UP CLOSE Delta IV Heavy Launch Pad Tour (Tory Bruno CEO of ULA) - Smarter Every Day

hey it's me Destin welcome to smarter every day here on the second channel this is a unique video this was an opportunity to geek out over Rockets with a fellow rocket lover that just happens to own the company that makes the Rockets which is a big deal for me personally because I've never seen an orbital rocket launch so to be able to walk up to the actual pad the launch pad and ask questions that I should not be asking if I'm at this location I mean these are things I should probably know if I'm this close to the rocket it was a fantastic experience and I'm grateful for the opportunity just to give you an idea of how awesome this was we spent three hours at the pad and there's a ton of stuff we recorded and this is pared down from what happened so I got to have very interesting intimate mechanical rocketry conversations with Tory Brno which was amazing an experience of a lifetime so real quick before we get into meeting Tory and talking to him I want to give you the context for where we're at this is some footage that was recorded by Kerbal space academy.com it's your gallery there I can click on that right now [Music] the people you see the people there were earlier right there but I got weak that was cool it's super me well that's just it let's Destin right there hey guys there's Destin from smarter every day oh boy destiny hey Destin to smarter every day busy that's the zoom in that Tori I think that's Tori destined for every day and Tori ya know be dating the mobile service tower right now yep how you doing sir good to meet you yeah you as well thanks for inviting me to your shot here oh we're happy to have it that's pretty cool I love your channel thank you very much subscribe I like your like your hard hat there is that it actually a hard hat yeah yeah that's pretty good so so you're actually gonna let us go up with you on rollback yeah yeah yeah that's a big that's a treat it is we're gonna write a ten million pound building 30 stories I well it heads to the other end of that pen really so how far does it like what's the speed of that thing it's gonna be pretty slow you know it's a blistering like third of a mile for Aspergers really yeah so it's not super fast but it's gonna roll back about three hundred and thirty feet or so how far back you you studied at Cal Poly right I did yeah though aerospace engineering mechanical that's that's my undergrad yeah there we go three segments the way I understand the two on the side there are a hundred percent the whole time but the one in the center score you throttle that back right and that's just to conserve fuel so that you can have a better performance right outside first and in a very short amount of burn okay so you get through max Q with all three well three cores is that the correct terminology the course we call cores are common core's okay because it's if you just have the center with a different payload fairing that would be a delta for medium and that core in the center is the same core you see here and it's the same as the outer course okay so you can think of it as kind of like Kerbal space here right so we're just bolting three Rockets together once you ramp it back up you have a better propellant mass fraction with what's left of exactly right okay that makes perfect sense so on all of our Rockets we use cryo on the upper Delta has cryo on the Lord of course Atlas uses gears but this one's different though because on Parker it's my understanding you have a kicker staged at the end there that's solid right now that's abnormal that is as very unusual with nets because park Solar Probe has to have so much energy and makes so much velocity to get to the Sun one of the things people don't generally appreciate is how hard it is to get to the Sun from here because of course as you know you and I were in orbit right now around the Sun 67,000 miles an hour you got to take that energy out to get any closer it's actually really hard to go in much easier to go out but what's the what's the Delta V required to get to the Sun compared to Pluto it's like some order of magnitudes Weldon our magnitude but glutens that was our previous sort of speed record where we had the fastest object to leave earth that was 36,000 miles per hour this will be 43 that much faster and what we're really going to do is establish in orbit around the Sun where it's its perigee its lowest point or perihelion because it's the Sun is pretty close to the Sun it starts out at about 33 or so solar radii at the top of that elliptical orbit is going to be a starting between Venus and Earth and then each time it goes around we're using Venus to pull more energy out and we'll pull that perihelion in we'll also pull in the the Apogee until it's coincident with Venus's orbits so that about every third pass around the Sun it'll get a close pass with Venus which tightens that orbit up so that finally will be within 3.8 million miles of the surface of the Sun which is really really really close yeah and so normally when you think of a gravity assist you think of making that ellipse bigger right but in this case you're trying to slow down and it's smaller which is abnormal right yeah that's unusual yeah and it's B it's a unique feature of trying to get into the Sun from here on earth and because it's an elliptical orbit here's the other cool thing speed record when we leave Earth 43,000 miles per hour but when you're at your your perihelion or perigee your orbit is faster right so that's Kepler physics so you think it kind of goes slow out here and then faster down there right because the energy has to be the same that's going to get all the way up to four hundred and thirty thousand miles per hour at that point you don't talk about miles per hour anymore you got to talk about see that's like fractions of C right yeah speed of light it's about six hundredths of a C really yeah which is it's still on the C scale I'm cool with it that's awesome so this is my first orbital rocket launch I've ever seen yeah well in person I've watched tons of them online but this is a big deal Callie it's a specially dramatic you know not only is it big and it's loud but because it's a hydrogen booster the flow hydrogen first to get the engine cooled and spun up then you ignite it all that hydrogen it's football on the side rocket that's why you kind of char the side of this one right so it kind of looks like it's setting itself on fire yeah then it lifts off it's actually doing a G 2.2 million pounds of thrust rocket all the ways one six million pounds holy tank it's so huge it looks like it's just sitting there lumbers into the air I gotta say this is pretty rad just walking right up to the sixes this is interesting do you always go up on the now it's called the MST correct yes and what will servers to do you always go up on the tower obviously you don't usually use the tower use other things right well this is always the setup for a delta launch oh really yeah so Atlas is a little bit different we build a rocket on its launch platform which is mobile and we roll it out to the pan Delta would build the rocket in a horizontal facility roll the rocket out here so all three cores came out of the giant truck lifted up vertical into that building then we finish it and then when we're ready the building rules away man yeah I'm able to comprehend less and less about what you're saying yes sir it's yeah for you this is old hat but I mean imagine studying this stuff in school and like actually seeing it for the first time it's pretty rad little secret what's that I'm coming up on 400 uh-huh feels the same every time does it really it's pretty cool yeah so guys a beast I mean even we're standing here and it's huge but it's bigger than it looks that's a 30-story building yeah it doesn't Rock it is the rock yeah it doesn't look like it at all this rock that will do about about thirty thousand pounds to low-earth orbit that spacecraft is only fifteen hundred pounds so this is a gigantic rocket with a tiny little spacecraft okay I was trying to compute that that's how you can get so much Delta V exactly ignition starts you start thrust you measure strain of some sort there then we release and then now the rocket is under thrust vector control to keep it oriented in the right way right and I've got to imagine that TVC is way easier with a heavy because you have a larger moment arm from the senator that's right okay that's right okay very good awesome and as you also correctly figured out you got to have the engines running because thrust vector control doesn't work unless there's thrust right so you can't you know let everything go then turn the engines on that would ignition starts you start thrust you measure strain of some sort there then we release and then now the rocket is under thrust vector control to keep it oriented in the right way right and I've got to imagine that TVC is way easier with a heavy because you have a larger moment arm from the senator that's right okay that's right okay very good awesome and as you also correctly figured out you got to have the engines running because the thrust vector control doesn't work unless there's thrust right so you can't you know let everything go then turn the engines off because if that would work characteristic energy for Parker Solar Probe is going to be north 154 kilograms squared per second squared is that what I keep here in C 3 C 3 okay so C 3 is one of the parameters we measure when we just want to talk about whether there's enough energy and it is energy per unit mass to escape the gravitational influence of a given body so if your C 3 is less than 0 you're not getting away from the earth but if your C 3 is greater than 0 then you can leave the earth and in this case we need to get into that very exotic orbit we talked about before and so you know a C 301 we've just sent us you know out in you know away from the Earth orbiting the Sun it would be a solar orbit we need 154 right because you need to do something to very much get out there yeah that's awesome C so these clamps open up pneumatically and then the whole thing pushes that you've done and we're gonna be up there when it happens if we are we're gonna write it that's awesome let's do it [Music] alright are you on are you on flight ops here safety quality I'm Destin so you're gonna make sure that YouTube guy doesn't hurt himself that's good okay sounds good Wow good campers because they're in the middle of an operation or this is the time those sign right and you can see here is your Center for so the second stage is going to be basic Wow [Music] hold your camera you can peek over the edge sure it sounds good join me to film you that sounds great it's rolling right all right yeah that's a big over there yes you can yeah hold your hat okay that's higher than I thought yes pretty high you can heal yeah we're this isn't a joke so this right here is mostly insulation that I'm looking at right now yeah okay how thick is the insulation because the cryo tanks are behind this right yes so we use a couple of different kinds of insulation on which is where we use court is relatively thin literal court or like like the tree that's a very common rockets in insulated material because known is it's ablator which means that it arose her burns on as it's trying to heat up which helps to remove the but how do you how do you make cork not just flake off in big chunks so it's ground up and then it's bonded together with a binder and the sheets and then we bonded onto the side all right Wow and of course where we have cryogenics pallets like this yes okay and you're gonna look for areas that look really rough on the side of the rocket okay so that's an insulated material we spray or paint on called Sophie and that's a polymer insulator and it's very similar it'll be thicker much thicker couple times thicker than the cork and that does the same kind of thing at a blade soft as well as insulate so it's an ablation type agent as well as just an insulator it is and that is important on these big guys because that's propellant that is boiling away being vented and so really these boosters off constantly the gas hose if you will is still plugged in finally retracted so the tanks are nearly completely the whole time it's boiling and so by having that installation on the side of the rocket available to burn right okay so that makes sense what are your propellant margins on this like you have a certain orbit that you have to hit and so obviously you don't put just that amount of hydrogen locks and and lh2 in there what do you do so we you know every every mission is different so we analyze every one and we have a certain set of standards for and that comes not just from the calculations but also from our experience we account for oil on or variability and winds on any given day for the variability and the trajectory things like that build all those up quickly a certain minimum of five hundred chalo of this size and then we can do excursions now in this particular case we're gonna want to burn everything to depletion which is a that we can do it's been a special about our rockets we have techniques though Wow four months in wine and then recalculate and reprogram its own flight trajectory to give more I mean our customers would appreciate that some of them don't they want to go to a fixed place but we so it varies mission by issue well I know for this is a very weird one right because normally you go east northeast because you're going to get into that 50 1.8 degree right for the ISS was for this yeah but you're just going to the Sun and so you're in you're trying so you're gonna stay in the the solar the solar system's plane so you're going straight equatorial right right so how do you do that because we're not on the equator we're going to hit a specific point in space with a given velocity and in this case the accuracy required is really stunning because we're going to drop off the partners within 40 minutes or so and watch and it's gonna be very close to the earth would we do that Travel tend miles without affect his trajectory just ballistic just pull listening to that first rendezvous with Venus and then everything after that is to insertion wait you're not going to do course corrections on the way nothing of any meaning how do you do that you've got to get this exactly right so Parker Solar Probe does have an attitude control system on it is to orient the spacecraft so that hits carbon-carbon hu is always facing the Sun when it's passing through the and the amount of energy this there is very very small its ability to correct any kind of error coming off this boosters is almost on the system so what does we gotta get right so what's the last well I thought the the supreme upper stage was a solid particulars so you're saying you have to point with cryo and you're going with the solid and we're gonna point the solid so when the cryo burns out we're gonna like the song because you don't have that specter control on the solid this one does Oh how does that work so it is a vector pool Mazal so it has its own actuators nozzle it has it has controllers so it is literally part of the rocket just like these first two stages are it's our third stage and then when that's burned down about 4045 that's it we separate the spacecraft and its first perihelion out and it'll be seven years of doing that loop so 24 passes on the Sun and about every third pass is going to get close enough to meanness to affect his trajectory and you really you really live and breathe this stuff that you Noah you do oh yeah sure I love Brian said Marcus my whole life really that's awesome what was your first rocket much first professional launcher first launch yeah it was doesn't that counts the same to me all right I was nine years old and I'm old enough to see so I was pretty stoked by that and so I'm out in the back of my grandmother's barn case of the eight-year-old and I figure there's only one thing to do with that I'm gonna build rockets up Wow so it took the sticks you know I could have like you know they're all soaking wet nitroglycerin the surface of the sticks which is something that happens too makes it unsafe but I didn't so I cut them open and pulled out crammed it into this old wrought iron pipe and I made my own rockets and I'm proud to tell you that even at nine years old some of my Rockets made it partly into the sky before they did they that's made us to end I got all 10 fingers that now that's the true measure right there that's the true measure that's awesome it's the first professional one so the first professional one was with Lockheed working big rockets that launch on submarines that's awesome I just wanted to briefly mention that Tori's wife Rebecca is also a rocket scientist right can I say that yeah so you work for lucky for how many years ballistic missile that's where my kids are going now those benches yours that's awesome that's good hypersonics follows janitor to the pantry so you deal with a blasian type stuff all the time yeah other things you can't tell me about so this is a family affair there my kids are fourth-generation engineers my dad worked on Apollo really North American Aviation I grew up near Edwards Air Force Base so I spoke with some of the scientists involved and they told me about Andy here do you know the best story there so in Andy's pretty special to this mission because it's so hard to get to the Sun and it's to a mission like this the original designs for this type of probe just impractical and this gentleman Andy the trajectory that we're going to use that really made this mission possible without but not you standing here today so he did the orbital mechanics it's my understanding he passed away yeah he got sick Wow so the whole dull flight is in memory it is is that is that normal do you normally do subjects really it is so it's not uncommon for August applied with the memorial like this for someone either in the customer community yes sometimes after they've retired we like to remember them so we just started rollback right yes so I can see that we're physically moving away from that it's very slow how many tons are moving right now this building weighs 10 million pounds okay Wow we're gonna move it about 300 feet really okay and so is it gonna go at this velocity the hope the whole time it's actually gonna speed up a little bit in a few minutes really but it's not exactly blistering speed as you can imagine it's a gentle trip it'll take us about 45 minutes to make that three hundred foot journey that's awesome that's very good so we were we were very high up there run tree Tori oh yes yeah and it's not until it starts moving that you realize that's one mile up man my knees kind of starts shaking what so yeah that's pretty good see so under the white is the cork and under the orange is the Sophia some places under the white where it looks really rough that's going to be soaking too but primarily that's pork that's so that is pretty what kinds of things are you looking at right now like you kind of just understand this rocket at this point right yes yeah okay so of course we have the big center core and the reason you see the orbital ATK emblem down there is because Northrop Grumman was over lady Kay fabricated that extra third kick stage that we don't normally use that Parker Solar Probe needs for that extra oomph of velocity c3 or energy to escape earth in orbit the Sun instead and so you're seeing these big horizontal struts here those are carrying the loads from these side cores mechanically and transmitting that into the center core or their dampener there as well or what was it no this is really a rigid structural frame that we're looking at and that's actually that the cleanest way we can do that dynamically and be able to steer and control the rocket in each of these cores at full power their throttle but at full power they have the same engine same propellants and they can put out the same level of thrust together about two point million pounds or you know something a little over 700,000 pounds each and those that 700,000 pounds of thrust is being those spectral members you can see I'm having an optical illusion right now I feel like the Rockets moving away from us I really do so that makes you feel really small but you sit so to be clear about what's happening right now this man is a safety spotter for a 300 million dollar operation that's happening here in the last moments before launch this is a this is a big deal like that's a serious serious job right there okay so I'm going to level with you that's a really really cool rocket okay and it's going to touch the Sun it's gonna be the fastest man-made object ever in the history of objects right but what's really really cool to me is Tory Bruno's wife is also a rocket scientist and as they back away she comes to the launch pad with they're having a discussion about how it works and like I went knees dropped in there and they're talking about like the different stages how they work why they're using solids over cryos and certain like this is a very technical discussion and I really like that like a lot it's kind of a moment [Music] so feel very honored to be where I'm at right now this is pretty special okay we can see the whole thing now so what was made where oh okay so this whole rocket is assembled and of course the Decatur factory near your hometown right the structure that you see in there literally come in the back door educators when we call an isoprene structure so they're very thin but they have ribs for stiffness and strength everything's about weight anything that's not propellant right all of that gets welded and assembled the Sophie insulation gets supplied all of those structures in the air built their indicator and all we bring the engines in from our partner chat riot dine out in California to go on the bottom of these [Music] from our partner at Rouen which is a company that today builds hardware for us in Switzerland as I say there are you peeing your they and are they I guess they are but as we move to our both invited they have actually moved in to our Factory composite structures and fairings for us indicator so in bulk and they'll be fully supported in the US which is really cool story because we're bringing inside our country the other way around right that's one of my favorite partnerships and then of course the spacecraft itself is up there the payload fairing that was designed and put together by NASA to quite physics lab John huh so that's that's what this is all about I mean we love the rocket but it's really about that mission we measure our success by whether or not that missions so how much more do we have to go you think I think we're about two-thirds of the way okay and that's the flame bucket down there right right where does the so as as it burns the flame goes out it's gonna turn and go really so why do you divert it that way well you could it's just the quickest way to get it away from all of this structure so we don't want to send it back towards the tower it's back every part that direction has a lot of plumbing and activity you can see the telemetry lines that are going off to the shelter out there this direction happens to be clear right no special reason so I noticed that there's a ton of people do encounter what we're doing they're getting pictures made I mean this is a this is a huge moment in the life of many of these people I mean it's it's a huge moment period but like for some people this is decades yes yes well you of course for us you know we love our rocket and put a lot of blood sweat and tears in it but the rocket is only here for the payload and so when we're launching a mission like this Parker solar field this is someone's life's work and in fact dr. Eugene partner he did the fundamental research and did the calculations and theorized the existence of solar winds way back in the 1950s as well as the notion of the would be hotter than the surface of the Sun people didn't believe him back then it's taken a 60 years of technology development not just in rocketry but in the sensors we put on the spacecraft to now realize first off and he was right of course but why does it do that we get to go and verify that this is a man's life life's work and the people who worked on that spacecraft same kind of thing it's the pinnacle of their career they've been at it for at least a dozen years many of them so that's a pretty big responsibility weighs heavy on our guidance I'm seeing these are the lightning protection system is that correct that's right and so you were telling me that because this is hydrogen that's right before launch it's going to dump a bunch of hydrogen and then light off and that's why that nice beautiful orange rocket on the side it's gonna get charred is that the properties yeah it's charred okay and so this is the prettiest the rocket will ever be in it well I mean it's awesome when you got shot cones Ramat diamonds coming out the back but but that's going to be I don't know do you kind of predict what the pattern is going to be like do you ever know is it's a function of the its its it's a little bit there's you know there is a dominant pattern and so you know we know what its gonna look like and that's okay but you know it just makes it kind of a really cool rocket I mean the rocket sort of sets itself on fire and then it wanders into the sky and this column of fire that goes it's really cool we used to light all three stages at once we actually stagger that we won't light them all the lines and that tends to suppress that flame oh because one one rocket will light off the other ones kind of like a gas burner at your grill so it makes it that much quicker to start pulling all the propellant in the flame okay so if my flame trenches to the left here and I've got three cores which one would you light off first in order to try to drag all that out I got to get myself oriented so we light off before an hour left first of them they roll across that makes sense standing on the other side so that makes sense because you have containment on that side so that flames gonna be coming up in there that makes a lot of sense actually so you employ orbital mechanics Weaver's and absolutely yeah so you know I've been doing Rockets my whole life there are people in ula where are smarter than I am to specialize really deep in their individual disciplines so we have people too design analysis we have people who understand obviously modes and dynamics motion I have sloshin ologists who can model how the propellant sloshes inside the tanks as the rocket is fun so we know I'd end up cavitating you said you've watched smarter every day before yeah so did you see the video of a balloon in the van where when you drive forward a helium balloon in the van will go forward did you happen to see that yeah yeah so so you have helium excuse me you have not kneeling behind regime tanks in there but it's liquid right so we don't have any issues with pressure rinse or anything do you have any fresh currents in there like helium or anything like yes so we use helium to me our engines is that an issue like when when I when that rocket first fires you have a massive acceleration in one direction but you have all types of fluid in there and then you have tanks of hydrogen and helium and they're gonna start floating in really weird ways once you launch yeah so when we're under power or so everything is pressed to the bottom and it's behaving itself very very well but where it gets interesting is in in two phenomenon first is when we're still boosting something called Pogo instability and the other is when we're actually in zero g or miko main aim to cut off you got okay so let me talk about Pogo first so that's a really long rocket right we must we're probably on this deck I'd say probably 18 stories up and there are propellant feed lines that run all the way from that top orange band were you know one preparedness all the way down to the bottom the parents are gonna mix that fluid column can resonate and actually oscillate up and light water hammer exactly like water hammer and that is feeding our engine so that can cause instability and mansion's combustion process because the pressure at its in it would also they have the same frequency so within that design are things we call pogo suppression systems that actually absorb that energy out so when you plumb assume and you're worried about water hand now extra Wi-Fi right instead ended to absorb that energy it's a very similar thing so that's the only thing we really have to worry about on the way up until the propellant is very near the bottom and it's free to slosh around we need to suppress that sloshing and baffles inside the tank so that it doesn't slide away from the inlet to the engines and starve the engine right and then of course when we get to the upper stage we're going to do coasts so when you stop firing the engine goes for some length of time the propellant is floating around in zero g so it's we have to worry about where the bubbles are going to go because we don't want to have problems where they're fluid scents and then when we're ready to get going again we have to get a little bit of positive pressure on that thing to move the propellant back aft and so it covers the inlet to the engine go so how do you do that and so we do that with our attitude control system and we use it to get that first little bit going so we have people that actually be really cool computational fluid dynamic modeling of slosh when we have about fluid in a vapor on top of it in the confined space sort of bouncing around systems so the baffles are important because not only do they stop that sloshing but they also waste them they do and so you want baffles but you don't want baffles exactly so everything on a rocket is a trade or a compromise in layman's terms so there's a real science to figuring out all the different options and finding out the absolute optimum related so if you don't have enough then you Rockets not going to fly or you have to maintain enough thrust all the time wasting propellant to cover but if you put too much baffle in there then it's a lot of weight to take mass identity performances so you gotta get the balance just right I love rockets I think they're cool he's a cool job man you really do Tori thank you I mean this is an opportunity of a lifetime for me thank you very much I really appreciate that so we'll get out of your hair and let you go shoot you rock okay thank you I hope you enjoyed this experience as much as I did this was very very impressive thank you to ula thank you to Tori Bruno which is I mean he's amazing if you tweet him he will reply the youth like individually he replies to tweets it's incredible he also is all over reddit he's a very active person and you can ask him super technical questions and he will answer you on the Internet it's impressive so I'll leave a link to Tori Bruno's Twitter account down below and thank you for watching this extended video on the second channel I'm Destin you're getting smarter every day have a good one bye

Channel: Smarter Every Day 2

Views: 1,108,079

Rating: 4.9448738 out of 5

Keywords: smarter, every, day, science, physics, destin sandlin, destin, sandlin, ula, delta IV, delta IV heavy, parker solar probe, kennedy space center, Cape Canaveral, math, smarter every day, space, orbit, united launch alliance, kerbal space, kerbal space program, venus, sun, orbital mechanics, nordvpn, hide ip, secure vpn, vpn network security, rocket, booster cryogenic, delta, atlas, tory bruno, elon musk, space x, booster, mobile service tower

Id: x-vXJL8jXBk

Length: 36min 46sec (2206 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 02 2018