. This is something that I believe will
see changed in the very near future. The permanent solution will likely
be incorporated into the raptor QD. This would remove the need for replacing all
of this damaged pipework after every launch. As of now, we have already seen the first signs
that this will actually occur. On April 29th, 9 days after the launch, Starship
Gazer caught these incredibly well timed images of all of the flex hoses being
removed from the inside of the launch ring The next day he also captured these images
showing a pallet full of raptor QD's laying on the ground near the Orbital Launch Mount. So
it looks like SpaceX has wasted very little time getting to work on this upgrade process. We can't
say for sure yet whether or not this change will include raptor chill collection or if these are
simply being removed for inspection purposes. But, we will have our answer pretty much
immediately when Booster 9 rolls out with all of it engines installed. If we don’t see
these ports on the bottom of B9's skirt, we can probably assume that the raptor chill system
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off your first purchase of a website or domain. You can find that link in the description below. Moving on to the next milestone in the
countdown, at T-11 Minutes John Inspruker announced that the hold down clamps used to
secure the booster in place had been unlatched. [John Insprucker] We are also configuring
the launch pad for liftoff the booster hold Downs have been unlatched they'll
be ready to retract at liftoff This was pretty shocking to learn that
the hold down clamps are released this early into the countdown sequence but it
makes sense to do this for many reasons. The first reason is because at this point
in the countdown there is upwards of 4000 tons of propellant in the first and second
stage vehicles. Im not sure how much wind speed would be required to tip over the Starship
when it near fully loaded with propellant but, it's probably safe to say that we would
be talking about hurricane force winds. This makes it even more important
to monitor the load on the hold down arms as engines are igniting.
This is something I discussed in my most recent deep dive investigation which
you can view here if you haven't already. In that episode I mentioned the possibility of
multiple engines failing to ignite during a launch and the need to be able to safely balance the
load in order to ensure that the booster doesn't shift to the side and collide with the hold down
arms or the side of the orbital launch mount. Well, lo and behold that's exactly what
occurred. Booster 7 ended up losing 3 engines immediately at startup. It didn't collide
with anything on the launch, but it did perform a pretty serious powerslide as predicted. We will
touch on this again later in the investigation. Before we discuss what occurred at the moment
of liftoff I want to give a brief mention about the Detonation Suppression system. The
detonation suppression system uses water, and high pressure gaseous nitrogen gas to
disperse oxygen from underneath the engines. By doing this, SpaceX is able to
further reduce the possibility of a detonation occurring under the
vehicle during engine startup. This system was activated at T-15 seconds and from
there it had less than 30 seconds to live. Once the booster throttled up and destroyed the pad,
this system became one of the first casualties. Looking at images taken two days after the
event we can see that the nitrogen down pipes that connect to circular manifold in the
middle of the table were completely destroyed. This is not designed to be a single use
system like the raptor chill collection so this definitely an undesirable outcome.
Luckily it shouldn't be a huge deal to replace them and during future launches, I expect that
this may have a better chance of surviving. Miraculously, the circular nitrogen manifold
in the center of the table managed to survive the punishment. This was the one component
that I was actually convinced would sustain some pretty serious damage, but I'm
glad I was wrong about that as well! Beyond this there was some slight damage to
the fire extinguisher system, as one of the pipes that are used to supply water to the spiral
nozzles in the center of the table was damaged. This isn't a huge deal though because ideally,
this system will never actually be used anyways. Alright next up is the moment of
ignition, which occurred at T-2 Seconds It took 7 seconds to ignite all 33 engines
and throttle up before Starship lifted off of the pad for the first time ever.
It's truly incredible the amount of force being generated by the super heavy booster
and the crazy part is, that this was still 1.5 million lbs of thrust away from being max
power. Looking at this amazing footage from The Everyday Astronaut and Cosmic Perspective, you can
see Massive shockwaves traveling up the vehicle. There is no way to know for certain, but if there
was one moment during this launch that would have resulted in the loss of thermal protection
tiles on ship 24, it was this probably this one. Now this is just my opinion, but I think
if the ship was hit with flying debris from the concrete tornado then we would
see more than just a few isolated tiles here and there being damaged or torn free.
SpaceX took a lot of care over the past several months to make sure all of these
tiles were properly seated so that they wouldn't be shaken free as the shock waves
are traveling up the body of the vehicle. Overall, I think the TPS tiles performed
much better than a lot of folks expected, as far as we can tell. Although it is likely that
losing this small number of tiles would still have resulted in the destruction of the vehicle during
the re-entry phase. Unfortunately, Ship 24 didn’t make it that far so we weren't able to see how
the ship would hold up under those conditions. The addition of a water deluge system in the
future, may significantly reduce the severity of the shock waves by absorbing a lot of the
acoustic energy produced by the 33 raptor engines. One would think this would become even
more important once Starship moves on to missions where its actually carrying a payload.
I should note however, that we are no longer certain that SpaceX is actually intending
to install a real water deluge system, but we will get to that here in a bit.
Next up - Liftoff. As I mentioned, ignition occurred at T-2 seconds, it took 4
seconds to ignite the 33 engines and 1 second into throttle up at T+ 03 seconds we witnessed
the first large slab of concrete ejected from the blast surface at the base of the launch mount.
This is a bit of a guess on the time, because it didn't become visible until T+ 05 seconds. However
based on the speed it was traveling I estimated that it occurred roughly 2 seconds before
It's important to note which side fractured and gave way first because it explains why there
was significantly more damage in this area. Essentially, if we are looking to identify the
point of failure in this situation, the best place to look is around the area with the most damage.
But more on this later The western and northern sides of the blast
surface were the next to be blown out as the booster continued to increase its throttle. You
can actually see the moment where the violent exhaust flow punches through the blast surface
and comes in contact with the earth underneath the pad. It happens shortly after the large
chunks of debris are ejected in this location. Notice the dark cloud that erupts from beneath the
table shortly after T+06 seconds. Following this, the concrete next to the launch mount in
this same direction was ripped free as if someone took a giant spatula and tossed
the slabs of concrete into the orbital tank farm like it was Sunday morning pancakes.
A large chunk of concrete landed on the compressed gas cylinders, and thankfully this didn't cause a
secondary explosion especially since some of these cylinders just to the left of these are storing
compressed methane at 200 bar or, close to 3000 psi. If these were punctured, it could have ended
really badly. But they weren't so let's move on 3 seconds later at T+09 there is another
dark plume that appears on the back side of the launch mount. This is the explosion that
sent all of the debris that destroyed the press cameras that were located on the landing pad, and
across the street at the employee parking lot. Alright now let's take a look at the
aftermath and see if we can get a better understanding of why this happened.
In the center of what used to be the blast surface you can see exposed auger
pilings that have been partially destroyed. I think this is a very important detail,
but in order to explain why that is we need to quickly get a better understanding of how the
foundation of this launch mount was constructed. The first step in forming the base structure of
the Orbital launch mount was to place 6 massive auger pilings roughly 30 meters deep into the
ground. In this image you can see the large holes which had already been completed, Laying
nearby are 2 of the 90 foot long rebar cages waiting to be used in the remaining piles.
These auger piles are extremely important because they are used to anchor
the structure into the ground. Once all 6 pilings were completed the hexagonal
base structure was formed and then the rebar cages were placed inside and also filled with concrete.
These are the same strands of rebar that were left exposed after this side of
the base structure was blown out. Now, this is the important part. In the center of
the pad, there were 24 smaller auger piles drilled to an unknown depth into the ground.
These are used to support the blast surface in the center of the pad.
One thing to note here is that each of these piles were reinforced using a single
strand of rebar instead of a full cage with a circular grouping of rods coming out of the top
I think this is pretty odd because it makes it so these aren't anywhere near as strong
as they could be. Our field agents were unable to find many examples of this as we were
researching this topic. But from my understanding, this type of piling could be significantly more
vulnerable to cracks that can form as a result of shear stresses being exerted on the column. I will
explain why that’s important here in a second. The following flyover showed a few layers
of rebar laid in the center of the hexagon. It doesn't look very thick, at least not
as thick as it should be considering this pad has to tie in with the pilings without
leaving several feet of dirt in-between. So I believe there was already a larger base layer
of concrete present at this time underneath all that rebar. It's hard to tell from this image,
but there will be more evidence of this as we go. After this the secondary layer
of concrete was filled in. Fast forwarding 2 years…On November 14th of
2022, Booster 7 performed a 14 engine static fire test which caused a significant amount
erosion to the top layer of the blast surface. Looking back on this, the raining debris truly
was pretty miniscule in terms of the size pebbles that were blasted away from the pad.
This left several craters in the blast surface directly beneath the engines.
SpaceX replaced the top layer with an unknown material that was likely similar to the
martyte used underneath the two suborbital pads. This had to be replaced yet again after
the 11 engine test on November 29th. In my opinion, this was one of the most violent
looking static fires that we saw on the Orbital Launch mount, even beating out the 33 engine test.
Following this test SpaceX upgraded the blast surface for a second time, now using a
higher strength material known as Fondag RS. As Elon mentioned during his recent twitter
space discussion, Fondag is literally the strongest form of concrete in the world.
This time around we were able to see the formwork that was laid down before the Fondag
was placed on top. Looking from the aerial view, once again you can see that there does appear to
be a base layer of concrete underneath the rebar. As far as we can tell, this was never replaced
One thing I haven't figured out, is how the top layer was removed without damaging the base layer
underneath. I'm not saying this is what happened, but I do think we should consider the
possibility that the jack hammers used to remove the top layer could potentially
have caused microcracks to form in the base layer which if true, would be a very bad thing.
So after the top layer was replaced with Fondag, B7 performed a 31 engine static fire test and
everything seemed to work out pretty well, at least on the surface. But if those cracks were
present in the base layer, then they easily could have been made worse during the 31 engine test.
Even though the thrust was only at 47% during this static fire, that is still
a significant amount of force. Let's take another look at the arrangement of
24 auger piles in the center of the hexagonal base structure. This time lets focus on
the areas where the piling are not present. You can see that in these 4 corner there
are no piles present at all. The other two corners do have these supports but for some
reason, there are none in these locations. Now this might not be a huge deal if
you assume that the only place where the piles are needed is directly under the
engines. I mean, just using common sense, this is obviously where we should expect the force
being exerted by the engines to be the greatest. While this is true, it doesn’t mean
that outside of this circle there is not going to be any force pushing down on
the blast surface. That’s not how gases work. According to our estimations, and keep
in mind these numbers may not be exact, the stagnation pressure directly beneath a raptor
should be about 16 bar which is equivalent to just over 160 tons per square meter.
The gaps between the individual plumes will probably be about the same as well.
So it's fair to say that we can expect to see 16 bar of pressure across the blast
surface directly underneath the booster. Outside of the hexagonal ring, which is also past
the perimeter of the 6 columns, the pressure will be just above ambient. So about 1 bar.
In between those two areas there will be a pressure gradient as the supersonic exhaust
gasses are transitioning to a subsonic flow. Keep in mind that the exhaust gases start
off traveling at a speed of around Mach 3 as they exit the main combustion chamber
This means that the blast surface immediately outside of the radius of the 24 auger piles will
still be experiencing around 15 bar of pressure or 150 tons per square meter. The heavily reinforced
concrete tension band between the legs could be experiencing around 10 bar or 100 tons per
square meter. Maybe it's less, maybe it's more. But hopefully you see my point here
So with this being said, I think the area that would be most at risk of failing
would be these four zones right here. Essentially these 4 corners are or…were under
supported. Now this obviously wasn't a problem during the 31 engine test because there was about
half the amount of force being exerted on the pad. But when the booster throttled up to full
thrust I think it's highly probable that this corner began to buckle and then
piling closest to the corner decided this was not what it signed up for and then failed
due to excessive shear stress. Immediately after that the base layer of concrete was fractured and
broke free from the rest of the blast surface. This opened up a crack in the base layer
which gave the exhaust plume direct access to the sand layer underneath. Depending on
how much water was present underneath here, this could have produced a rather large steam
explosion as well. After this the corner that broke free was the first thing ejected from under
the OLM and I believe it came to rest right here. You can see a severed auger pile with the single
rod of rebar which is still attached to the concrete base layer of the blast surface. I don't
know if the Fondag layer was actually tied into the base using rebar, but I'm assuming there is
a possibility it wasn't because when I toured the aftermath I wasn't able to find any sections of
concrete that were still attached to the Fondag. The way you can differentiate the Fondag from
the concrete is by carelessly picking up one of these blocks without paying attention to the sharp
steel fibers embedded into the aggregate mixture. These steel strands help enhance the Fondag to prevent micro cracks from
occurring within the material. Anyways this failure set off a chain of
events where a giant crater was excavated by the booster's 33 engines while the remaining
3 corners of the pad began to fail in succession. Had they all failed at the same time, this
crater would likely be even larger. And also, had the booster remained on the pad for
even a second longer…this damage may have actually ended up being unrecoverable.
Now this is a rather intense bit of speculation here. Which is why I was really
grateful that I had the opportunity to ask Elon about this during the April 29th Starship
twitter space event and here's how that went. [Elon] We thought we would erode uh some amount of the concrete but that it would be
fine we certainly didn't expect to effectively what it looks like like when we went
up to full thrust probably shattered the concrete [Zack]-Um so is it possible that the base layer failed first instead of the
actual Fondag layer on top? [Elon] it is um but we're all getting
into some some amount of speculation here um one of the more probable explanations
is that when we went up to full thrust that that we may have compressed the sand
underneath the concrete to such a degree that the concrete uh effectively bent and then
cracked. that that's that is a leading theory So first of all I want to thank Elon for the
exceptional level of transparency and for the most part, not shying away from any of
the questions that were asked. I think it's awesome that he was willing sit down in front of
a large group and just talk about what happened. It truly helped us get a better understanding
of the events that took place. After hearing his response, I realized that
I needed to address one of the details he mentioned related to the compressed sand.
So looking at that example that I showed a few minutes ago you can see the main areas
where you might need to worry about sand being compressed is near those four unsupported
corners. This is where the concrete slab is primarily being supported by the sand underneath.
So it's pretty straight forward to imagine that 100 to 150 tons of force per square meter could
cause the sand to compress underneath. This, coupled with the vibrations from the
acoustic energy of the 33 raptor engines would likely be enough to cause the sand
to densify into a tighter configuration. Now because of the way the ground was
prepared prior to construction this would actually be a relatively small volume
change and shouldn't really cause too much of a loss in bearing capacity or shear strength.
But, the other thing that we have to consider into this equation is the height of the water
table. In the days after the pad was excavated by Booster 7 we noticed SpaceX pumping out
water from inside of the massive crater. If loose soil and sand is located below the
water table they can become saturated with water and once that happens, now we have to worry
about another phenomena known as liquefaction. As explained in this animation by Seismic
Solutions, because water is essentially incompressible, any densification of
these soils due to a seismic event like the one that occurred prior to liftoff,
will result in increased pressure in the water between the pores of the individual grains.
When this pore water reaches a pressure that is approaching the shear strength of the soil
than the grains will actually begin to lose contact with each other and essentially
transition to a liquid state. This can quickly result in the failure of the bearing
capacity within the soil and cause a collapse. So now that we understand what caused
the failure of this blast surface lets discuss the solution that SpaceX has come up
with to prevent this from occurring again. I have to be honest with you all, when I first saw
the images showing the damage to this structure I did not think it would be possible to repair this.
My initial opinion which I stated on twitter, was that we should not expect to see another
Starship launch until 2024 and that this may require SpaceX to start over from scratch.
Thankfully, my initial assumption was wrong, but I wanted to acknowledge that
before we jump into this next part. The first step to repairing and improving
this launch structure will involve excavating all of this unusable and damaged material
from out of this crater. SpaceX is already well underway with this process by now
After this, they will need to repair the lateral supports of the tension
ring in these three locations. Im not 100% certain yet on what will be required
for them to pull this off, so I won't bother speculating on how that will be accomplished.
We will just have to wait and see on that. In the center of the blast surface, SpaceX
will need to remove all of the damaged auger piling and replace them with new ones.
This time around we believe they will no be longer using the single strand of rebar
like they did the in the original design. In a recent video posted by Starship Gazer he
noticed new circular rebar cages being assembled near the berm in between the launch mount and
orbital tank farm. This will be a significant structural upgrade from what was present in the
original auger piles and these will be far less likely to form cracks and fail under shear stress.
Once this is complete, SpaceX will install a system that they began constructing back in
January of this year. We have been keeping our eyes on this for quite some time and
initially thought this was going to be some sort of water deluge system. It seems like
that may actually be a secondary function however and not its primary purpose
Thanks to the information Elon has provided over the past few weeks we now have
a better understanding of how it will work. I'm not going to go too deeply into this because
we are still not 100% certain what the final version will look like but here's what we do know.
This water cooled steel blast surface will be installed in place of…well everything that used
to be under the OLM. So one way or another, the Fondag and concrete base layer
would have eventually been removed. And its possible that the pre-existing auger
piles would have needed to be cropped down in order to allow a new base layer of concrete to be
formed several meters below its original height. I believe this will be needed in order
to create a base for these steel box frame structures to be placed into the
ground. We can't be 100% certain of this, because we have only spotted two of them thus far.
But we anticipate that these will be used to hold up the new blast surface and could theoretically
be mounted on top of mass dampers that will reduce the amount of vibrations transferred
to the ground. But that part is a stretch So the first step will be to excavate around
the hexagonal base structure so that this multi section water manifold
can be placed into the ground. This is similar to the one that was
constructed for pad 39a except at that location it was constructed as a single
manifold. They were able to get away with this because it was part of the original design
so they were able to route the piping for the propellant supply system with this in mind.
At Starbase there are two concrete culverts in the ground, which carry the various
cryo tubing and high pressure gas lines that supply the Orbital Launch Mount. In the
middle of those two culverts is a large amount of conduit buried in the ground that supplies
power and communications to the launch mount Because of these obstacles SpaceX had to get
creative with designing this manifold in a way that would allow it to fit around everything
that is already present in the ground. Once these are in place they will add in
the water cooled steel sandwich. You can see them here in this image from RGV Aerial
Photography. There are 6 rectangular plate, and 6 trapezoids which will be arranged like this
under the OLM, with a smaller rectangular plate to join them together. There will also need to be 6
triangular pieces in the center for full coverage. Looking at these plates from the ground
view we can see that the top plate is about an inch and half, to two inches thick.
There are vertical supports that create a large gap between the top and bottom plates,
which is where the water will flow through. Viewing them again from above, we can see the
markings on the top which look like they might be weld marks to attach the vertical plates,
but after hearing Elon describe this system. I think it's possible that these are actually
circular perforations in the top plate which will later be removed. These will create the
upside down showerhead that Elon described. On the bottom side of the rectangular plates
there is a row large holes where the water will be supplied from the manifolds that
I mentioned a few minutes ago. There will likely be end caps where the second row of 8
pipes will connect to. By extending this out from under the legs they will prevent damage
to the concrete outside of the blast surface. Finally, the edges of the plates will be welded
to the wedge shaped flame diverters attached to 6 columns that the table rests on top of.
This will prevent them from being pulled towards the center under the force of the 33
raptor engines. Think of it like a gigantic steel trampoline where the columns are the
springs that provide strength in tension. The most important part of all of this is to make
sure that the water pressure exiting the nozzles is exceeding the stagnation pressure of the 33
raptor engines. This will prevent the abrasive exhaust flow from entering the void space between
the top and bottom plates of the blast surface. If that were to happen, it could theoretically
cause a blowout of the entire system as steam would be rapidly generated inside of the
plates, and possibly the water manifold as well. With nowhere else to go other than back
to the source of the water, the entire manifold could explode under the right conditions.
But, SpaceX has already considered and designed around this possibility. In order to force water
out with the required amount of pressure they will use 76 high pressure gas cannisters which are
able to store gas at somewhere between 200 to 400 bar. Which is about 3000-6000psi, similar to the
ones that are on the roof of the fluids bunker. By maintaining a layer of water in between
the exhaust plume and the blast surface, they should easily be able to prevent the top
plate from melting. Even if the temperature still reaches the point where the water begins
to boil on the backside of the steel plate, it should have a rather short path to escape out of
the nozzles without generating too much additional pressure between the plates. We may dive deeper
into the physics of this in a future episode and actually attempt to simulate the heat loading,
but for now we will just keep it conceptual Now that we understand this system
a little better I think there is a chance that we should no longer expect to see
a large water tank constructed in this area. The water contained within these
tanks may be enough to do the job, as long as the rest of the 4 foot diameter
pipe sections are already flooded. Yo I seriously hope that I can get some kind of
forewarning when this system is ready to be tested for the first time because I really want to see
this in person. It's going to be pretty incredible to watch. Especially if it ends up being a two
stage system. Which we will discuss here in a bit. For now, let's return to the footage from the
launch starting again at T-2 second because there is another important moment that we need
to analyze. Booster 7 has just begun the ignition sequence and now has all 33 engines ignited.
The engine grouping that we care about the most right now are the outer 20 engines
which are presumably the last to ignite. The flight computer is in the process of
checking he health of all the engines and is preparing to throttle up. While this
is taking place there is another pretty major concern that had to be addressed when it
came to protecting the orbital launch mount. First of all, how do we protect the 20
nozzles, or quick disconnects that are used to start up the outer 20 raptor engines?
And second, how can we prevent super-heated gasses, shock waves from over pressure
events, and airborne shrapnel from engine explosions from entering into the launch
mount structure and causing serious damage. This is extremely important because if you
look at the original design of the hold down arms and the Raptor Boost Quick disconnects,
or RBQD's for short, there are some pretty massive holes that allow for direct access to the
mechanical systems on the inside of the structure. I'm not sure if this was always part of the plan
or if the July 11th detonation event was the reason that SpaceX decided that the protections
we are about to discuss were super necessary Let's start off with the hold down arms. On
September 7th 2022, SpaceX began installing these large panels onto the sides of the hold down arms.
These are used to prevent hot gasses and large debris from entering through the sides
and damaging the hydraulic actuators that are used to extend and retract the load arms. By
releasing the hold down clamps 15 minutes early, they no longer need to worry about them
being damaged during engine startup, but the 20 pistons used to retract everything
into the table are a completely different story. This is because if even a single one of these
were to fail, that would be a very bad day for the protective shielding on the engine skirt.
A few weeks after the side shielding was complete they added these curved panels on top of the
constraining links to prevent anything from entering through the top as well. I'm sure to
some degree this also helps to prevent rain water from entering the structure which is good
considering how corrosive this environment is Anyways, here is the before and after of the hold
down arm shielding. You can see it does a pretty good job of closing up all of these gaps
Next up are the RBQD's which were already protected from above by the retractable
hoods. They also have a small shield below the nozzles to deflect shock waves that
are bouncing up from the blast surface. But this was nowhere near enough protection
because in the event of an overpressure situation, these are basically still exposed from all
other sides. That’s a problem for all of the delicate pipes that are delivering
high pressure gasses to the QD nozzles Another issue which was perhaps even more
difficult to address was the massive hole entering the table. You can see the 5 circular
piping manifolds visible behind them. These are used to supply high pressure, helium, nitrogen,
oxygen, and methane to the 20 raptor QD's In-between the manifold and the nozzles are
the flex hoses which connect them together. This is a very complex mechanism to design a
protection system because of the way everything folds back into the table. So any new shielding
here must allow for initial retraction of the RBQD nozzles after ignition and cannot interfere
with the secondary retraction into the table. Before I explain how they accomplished this I just
want to say that it was incredibly difficult for us to figure out what was going on in here. If not
for Agent Ryans exceptional ability to angle match all of these images with his 3D model, we probably
would not have been able to figure this out. This also required Starship Gazer to be at the
launch site at the perfect time of day to capture these images. The position of the sun had to
just right for you to be able to see through these openings. Shout out to Starship Gazer for
all of that hard work gathering these for us! I have a link to his Patreon in the
description if you would like to support one the great Starbase Photographers
So the first thing we noticed was a triangular side plate that was welded onto the
retracting arm of the QD. About a week later we realized that additional shielding had
been installed around the nozzles as well. From what we were able to tell, this is
a two piece shield that now protects the nozzles from below, and also from the sides. The
reason it is constructed out of two separate U shaped plates is to allow the nozzle to
perform the initial retraction away from the injection port on the raptor engines.
So the first plate is attached directly to the nozzle and is moved by the QD piston,
while the secondary plate remains stationary. After this was completed we noticed
additional paneling which we thought created a two piece interior
hood that would separate in two different directions when the hold
down arm retraction was initiated. As cool as that Idea is, Ryan realized that this
was actually a backing panel which is attached the roof and doesn't move at all. The purpose
of this panel is to prevent shock waves or debris from engine explosions from damaging the
high pressure gas pipes mounted to the ceiling. After everything was completed SpaceX
performed a retraction test to make sure everything worked the way it was supposed
to without any collisions. Hold down arm retraction was significantly louder after all
of this heavy steal paneling was installed. After it was over we could hear
workers inside of the table cheering. Now, I can't even imagine what that
must have been like to witness this from inside of the table. But thanks to
Ryan I was able to try it out for myself. Alright so I brought Louis from the
Labpadre Channel up here with me since hey happened to be in the area.
now the key here as always is to make sure you have your safety gear on.
Hey uhhh make sure you stand clear of those flex hoses because they have a tendency to snap back
[Louis] gotcha all right run it! damn man that was loud
yo this is just this is just one of the reasons why I keep
trying to tell people that the orbital launch Mount is an engineering Masterpiece!
Really Zack you need some tissue? No I'm good man I'm good
from what we can tell the new shielding seemed to do its job although we are unsure if anything
inside of the launch Mount was damaged but as of right now we haven't seen anything other than the
Raptor QDs removed so that's a really good sign. Okay next item on the list is the Booster QD.
Now this one is rather simple. Just like the raptor QD's the goal is to prevent explosions
and FOD from damaging the critical components inside of the BQD during engine startup, long
duration static fires, and overpressure events. For this they installed a deflector shield below
the BQD panel which also adds some protection from the sides. It's still completely unprotected
from above as you can see but I don't know if there was much that could be done about
that because of the design of the swinging blast cover that protects the BQD after
it retracts. This would only really be an issue if debris begins to rain down from above.
The door itself is a big concern but it seemed to hold up pretty well and had it not,
SpaceX already has another ready to go. Eventually with repeated usage this will
inevitably have to be replaced though. I also want to briefly mention the BQD rear
shielding which is pretty straight forward as. But it's important to note these one of the few
shielding upgrades that aren't welded in place. These are designed to be removable in case repair
work or upgrades are needed to be performed. Unfortunately, this shielding did not
stop this emergency depressurization vent for the methane supply from being
severed…so that will have to be replaced. This is probably not a very big deal though
If there ever was a pad explosion, none of this makes any difference whatsoever
but I believe all of these protective measures performed extremely well during the
violent event that occurred on April 20th It's now T+07 seconds and the vehicle has
finally cleared the pad. The hold down clamps have retracted and the world's largest blow torch
is now sending a massive flame straight through the inside ring of the Orbital Launch Mount.
There is now another huge issue that has to be addressed here. The superheated exhaust coming
out of the 33 raptor engines is an extremely abrasive force that will immediately begin eroding
away the inside edge of the orbital launch mount. According to a statement made by Elon Musk
during this recent twitter spaces update : "depending on how close the engines are
they erode that steel at a roughly half an inch to an inch per second high strength
steel is eroded by the The Cutting torch" That is absolutely insane and
honestly it sounds made up. But we can probably assume that this is
accurate because we know that SpaceX has done testing in order to verify this. Some of
you may remember the steel sandwich that was mounted in front of a raptor engine test stand
at the McGregor Texas facility late last year. Now, NasaSpaceflight did label this as a concrete
test article, which this very well could be. However when we compare this to the future
water cooled blast surface that SpaceX is in the process of constructing. You will
notice that this is the exact same color as the material we see on this test article.
So this is likely where they got this data from. I believe this was a proof of concept test for
the system that we are expecting to see installed before the next test flight, even though there
was no water involved here from what we can tell. Anyways, in order to prevent erosion of the
inside edge of the launch mount SpaceX began mounting what we have been referring to as "burn
plates" in between each of the hold down arms. I actually first noticed these
back in September of last year when most of the major final upgrades
to the launch mount were taking place. I had a feeling it was something related to the
inside edge of the of the ring due to the insane amount of welding that was going on in there.
But it wasn’t until Elon Musk posted this picture on twitter when Ryan and I were actually
able to figure out what they were doing So what we have here are strips of steel that have
been welded to the outer surface. They more than likely have tapped holes drilled through them
to allow these thicc burn plates to be bolted down instead of permanently attaching to them.
These sacrificial plates protect the interior of the launch mount by drastically reducing the
amount of heat that is transferred through the walls. After an unknown number of launches these
will be worn down and replaced but that’s better than the permanent damage from erosion and warping
of this surface that could likely occur otherwise. It seems like this feature did its job as planned
and remained in perfect condition from what I was able to tell.
T+12 seconds. Easily one of the most intense moments
of my entire life. The feeling while I had while witnessing this power slide off of
the pad is something I can't easily describe. As I said earlier, I discussed the possibility
of this happening in this episode I released the week before the launch where we learned about the
load monitoring system for the hold down clamps. I did not however, actually expect to see that
occur in real life. The moment I saw the ship lean to the side my first thought was that there was
clearly multiple engines that were not performing properly because this is the exact situation
we simulated using the Starbase Sim video game. For me, it was absolutely terrifying to be
tracking this object on camera when you aren't sure if it's about to come back down to the
ground. But I loved every second of it even though it felt like an eternity waiting for
it to straighten back out. I was honestly a bit relieved when it disappeared into the
clouds because at that point my hands were shaking and I wouldn’t have been able to
track it very well anyways after that point This was originally speculated to
be a pad avoidance maneuver by many, but during Elon's Twitter Space discussion, in a response to John Krause he confirmed
that this was in fact unintentional. [Elon] No, it was an issue related to the engines out and we do not normally expect to lean. We should be aspirationally going straight up Elon also mentioned that these engines did
not explode but they were simply not heathy enough for the computer to bring them up
to full thrust so they were shut down. This diagram from 3D forensics agent chameleon
circuit shows the position of the engines that were aborted during the startup sequence. With
the loss of two engines that were directly next to each other, there is now a 500 ton
thrust deficiency on this side of the booster. So as a result, the vehicle
pitched over in the direction of the lost engines which forced
the thrust vector control system to have to make a pretty significant correction.
You can see the outcome of this when you look at the booster QD and the actual surface of
the deck in this area. This is what happens when "as Elon put it, you pass the world's
largest cutting torch over a flat surface. Now it’s a little difficult to determine
exactly how much erosion occurred in this area. Especially when you are looking at it from
an altitude of 10,500 feet, or 3.2 kilometers. The good news is, that even if there
was damage to the surface of this deck, it wouldn't really matter because
SpaceX planned ahead for this as well. This is where the deck mounted
burn plates come into play. Once again, thanks to Ryan Hansen Space
we can get a visualization of what I'm talking about here as we discuss this.
So the first challenge to protecting this top surface was making sure that the 20 deck
cameras don't get destroyed during the launch. These cameras were originally mounted onto
the edge of the deck and are used allow engineers in the control room to visually
monitor the position of the booster as its being lowered down onto the hold down clamps.
This is not a system that SpaceX can allow to be destroyed during the launch because
eventually they will need this to be operational when the booster returns to the
launch site 8 and half minutes after liftoff. With this in mind, SpaceX could not simply
attach these burn plates directly to the surface of the top deck because they need
room for these shielded camera cables. So the cameras were moved from the
top of the deck and relocated to the top left corner of the cubbies where
the hold down clamps retract into. On March 14th SpaceX workers began lifting these
T shaped plates onto the deck of the orbital launch mount. There were 18 of these in total.
The purpose of these, as determined by Agent Ryan is to be mounted on top of the inside
edge of the top deck. They are placed across the corners which allow the camera cables to be
routed down into the cubbies. This also creates a decent overhang from the top deck that should
protect the backside of the hold down clamps from the exhaust flow to some degree…but
more importantly, they protect the cameras. Well, as long as the booster doesn't
perform a power slide over the launch mount. After this, stainless steel burn plates were
added on top We believe there is a 1 3/4" air gap between the deck and the sacrificial
plates. Sorry for using imperial units here, but…that’s the units this launch mount was
designed in…So don't fight me…fight SpaceX. We believe these are designed to be cut off
and replaced if necessary, however you might notice that these look very similar to the water
cooled plates that SpaceX is planning to use for the blast surface under neath the Launch mount.
As Ryan was modeling these we realized that this air gap might be useful for incorporating
a water cooled system for the upper deck but we haven't seen any sign that this would
actually be the case after they were installed. Interestingly enough, after all of this
exterior shielding was completed on the launch mount I posted this tweet letting Elon
and the SpaceX team know I was really loving the final touches to the launch mount.
In response Elon acknowledged why all of this shielding was necessary, and ended his
reply by mentioning that In the future they will need to make a water-cooled steel
jacket to achieve full reusability. My initial reaction to this was to replace the
VPN service that we are using here in the CSI Starbase headquarters. But then I realized that
we are hardwired directly into SpaceX's data network here in the Highbay, so that wouldn't
really prevent him from spying on us anyways. Anyways we know the current system does not
currently support this as an option but thanks to 3D forensics agent Chrome Kiwi we can get an
idea of what a system like this might look like. This design involves circulating the water through
the entire upper deck which could be one way of pulling this off. One thing that would need to
be considered in this design however, there is a possibility that by circulating the
water, there would be an uneven cooling effect as the water heats up along its path.
There would be a risk of generating steam within the system which would
cause a blowout of the panels. One way to prevent this would be to dump
the water over the inside edge of the table, possibly using the gaps that the
camera cables are routed through. The third option would be perforated plates
similar to what we are expecting to see on the blast surface. And when we look at these from
the aerial view, it looks like these perforations are already present but are currently capped off
just like the ones on the lower blast surface. This would be a secondary water
system that wouldn't be activated until the hold down clamps are retracted.
Just for fun, let's take a look at what all of the new protective features that we discussed
look like from the new protected camera position. [Music] Alright, we are finally done talking
about the ground systems for now. Let's do a quick analysis of the remaining 3
minutes and 45 seconds of this launch. So Booster 7 and ship 24 have now cleared
the pad and from the start, they were missing engine number 1 and also engines 26 and 27.
With all of the flying debris in the air, it's very well possible that Booster 7
was struck by a large chunk of concrete as it was rising out of the ground plume.
As of right now I haven't been able to find any proof that this occurred which aligns with
the recounting of events reported by Elon Musk At T+27 seconds, Elon stated there was a high
energy event that liberated the protective shielding from engines 17, 18, 19 and 20.
We can't really rely on the SpaceX layover right here, probably due to a delay in
transmission of the telemetry. So instead we will use one created by SpaceRhino which
shows the engines in their correct orientation and is more properly synced with the footage.
I'll leave a link to this in the description if you would like to review it yourself.
So now we can see that the high energy event that E was speaking about
was actually a failure of engine 19. This doesn't look like a simple shut down, but
instead appears to be an actual explosion in the power head of engine 19, which then ripped off
the shielding on 17, 18, and 20. This is exact situation that the Hold down arm and Raptor
QD shielding is designed to protect against. Shortly after this at T+33 Seconds, Engine #18
suffers an explosive shutdown which I believe was the final straw for the Hydraulic power unit.
The hydraulic unit, or HPU for short, is located inbetween engines 18 and 19 on the side of
the booster. The HPU's are used to actuate the thrust vector control system which you can
see in this dope video from Trevor Mahlman. Elon did not explicitly state that the first
HPU was destroyed at this point, but when we look at the SpaceX footage you can clearly see a
flame inside of the HPU starting at T+33 seconds. In this angle filmed by Ricardo G in Matamoros,
Mexico we can see that a massive fireball is ejected out of the back of booster 7 at the
same time this high energy event takes place. I believe that the HPU explosion
caused a catastrophic rupture in the hydraulic lines somewhere inside
of the engine skirt which resulted in the remaining fluid from the reservoir
to be emptied into the exhaust plume. This must have been a large amount of hydraulic
fluid because after this point there was a fire raging inside of the engine skirt for the
remainder of the flight which we could see very clearly thanks to the tracking footage from
Cosmic Perspective and The Everyday Astronaut. If this hydraulic power unit was taken out
of commission then that would have caused the second HPU to have to put the team on its
back and would put additional load on that unit. This does not however, mean a total loss of
control nor does it affect stage separation After this the next major event occurred somewhere
around T+55 seconds this is when we noticed what appeared to be a major leak of liquid oxygen
coming from an unknown location. You could see the sudden drop in liquid oxygen levels in the
telemetry provided by SpaceX during the livestream coverage. Here is a graphical representation
of it posted by Marcel12645297 on twitter Looking at the EDA footage we can see a
trail of liquid or gas bleeding into the exhaust plume. This trail becomes extremely
bright as it begins to reflect the light from the boosters 27 functional engines.
Initially I considered that this could be an intentional LOX dump in order to increase the
thrust to weight ratio to compensate for the loss of additional engines. There are 2 valves on the
bottom of the booster in these two positions which can be used for dumping LOX from the tank.
The fluid does not seem to be coming from this position though so we cannot say for sure
that this is what happened. Unfortunately during Elon's twitter space, none of us who were present
remembered to ask about this detail so all we can do right now is speculate on what happened here.
After this at T+62 seconds we witnessed another engine get murdered and this time its engine
number 22. This is accompanied by more engine shielding being ejected from the vehicle at T+65
seconds. This is now the 6th engine to fail. At T+85 seconds Elon stated that engine number
6 lost communication to thrust vector control. This wasn't just an isolated failure,
it seems to have effected all remaining center gimbaling engines which means that
for the next 155 seconds, the booster now essentially has zero capability of
maintaining the desired flight path. At T+94 seconds Engine number 2 shuts down,
followed by engine number 23 6 seconds later. Booster 7 is now running on 25/33 engines.
With the crazy imbalance of thrust on the outer ring of 20 engines the vehicle begins to
perform cartwheels through the atmosphere. I'm not going to lie, this was pretty hilarious to watch.
If you would have asked me if these two vehicles would be able to withstand this type of
maneuver 2 weeks ago, I would have said absolutely not. But…this is why I usually
stick to analyzing ground support systems. Anyways, after this the vehicle continued its
uncontrolled tumble for quite some time. A lot of folks were wondering why the Flight Termination
System wasn't triggered earlier, myself included. However, I'm sure both SpaceX and the FAA were
likely monitoring the vehicles trajectory very closely at this time. As long as the vehicle
wasn't in danger of ending up somewhere outside of the exclusion zone, then there really
isn't any reason to not let it proceed. I'm sure SpaceX gained massive amounts of data
during this period. All I have to say is that I am extremely impressed with the way this vehicle
performed under the circumstances and I don't really see anything wrong with what occurred here.
At least until we reach the point where the FTS was actually manually commanded from the ground.
According to Elon Musk it took roughly 40 seconds for the vehicles to be destroyed after
activation of the Flight Termination System. Shoutout to Scott Manley for figuring this one
out long before anyone else. I personally didn't think there was any chance he was right about this
at first but looking at this stabilized footage from Tim Dodd, we can see the moment the FTS on
both the ship and the booster were triggered. Surprisingly this did not result in the
immediate destruction of the vehicle. For the life of me I can't understand how
puncturing the LOX and Methane propellant tanks on both vehicles didn't immediately destroy them.
Instead, it appears that the booster actually suffered a massive explosion within
the engine bay, which then took out the the rest of the liquid oxygen tank,
and then finally the methane tank as well. About a second and a half later we saw the
explosion of the Starship second stage. There was an interesting moment before the
explosion of ship 24 which had a lot of us speculating whether or not the second
stage engines were actually ignited. Tim Dodd and I were both pretty convinced
that this actually did occur because once you slow down the footage at
the moment before the explosion, you can see 3 blue lights inside
of the plume which look an awful lot like what we might expect to see if the
3 Vacuum raptors on the ship were ignited. The ship then made an aggressive turn to
the side for a brief moment before the final explosion occurs at T+241 seconds.
We both tried our hardest to press Elon on this issue during the twitter
Space, but this is what he said. [Elon] um and by the way you know people
have like basically think that maybe something different from this occurred...
that would be interesting to... because I know some people have looked very closely
frame by frame at video but this is the SpaceX best assessment after a week um.
um yeah I can confirm that we have been doing a massive amount of speculation in
particular as it relates to Stage separation. so I guess this is a two-part question number one
what actually triggers second stage ignition? And number two did ship 24 attempt to ignite
its engines after booster 7 was destroyed? [Elon]uh no it did not when um
flight termination is is uh executed if it's executed around both so the ship
currently does not attempt to save itself um arguably maybe a maybe it should.
( come on Tim pressure) [Tim Dodd] um yeah it's crazy it looks like the
engine's lit after the boosts are let go and after the booster finally blew up like there's
what looks like engine ignition pretty wild [Zack] Yeah, deny that!
[Elon] uh that is that has not been reported to me in the data reviews
that uh it's not impossible but it's not been reported to me that that is totally not what the
ship should be doing after a termination event Soooo what I got from that is, its not confirmed
yet. But he didn't explicitly say no…so maybe there's still a chance that this
actually did happen. Maybe one day SpaceX will release more info on this,
but I'm not going to get my hopes up. At the end of the exchange Elon mentioned
that it might actually be a good idea for the ship to separate and attempt to continue
the mission once it becomes apparent that the Booster is not going to survive. This of course
would only be a good idea if the second stage actually has a chance of reaching orbit at
the moment this decision needs to be made. Overall, this was an incredible first Integrated
Test Flight for Starship and I want to once again congratulate the SpaceX team for everything
they have accomplished so far up to this point. The only direction they can go
from here, is up..literally. From what we have seen in the days since
the launch, SpaceX has quickly gotten to work with repairs to the orbital launch mount so
maybe Elon's two month timeline isn't all that unrealistic. I will personally tack on another 2
months to that estimate but either way, its still better than my initial fears of more than a year
of reconstruction before the next launch attempt. I'm more than happy to be wrong about that.
One of the most difficult challenges they will have coming up is recertification
of the FTS system. It seems that everyone is in agreement that the way those final
moments went down is highly undesirable. Elon mentioned that the new version of the
Flight termination system will likely resemble a strip of detonation cord. I imagine this may be
placed vertically across the common dome of the booster and ship so that it completely unzips both
tanks instead of simply punching a hole in them. This is actually a pretty
interesting idea to consider, but hopefully we never have to see that in action. Alright before we get out of here there is one final important thing to discuss.
And that is the Orbital Tank farm. During the initial Twitter Space interview
that took place on April 16th I had the chance to ask him a question that I have been
dying to know the answer to for a long time Hi Elon yeah so I was just wondering what
would you say was one of the largest uh you know hurdles that you had to cross
in order to get this launch underway? Because obviously there was tons of like
GSE issues, tons of actual vehicle issues, structural qualification testing... so out
of all the things that you came up against leading up to this big day what was the
most difficult challenge that you had to get over in order to reach this Milestone?
[Elon]I mean I guess in retrospect we should have gone with relatively off the shelf vacuum
jacketed horizontal tanks instead of trying to make our own you would call them like the hot
dogs the the big horizontal vacuum jacket of Tanks so probably should have gone with those
instead of trying to build our own. So the moment Elon answered this, I began
thinking about these horizontal storage tanks that have been sitting unused at the
Massey's site for several months now. Ever since their arrival I had a feeling that these
would end up being used for tank farm expansion at the launch complex because there really is no
other destination for them that makes any sense. After seeing the results of the
first Integrated Flight Test, I think it became even more apparent that
placing these massive vertical tanks this close to the launch mount was a very very bad idea.
Don't get me wrong, It's extremely well designed, and it's just about as efficient of a tank farm
setup that you could possibly create but…yea, damage like this should not even
be allowed to be a possibility. Thankfully, on April 29th Elon mentioned
that these tanks will likely be replaced with more horizontal storage tanks. I do
not expect to see this happen until after the second orbital flight test however because
replacing these tanks presents several issues. The biggest problem here, is that in order to
store the amount of liquid oxygen and liquid nitrogen required for launch operations inside
of horizontal tanks. They are going to need close to 2 and a half times tanks than what
we currently see in the methane tank farm. The bullet tanks used for Liquid Oxygen will
more than likely be larger than the ones we are seeing here. Or at least they will be the
same size as the two large methane tanks here. As you can imagine, this will simply
not fit inside of the existing tank farm space footprint. That means it will
need to be relocated somewhere else. It's going to require a massive amount
of surface area to pull this off. Overall the best solution I think would be to
construct one giant tank like the one we see at Pad 39a and place it in this location
behind the tower. And to those of you who have been watching this channel for a while.
Yes, I am finally acknowledging that this is a liquid oxygen tank and not water.
Needed to prove that one to myself instead of accepting peoples word
for it. That’s just how I roll. Anyways, the existing tank farm area can be
replaced with smaller horizontal tanks used to store liquid nitrogen, and the LOX can be moved
behind the tower. I think this will also require a new fluids bunker to be constructed, along with
physically moving the LOX pumps to a completely different location close to the tower.
The only problem with this idea, is its proximity to the suborbital test
stands so we will see what ends up happening. Beyond that, I have a feeling this will require
approval from the army corp of engineers Either way, that is not going to be an easy job
but I trust that the incredible team at SpaceX has already come up with a solution. We will let
you know as soon as we figure out what that is. Anyways, I hope I was successful
in answering a lot of the remaining question that you may have had after the
first Starship Integrated Flight test. If you enjoyed this episode than
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of production quality is certainly not cheap. If you would like to contribute to
the future growth of this channel and help us towards our goal of being able to
increase the frequency of these episodes, you can do so by becoming a member of the YouTube
channel or a monthly supporter on Patreon. As a perk you will be able to watch the ad free
version of these videos, and can also gain access to the CSI Starbase discord server where you can
hang out with me and the rest of the CSI team. I want to say a huge thank you to those
of you who have supported us so far and shoutout to those who donated to the camera
fund which allowed me to be able to capture that incredible footage of the historical
first Integrated Flight Test of Starship. As always, I also want to thank all of the
photographers and 3D artists who's content was used in today's investigation, especially Ryan
Hansen Space who spent the last 7 months working with me to create all of the incredible animations
that were used in this investigative report. Before we go I want to also thank my
team of CSI Field Agents who helped gather all of the information needed
to explain this story to you today because there was a ridiculous amount of
research time that went into this one. Last but not least, Thank you to Squarespace
for sponsoring today's deep dive investigation. Alright that’s my time for today, I hope to see
you all on the next deep dive investigation. For now, this is Stage Zero Zack signing off.
[Music]
