Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel | Lex Fridman Podcast #356
and the nozzle so as you're saying there's a bunch of different design options but it's a critical part of this how you do that conversion basically like how much can you convert is really like the ultimate game how much pressure and heat can we convert into thrust like that's really at the end of the day that's what a rocket engine is the following is a conversation with Tim Dodd host of the everyday astronaut YouTube channel where he educates and inspires all of us with detailed but accessible explanations of Rocket engines and all things space travel this is Alex Freedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's Tim DOD can you give a brief history of SpaceX Rockets so we got Falcon 1 Falcon 9 there's different versions of those Falcon heavy and Starship and also the the dragon capsules and so on well uh yeah Falcon 1 is where it all started the original intent and the original idea of of SpaceX was Elon wanted to try to get something to Mars you know um he saw that NASA didn't have a current Mars plan and he wanted to go to Mars so he decided how do I best do this um he literally wanted to at first purchase a rocket from from Russia uh then on the after a foiled attempt at doing that he decided to he was going to try to develop his own rocket and the Falcon one is what came out of that process and he developed a pretty incredible team like I don't know how exactly he stumbled upon the team that he stumbled upon that quickly but the people that he assembled were amazing and they built the Falcon 1 which was a single Merlin engine followed by an upper stage engine called the krol engine um pretty small compared to the things they're working on today but that Merlin engine continued to evolve uh into being the power plant for the Falcon 9 they went from a small lift launch vehicle up into the medium class launch vehicle so they could provide services for NASA um that's one of the big things they first kind of hung their hat up was they got the opportunity to fly cargo to the International Space Station under um originally was called the cots program the commercial orbital transportation services uh for NASA which evolved into the commercial resupply contracts and that's when SpaceX developed both their Dragon capsule which is a uh uncrewed at first uh spacecraft that can dock to the ISS and the Falcon 9 rocket that can take it to the International Space Station and then dragon rides on it's a thing up top that rides on the big booster thing that uh that launches it into orbit exactly yep the Falcon 99's the the semi- TR the dragon capsules the payload you know it's the thing being dropped off basically at its destination in this case the destination is the International Space Station um and uh yeah so they developed those relatively quickly and uh became a commercial success before for you know it they're now the number one launch provider in the world launching more mass to pay to orbit than anybody else launching more frequently than um countries like the entire country of China who's going crazy right now with launches granted China beat them by two launches this last in 20122 but prior uh prior year SpaceX beat the entire country of China I mean it's it's nuts what and just like you said SpaceX still beats China even this year in terms of the amount of payload those so the yeah the mass to orbit right that uh China had like 60 something a couple more uh launches but the there was just like small cubes that type of launches exactly some of them were literally like 100 kogs or something you know like not not large payloads and so SpaceX customers are different different so whoever wants to send payloads up into space yes but right now their biggest customer is actually themselves with starlink with one of the biggest reasons they've launched so much mass to orbit is because starlink is designed around the payload Fairing and the payload capabilities of the falcon9 rocket so you know because they're vertically integrated because they build their own satellites because they're building their own rocket they can literally design a system that's you know another manufacturer might have made a more Square satellite that was heavier or something but SpaceX looked at it from a blank slate and said here's our constraints our payload Mass constraints or volume constraints and they made a funky looking satellite things like the size of a you know it's like a table folded up which isn't anything I've you know really ever seen before so but it's purpose built to fit as efficiently as possible inside their Fairing and inside the capabilities of that rocket so therefore because they're launching those like an insane amount you know a dozen you know 40 50 times a year or whatever um they're uh they're just putting up insane amounts of mass like we've never seen before what about the different versions of Falcon 9 so we can Linger on them what are some interesting memories to you of the different developments in Falcon 9 the very first Falcon 9s had a a square array of engines it had like a 3x3x3 grid of their Merlin one engines the 1DS and um I think it only lasted I don't remember if it was two or four flights before they went into this OCTA configuration where um there's eight like a ring of eight engines with a center engine in the middle um still in the same diameter that the rocket was the fuselage was more or less the same 3.7 M wide diameter but the the actual thrust structure changed and one of the big efficiency gains was you no longer have you know a corner engine and then like a edge engine and then another Corner engine you can just make eight of the same you know kind of part of the OCTA web it's called uh you know the same shape and then the your interchangeability and your manufacturability becomes a lot simpler so that was kind of one of the bigger upgrades at first and they kept stretching it every time they like touch this thing it got longer and like or taller and taller technically um and then the next big feature that you saw uh in 2014 would have been they add added Landing legs to a Falcon 9 rocket which was I was at that was the first launch I ever went to was actually to see um it was CRS 3 so commercial resupply Mission 3 it was probably their God I don't remember what that was like their 14th or 15th launch or something like pretty early on um and people were literally laughing at the idea of them putting Landing legs on it they just thought it was stupid they're like why are they wasting why is this billionaire Elon mus guy wasting his time trying to land a rocket it's not going to work so you said the Mars planet was there in the beginning uh what about the re reusability of rockets was that there in the beginning uh I think reusability definitely you know it's it's a necessary part of making any kind of interplanetary mission you know in order to actually do that just financially you have to start reusing these things in terms of the development of the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 how early on did the uh goal of reusing the rocket having the rocket actually land how how early did that goal creep in I I can't speak for Elon and and SpaceX but it was pretty you know immediate they wanted to try to recover and as a matter of fact I think the very first two Falcon 9 rockets and Falcon 1 I think they even wanted to try to recover uh using parachutes to recover the first stage um and now fast forward you know almost 20 years later and Rocket lab is actually doing a concept like that where they're uh pulling a parachute after the first stage is re-entering and they actually are trying to recover cover it with a helicopter he's going to try to snatch it out of the air they've actually done it they've actually done it successfully once how does the helicopter grab the the rocket with this giant like drag line in a hook oh W and literally just like grabs snags onto the parachute wow and it's pretty amazing and but this is a small rocket their Rocket's only about a metric ton the the booster is empty so the rocket releases parachutes yep like really high up I'd love to see this yeah it's an interesting idea there's so many interesting ideas and possibilities like SpaceX basically just innovated a lot of different weird ideas just in in the pursuit of making things more efficient reusable um all that so basically thinking from first principles how to solve this problem and so what you find is like you'll get all these kind of crazy kind of solutions and with SpaceX they weren't even getting to the point of the booster surviving re-entry long enough to be able to pull the parachutes yeah you know their Mass fractions you know and that varies every single Rocket's different you know all the you know for instance rocket lab uses carbon composite fuselage and tanks um or you know same thing and that's very very lightweight has really good Mass fractions and therefore their drag coefficients and things like that they were able to survive re-entry of the first age which is something that SpaceX wasn't able to do at the time um what's what the kind of the big I think breakthrough for SpaceX with reusing the booster is they uh they realized we have to basically slow down before we hit the atmosphere so they actually do what they used to call a re-entry burn which I still think is the correct term because it is re-entering the atmosphere but now they call it the entry burn and they light up three of the nine Merlin engines uh not only to slow it down but actually even while those engines are firing it creates like a a literal like force field as it's falling through the through the atmosphere interesting and uh but it also decreases the velocity by almost half or around half and then that therefore decreases the amount of you know the biggest thing with the atmosphere is that it as it gets compressed against um the the front of any anything flying through the atmosphere uh the compressed atoms just get hot and they can get so hot they turn into a plasma and they get so hot they can just absolutely destroy anything um so they slow down enough that the air molecules don't end up you know destroying the vehicle on re-entry and then they then they realize I think at some point it's probably a similar crossover they're like well if we're lighting the engines already to slow down in the atmosphere we can just use that same engine to land MH and so like well what if we just stuck Landing legs on it and just landed the thing vertically and next thing you know is December 21st 2015 they did exactly that for the first time they landed so you were there before that then right yeah in 2014 yep early 2014 so that and for me like that was so fun watching you know that was like the peak of me just becoming obsessed with uh with this idea I'm watching with like and back in the day it was like months between launches you know so a launch was like a big idea I'd wake up at 3:00 a.m. to watch this Landing attempt or whatever you know and every you know there's crs4 um almost almost landed crs5 almost landed CRS 6 CRS 7 blew up I was watching that on I think it was like a Saturday morning or maybe a Sunday morning and I remember watching that and watched it blow up and I'm like oh my God now what you know and it blew up on a scent it was their first failure um so it was their 18th flight I believe CRS 7 the upper stage um had a uh one of the bot there's bottles inside the tanks that are filled with helium and one of those bottles broke off on a scent mhm and actually just completely overpressured this the upper stage the upper stage blew up and the whole rocket went Kaboom uh in an uncontrolled Manner and so uh so then they came back with vengeance when they came back the first mission back is the first time that they landed a rocket which was awesome so they return to flight after the anomaly was was uh yeah was was Landing a rocket stuck The Landing yep well actually the first time so the first time you were there what was that like what do you remember from that from that day just I was surprised at how much bigger the rocket was than I imagined I was I originally when I was going down to Kennedy Space Center I was disappointed that I wasn't seeing like a you know I didn't know a ton about Rockets I knew enough to like know what a space shuttle was what like the Saturn 5 was you know but that was probably about the end of my knowledge I just remember being disappointed that I wasn't seeing a big quote unquote NASA rocket flying you know I was thinking in my head like oh I'm going to see this launch it's probably going to be like you know three stories tall or something you know just some little skinny little stick and some little firecracker and yay you know and I think I'd almost been pitched that too I think the the people that I was working for at the time I think they kind of were downplaying it as like well it's not a big rocket here it's not going to be that exciting you know but we get out there to the pad and I'm like this thing's huge this is not a small rocket like this is It's you know it's 70 M tall 220 feet tall it's huge um and I think people forget like the scale of that you know it might look skinny and tall and and all this stuff but is still a very very large piece of machinery it's physically about as as large as you can ship the booster is about as big as you can ship across the country period without like completely shutting down highways you know it is made within those exact specifications of of like having you know Lane Privileges and bridges and everything it's you know 12 feet wide 3.7 meters wide and it's 45 MERS long so it's like exactly what you can fit uh with a pretty standard you know like before you start getting into crazy amounts of of problems shipping the rocket and it's huge it's huge and people just don't understand that and so when I saw with my own eyes I remember just being like this is so much cooler than I thought is it hard to believe that that thing is going to have to lift off the ground and launch up into the air maybe that's the most humbling aspect of it that something that size humans have come up with a way to take something that size and launching launch it up into the air yeah there's certainly a very humbling aspect when you watch it actually leave was was there a sound to it was there like a feeling what what were the different experiences that you first remember well ironically I didn't end up getting to see that one fly oh I went home my camera saw it I left my camera out there like a remote triggered camera uh my first images as a launch photographer at the time was was CRS 3 but I went home it it scrubbed too many times this is back in the day they were scrubbing like often and it'd be like a threed day five day 7even day you just never knew so I go home and I watched the live stream of it so I didn't even get an experience my first launch and any anyone that's ever tried to you know go to a launch is can probably empathize because yeah scrubs are very common in the space flight world so that one I didn't get a see uh but since then obviously I've been able to um attend very many launches uh how much do you understand the control involved in the landing how difficult is that problem I couldn't tell you a single thing about like the code and like the avionics behind it but I can tell you all the hardware that makes it happen if that helps well that I mean to me it seems like whenever I talk to people they they say it's not that big of a deal in terms of the the level of intelligence and the control but to me it's just like when you observe it it seems is incredible cuz all the variables involved all the uncertainties involved all the um because there's aerodynamics I mean like there's different temperatures there's so so much going on with the fuel the burning the the combustion just everything that's going on to be able to do perform control at such high stakes effectively like you know I that code is probably not written in JavaScript I guess is what I'm saying actually no I don't it it if I remember I again this is well outside of my domain um but um I'm they they code in a Common Language it's is it's probably it's probably going to be c yeah yeah I'm pretty sure it is and that was one of the things that was weird is that Elon when he you know started SpaceX was like we're just going to code in the most common language so that we don't have to like have people learn this archaic you know weird thing and we can just literally pull people off the streets and be like here write it you know and yeah it's probably C++ I mean it'd be epic if it was like python or something but I don't I I think like reliable systems have to be written in cc++ probably which is a common language which is something uh I imagine like NASA Engineers would probably have to use some kind of proprietary language in uh in the olden days for for security for privacy all that kind of stuff um well in the olden old old days like they're inventing code and language from scratch uh for sure but still it's just still incredible that it's able to do that like just the feat of engineering involved is just is truly it's like one of the Marvels to observe about these Rockets coming back to Earth uh that they're able to land like the drama of it is just incredible to see yeah well the the one of the fun things to remember too with specifically with the Falcon 9 and the falcon or Falcon heavy boosters I mean it's the same thing basically um they shut down all but one of the nine engines and even with that one engine at its minimum throttle setting it's still too much thrust to hover so as this Rocket's coming down if they start a little bit too early if they light that engine too early it will actually stop above the ground and will not be able to lower itself it will literally stop like say I stay say it stop 200 feet above the ground their only option is to kill the engine and then it's just going to fall those 200 feet so they it's what we call like a suicide burn or a hover slam kind of interchangeable terms because your thrust to weight ratio is never below one so they have to actually literally be riding the throttle so what you do is you kind of start ideally you know you kind of start like in the middle of your window of of throttle range so let's pretend your engine can Throttle Down to 40% of its maximum rated thrust you might start at like 70% of thrust in the middle of that like window of where it could burn so that so if all of a sudden it's kind of coming in too hot you have room to throttle up if you're coming in you actually you know a little too early you throttle it down you have a little bit of wiggle room it's just amazing how smoothly and how perfectly they're able to still control that thing even though they're down to one engine out of the nine and they're still riding like the finest margin of what's possible and they're they're continually playing with that to try to get it because every every bit of fuel they're using and proponent they're using to land is proponent they weren't using to put something into space yeah so they want that to be as efficient as possible so they're really like watching them hone that in and and just continue to evolve and edit that and and just get it to be the Workhorse we're coming up on a 100 consecutive Landings perfect Landings 100 I think they've done like 150 something Landings all together 160 altogether but we're talking like in a row without blowing up which at the you know 5 years ago was completely experimental and insane and now we're coming up to the point where we're 100 in a row it's like this is becoming more reliable in the landing which is not the primary Mission this is purely for spacex's like gain is to recover the booster it has nothing to do with the effect of getting the payon on orbit you know most of the time and uh the landing is really only for their their benefit and their gain long-term gain like it's a long-term investment in in uh being able to recover the the the boosters can you believe all this was done in basically 10 years so we've seen this development over a period of 10 years oh man so like where we started uh commercial space flight at scale to today where it's almost uh almost starting to be mundane yeah what FC is able to do yeah uh I I can't really believe it I mean obviously even just in the I I think I'm a fairly fair weather fan really didn't start paying attention till like 2014 yeah and just seeing what it was like back then to what it's like like I don't watch every launch at all anymore like I'll catch the big ones yeah I'll stream some of the really big ones but like back in the day I like I said would wake up in the middle of the night to catch these streams or you know catch these launches and watch them because they were such a big deal and there's maybe only five of them a year you know and so it's a really big deal nowadays it's like oh yeah there's literally like two a week on average now it's insane from SpaceX alone let alone you know United launch Alliance rocket lab any of the Chinese missions you know I mean all of there's countless it's it's insane it's hard to really really really hard to keep up with I wonder at which point in the future the number of uh launches to orbit will exceed the number of launches of airplanes like on the surface of Earth see I have to admit I kind of have a hard time extrapolating out that far you know there's a lot of people that are like big futurists and really do think about like interplanetary stuff and think about colonizing Mars and stuff I have a hard time predicting like when starship's going to fly the orbital launch you know and that's like imminent is like month or two scale time frame and yet I'm still like I can't tell you when that's gonna I can't tell you anything about like when we're going to land on Mars or what that's what that economy and what that you know the scale of launch operations is going to look like in order to do that because it's just so hard to I wouldn't have predicted where we're at today five years ago you know it's it's insane it's so hard to predict and yeah but it's it's funny because there's so many like new companies starting up trying to predict that and it's a really exciting you know startup culture right now I think uh when you make certain engineering decisions and hiring decisions and like what you focus on in terms of both business and Engineering it's good to think on the scale of 10 20 50 100 years that's one of the things that Elon is exceptionally good at which is asking uh the question okay this might seem impossible right now but what's the obvious way to do this if we look out 20 years and then you start to make decisions you start to make decisions about robotics about brain computer interfaces about uh space travel that are that make a lot of sense when you look at the scale of 10 20 50 100 years and don't make any sense if you if you look at the scale of of just months so but of course the actual work of day-to-day is focused on the next few months because there's deadlines there's missions they have to accomplish anyway we uh we're turning back to the brief history of SpaceX Rockets the Falcon heavy so what what else is there so we talked about Falcon 9 and the rapid development there what other flavors of of Falcon is there and how does that take us to Starship yeah realistically the Falcon N9 evolved more or less kind of like just got more powerful and a little bit longer and more capable but nowadays they fly What's called the block five even though it's like the eighth or ninth iteration of the the Falcon but they call it block five it's the one that has the black Landing legs the black in stage they have a fleet of roughly 10 or so that are doing the majority of the leg work these days and they're flying you know up to 15 times I think right now is the current booster leader they're also recovering the fairings so the nose cone of the Rockets are frequently if not every time being recovered um same with yeah same with the booster for the most part and the only thing being expended is the upper stage and that's kind of where the Falcon 9 is ending it's really doesn't make sense to develop that infrastructure any longer so they went with the next step which is go even bigger physically so they have more margin for upper stage reusability and that's what we see with Starship and super heavy so the super heavy booster uh the whole system is confusing the whole system's kind of considered Starship but it technically the Starship is just the upper stage which is also like the spaceship which is also the upper stage and then the booster itself is considered the super heavy booster and that's what they've been working on uh publicly it came out in 2016 as the uh at the time it was the its the interplanetary transportation system uh later in I think about 20 by the end of that year 2017 it kind of became known as the bfr the big uh Falcon rocket yes yeah um and then I think it was about end of 2018 they started calling it Starship but that is the that is where we're at today and that's what they're uh working full steam ahead on and uh what about Dragon we mention Dragon uh crew Dragon cargo Dragon yeah so they went from the cargo version of dragon that flew uh about 20 times uh successfully to the AAL space station except for that one CRS 7 where the rocket blew up in the capsule obviously didn't make it to the ISS um then they went into the dragon TR Dragon 2 which has two variants it has a crew variant so we just call it crew crew dragon and then there's the cargo version of of Dragon 2 um and that's just an updated sleeker sexier version of dragon and it's ironically it's heavier altogether so it uh you'll never see those those cool return to launch site Landing the boosters coming back to land for CRS missions anymore like like we used to but they landed on the Drone ship anyway and um and yeah that's been flying successfully that's kind of the so there's yeah starlink Dragon falcon9 Falcon heavy and Starship system is kind of the whole the whole SpaceX world really in ter in terms of the the the spaceships involved what do you are some of the major milestones in that history we kind of mentioned a a few stick in the landing is is there something that kind of stands out yeah I would say definitely um the big ones obviously like any of the first the first flight of Falcon 1 First Flight of Falcon 9 first time they went to the International Space Station um the first time they landed a booster um the first time they reuse a booster which is I think about six months after no oh it was a year after it was scs1 um 2017 was the first time they they reused one of those boosters you know and that was a big milestone like can we even yeah we recovered one we we caught one you know it's like we got one now what um that was the first time they refle one um yeah then flying humans was a huge one dm to Bob and Doug um for NASA Bob and Doug yeah Bob and Doug that was incredible you know that was that was a huge huge step I think for SpaceX was flying people so it's it's first major commercial launching of humans out into space yeah and not just into space because you know there's been people that have done you know space flights with you know like suborbital hops but going into orbit and especially docking and roning with the International Space Station is a it's a big deal it's a whole it until you really understand the physics involved and the scale involved of like just crossing the Cara line going straight up versus going into orbit like they're just completely different things almost what about uh Starship are we are we in a place where we can talk about Milestones with Starship has there been or has it just been an Epic Journey of failure and successes of testing and and so on was there like yeah what would you classify at this point as a as a milestone a Starship or be a whatever the name is was able to achieve well so far the Milestones we've seen I'd say the first one would be the Hop of they call it starhopper and it's basically a very rudimentary rocket but it was the first time they they utilized their new Raptor engine to produce thrust to to fly something it first flew like literally like 3 MERS off the ground or something like Tethered to the ground then it flew like 15 and then finally it flew 150 m m um and that was in 2019 and that was the first big milestone of of Starship then after that we saw uh sn5 sn6 kind of do the similar like 150 M hops with a little bit more elegant systems you know proving out more of their their tank building proving out more their you know a lot of just subsystems and then the big ones physically were in uh and end of 2020 and early 2021 when they flew the uh SN 8 9 10 11 and 15 what does the n stand for an SN I think just serial number or number these are just names numbers numerical representations of the different testing efforts they ski some numbers right if they if they scratch a test yeah and lots of times it'd be like literally they're building you know CU at Star base and what SpaceX is working on like the one foot is always in front of someone else's foot and like the arm is not knowing what the leg is doing sometimes yeah they they will have someone working on you know they'll just be like hurry up and build 40 of these tank sections and you build the bulkhead and you build the downcomer and you build the header tank blah blah blah and all of a sudden like oh we actually evolved that we don't use that header tank now so it's going to go on to this one so they'll have like parts of certain Rockets built like ah literally scrap it like not scrap it like in the you know joke term but like literally just go scrap it and they uh so yeah they just evolve and iterate so quickly there were some epic explosions um I think Starship something about it uh probably just the amount of fuel just leads to some epic epic failures oh yeah probably would you say Starship is the source of the most epic failures in terms of size of explosion so you can literally measure in like a yield of explosive power you know like like you could TNT like you can take a look at uh how much propellent is left over at the at the time of the exposion and you know Starship what what's flown so far even though it's physically one of the largest flying objects ever uh just with the upper stage alone they've not filled it more than like 10 or 20% full of propellant yeah and so it actually hasn't been the the failures have been really epic looking uh big visual ual Fireballs but in terms of space fight they're still pretty small explosions believe it or not they could still go bigger oh yeah a lot a lot and of course the test payload of a Tesla rooster was launched um I forget what year that was yeah that 2018 that that was quite epic would you put that on a milestone oh yeah yeah Falcon heavy demo was like definitely a a big big big milestone yeah is that funny to you that there's a Roop floating out there do we know the location of that Roadster at this point oh yeah where is roadster.com yeah oh yeah where's is it orbiting something yeah it's orbiting the Sun so it's it's orbiting the Sun and its orbit is basically between the Earth's orbit and Beyond Mars so I think up like 2.5 Au if I remember right so it's it's beyond Mars's orbit at its highest point and it's back at Earth kind of in its lowest point I wonder if there's a mission where you're going to somehow connect with it once again and like Place extra things into it I wonder how challenging that is technically oh yeah it could it could absolutely be done um you know the the hard thing at this point because it's on an eccentric orbit would be Rend deing with it because you kind of have to be in alignment with its orbit to really line up well with it yeah um but yeah I mean someday I don't see any reason why we couldn't at least and for sure an uncrewed you know Elon wanted to just fly a a robot out there to check up on it and photograph it or something like we could that could be well within the realm of things and get an Optimus uh robot up there uh so that was a story uh brilliantly told by you of the Rockets uh for SpaceX what about through the lens of engines uh can you give a brief history of the SpaceX rocket engines that were uh used that we haven't covered you mentioned it all started with the Merlin engine and a cust engine what um yeah through that that lens yeah what's there the engines are relatively small number which is which is easy for us there's yeah the Merlin Merlin's evolved throughout time to be from like the Merlin to the Merlin 1C to the Merlin 1D to the Merlin full thrust and all these other kind of tweaks of the same architecture uh krol ended with Falcon 1 um they also have the Morlin vacuum engine which is the upper stage engine for Falcon 9 same relative uh system but just optimized for vacuum so it has a much larger Bell nozzle there's the Draco thrusters which you know you kind of consider engines well they are rocket engines but they're just small they're not like the orbital engines there's the super Draco engines which are the abort thrusters on on crew Dragon capsule and then nowadays they have the Raptor engine and the Raptor vacuum variant um but they've already had two versions of raptor we've already seen kind of the Raptor development engine um we've kind of seen like a raptor 1.5 where is kind of taking hints of the future Raptor but now we're well within the well within what you know you'd consider a Raptor 2 variant and that's really it yeah for the uh the Raptor maybe I'll ask you that separately but I like in general and people who doesn't know whoever astronaut is but if you don't somehow know go go go check his your YouTube channel out you're an incredible educator about the the super technical and uh the more sort of even the the philosophical the actual like the the actual space travel so you go down to the raw details of it and there's just great videos on the Raptor engine um I think you have one on Merlin uh and and also actual tours with Elon where he discusses some of those things on one of the tours he said says uh he's full of good lines that guy uh he says something about uh the number of fiddly bits and he's uh the number of fiddly bits was decreased between Raptor 2 and Raptor 1 yeah and I I think that's actually a really beautiful representation of um the engineering efforts there which is constantly trying to simplify oh yeah uh increase the efficiency of the engines but also uh simplify the design so you can manufacture it and in general simplification leads to better performance and testing you know and everything so the number of fiddly bits I'm sure there's a Wikipedia page on that now as an index is actually a really good one well and when you think about it I I don't know of any other company prior that had kind of tried to measure their performance of their engine not in like thrust to weight ratio or like how efficient it is like in specific impulse but literally in like dollar to thrust ratio like how much does this engine cost how much thrust can it produce and like using that is a trade study instead of just like pure metrics of you know because at the end of the day like okay if it's if it's cheaper and does you know x amount of work even if it's less efficient it can actually be better long term and so I guess another way it's not even just thrust I don't know if that metric is used but basically the cost of getting one kilogram of thing up into space yeah that's basically what they're trying to minimize especially yeah at the end of the day that is definitely the ultimate metric is how much does one kilogram cost to orbit eventually you know and but there's it's so funny cuz space FL is just the ultimate you know it's the ultimate compromise every little thing any variable can just change everything else so you can tweak so many different things to get to different numbers and conclusions you know but even things like on your first stage when you're when you're the Rocket's pointing straight up and the engines are pointing straight down you're dealing more with the thrust to weight ratio of the rocket so how much thrust is it producing versus how much is gravity pulling down on it is actually a more important than how raw efficient the engine is so it's funny then in space it's kind of the opposite thrust to weight ratio doesn't really matter uh what really matters is the actual the specific impulse it's called or like the the nozzle escape velocity of the or the injection velocity of the how fast is the the gas moving is like the more important number on orbit but it's it's just so crazy because there's all these like I would just love to see the trade studies you know when you're like trying to figure out like is this more important than this or this or this and it's like you change this one little thing and all a sudden you know like all the everything changes it's just even the profile like the the launch profile the trajectory of it the I mean everything everything I I wonder what that trade-off discussions are like cuz you can't really perfectly plan everything so and you always have to have some spare leway you know especially as you're testing new vehicles like Starship yeah margins are important yeah having having a margin given all the uncertainty that's there that's really interesting like how they do those kinds of tradeoffs cuz they're all rapidly designing and redesigning and re-engineering and uh the ultimately you want to give yourself the freedom to constantly innovate but then through the process of testing you solidify the thing that can be relied upon especially if it's a crude Mission yeah that that how to do that in a rapid cycle I I remember at some point that NASA as they're leading up to Flying humans for the first time for NASA um you know there's some talk that like we're going to do a design freeze because SpaceX does evolve and iterate so quickly you know they were saying that it was leading because especially at the time it was a mission called Amos 6 and they lost a rocket they've only lost two rockets like ever really as far as um you know trying to get something to space for the Falcon 9 sorry um and the second one Amos 6 I mean that was back in 2016 so it's it's been a long time and uh but at the time you know they're looking at flying humans in in the near future and it's like if you guys keep tweaking this thing every time you take it out to the pad there's going to be a problem you know and so there is some pressure from NASA to kind of slow down on that iterative process and uh but that is also why they were able to evolve the Falcon 9 to be what it is today is because they did just evolve it so quickly literally like one after another was never really the same and we're definitely seeing that with Starship now like it's evolved so quickly that you just can't even keep up with it you know so there's a fascinating culture uh Clash there have you just in observing and interacting with NASA folks seen them sort of grow and change and evolve themselves sort of inspired by this new developments in commercial space flight oh yeah yeah there's a lot of especially like around dm2 there's a lot of talks and the press conferences and stuff where you'd hear people say you know this was a big this is well outside of our comfort zone to work with SpaceX in this manner because we're we take this approach to things we're X Y and Z in this in this way the way normally certify things and we're not used to SpaceX like well let's just try it you know like and and do something you know to a point and so they they said it ended up being fantastic they loved working that way because it was just less paperwork almost and more just do and um and but at the same time SpaceX I think even expressed I I don't remember if it was Hans cigman or someone in a press conference said well we really liked having someone just double check us so that we're not doing something super stupid right before we test something you know um so there was a cool collaboration because it is uh two very different philosophies of uh of development and managing you know space programs I wanted to talk to you a lot about engines uh and maybe about Starship and maybe about your own becoming an actual astronaut but like let let's just go there uh before all that and and and talk about the actual culture of SpaceX and uh your conversations with uh Elon you've tour SpaceX facilities with him you've interviewed him you've interacted with them uh what have you learned about Rockets about propulsion about engineering about design about life from those interactions um he's pretty transparent open human being as an engineer as a as a leader as a person I would definitely say the biggest takeaway I've had from my times with Elon at SpaceX is really like the the idea of questioning your constraints he says that a lot but he also does it a lot like he there'll you know there'll be times where like you'll see him change on a dime because he's like rethinking of something in a in a new or different way and for me you know I I I think we all put constraints on ourselves we we think about our own limits you know on on things that we can or cannot do and I think it's made me kind of question like well why am I why did I say no I can't do that or you know you know just off the top of my head it a good example uh I so in Iowa I live in Iowa or half the time or whatever uh there's a a bike ride across the state of Iowa called ragb and every year you just you know like thousands of people get together and they they ride across Iowa and it was last summer uh I met up with some friends and like hey you want to go on ragb this year I'm like it's like a week away they're like yeah you want to go I'm like yeah and so I did without and it was one of those moments where I was proud of myself because like I it's easy to just be like no you know I'm not ready or this is my constraint is like I'm not in shape MH but like just question that you know and and so I think when it comes down to questioning your own constraints it's yes even to that level of like why do you question yourself on what you can and cannot do so that's for your personal life is really powerful but a little bit more intuitive I think what's really hard is the question of constraints in a place like Aeronautics or or robotics or autonomous vehicles or Vehicles because there's people there's experts everywhere that have done it for decades and everyone admires those experts and respects those experts and for you to step into a room knowing not much more than just uh what's in a Wikipedia article yeah and to just use your intuition and first principal thinking to disagree with the experts that takes uh that takes some uh guts I think well you can't have everyone doing that either you know like there has to be some humility of knowing that something is a hardened concept and a hardened you know like especially I I'm not an engineer I don't I don't do this stuff you know but I can imagine you sitting there having spent six years on a type of valve that perfectly managed as crowd Jun propellants or whatever and someone walks in and says why don't you just put a heater element in there you know or something that's you know something you're like be because we you know we've done that 40 times or whatever whatever you know like I'm sure there are things like that that are very frustrating but but see the I don't know what that's like you know the thing is with the experts they're always going to be frustrated when the Newbie comes in with their first principles thinking but sometimes that frustration is Justified and sometimes it's not sometimes it's just stubbornness for failing to acknowledge a better way and I've seen it both directions which is really interesting so you need you need both but that tension is always going to be there and there has to be almost like a dictatorial uh imperative that breaks through the the expertise of the way things have been done in the past to push forward like a new way of doing it and elon's done that um I've seen a lot of great Engineers uh do that in the Machining machine learning world because it's been so much Development I've seen that happen usually when there's like rapid development that starts to come into play yeah um and yeah and I've seen that autonomous vehicle space um brain computer interfaces that Elana's evolved with all of it it's kind of fascinating to watch um what about the actual design and Engineering of the engine since you've learned about so many different kinds of engines over the past few years just like what stands out to you about the way that engineering is done at SpaceX or that Elon does engineering the hardest thing to kind of remember is like how much stuff was developed in the 50s and 60s you know the the concepts finally being utilized today were already literally done in the 60s yeah you know so a lot of the things that SpaceX is doing isn't a novel concept per se you know they're like for instance the Raptor engine utilizes the full flow stage combustion cycle engine and that was already developed by the Soviets in the 60s um for an engine called the Rd 270 and it's makes sense like on paper 100% it makes sense because you're basically extracting the absolute maximum potential of the chemical energy in both propellants and you know at the at the end of the day like you have to be dumb enough to say we're going to try using this thing because it's actually really complicated to to do what they're doing but at the same time like so are so are Rockets like rocket engines already stupid complicated so adding you know 10 20% more you know pain in the butt during the R&D if it's you know in the long long long 20 30y year existence or whatever you know like future of that engine is that going to be worth it obviously SpaceX said yeah I think we can actually develop this this Raptor engine so it's it's just interesting to see the things that have been looked at or even reusability you know like the space shuttle was reusable it was fully uh the upper stage you know the shuttle itself the the Orbiter was you know I mean that thing was for all intents and purposes a reusable rocket now did it live up to its expectations not necessarily so it left a lot of bad taste in people's mouth on the the ideas of reusability so for SpaceX to kind of come back into the room and on the table and say we're going to use a reusable rocket specifically we're going to do a fully reasonable rocket you know a lot of people are even still today A lot of people are going yeah yeah you're not going to be able to do that even today even today so like long term you're not going to be able to reuse at scale yeah but yeah definitely I think the number of people that are saying that today is is a small portion of those that were saying that type of thing five years ago you know when Elon did that announcement in 2016 um for the its it was very very aspirational and people were just like yeah right you know and there's a large number of people that had the fact ual reasons to to think that and do that you know um at the time they had only landed like two Rockets or something you know when they did that or maybe three it was very small number uh when they announced that actually they had just lost a couple months prior they just lost amo6 so they like they were still this young blossoming company and to come in and be like we figured out reusability and now we're going to go full scale and make the world's biggest most heaviest most powerful rocket ever and we're going to fully reuse it and it's going to go to Mars was just pretty out there like it really was and yeah you know it's all about perspective but now again we're coming up on 100 consecutive Landings of an orbital class rocket that's you know 45 MERS tall 3.7 met wide like this thing is huge weighs 20 metric tons even empty when it's Landing that thing's already huge so seeing the success of that I think people are now more like well okay maybe maybe there is actually the opportunity to be fully reusable that's definitely probably the biggest constraint that I think has been questioned that isil yep and then of course like the broader one of cost of bringing down cost uh that it's able to you're able to kind of bring down cost so much that this something like colonizing Mars or many trips to Mars would be a possibility that's people don't even that seems so far out that they don't even have time or give effort to questioning it but it's the implied questioning can you really do that many launches actually do it can you actually do it yeah it's it's looking I think it's one of those things where you look at the curve you know you look at like 10 years ago that was ridiculous yeah following this curve if SpaceX goes from you know two years ago launching I don't remember what it was 40 times to 60 times to 100 times this year is their is their amount and if we just keep extrapolating that out if they maybe not that exponential maybe it goes more linear whatever what's 20 30 years like the amount of stuff we can put on orbit and and the potential we have to do things like absolutely now I don't want to put a time frame like you know yeah I think but you got to think it's we're increasing the number of launches we're increasing the amount of things in space we're increasing the amount of payload on orbit that's probably not going to decrease anytime soon and therefore eventually like the idea of going to Mars is absolutely reasonable let me ask a difficult question that needs to be asked here can uh SpaceX continue uh its successes without Elon this long-term Mission to Mars I I think the discussion about Tesla and autopilot or robotics or neuralink with brain computer interfaces is a question wholly separate from the SpaceX question um because there's a lot of other competitors doing um some different but amazing engineering that Tesla is doing and both autonomous vehicles semi semi-autonomy or full autonomy and obviously in vehicle design electric vehicle there's a lot of people that are doing incredible brain computer interfaces but while there is a lot of competitors to SpaceX and we'll talk about many of them they're doing amazing work it seems like he's really driving progress here over the past 10 years what do you think about that okay the first thing I think to remind people is just how many brilliant people do work at each of these companies obviously you know elon's had the some of the best teams assembled ever just incredible people he knows this he he will gladly tell people and he says it often like the amazing people the amazing teams here so it is important to remember that um that being said like there is something to elon's just super far forward not taking no for an answer on things approach that and and and almost to his dismay I think he is afraid of the sunk cost fallacy so much that it almost almost gets to the border of like being you know like throw out everything before it's even we've we've known it or not but at the same time like it moves the needle so fast so far so as far as the question of would SpaceX continue to like succeed and and be able to ultimately go to Mars without Elon the Mars thing I think would probably be hard to uphold without I think a lot of that drive for Mars is from Elon um it is maybe too Fantastical for the average person and the average employee and maybe the average CEO that might step in to have a company's mission to go to Mars like it's just or even governments clearly because like you said the Mars plan was non-existent for NASA yeah still really there isn't much you know so I I think if and how many people I'm sorry to interrupt how many people are talking about it's obvious that we need to become multiplanetary right there's not a there's the Mars society and like serious leaders of engineering uh efforts or or nations and so on yeah which it does seem if you think about it that it it's obvious yeah in the grand eventuality it it is obvious of the of human civilization this whole human experiment we have here we should be uh expanding out into the cosmos 100% so I think the big mission if we're we're measuring SpaceX spacex's success on getting to Mars or not I think they'd have a really hard time um continuing to fulfill that drive without Elon at the helm um now I think there's a certain balance and beauty of Elon specifically when it was Tesla and SpaceX where Elon will go in you know have mild tornadoes around the factory and the the engineering you know and like mix everything up and and things get sometimes just totally thrown together you know and and totally just like get it done just to to get it done and start moving that direction and then he'll leave and go do that same thing you know at SpaceX or Tesla vice versa and then there's a little bit of a calm where people come back in and they f in those gaps you know and I think that's kind of always been a pretty healthy thing honestly is like I think if he is too focused on on any one thing it almost is like spin too much you know like it's like the too many tornadoes yeah too many tornadoes and and I think it could almost be like you need someone to come back in and like you know like backfill almost because i' I've heard definitely stories of like like well public a good a good example would be last um last was that last year or two years ago 2020 two yeah was that yeah or no 2021 they did a the First full stack of Starship super heavy and they called it the big surge all of a sudden like thousands of SpaceX employees you know came down to Starbase and they just started building like you wouldn't freaking believe I mean it's just things going crazy be it was actually in the middle that first interview I did with him was in the middle of that surge there was like commotion like you wouldn't believe you couldn't hardly talk because there's just so much going on people just welding and blah blah blah you know everything they did during that period was basically scrapped cuz it was just not done very well but they got a fully stacked Starship rocket out on their Launchpad you know and it it said I think at some point you kind of have to stabilize some things enough and just say like this is what we're doing to catalyze some things and say now do this it's almost like do it for fake now do it for real almost it's funny cuz through that time cuz I had a lot a lot of convers with him I think that process was hugely stressful there was a sense I don't know where that sense is today but there was a sense that Starship is going to be very hard to pull off yeah that's still borderline impossible to pull off and and that was really weighing heavy on him and the team and everybody yeah so like to have this chaos of development is fascinating yeah big time and I think they really had to push you know if they hadn't done that if they hadn't done that big push you know we might only be now seeing a rocket stacked for the first time um you know might be a lot more finished rocket a lot more High Fidelity a lot more flight worthy rocket finished and and stacked but um and they might not have to walk stuff backwards but at the same time like you do have to in this world you do have to push really hard uh to to make rapid iteration rapid change in progress so it's it's interesting I don't know so lingering on that another question I I really should ask you because of you've seen you've been in awe of the amazing development of space travel technology over the past few years um what do you think about Elon buying Twitter so in this perfect balance optimized reallocation of tornadoes throughout uh the various efforts in human civilization uh do you think do you worry about his involvement with Twitter I mean personally I just I I see that as a lot less important than and personally for me inspirational than Starship and you know the work done at SpaceX and Tesla to me those were two very uh impactful and really really just generally like you know they uniting like you know something to Rally around get excited about rally and just like a future to look forward to Y um you know the idea of we're going to be building the world's most powerful biggest rocket ever and it's eventually going to be able to get humans on Mars for the first time and we're going to transition the world into fully sustainable awesome just totally badass cars that do all these cool things to me those were like that brought a sense of unity and a sense of like we can do this personally I just don't think that a social media no matter what it is I don't see that in a social media and I don't I don't see um any sort of politicking as ever anything that's really ever uniting thing I understand that I totally agree with you especially with space how inspiring it is I have to push back I I do think the impact of social media the basic level of uh meaningful connections of this collective intelligence that we call human civilization through the medium of you know digital communication which is social media I think that can have a huge impact it could be the very vehicle that increases the inspiration that SpaceX does and and all different uh the thing I've criticized them a bunch for is like why bring politics into this uh so the politic the political divisions that we see on Twitter feeding them It's Tricky um It's tricky to sort of understand what is the value of that what is the contribution of that to uh to this whole effort with God going on so that that's been a that that's been a big challenge but that said like again this tornado the number of tornadoes in social media I think is really important because social media has such a huge impact on on us as a society and to have a transparent um have a bit of turmoil you know it's like Tom way says I like my town with a bit of Drop of Poison with a little Drop of Poison so like a little bit of that um shake things up I think might be really healthy I just just worry about the long-term impact on the whole Mars project through that and so but you know what uh this life one of the reasons that's fun is uh through the chaos you like none of us know how it's going to turn out and hope hopefully we try to help each other to make sure it turns out well and and this really isn't like anything about my personal like politics or anything like that but really just generally any of my friends that are like the first thing you hear about them in their day is something that happened in politics or something that some world leaders doing or not doing or saying and not saying I just don't find that to be the most important thing really um I I know that obviously that can affect a lot of people that has big real world consequences politics do but like I just re and this is just me I'm such a like Oh Come Together you know cheero kind of guy that I just really think like you need something bigger than bickering about what you you know what people said and did and what they voted on and all this stuff to to Really push Humanity forward like I you know I know that politics and and there and and by extracting that social media can affect things like space flight and even our like planetary defense like be able to defend ourselves against asteroids like if politics has their way and everything goes to crap and we don't even get to you know yeah we're not going to be able to you know continue space flight and things like that but like I don't know I just think there's better ways to do it and more uniting ways to do it than than you know what feels like immature name calling sometimes you know yeah I think the political bickering that most people talk about that that's on top of most people's minds is the thing that'll be completely forgotten about history it has actually very little impact yes politics matters but like 1% of it I think most of it is just political bickering the push and pull of the red team and the blue team and the and then the uh the the news media that feeds off the division for the attention and it's just like a fun athletic event almost with the with the blue team and the red team so that you kind of have to have a historical perspective on it like most things uh will not really have a significant impact and we should focus on development of science technology engineering which is the thing that grows the pie 100% this is what the economists know well yeah which is the Innovation the engineering that's what actually makes everybody richer this kind of political bickering is just eating the pie and not just richer but it improves their lives you know we we can look at every modern technology that is bestowed upon us today air conditioning electricity internet access fresh clean water running water blah blah blah you know a hundred years ago so many of the things that I listed either didn't exist or were only accessible by the ultra wealthy you know and it's through the innovation of technology and and engineering and education that we able to have it be that even someone below the poverty line and the most of the developed world will have a good number of those things in their life um and that's just continuing to increase and continue to get better so I I think yeah that's to me that's in the grand scheme more important but um to each their own speaking of amazing technological development uh you have uh you have a few videos on this but how does a rocket engine work uh you you're you're wearing some of the instruction manuals but uh for one one type of it like what what's the fuel what are the kind of types of different rockets that you can kind of give an overview yeah ultimately a rocket engine converts um high pressure and heat into kinetic energy like that's the only real job of a rocket engine is to take uh high pressure gas hot high pressure gas um very energized there's a lot of energy involved and then literally turning that into molecules shooting in One Direction into kinetic energy so um yeah what you do basically you know I mean the simplest version of it is of course like famously a balloon you take a balloon you fill it up with air you've got a pressure you let go of it uh some of the air shoots out in a general direction is you converted that pressure into kinetic energy now if you start scaling that up um you know you can continue to do something like that like um cold gas Thruster would be kind of the most simple and easiest rocket engine to make would be a cold gas Thruster and all that is you literally just take air or specifically night because it's a little bit more dense than all the others or you know it's the majority of our atmosphere um you can uh or sorry it's more sparse um you can condense that down sort in a really high pressure bottle and then uh just literally shoot it through what's called a DL nozzle which is something that chokes the flow a little bit gets it to be um takes it and gets it into supersonic speeds once it's at supersonic speed you actually can't choke it down anymore you'll just constrict the flow of of mass flow you'll constrict the air flow so you actually go opposite you start making it wider and once it's already at supersonic speeds if you expand it and make it wider it actually gets faster and faster so at first you know when it's subsonic gas you start shrinking you can strict the flow you know it's actually speeding up just like you know a highway if you go from you know any of these examples like a a water hose you you know if you pinch it down you want to flow the same amount of water from point A to point B through a smaller pipe you can you can flow more water or the same amount of water from point A to point B with a smaller pipe it just has to go faster mhm so obviously you can constrict it but at some point you actually get to a physical limitation and that happens to be the speed of sound once it gets to the local speed of sound um you can then actually do the opposite you actually expand it back out and you're continuing to convert um the the pressure into velocity at that point but it's now Supersonic and what's interesting is while you're doing that you're actually cooling it down too each each bit of that pipe that you're making wider and wider and wider you're cooling down so the more heat energy you have to work with the more work you can actually do so at some point a hot High Press rocket engine is the best source of like that's the ultimate amount of work you can do and the nozzle so as you're saying there's a bunch of different design options but it's a critical part of this yeah how you do that conversion which basically like how much can you convert is really like the ultimate game how much pressure and heat can we convert into thrust like that's really at the end of the day that's what a rocket engine is so you have have a powerful enough rocket engine to actually lift the rocket and well a rocket is mostly just fuel it's like 90 90 plus% just the weight of fuel so you just have to lift the fuel that's going to take it uh you know into orbit and that's the thing specifically for Rockets you're just saying generally rocket engines but for the task of going to orbit you're Fighting Gravity Earth gravity which is fundamentally different than moon gravity or Mars gravity yeah uh or like you said traveling out into space Earth has a pretty intense gravity it's to overcome we're lucky cuz if I I think if it was 10% either way like 10% harder it'd be like oh we could still do it you know we'd still be with our current technology would still be able to get stuff into orb but man things like your reusability and this you know commercialization the success that we've seen in the last 10 years we' just be on two Thin margins I think 10% easier and we would have been like I mean it's just like totally different it's so much so much easier it's like this big you know sliding scale and 10% in either direction we'd be either screwed or really happy you know um as far as getting into space so it's just hard enough that it things like fully reusable becomes very very very difficult I think it's completely achievable um we have all the pieces to make it achievable it does not disobey any laws of physics it does not disobey any there's no like hard stops to it is just very very very hard and so ultimately yeah like on Earth for the first bit of of launch again when when the Rocket's pointing straight up and it and the engines are pointing straight down pointing end up flaming and down you're Fighting Gravity and so that's kind of your biggest enemy um outside of the Earth's atmosphere too so what kind of uh sources of fuel is there so this chemical Rockets liquid solid gas hybrid uh there's electric so what what are the kinds of fuels we're talking about what are oxidized what what what can you just explain your shirt I guess yeah the components of the shirt so uh so really I mean fuels it's there's kind of two terms well you'll generally hear the word propellant being used it's anything that is used to propel a spacecraft or used in a rocket engine so um you have to have you know you can have a fuel you have to have a fuel you have to have an oxidizer and you have to have a spark to actually get those things burning and that's just a general law of like the universe you have to have fuel and oxidizer and a spark um now some fuels will by themselves spark like hyper golf fuels But ultimately you're you're always left with some kind of fuel oxidizer in a spark so um the the general ones used most often in Rockets liquid oxygen is kind of the king of well there's better oxidizers but they're extremely extremely hard to work with like Florine um but the generally liquid oxygen so you just chill oxygen down to its liquid state minus 183 degrees C um so it can be dense enough to store in tanks you know it's a thousand times more dense when it's in a liquid than it is as a gas um rp1 which is basically kerosene um is a very common fuel another common fuel nowadays is methane liquid methane um liquid hydrogen is another it's the most efficient potential for the most efficient since it's one of the lightest molecules so I think uh correct me if I'm wrong but Falcon 9 uses kerosene and then uh Starship uses methane methane yep for fuel and they both use liquid oxygen for their oxidizer for the oxidizer okay yep um but then you know if you get into hypergolic you'll normally have nitrogen tetroxide um which is your oxidizer and some form of hydrogene for your fuel um there's solid rocket propellants like solid rocket boosters and those are actually premixed your oxidizer is inherently like baked literally like kind of baked into the sludge of of fuel so like for SpaceX it's all uh chemical liquid fuels yep yep so how many solid based uh fuels are there is are they still being used today is are most Rockets yeah and the United States really is the only ones that well the only ones I guess early on because it was really just the Soviet Union versus the United States the United States started to use solids pretty early on uh they're simple and easy but these days like you know you'll still see them kind of as traditionally like boosters like they're used to just uh help get something off the ground or help give it a little extra boost um so the space shuttle famously had those two huge white solid rocket boosters attached to the orange fuel tank those are solid rocket propellants um things like the atlas 5 can have up to five smaller solid rocket boosters there's very few rockets that use a Pure uh at least these days that use a Pure solid rocket motor for its first stage um there still are especially in China there's a lot of startup rocket companies that kind of use just missile technology you know they might use like a there might just be a variant of an ICBM um that just use solid rocket fuel because it is very relatively easy to develop you know model rockets use solid rocket Motors and stuff like that so they're they're still around but they're just not as elegant and not as uh yeah not as as used these days I'd say so uh what are rocket engine Cycles getting I I think getting more to your towards your shirt question you have a really good video called that uh I mean a lot of your videos that are technical are just exceptionally well done so I just I think um you deserve all the props you get I mean thank you for for doing this work really really really really well done uh so it's called rocket engine Cycles how do you power a rocket engine and you go through all the different options is there something you could say about uh open cycle close cycle full flow um all the different variants that you can use words to explain yeah without all the pretty pictures yeah without the pretty pictures so ultimately you know like we said we your your ultimate goal is you want to get heat and pressure into an engine so obviously at some point you can either make really thick tanks of your rocket you can like get it so thick that you store the propellants in really really high pressures but obviously like that doesn't scale very well at some point your Rocket's so heavy you can't even leave the ground or you know it's just so much of your mass is just literally the walls of the rocket so at some point people realize hey we could actually just pump the fuels and the oxidizer into the engine at a high pressure and increase the pressure through a pump now obviously a pump's going to require energy you have to get that energy from somewhere um and again at some point people were like well Rockets are there's already rocket fuel here you know we'll just use some of the energy from the rocket fuel to spin these pumps so that that would be considered like open cycle closed cycle full flow stage combustion Cycles are are ways to tap into the propellant actually and then there's tap off expander CLE I mean all of them kind of do the same thing but you end up uh at some point spinning a turbine uh you know a turbine can take uh some of the heat energy and the and the and the pressure uh of an engine and then they can that can be connected to a shaft to pumps and those pumps can you know increase the pressure of the propellants and force it into the combustion chamber now the difference between open cycle closed cycle full flow all those is what happens after the gas has flown through the turbine so after you've used the turbine and spun up the energ you know spun up the engine what happens to that gas so in an open cycle engine you basically have like a separate small rocket engine in a sense it's a gas generator they call it and that will be used to create some of you know take a little we say 10% of your the propellant flowing to the engine instead you reroute it to like a smaller rocket engine called the gas generator you point that at your turbine and that will spin your turbine up to you know ridiculous speed it's 30,000 plus RPM and then after it spins it's wasted most of its its energy you know and it's just dumped overboard that would be open cycle you're not worrying about it after that point but you are left with a lot of unburnt un you know unused fuel a good amount of that fuel is just completely and especially because the turbine uh you you have to keep it from melting so you can't run it at like Optimal ratios um not necessarily stochiometric in a rocket engine you actually don't want it to be near stochiometric where releasing all the energy you actually want to release um you actually want to be throwing out the lighter molecule so it can be shot out faster generally in the engine so um but in order to have a turbine survive you have to actually cool you have to have the the gas going through it it can't be stupid stupid hotter else you're just going to melt your turbine so they normally um especially in the open cycle you just run it really fuel Rich so there's a lot of extra fuel being pumped into it that will keep the temperatures at a reasonable uh you know at a reasonable temperature so you end up with this like dark Sy smoke pouring out of that gas generator that's just unburnt fuel it's just wasted fuel it never got a chance to be used oh interesting you know like in the combustion chamber it's not it's not being used to propel the rocket you know it's just being used to cool down the the propellant that's being used to spin the turbine that's being used to spin the pumps to push a lot of propellant into the engine so you know it doesn't take too long before you know you're a greedy rocket scientist being like look at all this wasted propellant all this potential energy that's just literally being spewed out the side of the rocket so that's where the clo cycle comes in so now you have to get that propellant take it from basically what was being wasted through the turbine and you're going to try pumping it back into the engine now you don't literally just pump that that that gas that's you know that hot that gas into the engine cuz it's actually way too low of pressure uh compared to the main combustion chamber by that point by the time it's gone through the turbine it's lost most of its pressure and heat to the turbine so if you tried pumping it into the engine you know just taking that pipe and sticking it right into the combustion chamber that the much higher pressure hotter combustion chamber would just go backwards and it stall out the engine and blow up the engine and whatever what have you so what they actually do is they normally will send um there might be some variations of this but the general concept is you actually flow all of your fuel or all of your oxidizer through the turbine mhm so that would be closed cycle so there's fuel-rich closed cycle which would be you're flowing all of the fuel through the turbine or there's oxidizer Clos cycle which is where you're flowing all of the oxidizer that's going into the engine through the turbine now the trick here is you have to have that turbine after it's done its work so after it's taken some of the potential energy some of the heat energy from we're now calling it a pre PR burner by the way instead of it being a gas generator M you now call that device that's that's creating pressure to spin the turbine you're now calling that a pre-b burner because it's just going going to pre-burn some of your fuel or some of your oxidizer the trick is that has to be by the time it's gone through the turbine it has to be higher pressure than the combustion chamber because otherwise it's going to go backwards still so you really have to get that pre- burner up to ridiculously high pressures like at least 20% higher than your main combustion chamber and these combustion Chambers you know we're talking about engines that are at you know 200 100 to 200 even in spacex's Raptor engine up to 300 bar in the main combustion chamber so that's what is that 4500 PSI basically insane amounts of of pressure inside these combustion Chambers so your turbine has to be even above that or your your gas generator your preburner sorry has to be higher pressure than that even in order to have the flow going the right direction through the engine so now you'll you'll have those closed Cycles you'll have fuel Rich you have oxidizer Rich um the tricks now you starting to get it's crazy there's just so many compromises every little decision you have of like oh I did this now I well now crap it's going to do this for instance fuel Rich if you ran kerosene fuel Rich you know how I mentioned Su coming out of the gas generator well if you run soot um through your through your engine like that and and had it go through your injectors like back into the engine it'll clog the pores of the injectors and it'll end up blowing up the engine the itself is so damaging that you can't really run a fuel Rich kerosene engine what exactly is soot so it's like fuel somehow mixed up with the smoke like what I wonder what what is it chemically it's just some some weird it's mostly just carbon it's mostly just a carbon solid solid chunks of carbon and it can cake up and just literally like you know like it's it's it's like ash almost you know like at some point you know especially under those High pressures and high temperatures it can physically build up and you know turn into like stalagmites and stag ties of of carbon really hard you know for forged in a rocket engine carbon I wonder how you figure all that out too is has to be experimentation some of that is cheem chemist like theoretical but like you're going to have to build the thing at scale and actually test it trial and trial and error there's many decades of trial and error and many pieces of engines that you're trying to piece back together going like what the hell happened here yeah what happened yeah okay so uh so that's closed cycle so how do we get to full flow so in either of those situations you're still actually just having the opposite so if you're fuel Rich you know all the fuel is going through the turbine but um only a tiny bit of oxygen is actually being put into that pre-b burner to to spin the pumps and the rest of the the rest of the oxygen is actually going through the pump the primary pump and straight into the combustion chamber now full flow the idea is you're going to actually pre-burn both your propellants both your propellants are going to go through a pre-b burner and they're both going to end up spinning one of the pumps mhm so you'll have a gas a fuel Rich pre-b burner and you're going to have an oxygen rich pre-b burner each one of those is going to get just you know they're going to heat it up just enough and get it up to just enough pressure to spin up that turbine as fast as they need to do to get the pumps up to the right pressure and still have enough pressure through the turbine to overcome the pressure inside the main combustion chamber and they're both going to arrive both your fuel and your oxidizer are going to arrive in the main combustion chamber as hot gases already so what was liquid oxygen is now gaseous oxygen what was Liquid methane is now gaseous methane and they're meeting this combustion chamber at still ridiculously high pressures again and for spacex's uh Raptor engine they're meeting at 300 bar insane amounts of pressure and then they uh then they combust from there on and because they're already a gas gas interaction they're happy to burn they're ready to they're ready to burn they're they're ready to mingle as opposed to having a gas liquid interaction which is what's a lot more normal you know you'll have two different states of matter and they just might not they might take a little more Co you know cooing to what's that word Co yeah Co coing coing that doesn't sound like a sound correct right coing Co coaxing yeah yeah all right I don't know we'll cut that post no we'll have Morgan Freeman over du us yeah was co uh the fascinating thing is they're Coes as gases in the combus CH word but yeah they they just take a little bit more it takes more time in the combustion chamber to have a liquid and gas interaction like mixed together and and unleash as much of their energy as you can before it exits the system uh some of the trade-offs here in terms of efficiency which which which is most efficient and then also complexity of the design and the engineering and the cost of the design and the engineering like what are the different trade-offs between open cycle closed cycle in full flow yeah it's it's a pretty it's kind of like a uh what's the the Bears uh the Goldilocks you know like it's like you kind of generally the easiest is open cycle because you know you're just expelling the the exhaust gas um the gas generator exhaust you're not having to worry about it you just spin up that thing as much as you need and deal with it right no big deal um closed Cycles offers 10 to 15% greater performance generally because you know you're not wasting that propellant and but it's it's complicated it's a lot more complicated especially if you're doing oxygen rich now you're having hot gaseous oxy mhm uh in your engine which just generally wants to react with everything it's just a recipe like hot oxygen is just a recipe for things to catch on fire that shouldn't be on fire so Metals you know under those conditions lots of times will just spontaneously start burning you know you'll actually turn your metal and it will now become fuel you'll be engineer before you know it because your hot oxygen nice is uh is is eating and using that engine as fuel basically so um oxygen rich is generally very hard but that is what the Soviet Union ended up doing with almost their entire line of engines was close cycle oxygen rich but you know so those two are kind of generally hard but offer great performance benefits over open cycle uh but at the end of the day you know full flow is by far the it's the ultimate of all of them it's the the most difficult but it's also has the most potential to be the most efficient Starship the Raptor 2 the why is that engine using full flow because it's the best I mean it's just physics wise if you're trying to extract as much energy out of your propellant there there just isn't another cycle type that that is uh better than it but of course it's very very hard to develop you know so far to date the Rd 270 in the 60s was built um there is a powerhead demonstrator built in the United States in the in the 90s and early 2000s I think maybe just the early 2000s um that was just the just the power Just the the pumps and the turbines and the pre-burners no chamber no nothing that was a big deal only the United States took you know millions of dollars to just develop that and then there spacex's Raptor engine so you talked about uh the combustion chamber and how damn hot things get mhm uh high pressure a lot of heat uh how do you keep the thing cool you have a great video on this too how do you get it from uh from what do you call it me metal Rich engine Rich engine Rich from like the the metal from melting well one of the ways is to let it be engine Rich there's actually you can use a blade of cooling you can literally let um make the walls thicker than you normally make it make it out of a material that will a blade away that will kind of chip away and take some of the heat away with it it's very again primitive and it's actually what SpaceX first used on their first Merlin engines they used a blade of cooling um so it's basically a carbon nozzle and you just let it get the carbon the inner layer of the of the engine was not was carbon and you just let it get chewed away and eaten away and that's just something you factor in uh it's not uh very elegant and it's definitely not reusable in that sense so there's probably really good models about like how it melts away the the rate at which melts away to know what thickness yeah but boy this is dangerous I just seems so silly so obviously you probably you know it's again it's not the most elegant and the problem too your your geometry physically is changing too because as you're eroding the walls now things like your expansion ratio or the ratio between your throat and the nozzle exit is changing yeah because the thick like throat's diameters actually like everything's changing so it's it's not great um it might might not be melting away uniformly there could be some like weird pockets for aerodynamics Stu just a bunch of chaos just can which I can't imagine having to like figure all that stuff out honestly yeah um so the uh the more elegant thing to do there's there's a couple other things you can do but the kind of the most common one especially when we're dealing with liquid field Rockets is something called regenerative Le Cooling and the the idea is you basically just flow fuel fuel or oxidizer through the walls of the of the nozzle on the chamber um before they go through like into the injector into the actual combustion chamber by doing that you're you're taking heat out of the you know you're you're taking heat out of the metal of the walls and you're putting it into the propellant so you're typically heating the propellant up which is remember when I said there's gas interaction versus a liquid like liquid gas so lots of times even if you pump them both at you know as um they you know both being pumped as liquids by the time it goes through the walls of the chamber lots of times one of them is Phase changed into a gas so now you do have that gas liquid interaction um that's because they're using that the fuel or the oxidizer to to cool the walls of the of the engine so when you look at a rocket engine although it looks like you know a nice beautifully uniform cylinder you know smooth thing um there's either there's oft times like a the channels actually like milled into the walls that they run fuel through and even though they're tin you know they can be like 2 3 mm thick they'll actually still have a channel that goes down and u-turns and comes around and comes back wow all the way down to the tip of the nozzle and everything so it's it's just insane that you know that wasn't that's predesigned and that that's that's like uh so they design those channels yeah there's probably some optimization there like how the flow happens well especially because you you're thinking about a conical thing or like a semic conical thing where the the area is getting smaller and smaller and smaller you're flowing the same amount of propellant through it as you are down the you know what I mean like the the propellant has to so they have all these unique things like you know sometimes uh different manifolds where they'll inject more less fuel in certain areas and there must be like propellent simulation software they can't surely can't like test this on actual physical well back in the day they had to just build it well you mean back in back in the day walked up uphill in both ways was like I mean like any anything back in the day before computers where you like had like you just had to do it and like your simulation or modeling was like a sheet of paper where you're like calculating stuff but you can heat flux you know like you can literally see how much energy and how much heat is inside the combustion chamber how much you know and that is a measurable thing even without a computer now I'm not near smart enough to do any of this like I've never tried measuring the heat flux of anything I barely even know what that means I'm just smart enough toate my friend you haven't lived but that something that they people would calculate and they find out okay copper you know does a better job of transferring the heat between the walls of it into the propellant blah blah blah blah compared to XYZ um so you know materials people I like I've met just in all walks of life especially just through MIT through everywhere where there's some people are just like 100x smarter than anyone you've ever met at a particular thing like you mentioned copper they'll know the heat dissipation through different materials they'll understand that like more than it's like holy shit it's possible for human being to deeply understand a thing dude Aerospace is full of that you'll have people that are so niche in some thing that no like the average person has never even remotely thought of yet this person has done it 40,000 different ways in a you know in a an environment being like well we found out that if we turn it four degrees that way and add four % niobium you know like just things you're like what is your life and how do you know this you know and the funny thing about them they usually don't think it's a big deal yeah they're usually like they're they're so nachal on about it that if you don't actually you have to know enough you actually have to know quite a lot to appreciate how much more they know yeah cuz otherwise you won't even notice it because our popular culture doesn't celebrate the intricacies of uh scientific or engineering Mastery which is interesting there's all these people that lurk in the shadows they're just Geniuses like you see you'll have like the LeBron's who like good at basketball so we understand that they're good at basketball they they do this thing with the ball and the hoop and they do like it really well better than a lot of other people under pressure well like we celebrate them big public spectacle look at how great they are yeah but like the people like yeah as at these aerospace companies in NASA SpaceX the kind of stuff they're doing just the I mean there's Geniuses there it's actually really inspiring I mean I've um I've interacted with a lot of brilliant people in the software world and maybe because I don't deeply understand a lot of Hardware stuff materials engineering mechanical engineering those people seem like so much smarter I mean it's always like the grass is green or whatever the expression is but there's a depth of understanding that Engineers have that do like mechanical engineering that's just all inspiring uh to me well not to get too like uh ex what I don't know what the word would be introvertive or something or whatever but that's actually kind of the whole point of everyday astronaut like that's almost the whole point of what I do each year from the beginning I I did a thing called the Astro Awards trying to be like an award show hoping to you know lift up and celebrate and and shine a spotlight on the people that are actually doing the hard work and and try to treat them like the the rock stars that they are that we don't know about I think that's one of the things that for sure I think you know I think Elon definitely helped make space fight cool helped make that like a celebration thing where people are physically out cheering for rockets and Science and space exploration um but I think that's just the beginning you know I think like this should be a thing where the general public uh looks to these people as as the coolest ones as the the coolest places to work as the most important things you know sports are great and everything I'm a big Formula 1 fan and things like that but you know at the same time like we should be celebrating the people doing this crazy work you know clocking in countless hours just trying to figure out this one little thing that's going to help us further our understanding I mean what's cooler than a giant thing with a really hot fire that that goes boom and goes up into the air I mean like there's no it's it's like to me like bridges are inspiring it's like incredible architecture design and like the humans are able to uh uh work against nature build these gigantic metal things but like rockets yeah yeah with a like a tiny little humans on top of them flying out into space it's like it's the coolest possible thing everything comes together all the different disciplines come together for the high stakes drama of you know riding that super powerful thing up away from the thing we call home Earth it's like it's so amazing exactly so freaking amazing well I think that's kind of part of my like story arc CU I I just used to be a huge car and motorcycle guy like I just loved you know things that go fast and you know are loud and go fast and make lots of power and at the end of the day like at some point you realize nothing goes faster and it's louder and makes more power than rocket you know and I think that's I think that's kind of where where I eventually just ended up you know wound up there just because there is nothing cooler than that yeah that's the ultimate level of reach as a car guy is you become a rocket guy yeah 100% And at some point some Car Guys literally become rocket guys and strap Rockets to cars and try and break land speed records you know like it's it's it's the same universe here and yeah uh so Elon with your conversation with him on on the Raptor 2 was talking about or you were talking about like there's an excessive amount of cooling to be on the safe side as you're developing the engine uh what kind of cooling was that so that would be film cooling so remember how well a little bit ago we were talking about like keeping the turbine from melting you can just run it off of like off nominal basically off you know typically fuel rich just run more fuel through that so it's cool enough you can actually do that uh locally kind of in your engine so you can keep it so you know imagine a combustion chamber and the top of it just a flat like imagine a shower head and then you have like you know the combustion chamber attached to it the Outer Perimeter there the the part where the flame front would be touching the walls you can actually have just more fuel injectors so you're injecting locally a more fuel Rich Zone along the entire nozzle and that would be called film cooling so uh it's it's less efficient though again you're kind of wasting fuel there's fuel that's running you know and your your mixture ratio is off but only for a little portion of your the big picture you know so that's one of those compromises like you can do additional film cooling to make sure you're not melting your engine uh you know but at the cost of performance usually um but you can also be smart and use film cooling you know there's fun little clever tricks um for instance you'll notice on the F1 engine that was on the Saturn 5 you know the biggest uh rocket that had been built to date prior now to Starship um the F1 has this huge huge huge engines there's five of them on the Saturn 5 and you'll notice that like the the gas generator has a pipe that comes down and then it actually splits off in a manifold and wraps around part of the nozzle and that manifold takes the hot gas uh from the turbine which which is actually I mean it's not hot it's actually cold gas compared to the combustion chamber but it's you know in human terms it' still you wouldn't want to put your hand in it you not live um and it actually pipes that gas into the nozzle so that it creates a film cooling an actual boundary layer of cooler gas against the hotter combustion chamber gas so basically repurposing that gas that was normally wasted and they pump it back into the engine and then into the nozzle like kind of further down so the trick there is it has to be far enough down that the pressure at the in the nozzle because remember as the nozzle gets bigger and bigger and bigger the pressure is getting lower and lower and the temperature is getting lower and lower so you have to find this trade-off point where the pressure is is lower than that gas from the turbine and then you pump it in and it's cooler than the than the gas still is in the nozzle and it can help not melt your nozzle so you'll notice that the F1 is actually a good example of regen cooling so the chamber walls you can physically see the pipes actually um on the F1 because it's so big and they just literally use pipes and bent them and you can see the the the coolant channels all the way up and down the the engine until you get to that manifold then from there on it just has what's called a nozzle extension and it keeps going and going and going and that section of nozzle is cooled by the film cooling of the gas generator I mean the aerodynamics of cooler gas and the hot gas uh cuz you have to have this kind of layer right to protective layer of cool g like understanding that obviously probably has to do in modern times there's probably really good simulation of aerodynamics but and to do that in terms of pressure PR too like um to make sure it's in the right place yeah that it doesn't like go back up go backwards exactly if they have that manifold even six inches too high on that nozzle yeah that it's just going to go upwards you know pressure always wants to flow from high to low the number of options you have here that result in it going boom is very large near Infinity yeah especially cuz I mean you can't do like a a small model of it maybe you can no you can't doesn't really scale very well no you have you have to do the full testing and that's why you have all the kind of that's that's why you have with Starship all the tests that you know you think why would you need to do so many static fires and so many tests and why is it failing so many times can't you get it right but like it's very tough to get it right well and when you're pushing the boundaries you want to know where and how it's going to fail that's right so you can engineer around them so that's that's a luxury that SpaceX does have with the scale of raptor you know they're building Raptor cheaper than probably almost any other engine you know maybe besides some of their own at least at that scale um then before they're testing you know I think since last March or last April they've tested a thousand Raptor you know rap a thousand engine fires I guess not just Raptors but um you know that's just an insane amount of data and an insane amount of edge cases to learn oh my God we found out that we're actually slightly over spinning our turbine to this degree and this frequency uh is harmonic at this blah blah blah and all of a sudden realize it's rattling and you know it did this and then you can engineer around that you know it's like It ultimately you know I think Elon said something like high production rate uh solves many ills or something along those lines and it's just true if you have an insane amount of engines and an insane amount of data and insane amount of failures to learn from you just know your system inside and out you know those margins you know where the failure points are you know how to engineer around them and that's how I approach dating no I'm just kidding uh cuz we're talking about engines uh so most Rockets I think all Rockets have multiple stages uh today uh maybe they'll take us in discussion of what ideas that could be for single stage uh to orbit Rockets but can you describe this whole thing that you've been mentioning here and there of multiple stages of a rocket yeah no that's a good question so ultimately you know like I said we're you're kind of pushing about 90% the Rockets like basically just fuel with some skin on it you know what I mean um and so uh that skin weighs a lot of you know skin and engines do weigh a lot you know like I said the the Falcon 9 on sonone is about 20 tons just the booster is about 20 metric tons um so it's not an insignificant amount of weight so the idea is with staging is you ditch anything you don't need more or less so um in the you know Falcon 9 is a perfect rocket to think about this because you have a an upper stage and you have a booster you know or first stage and the first stage Burns through all its fuel once it's out of fuel you let go of the second stage and Tada you actually just basically basically started and lit a brand new fresh rocket you know this brand new fresh rocket now doesn't have all that that 20 tons attached to it so it's a lot lighter it doesn't need you know nearly as many engines to push it around it needs just one instead of nine um this engine can be optimized for the vacuum of space as opposed to having to operate at sea level with all of our Rel actually pretty thick atmosphere you know relatively so there's so staging is basically the idea that you get rid of things you don't need um Earth again kind of that whole like 10% harder 10% easier if it was 10% easier single staged orbit would be no big deal and it it probably would have been like the the the way to get to orbit by choice just because like it's not that hard but with our Earth as it is uh with physics as it is it's just it's doable and we've had and you know we almost kind of actually the first orbit to take humans or the first rocket to take humans into orbit uh for from the United States um which was the atlas rocket um was kind of a stage and a half it actually only had like one big fuel tank and what they did is they actually dropped off two of its three engines so it just ditched some of the engines but if it hadn't done that you know so kind of people were like well that was single stage it's like it's still had a staging event still had a ditch mass in order to even make it into orbit had it not done that it would have not been able to get into orbit so you pretty quickly look at your trade and say okay well if I want to stick to single stage to orbit my payload Mass becomes tiny you know like you you might be able to put like you know a falcon9 booster on its own like if you just flew one of the side core boosters of a falcon heavy with the nose cone on and everything just said I'm just going to fly this on its own you might be able to put like a you know 10 kilograms into space or something you know a very small amount well throw a second stage on that thing and now you can put uh you know 177,000 kilograms into space so it's just an order you know orders of magnitude more payload Capac capacity because you did staging because you ditched the residual weight so um the other thing that's uh hard about that too uh is that the engines again that that operate at sea level uh are often not great in in space and vice versa like you physically can't most optimized for space engines you can't even operate at sea level they'll they'll destroy themselves due to something called flow separation MH so um not only are you getting the benefit of ditching all the weight but you're also able to use a much more efficient and less typically you know much less powerful engine in space so you mentioned on uh the multi-stage Rockets uh that maybe the dream would be uh if we weren't living on Earth but maybe we can on Earth uh to have a single stage uh to orbit rocket where it's all one package reusable mhm reusable gets even harder it gets even harder so first of all what is uh just to linger on it what is the single stage to orbit rocket why is it so hard to achieve on Earth you already kind of explained it a little bit but just if we were to say like that's your assignment Yeah Tim you're supposed to get together with Elon and other brilliant people and like you have to do this yeah why is it so hard why is it so hard um it your the the the payload fraction of a rocket is like 3 to five or six or 7% would be like re you know that's the amount of P compared to the total mass of the rocket like you're lucky to get into Beyond 5% so if you're now having to deal with the weight of the rocket by the time you're in orbit like your your payload fraction just you're you're talking about like margins it's such it's so small amount of leftover if you have to take all of it with you so the sooner you can ditch weight the better the sooner you can ditch weight the better the sooner you can you know and that's what you're doing a rocket the whole time is actually ditching weight all of that fuel all that big giant flame you see is literally Mass being thrown out the back of the rocket but what typically isn't expended you know at least during nominal operations you're not seeing the engines being you know expelled out the thing until you get to staging of course and that's where you know you're ditching all that dead weight so single stage orbit your margins just become so small that it it's border it's not impossible but it's just at the end of the day like almost no matter who you are you end up saying it's just simply not worth it like it'd be if you have two rockets that are using the same same amount of propellant you know they're the same physical sizes and one of them is cut in you know in a third and has another little engine it'll have a 100 or a thousand times more payload capacity than the one sitting right next to it and now so there's tricks you can do to like try to offset that things like Aeros Spike engines which operate at uh as efficiently at C Level at you kind of optimized efficiency at C- level and just by their uh by the way their design the physics of them they're also efficient in a vacuum too um you can do things like that and at the end of the day though you just end up with a worse rocket than if you had just done stage like no matter what and and people say like well what if you developed the new technology it's like okay apply that technology to a multi-stage rocket and it's going to do better you know like no matter where you end up it's just always better to ditch that weight you know is there a cost to having multi-stage because you can still reuse the different stages that's the the dream is you know becomes easier to reuse multiple stages because now you know like the booster doesn't have to survive orbital re-entry temperatures and and extreme environments and you only have to you know make survivable the upper stage you only have to put a big heat shield I mean starship's the perfect perfect thing of this the the upper stage has a big giant heat shield the booster doesn't need it because it's not going the booster is not going to orbit it's only going A fifth or a quarter of orbital velocity so it's heat that it experiences is survivable just by the stainless steel you don't need an additional heat shield um so all of a sudden if you're trying to reuse pretend that you just welded the two stages of Starship together remove those engines on Starship that whole vehicle if you're trying to reuse it the whole vehicle now has to have a heat shield on one side of it yeah the whole thing has to have these big heavy Wings by the time you come down to it there's probably just zero payload capacity you basically put your fuel tank in space you know good job so the the dream of a single state to orbit rocket is is that just even the wrong dream on Earth that's what most convention tells you you know by the time if if you're your if your goal is cheap then you're going to spend you're going to have a physically larger rocket that has more engines that has more propellant blah blah blah to put the same amount of thing same amount of mass into orbit compared to something else you know we're talking like rocket Labs electron a really small rocket it's like I think 1.3 M wide and something like you know 18 meters tall or something it's it's it's a small rocket if you were to you know the and it can put something like 300 or so kilograms into orbit you could either launch something that size or again like a full like big old Falcon 9 booster the huge huge thing and that would be lucky to put 300 kilograms into orbit you know so it's like which one's going to be cheaper to build you know chip around all the stuff and then you also look at you have fixed costs like the idea of flying a but this is this again everything in rocket science is a compromise because now you have things like um people on Console time all the people that are you know on comms and working on the rocket going down to the pad you know filing paperwork doing range control making sure there's not planes and boats in the way uh flight termination people you have all these fixed costs for any launch I don't care how big the rocket is there's a relatively fixed cost so now you say like okay I'm going to be paying let's just make them number I'm going to pay $5 million to fly a rocket between all the people going on site all the propellant all the licenses blah blah blah if your fixed cost is $5 million you can put 300 kilograms in Space versus have a $5 million cost of operation and he can put 5,000 kilg into space like it it's it's the business case is going to send you in One Direction pretty quickly so you mentioned aerospike engines I think uh the internet uh inform me of your love affair with aerospike engine find somebody that looks at you the way Tim n looks at aerospike engine uh can you can you explain uh what the these are how do they work um what's beautiful to them what how practical are they why don't we use them oh my God uh does it just boil down to the design of the nozzle uh so maybe can you explain how is it possible to achieve this thing for an engine to be as efficient at uh in a vacuum and sea level and in all different conditions you know what I love about this is like every question you've asked me is like a 1 hour video on my YouTube channel like now boil it down to 45 seconds um so the Aeros Spike engine basically um is an inside out engine more or less so with a traditional engine you know we've talked about the combustion chamber and the throat and then it expands out into the nozzle those walls are containing the pressure right and air spike is the opposite it's basically the pressure of the engine is on the outside of it and it's pushing inward against a spike so it's it's almost like it's like like the difference of if you were let me think about this if you were standing in like a a tent or a tee right and you put your arms at the top and you pushed your arms out like into an iron cross or something you know you can physically lift the tent just by pushing outwards on the tent walls right well that would be like a traditional nozzle now Aeros Spike would be almost like squeezing an ice cube you know if you squeeze an ice cube you can push in on it and kind of that wedge force will shoot that ice cube so that's kind of what has happening we have the high press gases on the outside of the spike squeezing in on that Spike and that's and then it's pushing up against the you know because it's equal on both sides against the kind of the ramp is pushing up against the rocket so that's where that Force comes in is against the nozle against the chambers the hard part with an Aeros Spike so the cool okay I guess I guess the cool thing about an Aeros spike is that it can operate um in space you can have what's known as a really big expansion ratio so that's your ratio between the throat the area of the throat versus the area of the nozzle exit mhm and remember how the bigger the nozzle is the it's con continually just converting more and more it's converting that that high energy Hot High Press gas into cooler and cooler lower pressure and faster gas so each little millimeter along that nozzle is just getting it lower pressure and cooler but faster now if you take a big nozzle on Earth and you at sea level and you fire it you can actually get even though we're going from say 300 bar the Raptor engine um you know our atmosphere at sea level is about one bar it's pretty much exactly one bar um depending on conditions but you can actually get a Noz to get way below one bar of pressure so every little you know you can go from 300 bar in Just 2 m down to one bar or below one bar W there's actually a limit you can actually only expand it below you know we'll say something like 70% so you can get down to like7 bar at nozzle exit before the pressure of the atmosphere is actually squeezing in on that exhaust and tearing it away from the walls of the engine the walls of the nozzle exit and what happens is it's it's kind of unpredictable you get these Pockets these oscillations and they'll be so extreme that they'll end up just destroying the nozzle so you can't lower you can't have a bigger expansion ratio than again relatively speaking something like s like you can't go below you can't get that pressure exit too much below ambient air pressure before flow separation can destroy the engine so how come this engine can do so well in in different pressure conditions so because it's inside out the ambient pressure is pushing the exhaust gas into the wall M as opposed to a conventional engine that exhaust gas or the ambient air is actually squeezing the exhaust gas away from the walls of the engine and that squeezing away from is what can be destructive so that since the in since it's kind of inside out the ambient air is pushing the exhaust gas into the engine walls so you can't have flow separation you won't have flow separation now what happens is so you can have this huge amazingly like efficient vacuum engine that's that's has a we'll say a 200 to1 expansion ratio which is really big like a lot of sea level engines are like 35 40 50 to1 expansion ratios and then in space you know it's common to use like 150 180 200 to one expansion ratios so in Aeros spite can have something like 200 to one it's just that the at sea level it's kind of just getting pushed and it's kind of getting cut off early almost but it doesn't matter it's not like destructive it's just not running at its maximum efficiency as it climbs in altitude as the ambient air gets thinner and thinner and thin it just inherently is pushing less and less and less against the walls of that Aeros Spike engine so it actually continually gets more efficient at you know as it climbs an altitude as as does the normal engine but the difference is that you can use that huge expansion ratio at sea level and you can't use a huge expansion ratio at sea level with a tradition traditional nozzle has that anyone actually flown on an Aeros Spike engine no aerospike engine to date has ever been flown on an orbital rocket why not not and would you like to see a future where they're used purely purely because I think they're cool you know in the same way that's that's the core of your love affair with AOS Spike engines is the just and I said this in my video actually there outside before I came in here I saw an RX7 on in the streets that I just love and that uses a rotary engine on paper the rotary engine is like more efficient does all you know smaller more efficient all these things but in practice it's like the thing is actually just like unreliable hot and it you know it blah blah blah blah blah Burns oil it's kind of the same thing with the airos spike engine like yes on paper it's more efficient but now you have a lot more surface area of your your your your throat area no matter what is going to have uh the throat of the the rocket engine is always where it's the hottest you know it's the hardest thing to cool and with a narrow Spike if you know if it's inside out now your throat is no matter what like way bigger you know it's almost like the size of the nozzle exit normally but now it's your hardest thing to cool and you have a ton of it and you also have two edges of it no matter what so even if you have like a you know a circle inside a circle you have like a just insane amount more surface area to cool with a limited amount of fuel don't foret you're using your fuel as your as your coolant so if you all sudden now take your throat area and you have um x amount of space that you need to cool you only have you have a limited Supply it's it's like H it's sorry this is stuff that just are are there ideas of for cooling um for cooling airos Spike engines it's the same physics apply for an Aeros Spike as they would so you just run into you just run into a limitation like at some point I'm not flowing enough propellant my it scales it SC scales kind of poorly you know what I mean like you can increase the thrust of an aerospike by making it bigger and increase the mass flow and the fuel going through the throats um or the throat but at the same time like it just it's at the end of the day it's physically possible it's a lot more complex you have aot lot of issues with Cooling and it just you end up kind of right back where you started so it's like is it worth it to just keep going down this Rabbit Hole you're trying to engineer this thing to work when like you could have probably spent a tenth the amount of time just slightly increasing the performance of your normal engine in the first place you know again I'm going to anthropomorphize uh that that lesson and apply it to my dating life once again just kidding okay um actually just on a small tangent since you are also a Car Guy uh what's the greatest uh combustion engine car ever made to you if you had to pick something what's the like the coolest the sexiest the most powerful the classiest the most elegant welld designed I don't know what things are are different for me but I'd say I still it's funny because now maybe it's just because it's fresh on mind but I love that mid90s RX7 which you know especially in in Japan they had the the 20b a TR rotor that is like the coolest engine ever to me the FD RX7 it's just too darn cool honestly it' be uh there you go what about the mid 90s that makes it special just that's the only time it's it's more that I love the engine and I and I like the car it's attached to I'm not actually a big fan of like 90s styling you know personally but just that the 20b is just such a cool cool engine and it's twin turbo sequential turbos they used um they a bigger turbo takes longer to spool up you know it takes more it's using that same like a turbine and a compressor and it just if it's a large turbine it takes more exhaust gas to get it spooled up so if you have an engine that revs to 9,000 RPM and you want to get a lot of pressure out of that turbo you have a big turbo it's going to take forever like you're going to have you know your floor it and then like it's going to take a long time for that turbo to get spooled up so they actually did a small turbo on it and a big turbo so small turbo would spool up first get some boost going through the engine get that engine operating get it up to speed get it you know get some power to the wheels and then once that kind of reaches its limit you'd flow it into the divert the exhaust gas into the bigger turbo it's this sequential turbo and then that now can supplement and actually increase the you know overall performance of the of the vehicle by a lot and I just I think that's just so cool it's it's just like the ultimate like Brute Force out of the box thinking and it actually made it into production you know what I mean can you uh what What's the sound like can you tell an engine by it sound it sounds like a a really really really angry lawnmower it sounds horrible it's actually a terrible sounding car in my opinion like it sounds just raspy and like the opposite of like a big muscle car you know like a big muscle car is this deep gut roll like deep oh it just it hits you this is like it's just going to annoy the hell out of you in all your neighbors like it's but you love the engineering I love the engineering of it so to you the car is the engine it's not all the surface stuff all the design stuff uh all the you know yeah the the the Elegance the curves Whatever It Is Well those come and go you know to me Styles change forever yeah the I'm going to apply that to my uh dating life once again the metaphors just keep on coming well if you think about it like my taste has changed throughout the years when I first saw uh a model 3 Tesla I thought it was the most hideous car I've ever without without the gorilla I like this is so stupid it took me all but two months to think that it was one of the coolest looking cars same with cybertruck I mourned cybertruck when I first saw that thing I was at that that thing with and I went with we used to do a podcast called our our ludicrous future so we talked a lot about like you know cars and EVs and stuff we went to that unveiling and literally like we had like almost a a non-alcohol induced hangover the next morning of like mourning the hideousness of cybertruck come six months later a year later and I'm like damn it that thing's kind of cool yeah that also teaches you something about again it's it's the thing you said uh earlier sort of uh going against the the current of the experts of the beliefs or whatever is is and and making a decision from first principles some of that also applies to design and styling and fashion and culture and all that big uh some of that you know so fashion especially it's so interesting so subjective being rebellious against the current the the the current fads actually is the way to pave the new fads well it didn't take long for others to follow you look at like currently like what Hyundai is doing with their I forget which one like the ionic or something like that it's it's Square it's like it's boxy you know it's it's a throwback it's 80s it's got these beautiful retro tail lights it's got these Square headlights it's it's it's very inspired by cyber truck in my opinion Ian it might not be it might be coincidental that we're all kind of getting this F Vibe but uh I personally like the boxy so I never I still haven't understood uh Porsches Porsches I still can't quite understand the small size the eleg the curves I don't quite I don't quite get it see like I said I don't love the look of the RX7 I don't love it but I love it because of the engineering I guess that it represents you know what I mean yeah it's it's uh it's not the surface stuff it's the deep down stuff it's that 50/50 weight distribution that matters all right let's uh let's talk about Starship a little bit we've been sneaking up uh to it from a bunch of different directions can you just say um what is Starship and what is the most impressive thing uh to you about it I you've talked about the S of the engines involved maybe you haven't really kind of like dancing around it but because this is such a crucial thing in terms of uh the next few years in terms of your own life personally and also just human civilization reaching out to the Stars seems like Starship is a really important vehicle to making that happen so what is this thing that we're talking about yeah so Starship is uh currently uh in development the world's largest most powerful rocket ever built fully reusable rocket a two-stage rocket so the booster is landed and you know all this is currently aspirational until it's working uh so I'll I'll I'll say it's I'll say what it's aspirationally going to be and obviously I have faith that that will happen but just factually so the the booster will be reused landed and refueled and reused the upper stage will be landed refueled and reused and ideally rapidly in the in the sense not talking about months or weeks of refurbishment but literally talking about like mild inspections and ideally like under 24-hour reuse you know where you literally land it and fly it like an airplane um so it utilizes liquid methane and liquid oxygen um as its as its propellants it utilizes uh the current iterations of it are 33 Raptor engines on the booster engine on the booster and six uh Raptors on the second stage so they'll be three that are vacuum optimized and three that are sea level optimized on the upper stage that are primarily they'll be used I think at stage separation anyway um in space but um they'll their main reason that they use them is is they can use them for landing too the the three sea level engines uh to be able to propulsively land the upper stage as well so the three Raptor engines are the ones that generate the thrust that makes it the most powerful rocket ever built by a almost double compared to the Saturn 5 really the N1 had 45 Mega Newtons of thrust the Saturn 5 had I think 35 or 40 Mega Newtons of thrust and this has 75 Mega newon so we're talking almost double it's a it's a lot of power um that could be the sexiest thing I've ever heard okay the so uh so what are the different testings that's happening so like uh uh what's a static fire with some of these raptors look like and where do we stand you were you were just talking about offline like the thing that happened uh yesterday that was impressive you know everything in this is kind of iterations and so um you know the the Milestones that we're seeing we actually have on on everyday astronaut. comom we have a milestone checklist of like all the things we're hoping to see that we kind of need to see before the first orbital flight of this rocket so um a big milestone that got checked off yesterday was uh wet dress rehearsal so it's literally like fueling the rocket up getting ready to do everything but lighting the engines basically so we're talking about loading it with propellant all the way uh this is the first time yep right there where's the Milestones right there at the top click that big picture yep just anywhere that big picture yep so the there's the wood dress rehearsal so what what's the wood dress rehearsal yep so that's where they uh for the first time they filled it completely to the brim with both liquid oxygen and liquid methane now they had done component level testing where they fill it with liquid nitrogen which is you know it's an inert gas so it's not like say it leaks out it's not going to explode uh you could just have a big giant pool of liquid nitrogen like flooding the area but it's not going to be an explosion so they've done that for cryo testing to make sure all the components and stuff can handle you know being at Crow genc temperatures um it's kind of a good analog before you start putting your your fuel and your oxidizer in there but now yet as of uh yesterday they fully fueled the rocket with uh propellant both stages the first stage and the second stage wall fully stacked on the on the pad like basically I mean there's the first sense we really got of like this is what it's going to look like right before it takes off you know kind of breathing coming to life for the first time what is the pad look like so there's a few interesting aspects of this what's up with the Chopsticks and the uh all of that yeah yeah so the the Launchpad is is is unique I've never seen anything like it um in the prior history of of space flight but it's a really simple launch stand they basically have like this almost looks like a a stool like a you know like a milking a cow stool thing with a a whole a big giant now I know you're from Iowa but yeah yes we all know what that stool looks like yeah we all we all been sitting on that stool milk and cat yeah uh with with a giant hole in the middle and that hole in middle of that stool is where the rocket sits and it sits on these you know launch clamps um and then next to it is the so that's the orbital launch Mount and then next to it or the olm some people will say next to it is the orbital launch Tower the Olt and that is not only um integral to fueling up the upper stage you know the upper stage has to have propellant lines run to it so that they can fill it with propellant and you know all that but it also uh they ended up making it so instead of having a big crane on site to stack the two on top of each other they literally just use that Tower as a crane so the crane has these giant arms lovingly called the Chopsticks or the whole system can be called mechazilla and that will grab onto first it'll grab onto the booster pick it up off of its off of its transporter that transports it from the production site uh lifts it up puts it down onto the launch Mount and then it will pick up the second stage or the upper stage Starship and plop it down on top of the booster and they did that for the first time last year actually I think it was like Valentine's last year was the first time they used the Chopsticks to stack it and now they're doing it quite frequently you know but ultimately those Chopsticks have to serve a second purpose they're actually going to utilize if you say catch it's not so much they're going to catch the booster with these Chopsticks it's not like it's you know a dad trying to catch a falling child you know it's more that the the booster and the Starship will someday land on those arms yeah so um they're more or less stationary I'm sure there's some bit of you know adjustment of the arms will do but more or less the Rocket's going to propulsively land and get picked up by like what's essentially like two like relatively small ball joints that hold the entire thing and so has to land very precisely on these these mounts and on onto the the launch Mount and that's what's going to just place it back onto the stand and allow it to be refueled and fly again what's the idea of using the arms versus having a Launchpad to land on what's what's the benefit you are basically removing the mass of what would be heavy Landing legs and you're putting kind of that Landing infrastructure onto a ground system so you're not having to carry those Landing legs into orbit but is it's also elevated off the ground is there some aspect to that where you don't have to balance the thrust and all the you you you can negate some of those like there's like plume plume interactions there's like you know the exhaust hitting concrete and especially with the rocket this big it's going to you know use like three Raptor engines firing if you know if you have them firing really close of the ground you're just going to absolutely destroy and crater the ground and you're going to have to refurbish the the ground and the the landing pad every time and you know or have huge Landing legs that are super long and and Tall you know to to make it so it's it's elevated enough to not do that um so yeah you're kind of you're avoiding that whole mess by by catching it high enough off the ground that you don't have to factor that in and it's that's how many engines are involved in the Landing part is the three Raptor engines well we haven't actually you know we haven't to date seen the exact l in sequence so it might be something like at first they might light up you know seven or something or nine or something some number to to accelerate quickly or decelerate quickly same thing um and and then shut it down to three or something for a little bit more granular control um because unlike Falcon 9 Starship has enough engines and variability to actually if it needed to hover you know to maybe more precisely align itself with the pad it would have that capability um and especially having multiple engines you know if you only have a single engine running you can't really roll you know your roll axis you can do pitch and yaw because the the engine is kind of like a a Rudder it it can move in two axes so you can easily pitch and yaw the vehicle but to actually induce Roll Along its its vertical axis you you would either need like auxiliary engines to roll it or you'd need a pair of engines so they can be opposed and induce roll so by having two or three running they have all three axes of control that they would need kind of like a broomstick you know and uh balancing a broomstick on your hand they can just move Mo it over and if they need to align it to those Landing Nubs you know on the landing arms and stuff like that then uh they can do that uh speaking of pitch and yaw the thing uh so Starship flips on its belly flops does a interesting kind of maneuver uh on the way down to land uh can you describe that maneuver what's involved with that yeah so this is definitely a first I don't think anything's tried Landing like this before but the idea is when you're falling through the at atere the atmosphere could actually do a lot of work for you you know you're moving quickly something is falling from space there's a lot of energy involved you have a really good video on this as well and uh thank you um the uh as it's falling you know you can let the you want to let the atmosphere do as much work as it can and so um if you have a a unsymmetric you know it's not a ball that's falling this is some kind of object with with shape some you know at at one face of it is going to have more Sur area than the other face so you know the in the shape of like a cylinder if you're falling you know like a a soda can if you're falling top or bottom first it's a a certain amount of surface area if you flip that on its side you actually have a lot more surface area so with the same exact vehicle you can actually have a lot more drag you can actually slow it down a lot more using the exact same like same atmosphere same same vehicle just by turning at 90° you can slow it down substantially like three or four times slower so so that's energy that you don't have to use anywhere else you know you don't have to use an engine to slow you down you don't have to do anything else so SpaceX realized okay if we flip this thing on its side and let it fall like a sky diver almost you know instead of like pencil diving into the pool you're belly flopping you're maximizing the amount of surface area that's in the windream that's being slowed down but obviously like in order to land especially if you're SpaceX and you know elon's obsessed with like not having different parts you know he wants the best part is no part so if you're going to land with the engines you might as well use engines that you've already have the the engines that are you know used for the other portions of flight so you kick those on and you use those engines to actually turn it 90 degrees from belly flopping to feet first and that way you can use the same engines to land and you don't have to have like auxiliary Landing engines you don't have to have forces you know even if you were to land like on its belly with a a separate set of engines Not only would those engines weigh a lot you know and be extra complexity etc etc but you also don't have to make the ship be able to handle Landing you know like on its belly as opposed to having the forces be vertical through it but it's a giant thing you have to rotate in the air huge and uh as you also highlight you know there's liquid fuel slushing around in the tank so like you can't uh I guess use that fuel directly after have another kind of fuel like there's just complexities there that involved uh plus the actual maneuver is difficult from the like like what are the thrusters that actually make that make all that happen you're you're adding a lot of complexity uh not a lot but your complexity to the maneuver and possibility where failure Could Happen uh in order to sort of save in order for the air to do uh some of the work so what is some of that complexity just you can Linger on it you know if you if we think about what it's going to take to go from horizontal to Vertical um this rocket in particular Starship has these big flaps um so it has kind of two nose flaps and two uh rearward flaps the rearward flaps are a lot bigger because the majority of the the mass the engines and stuff are in the back of the the vehicle so in order to kind of be stable and they just fold themselves inwards like on their dihedral angle at a dihedral angle in order to uh increase or decrease the drag so you can control its all three axes of control while it's falling uh you on its belly you can control it that way using these four different fins so you have these giant moving surfaces that take thousands of of horsepower is just insane amount of torque in order to move these quickly enough to be a valid control surface so that's a huge complication is moving these fins and and developing that that Landing algorithm and the you know the control for a a huge vehicle with flaps going like you know in and out in and out in and out to stay stable then right as you light the engines now all of a sudden you want the top you know that you want to flip the Rock at 90 degrees so the rear Rd flaps the bottom flaps fold in they tuck all the way in to minimize drag that's going to make it want a you know swing down you extend the upper flaps that makes it so the nose wants to pitch up you kick on the engines um they're now lighting all three engines at least as as of the last like successful attempts they light all three of the se- level Raptor engines and they're pitched all the way like you know 10 or 15 degrees or whatever the maximum pitch is on them and that induces a you know it does that kick maneuver to kick it over from horizontal to Vertical now the problem is you lit your engines while you're horizontal so they put some horizontal velocity into the rocket they're push the rocket you know at the time the nose is at the at the time of lighting those engines the nose is facing the Horizon and the engines are facing the opposite Horizon yeah so you now shot it a decent amount in an off you know the direction that you're not falling you know um so you have to factor that in to where you're Landing because you're going to land on this precise in this case you're going to land on inside the arm the loving arms of the Chopsticks you know the Creed Arms Wide Open you try to land inside this exactly the song that be playing through my head as I watch this now thank you thank you for forever joining those to I appreciate this and he had the very precisely control so what you have to do is now that it's done that kick you also have to cancel out that horizontal velocity so it's actually going to rotate Beyond 90 degrees to cancel out that horizontal velocity mhm and then modulate the engine to make it so the thrust you know is is perfect so that it can control itself into a control landing and all this is done in like 500 meters like 1500 feet you know you're doing all of those things stupidly close to the ground it looks absurd so far they've done five of these tests all um the first four all blew up you know um they're all coming in from about 10 km or 33,000 ft um falling flipping you know again this thing is huge that just the booster or just the Upper State of this um is is like 50 m tall you know so it's 150 it's like 45 M about 50 m tall about 165 ft tall um 9 M wide it's a 30 ft wide it weighs you know something like God I don't remember if it's something like 120 metric tons so 120,000 kilg you know two quarter of a million pounds empty and it's doing this flip maneuver and it has to do all this perfectly so the first four four attempts of this were pretty spectacular failures so just to clarify which stage is doing maneuver it's the upper stage is doing this belly flop maneuver yep uh so this is the the stage that would presumably um have humans on board if we were to use and uh if things continue to play now here's here's something I would love to see yeah just saying this yeah if you already have these big Arrow surfaces the flaps they also have to move they're on heavy Motors and hinges and flaps and all that stuff I'm actually surprised that for Earth they aren't just looking at Landing it horizontally on a Runway like the space shuttle oo I mean interesting that worked the brawn did it you know the Soviet Union's put on I rolled my art real hard there sorry thank you wow wow really good I'm very impressed I'm very impressed oh and uh you know the Bron did it we have other space planes like the X-37B we have the upcoming SRA Nevada's Dreamchaser uh it's yeah you have some extra mass in the wings but so does Starship Starship has the extra mass of those flaps and you know the the the motors and the hinges and all that stuff I I would like to see the trade on like is it actually lighter weight to do that versus doing what SpaceX is doing so yeah I mean that's the that's the funny thing I I think realistically if Elon walks in the door tomorrow and says guys we did some simulations and actually it's like we can get another 5,000 kilograms into space if we just land at horizontal if we kind of give up on our ego and land horizontally at least on Earth then you know I think they could be doing pretty quickly because that's the thing is uh this ultimate thing has been to land on Mars and you know other planets and Mars doesn't have a Runway doesn't have a you know thick enough atmosphere to utilize aerodynamic flight like that so you have to do propulsive Landing for Mars um you're going to land on a unprepared surface you know so it has to be able to do this at some point the the ultim it sounds ridiculous and it is but the ultimate goal of it is to land on Mars there's not much of an atmosphere to like to help you with the for the belly flop to be useful there's only 1% the atmosphere on Mars as there is on Earth but you still want to utilize as much of that atmosphere as possible so in the upper atmosphere it's still going to be coming in more or less uh kind of perpendicular to the Airstream I guess it's probably more like you know 60 degrees 70 degrees to the Airstream like where it's belly flopping and it's going to especially do that on Mars it's going to need to you know use up as let the little bit of atmosphere there is you know you're coming in an insane veloc I ities and so even that 1% thin atmosphere is still going to do a lot of work now on Mars it there's only 38% of Earth's gravity on Mars so the belly flop maneuver is a lot it could be a lot more conservative you could do that at like 5,000 ft up and it just wouldn't matter as much because there's not as much gravity loss or gravity drag so you can kind of just more slowly gently you know you don't have to do this crazy extravagant like belly flop you know flip maneuver um but it would still something at some point you would transition from more or less perpendicular to the Airstream to you know and horizontal to Landing vertically I like how we're having this old boring conversation about the differences of landing on Earth versus on Mars uh this is surreal that this is actually a real conversation that uh this is something that we're discussing yeah cuz it has to do both yeah but in my opinion yes I think we'll pretty quickly see an evolution of Starship that's like dedicated versions for certain tasks sure and at the end of the day again if if it's if someone runs a simulation says it's actually more efficient and it's better just to land horizontally on a Runway then that's what's going to happen you know it it it doesn't matter but they still will develop you know if the ultimate goal is to land on Mars then they'll have a dedicated Mars variant you know which will likely look different than the earth variant you know and they'll still probably be launched on the same booster you know what I mean so there's Oh you mean like that particular vehicle will not be returning back to Earth it'll need to be modified cuz uh cuz the ultimate is to have one Starship that goes to Mars lands on Mars then takes off of Mars lands back on Earth and is reused again over and over and over and there's a chance that you you know you have just a a cycler just a you know if you're if you at the end of the day you're just really trying to see what is most feasible what's the most efficient you literally have a vehicle dedicated to Mars Mars it's easy to do a single staged orbit it's a lot lower gravity a lot thinner atmosphere you can easily do a single stag orbit you get into orbit you park to a dedicated you know transfer vehicle that goes between Earth and Mars it only stays in space you don't have heat shields you don't have Landing leges you don't have all these things that you need and ideally it's nuclear powered so it's super efficient that gets you back to earth once you're at Earth you Rondevu again with another Landing Starship and that Starship might be horizontal Runway Starship you know like yeah there's no I I don't see the and I I think ultimately it'll win out where we don't have a one-size fits-all I think that's the that's the flaw of the Space Shuttle really is that it was trying to do everything and ended up kind of doing nothing well but that's I think what SpaceX is proven I mean SpaceX already has variants coming there's already going to be a dedicated lunar lander for NASA for the emis program there's already going to be a tanker variant there's already going to be likely just a pure cargo version there's likely going to be a human version we'll likely see evolutions of this thing happen you know relatively quickly and one once it's all working it's only a matter of weeks before people riding on it will be complaining about the speed of the Wi-Fi as the old like uh Louis C K joke with like where you're flying on a chair through the air it's incredible you didn't even know this existed and now you're complaining about it oh it's great exactly uh so you uh you tweeted fun fact about Starship by doing the flip around 500 m versus higher up like two 2,000 M the in Delta V is 500 m/s that's a 20 ton fuel saving which means basically 20 tons more you can put into orbit that's more than uh Falcon 9 has ever launched just by flipping later that's really interesting so there that that was the decision too to flip close to the ground yeah yeah the closer to the ground the better the more again the more the atmosphere is doing work and uh you know we get into that video really dives into like gravity losses and gravity drag the more time you're spent every every second that your rocket engine is running Earth is stealing 9.8 m/ second of acceleration against you m there's just inherently 9.8 m/ second squared of acceleration so every second that engine is running the first of big majority of your thrust is actually being just stolen by Earth's gravity well so if you're the longer you're fighting that the more inefficient it is so IDE I mean the best thing would be you flip at you know 100 meters off the ground you light all your engines to maximum thrust you pull 50 G's you know and you you land on a dime basically obviously there's no margin there there's you know and there's diminishing returns on that that gravity loss thing and your high thrust weight ratios so that's a pretty good compromise like yes it looks scary but they could be a lot more aggressive with that yet and squeeze out even a little bit better performance but there are diminishing returns so that's kind of the the magic number we've seen so far today but we'll likely see that you know be played with you've attended uh some of these what does it feel like to see Starship person first of all when is's just uh sitting there stacked and second of all when is doing some of these tests some of these Maneuvers well first off if you have the freedom of traveling and happen to live within a reasonable either by plane or car it's worth going down to South Texas it's so star base is right on the border of Mexico and the United States and very southern tip of Texas right along the Rio Grande and uh it's it's insane because it's right along a public Highway you can literally anyone can drive down this assuming it's not closed for testing because they do close the highways during the week a decent amount while they're doing tests but Sans any of those days anyone can just drive down and see these things up close and personal with their own eyes like we're talking you know from 100 200 meters away you know so two football fields away from the world's biggest most powerful rocket imagine being able to do that during the you know Soviet Union and you know during the N1 and Saturn 5 you know imagine just being able to drive up right next to the Launchpad there's no way you know and so to have this kind of access to to this program is so incredible the craziest thing is when you when you're driving out on this the on Highway 4 it's bumpy it's it's you know riddled with potholes now because of all the insane amount of trucks having to go out there and traffic and you're going through this it's just this weird you're like where am I you occasionally are seeing like you can kind of see the I mean you can see Mexico out your right window as you're driving driving down this highway you know and you're just sitting there like where am I and then all of a sudden you kind of turn this corner and the trees and the brush kind of clear out and all of a sudden you get a sense of everything on the horizon at that point you're pretty much five miles on the nose or eight kilometers away and from there you can just see through the the heat Haze through the you know the atmospheric Distortion and you just see this weird like looks like a city almost on the horizon you know there's tons of these tall buildings there's a weird ominous launch Tower thing With Arms Wide Open and sometimes and you know giant metal rocket and it just looks so so weird I mean it I it's the word surreal I think by definition I think if you are expecting it it's not surreal I think surreal kind of means like unexpected surprise or whatever you know even if you're expecting it even if you've seen pictures even if everything it is surreal yeah you stand there and you just go what is this and and also I mean there is a there's a kind of magical aspect to the that this is the place where over the next few years we'll start as a human species reaching out there and traveling out there well for sure see the development of the rockets that I think will take us further than ever before be born right there what's it like to witness the actual testing of of Starship so far it's been high stakes like it's it's been insane cuz those the the first I kind of mentioned earlier there's been SN 8 9 10 11 and 15 that have all done these suborbital hops the highest one went 12.5 km and the the rest of the four went 10 km in altitude and then turned off the engines and just fell mhm now the cool thing about that is the general public could be about five five miles away so again like 8 kilometers away and the weird thing is this Rocket's slowly accelerating mhm they didn't want to exceed a certain speed so they didn't have to worry about the aerodynamics of it you know they just slowly climbed and it probably also to appease the FAA they're like here we'll just limit the Thruster weight ratio and just you know make make it so it's slow and controlled no big deal so it's basically more or less like slightly above a hover just climbing forever for minutes for like four or five minutes you just hear and feel the Roar of this thing normal Rockets like after the first 30 seconds or minute you know they're so far away that it's just diminishing you know it's just it's just fading fading fading fading you still get that Rumble that that sense but but those first five flights uh the suborbital Hops were just I I'll cherish him forever because you just you're watching this thing that you've driven up next to you've seen it with your own eyes that's bigger than most buildings in a you know fairly dense urban area you know it's this massive thing you stay in there you stood there you look at it you're like wow that's crazy you've seen people working on it they're little ants compared to it then you drive away and you see it on the horizon and all of a sudden that thing leaves it starts moving hovering hovering and the first time I mean you know you put for me at least I put my hands on my head when I I just I can't help it I'm not it's not so I don't know what like you said I don't know what in human nature decides this is what to do when you can't believe something but that's what happens and when that thing first took off it was just like my brain couldn't process seeing you know cuz I had spent so much time driving around and seeing it and all of a sudden you're watching it just take off and you're like it's moving and all these you know most complicated rocket engines ever made are all firing simultaneously and it didn't blow up on the launch pad and it's slowly increasing and it's just crazy and the sound the everything about it and so by the time the first one and specifically it was it was December 2020 was the first uh sn8 it it went up and I actually we all lost it in the sky we couldn't quite see it but our our we had telescopes and and you know High telephoto lenses tracking it and what's funny is there's a pretty strong wind up there at altitude and it was moving there's a lot of um gaseous oxygen being vented out of the rocket and it's you know being blown by this air so it looks like it's moving actually quite quickly like away from us like it was strafing to one side so I'm watching the monitor I'm going oh my God they're moving it like over Brownsville mhm and we're all all of us everyone on this this hotel balcony is looking out down like way out over you know and we can't find it and we're like where did they lose it like we're thinking like oh my God this is going to crash down in Brownsville and and finally they they shut the engines off and we're watching it fall and again we're tracking it we know it's falling and it's falling falling falling it's falling super controlled and we're like oh my God this is perfect and all of a sudden it clicked and I see it with my you know my eyes I finally like track in it's it's straight out like straight in front of us and it looks like it looks like it was a blimp just barely moving cuz it is Falling Slowly thanks to all of its drag and again that's one of those moments I'm like it's falling so slow you know because it's so big it's so massive it's falling sideways you know I've seen Falcon 9 boosters and Falcon heavy boosters and they scream they come in so fast and you can barely even see you can just barely track all a they light their engines and they decelerate so quickly this was like the opposite it was like is that thing ever coming down it was just falling so slowly and so right there just felt like it was so close and so when it finally lit its engine and it flipped I was losing my mind because I'm like it's working you know this crazy plan this huge massive thing is doing this absurd feat and the first one well the first four again didn't work out as planned but getting to that point already getting to that flip maneuver was a huge milestone and it was so exciting just going through those those firsts were amazing and I think you know we're coming up now on them doing the full stacks of the booster and the upper stage MH I think when we see that fly when that leaves Earth for the first time it'll be like I said almost twice the amount of thrust as anything else it'll be the biggest heaviest largest thing to ever fly it's going to shake everything I can't wait have all 33 Raptor engines uh been active at once have they tested that no that's coming up that's kind of the next Milestone um I don't know you know when this will come out but we're that's like the next just a few days very quickly here it then but if people listening to this if they're listening to it early on they'll likely be able to catch I you know I think at this point it seems like next week so step one would be static fire yep holding on to the rocket and lighting up the engines and so so far they've lit at most they kind of they went for like a more than 14 engine static fired I don't recall if it was like you know 16 or something engines lit at once and they ended up going down to 14 engines that's the most engines they've ever lit um so the next step and the final kind of Step before they fly this thing is they're actually going to light all 33 engines simultaneously and um although that sounds scary let let's not forget the Falcon heavy that's now flown five times completely flawlessly um has has 27 engines running simultaneously so they definitely have you know SpaceX has experience with high number of engines running at the same time but it is still like this is going to be a lot of moving s and a lot of potential and a lot just a a lot of everything uh what are the upcoming uh Milestones expected milestones and I think um there's one in particular I'd like to talk to you more about but leading up to that of course is like what what are some of the tests here on the way so is the static fire uh the the the fully stacked with the two stages uh will there be uh and then all that leading to an orbital launch test uh what so what are the things we should know about and when do you think like what what do you think the timeline will be look like the orbital test timeline uh the reason we have this website the expected Milestones is because I always tell people to ignore any time you ever hear for any of this stuff and just pay attention to Milestones because when you're doing stuff for the first time you know you just have no idea so Ju Just to understand the expected Milestones here the First Column is the event the the second column is the date and Status DVD complete green means what green means it's been completed and it shows the completion date there and the completion date and then The Others May maybe more maybe not for the full full stack testing the daack and the there's a 33 engine so so realistically we're expecting them to daack and SpaceX I think just tweeted that actually that they're going to be destacking um the second stage from the first stage kind of get the ship safe while they test because they don't want to you know 30 engines is pretty high risk if they do blow up the rocket it when they test it for the first time it's not going to be fully fueled I don't think at least but there is a limit to how they do have to have it weighed down enough that the launch clamps can hold on to it because if you think about it like normally the launch clamps are holding on to an entire rocket weighing 5 million kilograms 5 million K like you know it's weighing an insane amount so those clamps don't actually have to hold 75 Mega Newtons of thrust they really only to have to hold down 25 Mega Newtons of thrust you know what I mean they're not designed to hold down all 75 so they do have to have enough weight on the rocket so that so even when they do these the testing of the 33 engines it'll have to have enough propellant in there that they don't exceed the clamping and the holding force of the stand otherwise it'll break free from the launch stand and that booster will go flying off uncontrolled so it's a difficult thing to figure out in the test how many uh simultaneous things you test right so they're kind of mitigating risks which is why like they're daack you know they don't want to have although the ship could be on top of it to help weigh it down and and simulate the you know the launch environment better at some point they that's a risk they're just going to take when they go for launch and so for now they're taking the ship off in case something goes wrong during the 33 engine test and then once we see if the 33 engine test goes well hopefully we see the the second stage get stacked back on it we'll see them get closer like closing out all the items and hope the big one too is the FAA launch license there that's a that'll be publicly filed we'll see that you know in the system uh having launch license and I I have no sense of that type of thing you know that's outside of but that's but that is a big milestone and it might be something that could potentially hinder uh you know hold up the launch date would just be waiting for a launch license yeah I'm sure there's a lot of fascinating bureaucracy and politics and uh legal stuff and all that kind of beautiful magical thing when you live in reality because it is I mean it is a big uh rocket yeah well and the biggest thing it's not not so much the fa doesn't necessarily care about the success of the rocket they just really just care about the safety of public and public property you know so it's it's it's a matter of being convinced and having the the data to prove okay if this thing blows up we have a control of how and when it blows up we have control of you know X Y and Z here's the potential damage here's the blast radius you know this again is over twice as powerful and twice as much potential actually it's it's a lot more potential for an explosive energy if it you know where it happened to well let me walk back a little bit because in order to have a real detonation you have have a perfect mixture ratio of of your fuel and oxidizer um if when a rocket blows up typically you know it kind of unzips and some of the fuel will mix into some of the oxidizer and you could have some explosive energy but a lot of it's actually just a def floration it's just you know flames and and yeah there will there would be explosive energy but it's not like you're lighting all of it simultaneously it's this giant bomb it's just really not so that's good but at the same time even in those circumstances the amount of energy is still absurd enough to likely blow out windows you know for miles and miles and miles including my studio space uh well if the cameras hold up it would be one heck of a show uh hopefully of course would not uh would not happen so how does that take us to an orbital launch when do you think that would happen in in my opinion uh this is a very fluid and this will change literally by the hour so you really think that it's very difficult to really say like oh even even for something that could very well happen this year even just a few months away um you making a prediction uh by the way are you like superstitious on this kind of stuff a little bit like you don't you're worried about jinxing it that kind of stuff at all no um cuz I would imagine you would be like waiting for all of these launches that keep getting delayed where you start thinking that there's certain things you do will control the weather socks why am I wearing these socks just scrubbed again you know like yeah you're lucky you have to wear the same lucky socks otherwise it's going to there's going to be bad weather yeah so the reason that I say this and why it's so difficult is they did a first full stack test in July of 2021 and the expectation was we're a month or two away from a launch yeah so like realistically for 18 months I've been in a Purgatory thinking that we're a month or two away of an orbital launch now I did say for the record when that thing stacked and when of speculation was saying you know a month or two I was saying I don't expect it to fly in 2021 you know and I've been just say I just saw the amount of work that still needed to be done like on the the ground systems the tanks the the launch Mount all the stuff I'm they're like there's still a lot of stuff they're going to have to validate it they're going to have to test everything every component and you know people were like how dare you say that even Gwen Shotwell the president of of SpaceX is saying Q3 of 2021 I'm like okay but like I'm just I'm not going to be surprised if it slips into 2022 and here we are are the beginning of 2023 and I I think we're finally within like two months I I'm expecting like I'm trying to keep my March in April as free as I can we'll put it that way I love it uh actually just in a small tangent on uh GW shell like it what what do you uh uh from everything I know she's an instrumental a really crucial person to to the successful SpaceX in running the show she's the president the COO um what what uh do you know about her that um sort of the genius of gwy Shotwell man my understanding is she's really the glue you know she's the glue to the tornado tornado comes in and then she comes around and just really executes on on and and helps you know a famous story is that at some point Elon walked in or she sprinted into a meeting because Elon was actively trying to cancel Falcon heavy MH saying it's too far like it's too much development it's still too far away and this is like you know this might have been like end of 2017 or something and it flew for the first time in 2018 so we're we're talking like it's close to the end of development you know there's Hardware being built all this stuff and elon's literally in a meeting telling people they're going to cancel it we're going to move on to bfr or now Starship um and just go full steam ahead on that and she runs into the meeting and reminds Elon we have X amount of customers that have already purchased a ride on Falcon heavy we can't delay that you know so it's it's that business sense of like we yes it's great to innovate but we also have to pay our dues and and and make the money to continue our operations and I think she's just a lot better at she has I think she has such a great perspective on everything it really seems like everything she she doesn't I wish she did more interviews because I would love to hear more from her um but man like it just seems hear that Gwen for both of us yeah she hasn't actually done them many interviews right not really no she's done like a TED Talk um couple little things here and there but not really many interviews and and I would just love to hear like what you know what on a daily basis like what is she doing that to keep her head on and and keep everything so organized you know it's you know yeah I my understanding is that she she is absolutely integral and and does just insane amount of work at SpaceX yeah I mean the so it's the the project planning but also the how the teams integrate together and the and and the hiring and this is the man I think it's a lot of it is honestly even just the business making sure the money's flowing in a positive trend more or less you know that yes elon's obviously a money guy but he thinks he's so I think Elon is so risky you know he just loves to throw it all in that he leaves little margin for error you know he's he's been really lucky with rolling his dice you know especially like when he started SpaceX and Tesla that was the ultimate role of the dice but I think she's a healthy balance to be like well here's our you know operations and how we can continue to do this without risking everything you know and starship's close let me be clear Starship is close to risking everything already it's just such a big fast-moving high-risk developmental program that like I I personally think you know SpaceX would probably be fine if they shut the doors on Starship and just flew falcon9 and Falcon heavy for the next 10 years they' still be commercially valid they could not spend another dollar on research and development they could fire I don't want them to fire everyone involved in anything research and development and just ran operations on Falcon 9 and Falcon heavy and they would still be dominant for 10 years and they would still have a business case and they'd still be fine but um they're all in like all chips are pretty much as many chips as possible are in this I I don't know what else I could say is there's not I've talked to a lot of uh great leaders there's just not many people like Elon that would push for Starship where they're already a very successful company yeah uh sort of everyone doubted that it could be a successful company it was so close to bankruptcy and failing and then to take it into a financially viable successful company and just when you do you take on a project that again risks everything well he already did this with Falcon 1 to Falcon 9 like literally people were like what are you doing they basically signed over and were fully ramping up Falcon 9 by the time they finally had their first Falcon 1 success they had one more flight they only flew Falcon 1 successfully twice they flew five times all together the fourth one was successful they flew one more time and the anyone else out there would have been like let's keep flying the Falcon 1 we have a working rocket we can start you know making money and profiting and already he was risking it all and saying nope we're going from Falcon 1 to Falcon 9 was a huge huge leap you know it was at I think it's at least as big as as a leap from Falcon 1 to 9 as it is from Falcon 9 to Starship or around relatively similar leap so it's just that same thing again people are going why are you leaping into this insane program and system and risk when you have such a you know you finally have this Workhorse of a rocket that's so dominant in the industry yet they're going 10x you know it's so happens that you've been selected for the dear moon mission that will fly Starship once around the Moon with nine people on board uh you are one of those people so just pause to take that in everything that we've been talking about you will not just be reporting on you will be a part of it so tell me about the objective of this Mission and um how does it feel to be a part of it well man yeah yeah it's basically it's the Willy Wonka of space like a generous yeah a generous individual purchased a ride from SpaceX as early uh at least as far as I know the earliest I knew about it was February 27th 2017 who is the individual uh yaku maawa but at the time I'm telling a story at the time we didn't know okay great great so February 27th 2017 a press release comes out from SpaceX saying someone purchased a ride through us around the Moon we're going to fly someone around the moon and at the time it was on a crew Dragon capsule and a falcon heavy it's like wow and that was enough that little moment right there that press release so first time I'm like I'm going to make a YouTube video about this I stood up turned on my camera put on my at the time space suit and I basically yelled at the camera for 3 minutes about someone's going around the Moon you know fast forward to 2018 uh end of 2018 or near the end they introduced there was a SpaceX press conference I'm I'm there as a member of the press I'm reporting on we're going to meet this person that's going around the moon and come to find out boom they're going to be riding on Starship now they change from Falcon heavy and dragon space tax is no longer going to do that they're going to upgrade them basically to Starship so instead of being in like a small Tin Can they're in this giant luxurious you know Mega rocket around the moon and it comes out that this individual named yusaku mayawa who is a Japanese billionaire uh purchased this ride and instead of inviting you know his friends and you know colleagues and whatever whoever his family members or whatever he decided that the most impactful thing he could do with this opportunity is invite uh more or less artists in the original thing it was like artists you know journalist a painter a an athlete a you know a all you know photographer videographer you know all walks of life basically when they said athlete they thought of you they're like I know a guy this guy rode ragby once oh but uh so and at the time you know I was like this is crazy I can't believe this is going to happen and you know he had this this vision of we're going to find people from all around the world I'm going to invite people from all around the world um from different walks of life different different you know trades and I'm going to share this experience so that they can share it with the world and really have an impact much greater than you know any one country or any one individual or any you know set of military trained you know astronauts could could do offer up A New Perspective beautiful I literally I mean at the press conference I I cried like I had a couple tears in my eyes I was like this is so cool could just pause on that so he goes by MZ MZ yep how incredible is that it's like uh I I I think it it's you often don't realize the importance of individuals in human history like they they they Define because this this could be we talked about the importance of Elon in particular you know most of the work is done by large groups of people that are collective intelligence that we band together but like these individuals can be the spark of the Catalyst of that progress and I mean just this idea of getting not just civilians which is already incredible but civilians with a sort of an artistic flame that burns inside them they're able to communicate whatever they do are able to communicate something about that experience it's just a genius idea to spend quite probably a very large amount of money for that I mean it's uh it's it's it's and and that will be part of History yeah and it's easy these days for people to be cynical you know especially about like space flight and Wealthy individuals but really in my opinion and maybe you know just the time I was just so couldn't believe this this idea you know I'm someone that has studied a lot about you know the Apollo program the people that have been to the moon and they're incredible individuals incredible individuals but they're so saturated with tasks you know and they're military trained and often um that they didn't really have the luxury of just being able to soak in the experience of going around or to the moon and seeing the Moon up close with your own eyes like that just psychologically has to be insane and so to have this opportunity to be able to observe our closest Celestial neighbor with your own eyes and your sole purpose is to soak it in and share it and communicate and create with the rest of our planet like that to me is just beautiful so that is the objective of the mission that right there is the objective of the mission and how does it feel to be selected as uh one of the nine to do it it's it's it's a it's a gradient it's slowly it's doing a few things um since I've known it's become um I think the closer it gets the more excited and the more nervous I get you know it's a the more real it becomes the more real it becomes you know the announcement was a big uh it just got announced at the end of 2022 publicly um who's involved and so you know prior to that like I had you know each step of the selection process you know there's a pretty comprehensive selection process with interviews and stuff each each step I'd try not to get my hopes up and frankly like this let me be clear this was not something that like I've always wanted to do you know it's not like I'm out there I didn't start doing YouTube videos because I wanted to even go to space like none of that I and I've said hilariously I've probably said dozens or hundreds of times on a like yeah I don't ever want to go to space because it's not like my it's not a driving force it's not really a thing I even really truly pictured or let myself fantasize about frankly so each step of the selection process I didn't really let myself dream about it too much or you know but I'd kind of it would kind of chip away like oh my God this is actually becoming more real this is actually more and more of an opportunity and I get equally more nervous too like you know frankly it is it's i' I've you know I've seen space flight stuff go wrong I've you know I I think about this stuff a lot so like yeah I get more nervous but I also get more excited about that opportunity like it's an opportunity that how can you pass and it's still I still have to actually stop pause think and actually realize the reality that like that I am going to the Moon I'm going to see the Moon up close uh flying around the Moon I'm sorry some people get mad when I say going to the moon since I'm not landing on it um but flying around the Moon seeing The Far Side of the Moon with my own eyes and seeing Earth and seeing the Earth rise behind it yeah it's going to I I just I can't I can't tell you what it's going to be like and feel like so epic but it's insane to me that like we're having this conversation and that that is my my reality you know like and that someone was generous enough to consider the option of of sharing this with with frankly strangers yeah and the the process that they had for selecting like how um how much thought and time went into the selection process is incredible you know they did a public call at the beginning of 2021 and so the the team's involved in in in whittling it down from a million applicants there's a million applicant that would and they got it down to to eight crew members and and two backups yeah um amazing people I would have you know I don't know how they wound up where they did but it's it's incredible I I feel very deep connection to everyone that's already involved and what can you say about the crew you've gotten a chance to meet them and talk to them and know Steve iok is on on the crew like who else who else is there so uh you are obviously the the star athlete under who else in terms of the the artists that are there so oh man we might just want to pull up just so I don't totally Butcher and forget anybody but because so far I have actually had the chance to meet everyone in person you know so far a lot of this was done during the pandemic but we've met through a couple different things we've had a couple different times to to get together but so so far I have not met Steve Aoki yet or top um we've been on calls and stuff I also have not yet met uh Dev Joshy who is uh an actor from India so yeah we can St Steve Aoki American uh DJ and producer and musician top from uh South Korea is also uh a musician and a producer so this is all across the world like truly Global uh all different kinds of walks of life all artists of different forms and Steve is is Japanese uh his parents are Japanese but he you know live born and raised in the United States uh Yi is uh a dancer and choreographer from the Czech Republic uh ranan is a fine art photographer from well England and and Ireland I guess she lives in both and kind of a bit of a she's all over the place uh Technically she's Irish I guess uh I Tim Dad yep that's me from the United States uh then you have Kareem who is from England and does also as a uh photographer and documentarian uh does a lot of work with oceanography and uh and volcanoes so he does really incredible work Brendan Hall is a documentarian and filmmaker uh Dev Joshy uh sorry Brendan is also from the United States Dev Joshy is an Indian uh actor uh I believe also I believe he's also already been producing and things he's very young I think he's only like 19 or 20 and he's I mean he's been acting since he was like 5 years old or something he's a he's a a Bollywood star like he is a star in India which is really cool right um Caitlyn Fairington from the United States is an Olympic gold medalist snowboarder so she believe it or not is the athlete and not me and then and she's one of the backup crew members as as as so is uh Miu from Japan who's a a dancer oh that's amazing I it's such interesting group I mean can is there something else you could say about MZ about yaka maawa yaka mayawa so he uh he's also a musician so he was actually in like some kind of punk hardcore Japanese bands in the early in the 90s and stuff and early 2000s he started a um a record company and and distribution and sales ended up in in fashion and um owns one of the biggest fashion companies in Japan and has become a fine art collector and just kind of a philanth th pist and and he's been out to space already he's already not only been to space like you know he's been to the International Space Station he's been on orbit and on the ISS and so he what's cool is like you know there's talks of when there then frankly to be to be honest like we still don't I still don't know all of the details about this you know we're not yet into training I kind of always assumed prior that there'd be some professional astronaut you know when they talked about it in 2018 there's talks of we'll have a professional astronaut on board but realistically now like MZ is a trained astronaut you know he has trained a long like six months you know plus to be able to fly on soyu so as far as like it's good to know for me that I have someone on the crew that has experienced with space flight um has trained and has some knowledge on space flight as well you know that's that is an important aspect for sure so you made a excellent video about flying in the fighter jet uh that I think you mentioned may be relevant uh to the training is there some highlevel asp the training that you anticipate that you might be able to speak to yeah so you know so far I think we can really lean on what has happened with the other um you know commercial crew missions and in in private missions like the inspiration form Mission or Axiom uh where SpaceX FLW individuals they trained for about six months a lot of like reading manuals and learning the spacecraft are you going to do like a rocky form Montage or I hope I just get shredded I hope it's physical a lot of physical training and they're like we didn't tell him to do this he's just seems to want to fill himself shirtless in the snow doesn't make any how this why is he always doing this I can't get him to stop punching meat um so yeah hopefully uh realistically I lots of manual reading I like it but there's there's a physical component to all this and that's that's really I mean that that's fascinating it's also inspiring that sort of civilians can do this that's that's really interesting yeah I mean this is and to me this represents this and the other commercial space you know private space flight missions like this represent really a turning point like truly an inflection and again it's easy for people to be cynical that oh you know why are people wasting all this money doing space flight stuff it's like well I'm sure some people were saying that same thing about you know airplanes and and early Aviation going like why are we can't believe those people are wasting the government's you know funding these stupid planes and stuff how's it ever going to benefit me and nowadays like imagine if all the planes just stopped working like we'd freak out like our economy would collapse yeah it would suck you know and I you know might be a long time before we get to that reality with space flight well I no if if space flight halted today you know space assets uh all of our you know on orbit assets our life would be crippled and I don't think people realize that yeah so it's already we're already reliant on it but now we're getting to the point where it's we're really turning that corner where it's the average person alive today you know if you're born uh you know now from now on I think there's a real decent chance that by the time you pass There's an opportunity to have flown in space yeah I mean I if I'm being honest I still haven't lost the the feeling of magic of flying in an airplane I often catch myself thinking like how's this real how is and like the contrast of this incredible thing that's incredibly safe flying through the a taking off and Landing while everyone else just looks bored watching like I don't know uh some romantic comedy on their phone with WiFi yeah so it's just it it's like the contrast to that is like wow we're we're incredible we're incredible as a society and it's like we we develop some uh amazing technology that improves almost the measure ably our quality of life and then we take it for granted and now still reach for the next thing the next thing and life becomes more beautiful and complex and interesting and yeah it's just the same stuff will be uh happening oh yeah uh with space travel oh it'll become mundane and boring at some point the tough thing about space travel of course uh you know I don't even know if it's such a giant leap over airplanes because airplanes are already incredible but uh the tough thing with space travel is the destination right is the is the is the landing on whole other the worlds whether it's docking with with different transport vehicles or the space station or it's Landing elsewhere it's it's it it really really is incredible I I think you mentioned since there's uh there's artists there's filmmakers and so on and you're all of those uh on top of being a great athlete I I don't know I'll just stop the running joke at this point uh but is there have you uh thought about um just just in general like we've offline talked about microphones and like the all the different ways to film space launch uh for yeah rocket launches uh have you thought about the different options of like how to capture how to capture this uh uh have you have the team have been like brainstorming and thinking about this do you anticipate it being super challenging because there's so many opportunities to sort of think of how to do this so one of the the fun things to remember is that Starship is huge like its internal volume is uh the pressurized volume on Starship is is bigger than a 747 pressurized volume and it can take 100 metric tons to anywhere with enough refueling 100 so we have in theory very little mass and volume constraints unlike prior all other space flight missions ever you you have to you're counting you know grams down to you know and just really can't RI you know you have very defined parameters on on what you can and cannot do we're going to likely have the luxury of being able to film and capture this in a way that's just never been done before you know we won't be inhibited by mass and volume constraints like prior yeah so all that said and done I'm hoping that we'll be able to just arm ourselves to the teeth with the absolute best cameras and Equipment possible backups on backups and you know and pre-wire you know pre- rig things Starship is going to be a a transportation system and it has you know it's being built from the ground up there's no reason why they can't put infrastructure in for cameras that are just housed in the vehicle you know um these are talks that I'm excited to have because I I really ideally one of the things I'd love to do I'm going to be pushing really hard to actually try live streaming from inside during the launch during the launch live stream from the inside that would be incredible if that's possible that's possible to pull off that's really really incredible there is the magic to the live stream because like that's real that's right there that would the world would tune in that would be truly inspiring yes to me that's one of those things a lot of people ask why they aren't doing it of course NASA and other individuals have their reasons of why not you know there's obviously some technical hurdles but now with starlink and other capabilities there's less hurdles there's obviously some transparency reason reasons why you know and safety reasons why it might not be a great idea to live stream a risky rocket launch you know the Challenger I think put a pretty bad taste in our mouth as far as publicizing an event and having every student in the United States tune in to you know a tragedy but um that's something I'm pushing for really hard just because I think it could be magical I think it could really connect with people in a way that hasn't been done before speaking of Challenger have you thought about the fact that you're riding a thing as we've been talking about that's um that's a giant explosive powerful rocket have you um have you thought about the risk of that the danger of that have you contemplated your own mortality how could I not you know I've seen with my I've seen and felt four of these prototype Vehicles blow up you know with my own eyes um I don't know if there's anyone else you know early days some of the you know Mercury and Gemini astronauts watched failures of rockets and then got on them I don't know of too many people that are dumb enough to do that though these day this day and age um it's it's obviously I will have to see a lot of successful launches and have to have a lot of confidence and in the engineering the data that they've developed a safe system because currently the current iteration of Starship Has No abort system has no Escape Tower so you know Dragon capsule which is currently flying people has a launch AB system it has super Draco engines that either by the push of a button or by the automatic triggering of the flight computer can shoot the the capsule off of the rocket in milliseconds and pull it safely away get it far enough away that it can pull the parachutes and safely splash down um Starship by all iterations I've ever seen does not have that the space shuttle also did not have that so it's not absurd to not have an abort system like it is there is you know certain engineering principles that that prove that that could be a completely valid thing you know the space shle threw 100 flew 133 times fully successfully it did have two failures resulting in the loss of 14 lives um 85 or what sorry 98.5% success rate pretty I mean yeah you there's other I've probably done things that are a lot riskier I race motorcycles drag race motorcycles and you know ridden like an absolute jerk on the streets on a motorcycle I'm sure I've had a higher than a 98.5% survival rate or lower than that I mean at some point um so it's a you know yes it's it's risky it's scary and um I think about it a lot a lot it it definitely is one of those things that I you know I I will have to see and and I'm I'm in no hurry for this to happen either you know personally I'm in no hurry because it's like I would rather see this thing be developed and integrated and see 10 you know or I was going to say 10 dozen but I'd be happy with a dozen fully successful like oh we've got this thing totally nailed down uh you know before I get on it but and that that likely is the reality there will likely be a dozen or two or three launches because just even to get to the moon on Starship they have to refuel it in orbit um so it will arrive get to Earth orbit basically empty and out of fuel so I'll have to dock with a fuel Depot fill up and then go to the moon so just to even get that full you know we're already talking about La you know a handful of launches so there there will be a lot of launches before we fly would they do a test flight without humans on board to that goes to the moon or no I'm not sure I'm not sure if they'll do that exact flight profile but by then they will have already flown most likely the Artemis 3 program will have flown a Starship variant to the Moon that that lands on the moon um so doing at that point you're pretty much I I would like them to test the heat shield at that entry velocity though because it it is uh you know it takes another it's about 30% faster to get like it to go 30% faster than the lower orbit to get out to a translunar injection and although that only sounds like oh 30% faster it's you know the the re-entry heating experienced by a vehicle goes up by velocity uh cubed not squared so and not even not linear so it's not like if you go twice as fast you get you see twice as much heat you know 30% faster 30% more heat it's and it's not squared it's not go twice as fast get four times as much heat it's go twice as fast get eight times as much heat on re-entry so 30% faster on reentry is actually a really really big deal M so I would love to see that beest you know there's certain things that I would love to see Milestones that I would love to see tested out and proven um before I get on board but at the end of the day I really do believe that um just like Falcon n and the success of that that they're going to push it and get all the The Kinks out well before anyone's on top of it nowadays Falcon night and dragon is you know arguably the one of the safest most reliable and best rides he could take to to space are you afraid of dying yeah yeah is this one of the first times you get to Year young yeah have you gotten a chance to think about death is one of the first times you've really contemplated it I mean yeah I mean like I said I've had I've had dumb moments on motorcycles where I kind of saw you know like I'm going to smash into this thing at 120 M an hour and I'm going so you've had moments when you realize it could end just like this yes where you lit and I and I've I have for most of my adult life had dreams of falling and hitting the ground and it just all you get a ring in your ears it all goes black and in my head I go oh shit that was it have you seen a therapist about this all uhuh I wonder what it means so i' and I'm sure there's a Freudian interpretation somewhere in there uh that I'm going to also apply to my dating life no the joke is the running joke continues okay so um I mean it's um it's it's fascinating in general as I hope we'll talk about in the early days of space flight that there is there is a the task of reaching out to the stars is a fundamentally risky one you have to take risks and of course there's really rigorous safety precautions and so on but it's still it's still a risk well and I think like most people the the for me the idea of dying isn't so much about myself it's about those in affected by it you know my my loved ones my family you know my girlfriend my my friends you know obviously I don't want to have this be a traumatic experience for anybody you know um it's already going to be hard like it's already I know uh my mom gets my my parents and and family and friends are very supportive um and you know my parents are you know all about it of course but my mom is also very emotional too so you know she's so my speaking of athletes my brother-in-law has actually been on American Ninja Warrior two seasons um phenomenal athlete and even just when he competes my mom gets so emotional like she can't even hold it together seeing that so what's it going to be like when she sees her son get on top of a skyscraper and and Ascend on a a column of flames into the heavens like that's going to be very difficult you know um and I I've you know I've taken them out they've seen they've seen star base and they've seen Starship they've seen a couple launches I don't know if that's going to make him feel better exposure therapy I guess exposure therapy okay uh have you had that conversation with them about this like before agreeing uh to join I mean was was that what that was or is it one of those things like uh you you just you don't have that conversation supp it's understood that there's a love there's a passion here and realistically I'm not I'm going to be convinced and statistically convinced that this is relatively safe you know like again in the in the 99s percent safe yeah again there's things that people do every day that are less safe than this you know like you riding the motorcycle again yeah riding the motorcycle doing wheelies at over 100 m hour not the you did wheelies over what all right I'm not a smart guy always okay well you know formation flying in the fighter jets was likely a more dangerous thing yes than what I'll be doing in space fight so as surreal as it is we're talking about you um flying around the Moon let's rewind and talk about the origin story what's the origin story of everyday astronaut I used to be a professional photographer so from 2008 until the end of 2016 that was my income was photography fulltime like you were an Instagram model and took butt pictures of yourself instag fitness model obit model obviously um now the uh I I did I did a lot of weddings I shot 150 weddings um all around the world so subjects all kinds of material like uh like uh do do portrait also a lot of portrait work and then just you know random like commercial things like you know food and beverages for businesses or like you know a wheelchair ramp company I shot their product like you know random whatever professional photographer does in Cedar Falls Iowa you know when did you uh fall in love with photography with a visual medium do you remember yeah I do actually remember I so I I drew up uh I grew up drawing constantly I I I was the weird kid that my would bring a a sketch pad to the restaurants like every restaurant when I was growing up until I was like 18 19 I literally would just sit there and draw or waiting for food and my parents like fostered that they would you know and I I'd be the weird kid but I'd be engaging and talking but I'd be sitting there drawing and I I was always obsessed with realism and like recreating and you know visualizing things and so when I got my hands on a camera was actually my dad's old Pentax that I first shot a on a film camera and developing the film I didn't personally develop like you know getting the film back back in those days um you know I just was like so excited about the idea that I had this visual thing that I saw with my own eyes and now I can stop time and capture it and and show it to other people just kind of like to me that was like the ultimate form of of realism was like literally showing you the photons basically that affected this film um and so I I mean it was I was 19 when I got my first digital SLR at Canon 20D and started shooting um and yeah I just I I fell in love with it it became like I got a job at a camera store and you know basically all my extra money went into buying everything that I could at the time and I only worked there for about exactly a year before I went into pursuing photography full-time and I basically was shooting weddings so that I could travel and pay like you know afford to be able to uh do some big trips every year and and develop some kind of you know portfolio of traveling and not necessarily like not for you know I guess Instagram wasn't much of a thing at the time it's really just I liked making big prints and having them displayed and that kind of stuff and pretty are you still a Canon guy you still a Canon elitist no no no I I I moved around I I did Sony for a bit I still kind of shoot mostly Canon glass but adapted to either Sony lenses sorry like Canon lens look at you what do you think about the these things that I'm using Sony a 74 great it's great see yeah it's uh I've uh I've been you know I Googled around just trying to find a camera that can do video and photography pretty well and obviously going with just like generic lens PR Prime I've resisted everything my whole journey with these camera thing I'm trying to figure stuff out is like prime lenses seem so stupid so for Prime Lin is like a fixed Zoom thing y it's like why cuz I remember I was going to like Ukraine and thinking it's similar like uh um yeah very similar to space flight but you're very constrained because you're going into an unknown environment you going into a war zone you going into a front you don't know what like you don't know anything and there's like a little suitcase you have to like see figure out like how do you film this what's what's robust um what gives you like a good image versus a flexibility versus the weight weight is important there you have to think about like can you really bring like a bunch zoom lenses and all that kind of stuff so I have to learn really quickly but yeah of um it's a whole journey that you've already been on but it's it's nice to have a beginner like me like to explore that I think there is um there's a nice thing just I guess we've been talking about with a beginner's mind to um not let equipment get in the way of like what your vision is of what a thing should look like yeah sometimes like especially if you're a professional videographer photographer C cinematographer whatever you call it you can like fetishize equipment too much you could get so much equipment and I've interacted that because I've been trying to learn from other people that have so much more experience than me I think their advice is often like uh very pushing a lot of equipment versus like the final thing like how do you create the art of it and like cuz to me even photography is just like storytelling and so like a lot of the discussion to me that I enjoy uh especially talking to creative people is like the the the final story like how and i' I've learned you know like light light light is a weird thing like it's so interesting it's so interesting how you can create em motion with light mhm like with a little you can take a like a a phone and like you light your face in different ways M and like it changes the emotion oh yeah it's so weird I'm like holy shit cuz like that's the conversation I want to have if people give me advice how to light a scene and all that kind of stuff it's great but the reality is that a little bit of light in a different direction that you have to understand how that changes the Contour on your face and everything and the expression that your face can like the the expression that could be effectively communicated under under different lighting conditions and then like the mystery of like having some of your face uh in darkness and some not uh when you can only see the eyes and not the face when the background is visible or not I mean just the the yeah it's yeah it's all just like this interesting art form that's can be so powerful when you're telling a story well and what's fun for with me with photography and Rockets they're both like the ultimate story of compromise cuz when you start learning about photography learn about you know how the aperture affects both your exposure but also your depth of field higher shutter speed affects both your exposure your depth of field how the you know a medium format camera versus a crop camera effects you know everything is a compromise and price versus performance you like there's always a compromise you're always literally doing like a trade study of what can I afford What's My outcome like blah blah blah blah blah how fast is the autof focus or whatever same with rockets like there's a million choices and every single one of them affects every single thing so there's always all these trades and it's so cool you can see uh the same totally different outcomes based on the same like requirements you know like do X and here's how we're going to do it and you know two teams of people will come up with wildly different things when did you fall in love with Rockets So yeah so the this the story kind of keeps going for me so I was doing s can't talk photography man we'll get we'll go on a deeper rabit hole there so um so it ended uh you know I'm through all this doing a lot of weddings I was already getting saturated and feeling like I'm not being as creative you know you can only shoot him so many weddings before you're like well now we do this pose this pose this pose you know even if like they're amazing places like you know in front of a castle in Germany or something I'm still like well any end of the day I'm I'm not being very creative you know so I remember craving like some some projects and so I was sitting at my friend's coffee shop in my hometown in Cedar Fall side car coffee and I'm sitting on this red couch and I see this article from I think Gizmodo and it said you could own the flight stick of an Apollo Command Module and I knew enough to know what that meant but that's really about the end of my space knowledge and so I clicked on it the clickbait got me like I'm like oh yeah I'm GNA see if you know and I see that the minimum bid was like $250,000 I'm like okay no I can't own the Apollo joystick you know but I got me on this website called RR auction and so I started scroll going through that looking for things that hadn't been bit on and they had like you know at the time they're doing a huge space auction and so I'm looking for things just out of curiosity fun these are cool like starting to really you know like I said I liked space but I wasn't like in love with it or anything but I I'm very just seeing all this stuff like this is so cool look at all this old history stuff and ended up seeing a um there's an article for a a vmk 44 flight suit high altitude flight suit that that came from the Soviet Union and looks you know it's like a MIG fighter jet fighter pilot suit very similar to like the SR71 like kind of pumpkin suit um pre semi- pressure suit with a you know full helmet I mean it full it looks like a space suit you know for all intents and purposes it's kind of like a spacit and I just bid on it you know I bid like I think $325 and next thing you know like it arrives at my door yeah and from that point on like literally I got it out I immediately try to put it on and the first thing that I do is almost die in it because I closed the helmet down on myself and locked it and didn't know how to unlock it so I'm literally and so as soon as I seal it up I'm realizing I can't breathe I'm going to run out of air so luckily like there's a hose you know that kind of that long hose thing that would normally plug into an Air Supply had a little plug on the end of it so I just unplugged it and was able to temporarily breathe through the hose until I figured out the the locking mechanism so there was my almost that was my mortality rate thing right there so that was probably above a 98 below 9 you're there panicking inside yeah for a few seconds already reading like my premature obituary like idiot dies alone in space suit in his living room you know like just imagine yeah that would be like Darwin Award for sure for sure oh so um so I I get this space suit and it kind of literally take my breath [Laughter] away you should feel bad for for that one you you introduced Creed to me so you should feel bad about that one Arms Wide Open yeah okay so um so I ended up like the space Su kind of like more or less haunted me because it kind of just it sat in like my living room for a long time and I didn't know what to do with it and I actually had a friend who is also a photographer wanted to do like a a photo he was just kind of taking pictures randomly like hey bring your space suit over we'll do a picture like all right you know I walk across the street literally lived across the street Taylor and I and I put the SPAC suit on he took this funny picture and me like this is awesome and I got a lot of like fun out of like creating a character you know of everyday astronaut or at at the time I guess I didn't know an astronaut and then that kind of just continued I was like thinking of more and more funny situations where I could have this astronaut on earth doing mundane everyday things and came up with the name everyday astronaut and originally it was just literally a photo project like this whole art series of an astronaut doing these things these funny Whimsical you know Silly mundane things but I was researching a lot about like you know I was trying to hide Easter eggs like I was going to hide in like the you know the echo cardiogram of of of Alan Shepard you know like his first flight into space and photoshopping that into pictures and like you know doing all these little like facts about space flight but there just hidden little elements in these photos and man doing that I just fell in love with it I just was going over every little detail that I could learning as I was just couldn't stop learning and I was I was getting excited because I was like I could be teaching people about all this exciting stuff and all the cool things people figured out you know 40 years ago 50 years ago and was trying to portray that through images on Instagram and you know it it took me a little while but eventually I realized you know on Instagram your retention rate you're lucky if you get like two seconds of someone looking at an image you know or maybe nowadays 60 seconds of a quick little Instagram short or something but um yeah I it doesn't give you a chance to really teach to explore a little topic that you felt like you felt the Curiosity about thing there's so much to learn here this is so beautiful there so many opportunities to have a light bulb go off for someone and be like this is awesome and so uh yeah I think I I started so at the by the end of 2016 like throughout 2016 I realized I want to be done doing photography as a profession and I want to pursue everyday astronaut but I didn't know what it meant yet I just knew like I had this thing you know and at that time I'd been doing it for roughly two years and had you know seen I don't know like 50,000 Instagram followers or something I thought like I can just be a full-time influencer now you know like just go around taking pictures of myself in a spacit and doing public appearances and write a children's book or something I don't know I don't know what this thing is I'll figure it out you know yeah and so um it basically I gave myself like a Runway of one year of 2017 of like I I'm G to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks um so I was doing like twitch streams I was playing Kerbal Space Program uh which is like a a video game like a physics-based rocket building simulation game but it's also like it's fun and silly cuz you're you're not playing with like humans you're playing with these little Kerbal like little alien guys and it's fun and silly um you know I was streaming that on Twitch and doing things and and doing posting some of those things onto YouTube but finally like I said it actually happened to be February 27th 2017 when SpaceX had that announcement that they're flying someone around the Moon that I'm I got to tell people about this and stood there and made my first like produced YouTube video and I didn't want it to be over 3 minutes I was afraid that'd be way too long for YouTube and I got it down to like I don't know 2 minutes and 40 seconds or something and that video were you uh wearing the I was wearing the the space suit Y and very like horrible audio it looks like it was color graded by a seven-year-old with a tan marker or something like it just looks terrible sounds horrible I'm yelling no one's happy but but the video you know did relatively well like I had no followers on YouTube like I had you know maybe 102 or something is the video still up yeah yeah that's great to watch so cringy and as it should be you know your first video should be terrible if it's not terrible then you spent too long trying to make it yeah so um the the thing that clicked for me is I had very little audience and all of a sudden that video kind of took off you know relatively I think it got like 10,000 or 12,000 views and I was like holy crap that's way more engagement than I would have I'm famous now 10,000 people that's almost my whole town first of all that is kind of crazy like 10,000 people is crazy it's crazy like if you if you had 500 people attend a thing that you do that would be like like you're like a rock star it's crazy is we lose perspective I yeah we really lose perspective very quickly very quickly so I made another video um this one I spent more time on and I I had before photography actually I used to do like wedding videography too so I had done My Wo with videography and weddings and stuff I hated video like I thought video was the worst took so long to edit you know I love photography it's like boom you snap it boom post you're done in an hour you know and video it's like this whole cumbersome thing so I thought I'll never do video and here I was making this long what a the time seemed like a long seven minute long YouTube video about how the Falcon 9 lands and again like that one I posted and actually it did really bad and I was really upset I'm like I spent two weeks on this stupid video you know worked really hard scripting and blah blah blah and then it you know had like a thousand views or something it did much worse than the first video and I was so upset and I kind of like was ready to keep throwing more spaghetti at the wall to see what's going to stick for everyday astronaut and I think it was like a month or two later I happened to like you know check the analytics on YouTube and all a that video like kind of yeah took off and it got like 40 or 50 or 60,000 views or something I was like no way and it just kept you know that just honed in more that like Okay YouTube will bring a bigger like bring an audience to me as opposed to like Instagram I had to find and you know try to get the audience to come to me and this was like they were going to do the leg work so if I make decent videos um and I realized like really the the fun thing for me was explaining a topic that was scary and intimidating and try to make it you know fun and engaging what were some of the struggles of uh building up uh a YouTube channel so for people who don't know once again you have a YouTube channel uh called everyday astronaut and has some incredible videos on it so what was the what was the some of the challenges and the struggles in the early days definitely like At first you're not going to find your own voice and I know like even you know Jimmy talked to you about that like how your first video is going to suck you don't you're not going to be yourself you're going to be nervous you're going to be you're not going to know the tone the pace the the things that are interesting and actually originally I I had constraints I was really worried about making a short video because I thought there's no way anyone's going to watch a three-minute video and then a seven-minute video and pretty quickly I realized like YouTube as a whole was kind of changing but also there's always that historic backbone of like 22 minutes of programming for a 30 minute spot on TV like no one goes over 22 or 44 minutes you know if you have the full hour special or whatever like that is the absolute limit of what a human being can watch you know basically was what I thought yeah and slowly I just kept playing and getting longer and and actually more and more in depth into the topics and instead of getting like push back you know and being like this is so boring I realized as long as like as I was walking people through the whole step you know giving them all the context they need they're happy to get as deep into the weed weeds as I can get them and so that just kind of fed the the snowball just kept rolling and I'm like all right and you know before you know what I'm making hourong videos like an hour long is is more or less a normal length on my channel for a for a produced video and they're really really in-depth but I love like that process of of trying to preemptively kind of guess what the questions might be and and you know part of that is like we do like script read throughs with like our supporters and do like cuts of videos and people a decent amount of people see it before it goes public and I we get those questions out of the way you know we get those people asking the questions and then I I I love nothing more than trying to you know get all those questions answered by the end of the video a question about being a a a Creator on YouTube there could be a challenging psychological aspect to it which is like you might invest a huge amount of your effort into a thing and it um doesn't receive much attention at all and you know there's something about YouTube and in general social media that makes you feel really crappy about that if you let it if you really look at the numbers it's very very difficult not to pay attention to that I mean that's the reason why I turn off numbers on my um on my interface for stuff that I've created because I just see it having a negative effect on your mind but even then you still it still has an effect uh the mean your uh your epic video on the the history of Soviet Rockets comes to mind and we'll talk about that in a second but uh it's called people should check it out uh the entire Soviet rocket engine family tree so that's something you've researched for two years yeah right you put your heart and soul into it there's a lot of passion and there's aot there's a long journey it's and I think about like an hour and a half video mhm um is there like uh is there challenges is there like how difficult is that to put so much of yourself into a video and it maybe not do so well yeah that that's the that's the struggle for sure honestly especially as like as we grow I I try to make better and better videos which means hiring more and more people to do you know higher end animations and spend more time editing and shooting and scripting and just at but at the end of the day like it still can't be just losing money and I have videos that definitely lose a lot of money because I you know hire 3D artists and stuff um and I I was so certain the the Soviet rocket engine video I thought was just purely going to be a passion project I did I honestly was like if it ever crosses a million I I it's a home run it did it cross like a couple million now I think it's a little over two wow which is insane to me like I just really thought this was more as something just to put on the Shelf as a resource almost for myself you know like just to kind of have that knowledge bank and something I've always wanted to straighten out in my own head and and kind of know the history a little bit better but come to find out like it took a while you know it's a slow turn well that's I remember when I when you first released it and I that's when I watched it I I remember like this has so few views yeah I remember being just sad like I'm I was like sad about the state of the world because I know how much love you put into it how like how much I don't know I I to me for some reason that somehow would directly connect to huge views but see you know what made me sad is like if you use a different thumbnail or a different title that could affect the popularity and then I just could imagine the torment you're going through what if I used a different thumbnail it's that Jimmy uh the Mr Beast torment like just a slightly different title uh or a slightly different it could change everything I have videos ironically the last like I don't know five videos I've produced are horribly flopping like some of my worst videos I've ever made stally the the interesting one is like the you summarize Incredible video you summarizing that people should go watch about all the the awards video for 2022 like all the cool stuff that happened 2022 I remember that not being that popular there's a few ones recently that they're not that popular like riding in a fighter jet I thought I thought that was going to be easy like one or two million I don't know if I've paid the flights off to go there you know what I mean like in that video it makes no sense and Frank here's here's at the end of the day I I realized like I have lately especially the last like year or two kind of disconnected from the that aspect of it I'm super fortunate I have very generous like patreon support and people that can help me sustain to produce people go support support Tim on patreon well it's that but as you know as a Creator like that is what keeps the lights on it and makes it so it you know I can go this deep like if I didn't have that if I had to RI solely on like YouTube ad Revenue I mean I would just they'd be super for different videos I wouldn't spend as much time researching because i' just you know they just be more glossed over it's like a hurry to turn them out so I can keep the machine going and I have this incredible freedom to really dive into a topic like a video that I've been working on now for almost three months is how to start a rocket engine and let me tell you it's not as easy as one might think or I guess as it is as difficult as you might think I mean it's it's an insane topic and how what do you mean by start you mean like the ignition yeah like how do you physically get them running you know like there's all these you know the valves and the if the turbine the turbine you know that we were talking about earlier like that has to run on the pumps but it itself is powering the pumps so how do you get that like chicken and egg how do you get that thing started you know there's tons of it's so cool there's so many ways and so for me you know that required reading a lot and talking to people that know a lot more than me um and just really trying to make sure I understand enough of it to explain it and try to weave a narrative you know and so that video is 3 months in the making we're still probably another two or 3 weeks out and it's I don't expect I mean I think this one will do relatively well you know but in the grand scheme of YouTube like still Child's Play you know but I I I'm okay and I'm okay with that I've I've I'm at that point actually where I am okay with that it still stings and I'm more worried about just like can I continue to do it at this quality and at this level if it's losing money you know what I mean so it's there is a trade-off and I am kind of having to navigate that but but you have it's sort of the depth uh of the impact you have is um is a is a thing that YouTube can't give you numbers on but it's it's a really important thing to sort of remember that it's really not just about the YouTube numbers or it's off for for people like you that are basically educating and revealing the Brilliance in a technology that uh will make humans a multiplanetary species and give hope to millions of young minds that will build that future I mean that's a measurable that's not just the views uh but you know it's um that's really important to sort of remember as you're creating it that's something I I I I I try to think about as well so like views um yeah and that and that becomes more don't matter I realize that more and more like every day you know the the more the channel matures the more I realized the importance of it as an overall mission as opposed to like you know in the first year or two it's a rat race of of growth and of popularity and all that kind of stuff you know and you feel that you feel that it's it's a driving force these days not so much just because that will wear you out very quickly so back to the Soviet rocket video the epic video probably the most epically researched video you've done I it's like is it it's TR it's truly an epic video uh so what uh again called the entire Soviet rocket engine family tree took you two years to research what are some fascinating things you've learned about the history of Rocket engines in the Soviet Union and in general um through a process of making that video the the coolest thing to me is how it's this weird blend for the the Soviet Union went through a an insane iteration process and made so many engines like I didn't even touch you know any like maneuvering thrusters or missile engines like I only really dealt with main propulsion engines on orbital rockets and there's still way too many to talk about I mean it's still dozens and dozens of engines and I I could have gone deeper into this which is hilarious um they iterated so much made a new engine for just at the drop of a hat yet they still also like did Super primitive things you know they they physically are still today lighting the main combustion chambers of the soyou engines of the Rd 107 and RD 108 with essentially match sticks like they literally stick a t shaped thing up into the chamber and have a a pyrotechnic in in the in it that ignites the actual propellant in the combustion chamber it's not the most elegant solution in the world yeah they're still using that so they went from like the whole spectrum of like it's a the mixture of like make it better faster harder stronger good all the way around to also if it ain't broke don't fix it it's like it employs all of the above so it's like it's uh a lot of innovation but also they use duct tape it's like all of it together yes aund that's exactly like that's exactly the way to put it and and they did things that are insane they developed a full flow stage combustion cycle engine this engine had it been used I mean it would have put the F it was same relative size as the F1 engine on the Saturn 5 like in that same category way up there of like you know 6.7 uh like Mega Newtons of thrust or something around and then the F1 is like seven or something it's it's huge yet way more complicated way more efficient way just better engine in that sense as far as far as performance goes yet it never flew it never left the stand you know they they' never built the rocket around it the N1 which was the you know the most powerful rocket to have flown so far to date um like it never made it through its first stage burn it all four attempts failed spectacularly and yet it had so much technology on it that was still unrivaled today almost like finally now we're beating it the nk-33 that they developed for that rocket like finally today we're to the point of like having better engines than they built in the 60s yeah what stands out to you uh from the N1 family of Rocket engines well it's interesting because the N1 was the ketov design Bureau and he was actually an aircraft manufacturer so he's one of the first people outside of kind of the the missile and rocket program you know we had all these other uh Big Wigs kind of in the other oks that were developing missiles and Rockets and then all of a sudden here comes uh Nikolai ketov who um had never developed a rocket engine and so his first attempt at Rocket engines was the NK series The nk15 nk-33 and they were amazing they were brilliant they were these wonderful closed cycle oxygen rich engines um that were that were awesome they were awesome engines and that were you know because I I love that because he his direct um boss he since he wasn't necessarily in the in the Aerospace you know in the I guess the rocket missile defense World um he didn't have to uh at the fall of the Soviet Union he didn't have to give away all of his things to the same people as the other people so he hid you know like 80 of his engines in a hanger and uh and then we still literally used them in the United States we used allog together I think it was like eight or 10 of them um um repurpose them as they're called AJ 26s in the United States but like we still were flying Soviet rocket engines in the 2000s because they were better than engines we are building today like that's to me that's my favorite fact about the N1 rocket that they're still that good that that they were the the best choice for at the time uh orbital Sciences some of the culture that um engineering has led to these things that still work it's incredible yeah uh you said that the Rd 171 is one of the coolest engines ever made why is that yeah so one of the fun things about the Soviet engines is it'll look like mult a lot of their engines look like multiple engines because you see multiple nozzles you see multiple combustion Chambers and you'd think well obviously you know the nozzle is the engine right but what they actually would do the the real the real heart and the real power of the rocket engine actually comes from the turbo pumps comes from the the pumps themselves and you know as we talked about earlier that that includes the turbine and and the actual um pumps that flow the propellant into the into the chambers and so the Soviet Union was incredible at at developing these closed cycle high-powered turbo pumps but if you try to scale the combustion chamber too big um you end up with what's called um combustion instability you're you're having you have such a a large surface area of crazy flames you know and and combustion happening they can get these weird pockets and oscillations and frequencies and and they just couldn't make big combustion Chambers they never figured it out they never quite well they they did actually kind of figured out but they they didn't like it so they ended up just shrinking down and having small combustion Chambers and just sending splitting the pipes basically instead of one fuel pump going into or one pipe going into one combustion chamber and one oxidizer P pipe going into one combustion chamber they'd split it off into two or four engine into two or four combustion Chambers and kind of spread that work around so they didn't experience this combustion inst stability so the Rd 171 is like still to date the most powerful rocket engine ever built the turbo pump is insane I don't even remember how many you know like 200,000 horsepower or something comes out of that turbo pump in order to flow the amount of propellant necessary at those rates and at those pressures into the combustion chamber so it has four chambers and it's just it's just an absolute Marvel of engineering and yeah and then the cool thing too is specifically with the R1 71 it's engine all four of those nozzles can actually pivot and and rotate and I just now as I'm explaining this realized that has to mean that they have joints like flexible joints in the high press pump lines in order to like I never I'm this is the realization I'm having right now because normally you put the gimbal above the turbo pump like the the the mount where the engine swivels so that you have low pressure coming from the tanks into the pumps and then you just have a straight you know fixed pipe flowing into the engine so you don't have to bend that pipe and have it be dynamic if they had the four chambers moving independently from each other that means those four chambers all had to have a flexible High Press pipe going which I don't even I don't know if that's why am I just now realizing this yeah so so there's engineering challenges with that I I never even thought that was a thing you would ever could do honestly I would I got to look into why and how and what yeah I wonder why that design decision was made so the easier thing to do normally is you would keep those nozzles fixed then then a fixed like say the the so use engine the Rd 107 and 108 they have a fixed main combustion Chambers and they and they use these little verer or some people got mad at me for saying verer and Verner engines that swivel themselves and those provide your your Control Authority so that the main chamers stay fixed and then you get your your roll and your pitch and your yaw out of auxiliary thrusters uh by the way did did you get anything wrong in that video that people told you about yeah I a few things yep um first off we had a graphic error where we actually you know we copied and pasted a lot of our like after effects projects so our nuclear engines one of them on screen says that it runs on rp1 it does not has basically all the wrong stats we just didn't catch it in the edit you know that we literally copy and paste it and I say it right on screen but the like in the voiceover but on screen it's wrong the other thing and I'm excited to ask you about this uh oh I watched and and I spoke with a lot of uh Russians speaking individuals we had a lot of research assistants that were reading and blah blah blah I tried really hard to learn how to pronounce Sergey cor corio's name and I'm still gonna say it wrong no matter what but I my understanding yes and from listening to native speakers is closer to krov than it is corv yeah definitely Sergey pavich corov see I I'll will never say it that perfectly but I I know it's not just corv I mean the the the English translation of it likely I should have just said cor 11 and said I'm saying it the dumb America way but but you roll your heart comad okay excellent so uh oh let me just ask you in a difference in in the culture because youve researched so many Rockets from so many different eras the set five and just everything you're seeing now are there some interesting differences especially when you look at the space race between um the Soviet rocket engineers and efforts versus the American the there's I mean there's definitely huge huge cultural changes and the the fun thing is that they kind of spawned from the same they have the same starting Place both you know the Soviet rocket engines and Americans all came from the Nazi V2 rocket and the A4 engine literally physically spawned from that because at the fall of you know at the end of World War II we took a handful of German scientists and the Soviets took a handful of German scientists and they both got their own a little bit some blueprints here and there and the other's got some blue so we literally have the same it's a weird thing where we're starting from the same like thing and letting two uh uh two Divergent you know Divergent paths go crazy on their own development so it's really fun to see the cultural differences one of the things the United States did is they really would kind of take an engine and and just perfect it more or less and then and not really that much like they they I don't know and I don't know why I actually need to do a history lesson on all of the US Engines but it's literally like uh as far as orbital class engines before now I it's like a dozen or two you know it's it's it's a tenth the amount of the Soviets and the Soviets just literally made up a new engine every time they had a new like they went uh and it was like a completely different engine yeah so I just yeah I wonder if there's some aspect to the culture I don't want to overstate it but uh there is more of a safety culture I think in uh the United States and I think if you care about safety or rather like you have uh you're more risk averse so you care about safety more about the value of human life and the risk taken there that you will iterate less so I think the Soviets especially in the early aspect of the program I don't want to overstate this is um some of it is just um through stories just anecdotes they are more willing to take risks yeah risks with human life risks with spacecraft for example the first uh orbital space flights from the Soviet Union the the Cosmonaut had to eject out of the capsule and parachute to a landing yes that's not very well like known and it wasn't they hid that even from history as as best they could at first because they were slightly as shame that they couldn't have a full recovery system with their spacecraft they could physically recover it but they wouldn't have been able to recover the cosm in one piece so instead they had them just eject out of the thing and parachute to safety like that's insane and so there definitely was some some extra risks and but also a freedom to just like push things to the limits and try everything you know they threw EV all the spaghetti on the wall it's funny that most people probably don't even know the first person in the space in America and obviously everybody knows that in uh the it's it's like um it's it's kind of interesting how the space race and even World War II even like the history books you ask most Americans they think that America won World War II like without America like they the the real heroes of World War II is America you ask uh British people they say and and everybody has a pretty good justification like without Britain without Churchill there Hitler would have taken over the world and I think probably the strongest case is the Soviet Union case that they're the ones that won the war the reason it's the strongest case is where most of the fighting happened most of the death happened most of like most of the destruction but everyone has their perspective and certainly on the Space Race you know the great accomplishment is the first man on the moon us perspective yeah I was going to say and then Yuri gagaran from the Russian perspective like first man in base and that I think still persist and some of that in healthy forms is probably constructive to a little bit of competition is pushes all the all the great scientists on each side uh but anyway what do you think about this uh yur gagaran mission of the first human in space and the VTO mission in 1961 just in general when you when you look back at that time leading to the the the the first man on the moon yeah April 12th 1961 Yu's night baby that's uh yeah it's it's insane what's insane to me is is the first person in space didn't just go to space he went into orbit you know urar flew around the Earth in orbit and re-entered that's a a Monumental task compared to suborbital so the United States did um two suborbital flights in that same year I believe in that same year at least I'm pretty sure in 1961 they flew for the first time orbitally in 1962 they weren't terribly far behind to get a human into orbit like in the grand scheme of things you know 10 months difference but at the same time like the fact that Soviet Union just went straight to Flying someone into orbit is Monumental and I'm sure they did not do excessive uh rigorous testing here because there is a space race and you have the first is important just imagine being Yuri what do he say when they're like launching him like let's go or something like uh I mean you're taking uh we're talking about you being on Starship like you're taking a pretty big risk being launched out into orbit oh hopefully a lot less risk than what Yuri went through so Yuri's Yuri the the crazy thing remember the those match sticks we talked about yeah you know there's there's 20 Main combustion Chambers on soyu and there's for and 12 more verer engines that all need to be lit so you're right you're sitting on top of this this booster and they light all of those 32 combustion Chambers on the ground and then it has this insane separation process between what the Soviet Union would call the first stage and the second stages but we would call it like the core stage and the boosters um they all four these boosters have to peel away perfectly from the core stage simultaneously you know if one of them sticks on Mission failed if one of them doesn't eject properly and drags into the other tank you know you're it's it's it's a goner so the the staging process of of the soy is is in theane to me that that that ended up working out it's just the the technology in so I mean more or less that same rocket is what still flying humans that are cosmonauts from you know Ros Kosmos and going to the International Space Station are flying on a variant of that so's rocket still today it's still like that big of a Workhorse what do you think about Ros Kosmos as it stands today uh it's history and its future in U comparison to NASA and other National efforts and in comparison to commercial space flight yeah I mean utmost respect for the engineers involved and you everything that's happened I think aurash is like still some of the one of the greatest engine manufactures when they have the funding to do so but man it seems like they're they're falling from Grace as far as uh space prowess you know the Ros Cosmos went from having I think they got very comfortable at the top of you know from 2011 until 20 until 2022 or until 2020 they were the only ride to the International Space Station since then like in it started I feel like in 2018 honestly I think that's kind of when things that's the first time I I specifically remember a pretty nasty like thing happened in 2018 I think it was uh a soy mission to the International Space Station had one of the boosters not detach and had to have an abort but you know that that happened then all of a sudden next thing you know there's a progress being docked to the ISS a couple years ago that spun the ISS cartwheeled the ISS out of control followed a few months later the piers module docks to the International Space Station spiral Z International Space Station aut of control again with like a Thruster getting fixed on there's a hole in in Russian segment uh there's well I think the most recent one right now there's a soou dock to the ISS that has a puncture in it and it's leaking coolant and will not be returning humans on it so they're actually having to fly up in uncrewed soyu um and that one likely wasn't a manufacturing era probably was like a micr meteorite puncture rendering the spacecraft unusable we don't know for sure yet um but it's just really been like this fall from grace where where it they have they have all the poent potential they have some of the best engines some of the the best rockets and especially like right before the collapse of the Soviet Union the the Bron uh shuttle and the energia rocket were incredible had they been able to evolve that into Bron 2 and the reusable energia they they had a reusable energia on the drawing board and like I honestly fully think they could have done it is it possible to return to a place where there is friendly competition between nations that ultimately um unites and inspires the peoples of these different worlds these very different worlds that have especially recently uh come to conflict over the over the war in Ukraine the tension builds uh the war the conflict the suffering is actually creating more and more division creating more and more hate I think as we've talked about I think science and engineering and especially the most epic version of engineering which is uh rocketry and space travel unites people um unites people even in a time of tension conflict and War so do you have a hope that we can return to that place I think historically space flight has been one of the most bonding things you know we look at we have countless examples of you know Cold War enemies coming together and working together lending a hand um Apollo 13 for example of course you know there is the potential that who knew where it was going to re-enter since it was not in the plan trajectory at all for re-entry and the Soviet Union said hey wherever you know wherever they land like we'll help you guys out basically you know and that was a pretty big thing at the time obviously um we also in 1975 saw the Apollo soyuz Mission which was an Apollo spacecraft docking with the soyu spacecraft first time there's International collaboration and again 1975 still very admidst the Cold War yet we have this collaboration um that I don't know what else could have done that you know I mean and think about what it actually takes to do that you have to come up with a a docking module that is you you know like that takes the two different air environments and the two different docking systems and talk to the engineers and Mission planners and figure out you know trained together the the cosmin Nots and the astronauts trained together and got to know each other they were crossing boundaries and borders and coming together for this Mission and even if it was totally a Fluff piece like even if it was totally this like you know cynical you know just trying to make a pretty face for everybody for the for the cameras or something obviously it's still had an impact yeah the symbolic impact but there's also the Practical impact I mean a lot of people have to work together yes and that and that has a ripple effect on the culture on the different Engineers uh 100% and even just the the the astronauts and the cosmonauts involved like think about what what probably went through their heads during this process of like going from oh my God I'm going to have to work with them to getting to know them and then sharing meals in space like that's a crazy transformation of of timelines and I would love I I I do think that space flight has the the ability to to bond us and unite us because it is ultimately you know this little tiny little planet we're floating around on you know it's the only it is the bound that we all share you know you only can you it only takes you getting off this planet to realize oh my God we're all neighbors we're all living in the same house together and I I do think ultimately you know as we continue to uh expand our Horizons and expand our exploration that it it has the potential to to unite us more than than it has the potential to divide us so one of the potential conflicts of the 21st century that I think everyone wants to avoid both in the cyber space and then the hot War space Cold War Hot War all kinds of War all kinds of economic conflict is with between the United States and China so China is going full steam ahead in developing a space program uh doing a lot of incredible work like you mentioned uh 64 launches in 2022 uh with two failures but you know Moving Straight Ahead uh and by the way we had a lot of startups like a lot of the launches were from brand new companies so to have two failures out of 64 I mean that's still an impr if you look at operational launches it was Flawless do you see a pathway where there's again in that same way collaboration or friendly competition between all the different uh companies and nations of the United States and China in the in the next as we push towards the moon uh Mars and Beyond I held a dumb hope that China would actually be allowed to sign onto the Artemis Accord to be able to take part in this next step towards the moon I just imagine if like if they provided a you know a propulsion module or a Lander or something and we actually came together to land on the Moon instead of having another space race you know it's like it would have been so cool and yeah I I still am hopeful that similar to to back in the Cold War or that we might have something like that someday where we actually are collaborating and it feels like sometimes we're really close to that and then other times it feels like we're really far from that and it it just sucks because I know and you know I try really hard on my channel to to always separate and celebrate the work being done you know because at the end of the day there's someone that's just going home to their family clocking an hour is working really hard on on pushing their program and and and doing engineering work you know and it's uh we don't get to choose where we're born and what we're born into too um so I I really like to avoid you know the the political aspects of things and the geopolitical aspects and just appreciate the science and the the science we're seeing and the the progress that China is doing in the last 10 years is is very akin to the you know early space flight programs and and with the runway of like just going keep on going like I see no reason for them to be slowing down so it's it's definitely something to watch and and be interested in and who know I mean there really genuinely might be a race to the moon again and and there really genuinely might be a race to Mars the part of me is excited about that cuz a race is is pretty cool it's uh but they hopefully it's friendly competition and some collaboration it is true that uh maybe I'm being a bit cynical but Nations sometimes governments and leaders of those governments sometimes ruin things like you don't often have like statistic Ally speaking it's harder to have a leader of a nation that looks beyond the political the particular political bickering of that nation and you have like a JFK type character that really steps up and inspires I think statistically speaking it's better to have somebody like Elon who's a leader of a company a commercial effort that is able to look beyond the borders of Nations and uh certainly inspiring Educators like yourself uh to look beyond the borders of those Nation and the geopolitical conflicts and so on to uh to inspire the to inspire people I think that's just made so much easier like you can have more reach uh Tim Tim DOD can have more reach than NASA right like in terms of inspiring the world and that's fascinating like that that gives power to the individuals that see past the this the silly short-term geopolitical conflicts yeah that's the hope at least um yeah do you worry that there might be a war in space yeah let's let's look let's look out into the future so forget so so the interesting thing about these Rockets right let's not forget Rockets uh do what Rockets do that they can carry payloads that uh can be weapons um do you worry about this I worry most about space wars as leading to the kler Slender of having a cascading effect of like a a spacecraft blowing up and then affecting another spacecraft and that blows up and then all of a sudden you're trapped and have this debris Cloud that we can't you know go we can't go into space anymore like that's my biggest because frankly at this point we we could annihilate ourselves with terrestrial stuff anyway you know what I mean we don't need space to to to end society as we know it you know what I mean um but we do we could really and I the the good thing is I think everyone well mostly everyone seems to understand this for the most part that like we really can't be risking blowing up stuff in space in in low earth orbit because it could easily like we could straand ourselves from space assets for 50 years if oh can you elaborate on that so like what is the danger of the debris there that uh could jeopardize access to space so for instance in it was only a couple years ago Russia did a an anti-satellite test on a on an orbital there's a we've done this to us has done this like I'm not pinning it on them but we kind of know nowadays like don't do anti-satellite tests on orbital things because those things stay in orbit you know when you blow something up in space it's not like you know people think you know when in in space like oh you throw something it's just going to keep going forever and ever and ever yeah I mean that's in the in the sense that it's not going to be slowed down due to you know due to air resistance it's going to continue to do that but it's staying in orbit around the Earth like you just slightly change the orbit of it around earth when you throw a ball or something you know so the scary thing is when you blow up a satellite all those pieces of that satellite are now millions of bullets in a halo around the Earth in a very specific Halo you know so some things get blown up uh faster you know in according to its orbit faster so they'll go a little bit higher elliptically some things will get slow down in that explosion and actually re-enter some things will go sideways and change its inclination of that orbit so you have this debris field but it more or less becomes a band of like no no you know like a big scary sharp scary bullets that can destroy another spacecraft and so then all of a sudden especially now star linking we're talking about thousands and thousands and thousands of satellites in space if all of a sudden one you know a couple of them crash and and you know blow up and all a sudden you have all the shrapnel going everywhere and then that hits another satellite that creates shrapnel you can literally blanket our entire low earth orbit in 17,500 mph bullets you know we're talking that the the K the kinetic energy in this is so hard for people to Fathom because that you know that's over 10 times faster than most like rifle bullets and even like a a big 50 cal is not going to be you know we're still talking about about 10% that so when you think about the kinetic energy it's insane so a Fleck of paint can go through canes of glass mhm at that velocity you know a a little piece of metal can puncture you know blow straight through so like so our actions that seem small so small scale military actions can have uh can have dire detrimental effects to the whole Space Program like Global Space Program oh yeah it can affect everything in everyone including the like including satellites oh yeah especially satellites like that's the well I mean the the good and the bad thing is the good thing is a lot of satellites don't operate in low earth orbit like a lot of uh the the ones that we use day-to-day a lot of them are in medium earth orbit like if they're GPS or they're geostationary uh which are way way way out there and because of that they they won't really ever deorbit or like it'll take you know Millennia to deorbit because the you know just because something's in space doesn't mean it's it's there forever especially like in low earth orbit the atmosphere doesn't just suddenly stop it's not like you hit the Caron line 100 kmers and all of a sudden there's zero atmosphere the atmosphere just slowly tapers you know you can experience that yourself as you climb a mountain you slowly realize there's less and less air you just keep going and just because you're in space 200 300 kmers up there's still Trace molecules you know there's the occasional oxygen molecule there's the occasional nitrogen molecule and so that is actually drag so as a spacecraft in lower orbit depending on its altitude will take anywhere from 5 years to 5 months to deorbit you know or two months or one month like depending on its orbit or its altitude we'll have some parasitic drag still and slowly throughout time slow down which lowers its orbit which drags it down more lowers its orbit and etc etc until it re-enters so if we end up with uh some kind of catastrophic event where the entire low earth orbit is you know has been initated and blown up it'll take months for the first band you know to clear up it'll take years for something like Beyond there's charts you know people have all this stuff available you shouldn't look it up this terrifying by the way this is really the but again the caveat is for the most part the lower orbit stuff would clear up within years so it could get back to doing some lore with it like starlink stuff would probably be able to be re and you know we could kind of redo it and build up from the ground up again GPS wouldn't be wiped out and our geostationary satellites wouldn't be wiped out but the scary thing is we wouldn't be able to relaunch and replace new things it's because we're stuck we we're not going to fly through that debris field you know and we avoid that by avoiding military actions in space and these days like there's more and more uh requirements and and legislation and and especially trying to get International collaboration on having end of life plans for satellites so that satellites especially those in low earth orbit have like drag devices to increase the once they're done they literally pull like even just a ribbon like a silly little like you know 40 foot long ribbon will sit there and it'll slowly you or it can speed up its re-entry process by months or years or whatever so we're starting to see that this is now in importance there's a a really cool company called Stoke Aerospace out in Washington is one of these launch provisor providers that's really looking not into just trying to be the next you know SpaceX launch company they're really seeing satellite uh bringing stuff down from space as actually being especially right now we have all of these hundreds and thousands of satellites being launched every year someone at some point is probably going to have to do some cleanup and so they're looking at at being one of those companies to do that uh what do you think about starlink and the efforts of starlink to put a very large number of satellites out there and provide internet access to uh to Earth anyone to anyone generally I think starlink is phenomenal and I would be saying this if it was any company I want to make that clear that people think I'm just some you know SpaceX Fanboy or something and everything they do is perfect I think I think as you're a fan I could say you're basically a fan a fanboy or just a fan of everybody that's doing space stuff and I don't like there's no even in this whole conversation there's no way we cover like 10% of what I wanted to talk to you about so we're jumping around I mean there's we could talk probably for another an hour about emis uh we could we could talk about anything with Ula obviously the all the other all the other commercial efforts we could talk about the NASA efforts the you know the I mean and saturni like are we going to really go this conversation not talking about saturni and we might okay so like anyway you're a fan of everything Starling is in general exciting to you and not for the space assets but just the potential for Humanity like I I really think even as a consumer of the internet personally our studio space down in Texas we're stuck with with MediaCom which has like the least reli internet service period That's the only option either that or they're trying to charge me like $20,000 to run a fiber op cable like a th000 meters or something like it's it's insane I'm not going to do that I bought starlink it helps but it's still not you know amazing but it has you can see where this is going in a year two three five years they're like oh I can totally screw the cell internet provider and this is now by far the best option and it's available literally anywhere you don't have to be limited to your internet local internet service provider um and and on the global scale of course you have you know people being able to learn and learn about Rockets learn about uh water management and architecture and City Planning and fitness and health all of the all of the modern conveniences that we Google every single day there's people that don't have access to that right now you know I I'm a self-taught rocket nerd I would not be who I am if it wasn't for the internet in the last seven years you know six seven years so unlocking the intellect ual potential of places like Africa of of rural areas that don't currently have internet access um that's a genuine that's a huge thing that's like humanitarian 101 is give people access to information and you like you know I think we have this uh potential to try to step in and and fix other people's problems but the reality is like people are smart no matter where you are you give them the resources to learn they're going to solve problems they're going to problem solve they're going to engineer they're going to but if you don't give them access to that information they're going to be stuck in their in their Cycles you know and so I I think the potential for starlink is incredible I think it's already impactful it's already affecting people in you know in Rural and Indigenous areas and it's already affecting businesses and all that stuff I think it's great I think it is you know there's some downsides with astronomy with with groundbased astronomy that it can hinder uh observations from the ground um there's already a lot of communications between SpaceX and um astronomical societies and things like that because it is a real concern you know it's it can ruin observations it can ruin data um but like one of the big ones for instance recently I think a new thing they're going to be working into is that currently if a starlink is flying over um over a groundbased asset a lot of a lot of ground telescopes actually have a laser that goes up and it measures the atmospheric Distortion and the telescopes literally sit there and like by the millisecond fixes like changes the focus and fixes those atmospheric distortions M and that laser um Can interfere with satellites so previously I I'm pretty sure uh that SpaceX actually had to you know request that as they're flying over these satellites they or these telescopes they turn off the laser MH and when you have tens of thousands of these things flying it's you're going to be turning off the laser more than it's on you know and just being this insanely inconen V thing because you're going to have these Junctions happen often and I think one of the things that SpaceX is like okay no no no you guys keep the laser on we'll deal with your laser um good good step you know things like that mitigating the brightness of them so they're not visible uh under most conditions of course like there's still always going to be visible in some um but then the ultimately for me it's like this you have this weird like almost like a puberty of space flight and and astronomy where currently it's not cheap enough to really do a ton of incredible science or space-based telescopes you know we have web we have Hubble we have uh you know all these other you know awesome space-based telescopes um Chandra you know all etc etc whatever and you uh but it's still so expensive to launch them yeah that we're still so reliant on our ground telescopes but in the future you can see a world where oh this is so cheap we'll just launch like we can launch 50 James web Space Telescope size telescop sces this year for half the price of doing it on Earth you know and get way better data so in the future I think in 20 30 years we'll look at it and be like oh man that was an awkward time where space assets were interfering with astronomy but I think in the future it's like can you imagine doing space you know astronomy from the ground that's insane you know there could be complexities to just having that many uh just another topic so complexity is associated with having so many satellites uh especially with competing companies and competing Nations do you see that as an issue having tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of satellites yeah it becomes a very interesting robotics collision avoidance problem the the one thing to keep in mind is perspective like I know 10,000 satellites and 20,000 and 100,000 satellites sounds insane and it sounds really scary but I mean just even look at how many planes are in the air at any given time and the planes are are bigger they're flying slower which actually means there's a greater chance of collision if you think about you know two objects occupying space if they're one's moving really fast like imagine trying to you know throw two basketballs at each other relatively easy now try shooting two bullets at each other and have like you know at 90 degrees from each other you have to have your timing down like really perfect to do that now take that times 10 you know and these objects are taking up a physical space very small amount of time they're relatively small like most satellites are not very big and they have in Limitless altitudes to deal with so even though you can have what look like convergences you know they can be 10 20 50 100 kilm difference often and and you know they're dealing with this like all the the all space assets know hey I'm at this orbital plane and this blah blah blah blah and they know their altitudes and know their safe distances and have these margins built in and it's space so there's like an insane amount of room you know so there's there's a lot of margin there's a lot of margin but of course you can't excuse that all the way like you have to still have plans and and be considering that and considering collisions and consider in all of the above when do you think the first human being will step foot on Mars I you don't like timelines but is this something and you're very much focused on kind of the short term of uh incredible progress that's happening and that makes total sense but there is the Mars plan that that was it the origin of the commercial space flight efforts um do you still see and dream about that day let me be clear that I don't want to go to Mars but um I do think if you're if you're making me guess a timeline for when humans will walk on Mars I even a year ago I still would have said by the end of 2020 like the 2020s decade you know um so by December 31st 2029 I thought humans would have walked on mars I'm starting to think that's still too optimistic but I do I I definitely think by 2040 like I I for sure think that I and I really think it's it's just hard to predict that curve you know that that project out that curve we're going to go from feeling like it's impossible to like it's feeling like it's inable you know it could be another by the end of this decade JFK T moment especially if China steps up with a space race yeah it could be like uh all right NASA NASA kind of says all right this Elon fella like really make this a gigantic effort well and if Starship works out as planned and as as NASA has invested in human Landing system they're relying on SpaceX to land on the moon SpaceX can land on the moon they can land on Mars now whether or not the life support and the human considerations of of long-term space flight missions and high radiation and blah blah blah blah blah refueling on Mars is a huge huge huge deal they definitely could send a Starship to Mars um and land ideally land in one piece on Mars as soon as they can land on the moon they can land on Mars basically I mean those two things are very in some ways Mars is almost easier if you can use because you can use the atmosphere to slow down it actually doesn't take that much more Delta V to actually land on Mars and it does because on the moon you don't have any you have to first get out to the Moon then orbit the Moon you know you have to slow down every one of those is a maneuver change then you have to lower your orbit until it coincides you know hits the moon then you have to slow down enough to not explode when you hit the moon so there's a lot of Delta V there a lot of change in velocity um Mars is is actually by the time you kind of crunch the numbers it's it's relatively similar it's just a lot more difficult like timeline wise and you know accuracy and all of these other communication you know there's a lot of other things obviously involved I'm glossing over it making it sound easy it's not but um but you know I I think if I I think there's a real decent chance we could see see a Starship vehicle land on Mars uncrewed by the end of the decade though end of the decade I mean there's also a sociological element maybe a political one where I think you're allowed to take more risks with Mars than you are with the moon because we've done the moon 1969 yeah it's been a while so PR wise you have to be much safer yeah with Mars like everyone's like it's super dangerous like super like so you could take a little more risk especially with uh W with man missions but actually just uh going back to the moonlanding Apollo 11 Mission we haven't talked about this at we the the the amazing engine there but the again the Romantic question when you look back at that Moon landing um one small step for man one giant step for mankind uh what do you think about that moment in human history do you do you go back to that often or are you focused just like with the cars on the on the engines no no no I I I I still when I need inspiration I rewatched this documentary called um when we left Earth I think it was like a I think it was Discovery Channel did it six-part episode uh it it was narrated by Gary sise phenomenal overview of the Space Race and that will get my juices flowing every time every time just it's so well done and it's it really just summarizes that program so well and when I and and Beyond it goes all the way to the Space Shuttle but um yeah when I when I watch footage of humans walking on the moon it's just I can't believe we are dumb enough to do it with the technology we had and the risks they took to do it and the insane engineering that it took to do that is just absolutely astonishing the the amount of the sheer like Logistics of what it took to do it with the the technology we had back then is like how did we have so much money and effort and energy and time and resources human resources to do this like it's just just the weakness of the computers they had back then they have to do so much I mean yeah it's so much was so little it's insane and but at the same time like I don't know if we want to talk about conspiracy theories or anything but like it is all of like we have the proof and the pudding of like the 400,000 people on payroll like all of the paperwork all of the Oh you mean the the question the conspiracy if we land on the Moon Yeah like well I mean I I think the receipts are there like literally we did but it's like a lot of things like that I mean we actually generally live in a in a pretty cynical time where people distrust institutions part of the thing with the space program is one of the things that can help reinvigorate the Trust In institutions by institutions even that word is a bad word now but institutions means a bunch of humans get together and do big thing together yeah um yeah but you know like if I was conspirator minded It's like how the the hell did humans do that yeah so I I think that's a very cynical take unfortunately but it's still an incredible one and also you know there's gr there's um until you look at the receipts there's a kind of um like a rationale to that kind of conspiracy theory because so much pressure was put on the Space Race the the pr of it to be the winner so it makes sense that you might want to try to take shortcuts and fake things and you know propaganda you you know different kinds of messaging and I'm sure stuff like that was happening some kind of like little you know adjustment here and there to present things better and so on but ultimately the actual engineering project of landing on the moon I the fact that humans did that I mean it is sad that we didn't have better like ways to record it and as I watch Like SpaceX efforts and blue origin and these efforts it's still not trivial to record the um how just amazing all inspiring SPAC is cuz it like you know it's like Elon jokes about like space does look fake yeah like I think there is some element of it where you have to be there to experience it really and I don't like I think it's un un it's currently is still an unsolved problem of how do you capture the a of that I mean you're one of the early people that are uh part of the crew that is exploring that very question I'm sure you won't find all the answers but you will start to say like how do we convert this into a visual format into some kind of format that captures the the magic of it 100% And that's a perspective thing that I think about all the time you know and I I'll I'll do a lot of thinking about like what is the thing that's reacting to people is it the sound is it the perspective is it like seeing a little tiny human next to a landing leg that makes people go oh my God this thing is huge you know just reading you know and digesting that and trying to help to to convey that as best as possible because the stuff that we are and have worked on is is so cool it's so exciting and it's so it's so important and like actually you know so much bigger than any one of us physically and metaphorically it's just so it's just I wish everyone had that that experience and and had that light bulb go off and that's the cool thing that you're like smack in the middle of solving that really difficult and fascinating problem of how how do you capture the magic how do you inspire like that's not just an engineer problem that's an communication problem education I I find specifically for myself that I get most excited about something when I learn a lot about it like when I learn the ins and the outs and I learn all the little problem solving and the you know the cool like oh my God they had to do what to make it work wow that's amazing and that's I try to just always go back to that root thing of like what can I teach myself like if I'm every video I I expect that I learn something making it no matter what like no matter how uh much I think I know about something at the end of the day if I'm not learning something it's not a good video you know and I always think that people get excited when they learn and when they have uh some questions answered for them let me ask you a couple of quick out there futuristic questions I have to I'd hate myself if I don't ask you so first let's talk about nuclear propulsion so out there interesting propulsion ideas uh so what do you think Beyond uh the chemical engines that we talked about what do you think about using nuclear fishing and maybe even nuclear fusion for uh for propulsion we already have thermal nuclear reactors uh they are nuclear engines that have been tested both by the United States and Soviet Union that were 100% valid like totally ready to go efficient ient super awesome um yes yes yes hardcore yes um and what what they're using is yeah basically a fusion reactor you're flowing hydrogen through it and heating up that hydrogen taking it from liquid to gas you know and by heating it up you're you're adding energy to the propellant and then you're literally just using that now steam hot hydrogen and flowing it through a DLo L nozzle and you also have to use that that energy to spin the pumps to still pump the thing so you're still kind of using like a lot of the tricks you're using but instead of a chemical reaction you're literally just using nuclear fion to heat up propellant and do the same thing and at the end of the day you end up with like 8 to 900 seconds of specific impulse which is double that of chemical propulsion most of that comes just because hydrogen's so light you're only emitting you're only ejecting hydrogen out of the nozzle so the lighter a molecule is the faster it you know just like if you had a a you know a golf ball versus like a a bowling ball you can only physically throw one so fast and the other one as a human you're not going to do very well with so you can just you get you have the more potential for a higher exit velocity so nuclear thermal amazing you can just shoot these little hydrogen molecules out crazy fast crazy efficiently we already have it like we can do it yes yes yes and actually we're already re- uh investing in that again as United States is is looking into uh basically ramping back up our nuclear propulsion why haven't we done it yet and what do you think the challenges that there and do you think that's an obvious future like would would you see in 50 years we're not using um like we're not for major projects like a Starship type of project we're not using chemical propulsion anymore for getting off Earth you'll always want to use chemical propulsion because the the gas would come irradiated like you don't want to you don't want to and and actually the Thruster weight ratio of these engines are relatively poor they're they're very heavy they have a nuclear reactor like they're not they're really the reason we kind of gave up on them is they're really most useful for like interplanetary if you're trying to get a big like if you're trying to send a huge payload off to Mars nuclear thermal is amazing it's still could be beneficial even going to the Moon you know like in a Earth Moon system you could use nuclear thermal uh very effectively it could be a great choice but it also that starts to get into that trait of like H we can just kind of use a little bit bigger rocket and and a normal you know it's it's that whole thing but another reason why we we kind of stopped using them the the one that the United States developed nerva was so heavy only a Saturn 5 could actually lift the stage of it like the the upper stage so it replaced the s4b with a nuclear thermal with a nerva engine um the Soviet Union developed one about one tenth the size and and thrust that was small enough to fly on Pro on a proton rocket um but neither of them ever flew both of them have been tested and like thumbs up ready to go which is just a huge shame to me because they they could unlock a lot of interplanetary potential and just all around a which potentially Interstellar as well not I don't think nuclear thermal not we're not quite getting there but then you get into like nuclear pulse drives and things where you're literally like basically ejecting a bomb out the back of your rocket and exploding and having like a shock absorber and and pogo sticking your way out of the solar system that that's I mean by all physics sure you know there not nothing wrong with that it's not breaking any laws of physics and you know I but I just don't see us getting to that need anytime soon I don't think we're travel yeah I don't I mean that's that's I I think we're going to want a better understanding of physics and physics itself yeah I do you have a hope that maybe theoretical physics will open the door to some exciting propulsion systems yeah I do I think we're still at the very infancy of our understanding of everything and how things work and you know a hundred years ago it would be stupid to try to predict the things we know today and who knows like even you know I think about things like James web looking deeper into our solar system than ever before and physically being able to see objects that we just have not even been able to physically see before Oh and being able to study black holes for example uh better or better the stuff that's happening outside of black holes at the edges of black holes how the information is stored uh the% holographic principle just there's so much weirdness about black holes around where gravity starts bending light it's like all right we get to look at that now and start to wonder like what is going on and how can we like use that somehow exactly for propulsion I mean it seems like awfully crazy and futuristic at this moment but I think that's because we know almost nothing about um you know that those kinds of objects where again where the general relativity and quantum mechanics start to start to um have to be both considered to describe those kinds of objects and as we study those objects we might figure out some kind of unification thing that will allow us to uh understand maybe how to use black holes to for propulsion like yeah to uh I mean I could say a lot of crazy things but like basically but the the point is it'd be stupid for us to even guess about things we don't even know about yet you know what I mean like and so therefore I'm not going to say that the best option for Interstellar travel is nuclear drives like that could be like someone saying you know in 1600 the only way to fly is by strapping a thousand Birds to your head you know like but that said I mean everything you're saying is right but human history is such like at the beginning of the 20th century physicist roord everybody there's there's brilliant people that said we've basically solved all of it right if you talk to most physicists I think they're going to say like we've pretty much solved like the standard model describes physics extremely accurately right uh general relativity explains the cosmos as we observe them extremely accurately yeah there a whole Dark Matter Dark Energy thing whatever yeah but uh outside of that we so like we basically solved like like where are you going going to find gaps in knowledge that are going to somehow create warp drives or something like that so wormholes uh but uh that's it seems like throughout history we prove ourselves wrong time and time again no I and I this is well outside of any of my knowledge based so I want to make sure that if I say anything stupid it's because I'm just a a peasant here in physics land but yes um we're all peasants in physics land but I I really just think like it's very humbling that we're still using chemical propulsion and and varant S like ejecting mass to to propel ourselves and I I no matter how you get at it and I think someday I I would expect that our species has figured out a way to to get beyond that gotta ask you another wild question what do you think of uh Bob Lazar who uh claimed that uh he worked at and saw in Area 51 a propulsion system fueled by I'm quoting here maybe from Wikipedia I don't know where I got this from uh fueled by an anti matter reactor which used as fuel the chemical element with atomic number 115 at the time it wasn't synthesized it was later in in uh 2003 synthesized named moscovium he said that the propulsion system relied on a stable isotope of element 115 which allegedly generates a gravity wave that allowed the vehicle to fly and to evade visual detection by bending light around it no stabiliz does of moscovium have yet been synthesized all have proven extremely radioactive decaying in a few hundred uh milliseconds one do you believe him which I I find him fascinating because it's um I find the human mind even more fascinating than um than than something like an anti-matter drive because I think it's such a giant mystery that we haven't even begun to explore deeply anyway um in that sense whether he's lying or not are both interesting things to explore from a psychology perspective but to I he basically saying that I guess it's an alien uh extraterrestrial engine thing um what do you think I mean I'm happy to change my opinion based on new evidence at any point I have like the biggest part of me wants to just be like this is obviously just stupid and a hoax and just total you know quack and then another part of me still is like this is exciting and fun to think that this is all real and then another part of me goes why how how good is this guy at lying and making stuff up because it's all really good like good storytelling good like I don't know what to think honestly I don't know I'm really very skeptical about anyone explaining anything like this like I mean my my radar is like screaming at me like this is all full crap you know but i' say like there's still a apartment it's just like man that is kind of cool how did he know that and like you know what I mean it's I think conflicted I think you're actually in the in the best kind of place cuz it's um I'm afraid of being the kind of person that hears something like that and says is definitely um he's definitely full of crap and basically close my mind off to all that stuff I'm afraid of being somebody who closes my mind off to a thing that's actually uh a a early thread to a brilliant to to a future to a fascinating solution to a mystery so uh but in this case I mean I have so many red flags from a psychological perspective that um that I but again uh outside of this particular individual I do wonder if aliens have visited us I think aliens are everywhere I think the universe is teaming with alien life I mean there's it's very difficult for me to statistically understand given how life finds a way here on Earth just everywhere the entire history of life on Earth from the very origin of life it seems to be damn good at doing its thing and evolving to get better and better and better at doing its thing now there could be some special aspects to the origin of life itself which is completely not understood so maybe the true magic is is in the origin of life or it could be that there's some magical leaps uh to uh eukaryotic cells for example that the Universe our galaxies teaming with alien life but it's all bacteria they're all boring bacteria or exciting bacteria no offense to bacteria the but the no intelligence space fairing civilizations I don't know but I just if I were to guess if I had to bet all my money there is space fairing civilizations everywhere in the universe and the fact that they're not that they have not been directly definitively observed confuses me and I think it's a mystery and if I were to suggest what the solution to that mystery is is they might look extremely different from us and we might be too dump to detect them yeah and like and so there I think you have to be extremely open-minded at what would we be looking for right that and that that's a very practical thing to be open-minded about and practically speaking if we were to be able to even detect them from a distance get a tech uh technos signature of a distant planet uh of a distant star system that has alien life honestly the number one thing I kind of want to know is like what's your propulsion system like how do we travel faster right like there's a details probably but first let's get together and teach me how to go fast go fast I like motorcycles I like rockets tell me what you got yeah uh yeah like how like I'll show you mine if you show me yours kind of thing at the at the inter Interstellar Intergalactic uh level um yeah anyway I just wonder maybe it's a cheat code in this video game we call life but I want to I want to use the cheat code to figure out what kind of propulsion systems are possible and it feels like other alien civiliz ations might help us give us um give us a guidance on that of course I think even just discovering boy one of the things with a space program like everything we're doing with Mars like the secret thing I'm really excited about the romantic thing is humans on Mars but the secret thing is building giant stations on Mars that allow us to definitively hopefully find the traces of life that either currently doesn't live or has once lived on Mars because if that's the case that means for sure life is everywhere oh 100% And then you're like and once you know that sorry to keep interrupting not shutting the hell up is this supposed to be an interview God damn it all right uh that uh like that just the knowledge of that just the knowledge that a four minute mile can be run I think will open our minds completely to really really hardcore push to Interstellar travel or colonizing Mars becoming multiplanetary species it'd be truly inspiring you think that do you do you get nervous though like I'm gonna I'm the interviewer now yeah um don't you get nervous that we could make spectacular discovery on Mars that not only has there been life there's actually like pretty Advanced Micro you know or multicellular life totally thriving in certain regions just hadn't visited the man on Mars and we make this big discovery that a relatively large percentage of people just simply wouldn't believe it they think it's all yeah 100% fake and that they're just doing this to control us and that blah blah blah like we could make the most important Discovery in human life like in all of human existence that that we're not alone in this universe by you know cellularly at least and a good percentage of people I'm thinking 20 30 in today's world 40 plus% of people wouldn't even believe it existed interesting I I I'd be it's it's a very important thing to think about especially as an educator like yourself I think the the current cynicism towards institutions and science is temporary I think it's they're basically the internet woke up the internet smells bullshit and it looked at uh I'm sorry I'm not being aeges but saying older scientists and and they looked at them and they kind of said you're kind of full of shit you got a lot of ego uh you're you speak down to everybody you're not very good at communicating I think there's a lot of Truth to what they're saying and I think the young scientists that are coming up will be much better at not being full of shit being authentic being real not treating uh people like their children they can't possibly understand like taking it very seriously that there's a lot of intelligent people out there that are curious that are this full of desire for knowledge like being transparent about all the uncertainties uh of the scientific process all the tensions the conflicts all of that and it's I I I think I think once we fix the Comm science Communication System adapted to the internet um I think that won't be an issue I I hope I hope I mean that's that's why people like you are really important is it's like communicate with authenticity um but yeah that's definitely something to think about I mean yes the the early uh I mean listen scientists too like the fos fine discovered on on Venus it's like they're extremely skeptical always uh so definitely there will there will be a lot of skepticism uh and it depends what it looks like if it kind of looks like this thing kind of looks like bacteria back on Earth uh yes uh so it means contamination is very difficult to avoid in general but if the thing looks like fundamentally different yeah then you're like all right yeah that like totally different DNA RNA like this is not we've never observed this ever at all then uh then you're like all right cool of course uh so that what another promising thing that difficult to be definitive about but was get better and better direct Imaging systems there's now U like I don't know how many but thousands of planets being discovered outside of our solar system there's moons being discover now earthlike planets being discovered so like all of that if you could do direct Imaging of those planets more and more and more uh there could be some gigantic listen if there is like a a card like type 2 civilization we're going to see the damn thing it's going to be producing a lot of uh it's going to be uh radiating a lot of energy so the possibility of detecting some of that that's also a real possibility with something like James web telescope like those kinds of efforts that starts becoming a reality uh have you read Andy we's project Hail Mary I have not no you're going to love it like it is basically uh almost answering that like how could they not see us type of thing almost where he creates this this incredible I don't want to spoil anything but you know um it's just this the sense that like we could have totally different perspectives with with an alien race and not even like consider that you know the two of us are coexisting it yeah I don't want to spoil anything it's really really really worth the read or Oh you mean a different perspective like the aliens have a different perspective than humans yeah like both we just like we see with this visual light someone could see in x-ray Etc you know like and just the way we even come to the same perspec and like looking and observing is just so different fundamentally that like we could I mean it's not quite like that it's not like it's like oh they were actually on the moon and we're you know it's nothing like that but uh but it's such a unique and incredible story I think Andy we is one of the the best science fiction writers I don't I can't say that with much Authority because I don't listen to much science fiction so zero Authority I really like Andy Weir's books and that book is is no different well that sounds like I'm really worried about that it sounds like uh I would really love it I've uh definely I'm been very um I've I've done a lot of reading in my life but like the science fiction is one of the things I've been really really weak on I haven't really read much and I just made more and more friends over the years recently um that say that I absolutely must read some of these things are you do you physically read or do you do audiobooks while you run and stuff both I I do both yeah but physically I sadly don't it's a Kindle right yeah yeah yeah yeah but uh but when while I run I also do uh so I do both I do about uh an normal day especially now CU I've been really focused on on reading it's about 6 minutes of reading on a Kindle and I one to two hours uh cuz I run about 2 hours when I don't have like other stuff like today I won't run uh so it's about 3 hours so on average I would say it's like two 2 and a half hours a day that I read and audio books are just the same they're a little slower but they're they they can uh especially for the classics they can capture some of the magic with the deep voice usually with the British accent I love it I also read that uh listen to sorry that uh a book on propulsion like two years ago I remember but I remember that was extremely diff it was by John D Clark yeah it was very difficult to listen oh I yeah I see I don't read I I listen while I'm on road trips or running or stuff like that too so I swear there's probably 40 or like not 40 but there's like eight minutes of we tried bmz 15 yeah 13 bm42 rmnl mro hydrogen for like I swear it's multiple minutes of explaining one trial on something because there's just so many different chemicals they try I don't know it's it's it's almost a joke like I literally audibly laughed out loud listening to it because I'm like this is so ridiculous I'm sure it makes sense reading it but like listening to it is just hilarious but it's great though what do you think of some of the challenges for long-term space travel do you think about this kind of stuff the biological stuff yeah um do you do you worry do you think about radiation on Mars uh and out in Space over periods of uh actually the effects on the human body get even the radiation over periods of months and years yeah I think realistically we have a really good handle on what the effects are and we actually have the solution to like everything it's just whether or not we can like you know for instance one of the you know low earth orbit one of the biggest challenges eventually after you're long-term space travel is bone density loss and not having gravity you know you actually have issues with a handful of things and artificial gravity is easy in terms of relatively easy in terms of uh space flight you know you can you can have two vehicles just tethered together and you know just spinning as give it enough distance and decent enough spin velocity and you can you can get one gene like relatively easy we're talking again relatively easy especially after talking about theoretical physics like this is is that's easy stuff um we haven't done that yet but like there's there's no reason why we can't produce artificial gravity if we say that that's um you know a big enough hurdle that we absolutely have to overcome this okay cool we'll just spin up two vehicles that are going to Mars and people will have but you know that's the thing is Mars is only about we'll say six months there then you're hanging out in Mars you have 38% of gravity and then 6 months-ish back people live on you know the International Space Station at six months stin we've had people for basically a year up on the International Space Station it's not like it's it's not life altering yeah you have a couple days of not being able to walk very well and you do have some bone density loss and some other concerns but like again that's it's solvable and I I think on you know the first missions to Mars I think it might we might we'll probably do the trade is it worth it to like land on Mars and have a crippled crew that can't even physically stand yet you know for a day or two before they get their you know feet from underneath them or is it do we need to spin up to spacecraft or you know a tether and have like you can't do it like Starship you know even though it's 30t wide or 9 MERS wide if you spin it on that one axis um that's not enough space to get one G uh without your feet and your head being at two different uh velocities so you get really sick it you always feel like you're falling your brain will tell you that you're falling constantly um but then again okay so this is this is a whole thing is I you know and I don't know if there's we don't really have the data yet on like going from zero g we know the effects of that we know the effects of one G really well that's our majority of our data set but we don't really have much data on the long-term effects of uh you know one six gravity like on the moon or 38% gravity is it is one 16 gravity actually enough to counteract 95% of the effects of low gravity or is it 15 you know is it one 16 the is it like a linear thing is 38 % gravity totally you know 38% as bad as one or whatever you know is it a slight like where is it out on the scale so there's a chance that we don't need anywhere near 1g of gravity to counteract the bulk majority of these problems we could have 0.1g or whatever is the you know the right compromise of of vehicle complexity and human biology and all of these other effects like we this is absolutely a solvable thing that is and and we figure some of this out through just experimentation 100% along the way yep uh one of this is back to my dating life I think one of the essential fundamental research questions I'm wondering about is uh the Dynamics and um so the details of how you have sex in space um asking for a friend of course I mean that's there literally is sort of work on this right cuz like if you think about long-term space travel I mean sex is is uh so of like the there's the recreational aspect of sex but the most important aspect of sex for long-term space travel is um uh procreation is and also the full biological cycle of that so the from the embryo the development of the baby the giving the birth and all that kind of stuff so like you know there's a lot of really difficult problems of biology there to understand and uh perhaps it's all some of that again just like you said brilliantly some of that can be just solved with engineering outside of the human body by creating a gravitational field like that but maybe be along the way you can figure out how to do that without doing it we're balancing the cost and so on and radiation is the other thing like we know we have a really good data set on what radiation and doses do to humans like we we know we can measure radiation we know we can approximate you know and kind of give edge cases for the Mars transient and getting to Mars and being on Mars and the simple answer to that is like at the end of the day if we have to you know dig into Mars or find a tunnel to to live in so you get some extra mass in between you and Cosmic radiation so be it like that's the that's the answer then again none of these are like insolvable problems they're just things hurdles you would have to overcome based on you know the the risk exposure and the the posture there imagine being the first child the first baby born outside of Earth that'd be pretty cool yeah I I would love to be alive to see that that'll be a big one I don't know if he'll um I don't know CU it's such a dangerous thing it's so risky I think that could be in our lifetime you think so yeah I I I would like to think in a perfect world of for thinking futurism that in 30 to 50 years I definitely think we could have full-time like permanent major civilizations you know like like um uh like what blue origin wants to develop where they have a a huge like sphere you know and you're doing a lot of uh especially heavy IND industry off of Earth so you're not polluting earth like that's makes so much sense to me um yeah I think I think we we could live in a lifetime where you know we thought this since the 50s and 60s that people are going to be living and working in space like crazy and at any given point we're lucky to have 12 people in space today um but I really think In Our Lifetime we're finally getting to that point of yeah that that's a reality let me because you mentioned blue origin I can we just lay out some of the competitors to SpaceX so much of what we talked about is uh SpaceX specifically because they're sort of pushing the bondaries of what's possible in the commercial space flight but there's a lot of like you said incredible work being done for large companies and small companies startups and so on uh so who are the competitors to SpaceX Ula United launch Alliance blue origin there a Virgin uh is it Galactic orbit orbit would be the competitor V Virgin orbit uh there's the rocket Labs electron rocket that you mentioned um there's the folks you covered Firefly yep yep and uh what are we missing there's the the Epic space launch system from NASA I guess that is yeah technically NASA but prime contractor Boeing and Boeing yeah North the boosters y nice so like what uh what's what's interesting to say to lay out the land here that you're excited about just in general I think if you aren't working on a reusable some form of reusable vehicle like physically working on it penda paper not Beyond pended paper like bending metal for a reusable vehicle you're gone you're toast I think we're well into that being the only provable you know Way Forward the only way you're going to compete and survive is a reusable rocket fully reusable would be great but that's obviously massively aspirational still um but it will come but to me um the yeah the list you pretty much had it right on the head uh there's there's Astra was another orbital rocket company um they there there's a lot of companies and I I think right now the the ones that I personally really believe in um you know rocket lab is is awesome I really think that they are one of the few that I believe can actually build a falcon 9 class rocket uh like today with the with their technology with their knowledge with their Investments with their funding you know they and they've proven themselves there's very few they have actually made it look easy I think there's a lot of startups and a lot of new rocket there's a too many launch providers popping out of the woodwork right now they won't all survive of course I think realistically if you look at like airplanes how many airplane Manu you know there's a handful of airplane manufacturers there's not hundreds and thousands of airplane manufacturers I think it'll be the similar thing for space flight I think we'll see we'll see you know realistically in the terms of jbo jets and passengers there's basically two you know there's Airbus and there's Boeing um so I I think in the long run there'll be two or three major players I think there'll be you know 10 minor like as as far as launch providers as far as the ones actually leaving Earth and getting into orbit I just don't think there's a ton of room for individuality really you know yeah I I would love to see it like a really serious competitor uh to SpaceX in the way that SpaceX does things I don't know if you L is quite what i is quite the right kind of competitor let me let me say this Ula has all of the potential but just operationally they're you know they're they locked Martin and Boeing's like love child yeah like they're kind of set up in a far too traditional manner where they just really aren't given the opportunity to uh innovate like a lot of these startups are so rocket lab is a little bit more of that nature what do you think about s of just blue origin in general is BL Origins I man I what blue origin has done with new Shephard is amazing and people just lot it because it's suborbital and it looks very phallic it's it's h so I guess the meme matters also it's modern day sad because people don't see what they are also working on which is new Glenn you know I I see comments almost every day still of like it doesn't matter because you know they're they're working on Tiny it's like no new Glenn is more powerful and more capable than Falcon heavy new Glenn is almost more of a competitor to not quite as to Starship but it's almost in that class it's it's a it's a heavy lift launch vehicle it's huge it's crazy it'll be nuts they're very actively working on it you know I still think we're three years away from it launching but that's a very strong comp competitor in the class of rockets that SpaceX is currently making so SpaceX is currently leading the way but that that it's it couldn't become a close race and well it's just I we'll just for now we'll ignore SpaceX and we'll just kind of talk about like I think who's kind of coming around the corner here who's sure so let let me just do a quick overview I'm I'm going to shoot myself in the foot for getting some cool people here and some some exciting companies but relativity is one that if you you should definitely get Tim LS on the show who is the uh CEO of Relativity they're doing 3D printed Rockets the ones that have the world's largest 3D printer they're getting really close to their first orbital launch um the cool thing about them the reason that I think they're exciting the reason that I I I think they have the potential is just how quickly they can iterate I think 3D printing a rocket is really dumb I think iterating with 3D printing on a rocket is brilliant because you can literally change software and have like very little you know upload a file and have a new rocket like that's amazing so in terms of long-term iterative process if if we're really talking about like hitting the ground running and and just seeing where the the evolution takes you I think that's about as good as you can get you know I think what SpaceX is doing at Starbase just physically bending cheap steel is probably also a very valid solution I so I really think and they have the engineering chops I think they've got some amazing people there um again rocket lab I adore what they work on and you know like every everyone there's a cave out here that everything takes longer anything any company tells you it's two or three times longer just period rocket lab's no different um but I really they're they're working on a neutron rocket that's going to be um like I think 8,000 to 15,000 kilograms to lower orbit like it's a a good medium class rocket will compete right along with Falcon 9 hopefully by the way Neutron would be its name right it's Neutron it's not some kind of fascinating new physics breakthrough where they're using neutrons yes no no but they are using they're also using liquid methane and liquid oxygen um I just think it's a really it's a seems like a a great rocket and assuming they can actually get it flying in two or 3 years I think they're going to be here to stay you know um I I'd be remiss right now I'm editing a video from an interview with Stoke Aerospace out in in Kent Washington um it just one of these companies that they have a long ways to go like they're still in the very they're they're behind the curve frankly in in terms of launch Vehicles right now because like I said there's so many coming out of the woodwork but the idea they're working on their solution to a fully reusable rocket is amazing one of the coolest Concepts I've ever seen are you going to cover in the video yeah yeah y yep that'll be hopefully coming out the next depending on what the schedule like is down there I'm work I'm actively editing that as we speak and it is so cool I mean it is like it's it's genius and um if they can actually get it to work I could see them merging I can for sure see someone potentially like I perfectly in a perfect world they merge with rocket lab mhm they uh Stoke develops the upper stage and maybe even the engines they are the two guys the the CEO the co-founders of that company um have they are engine like propulsion engineer magnificent they have they used to they both of them worked at Blue they developed engines in a hurry there and then left blue and it felt like it was getting too slow for them and now they are I mean these these guys fired uh a 15 chambered rocket engine instead of four from the Soviet we're talking 15 Chambers single turbo pump uh 70 times in the month of October wow that's impressive wow and that's like that was on a you know if you think about like days off time off you know Parts changing over twice a day on average of a hydrolox engine that's insane so I I love them and I hope the best for them uh but they're also topical right now they're at top of my head so uh uh what about Firefly what I like about Firefly they've already got kind of a a traditional AOS face backing they're starting to Buddy up a lot with north of Grumman they're going to be building the booster stage for anaris which is currently flying only out of walps Virginia and is one of the only other commercial providers for the International Space Station and north of grman is a very traditional Aerospace company you know like lots of solid rocket boosters and they've purchased ironically their their current anaris is reliant on Russian engines and Ukrainian boosters two things that I don't think you're going to be able to get your hands on too much anymore so yes they're looking to um some us propulsion and stages so they actually are partnering with uh with firefly and their new anari's rocket will be a first stage built entirely by Firefly so I'm I'm excited that Firefly already has the propulsion technology um and they actually developed the ironically their their tap off cycle engine was developed uh in partnership with Ukraine with Ukrainian Engineers uh who developed the the whole turbo pump system so it's like it's this cool me meddling of of these worlds um their former CEO Tom Rusk was a like I have an interview with him and he's anyone that can just spout nuances and facts I just love I I just soaked that guy's information up as best I could because he is brilliant literally a doctor a rocket doctor you know it's so yeah I mean that's what like you said the fascinating thing about these folks they're they're legit there there's such great Engineers that people that that bring these Rockets to life and then there's all the stuff that we know and don't know about in uh in China and other parts and other nations that are putting stuff into orbit one of the sad things also is like you know with locked and and Boeing is um and just military applications in general there's so much technology that's currently being developed that we probably know nothing about yeah and um that it makes me a little bit sad of course yeah U for several reasons one is that the use of that technology is has really much like it's not it's not that inspir it's like a very military focused yeah it's to kill someone it's to kill someone yeah uh there's not even like a a side application right and and the the the big one is that the secret it's it's it's shed in secrecy as opposed to being a source of inspiration yeah 100% but that's the way of the world mhm like what was that one plane that you covered that was like we know nothing about oh the X-37B yeah X 37b yeah or for over 900 days and returned like yeah I want to know about I don't know that's what's it's so frustrating we know when it launches people you know amateurs track and know they even will be like oh it changed orbit you know it raised and lowered its orbit blah blah blah we generally have just almost no idea what it's doing up there and it just saddens me because I want to know and it's awesome it's a great vehicle War what is it good for uh you mentioned Kerbal space program the video game uh someone asked you what video game you recommend for learning about space and Rockets and you said duh uh Kerbal Space Program so tell me about this game what what is this game and I also saw heard that a second one is coming out so what what what like uh you know I've been playing more games recently uh because games are fun and they remind you that life is awesome uh so why should I play this game if you want to learn about Rockets how to fly how to build how to get into orbit how to get to other planets there's no better way to learn about Rockets playing space what does it entail like do you actually like uh it's like Sim City and Microsoft flight simulator for Rockets oh interesting so you get to like what do you design the Rockets yeah yeah it's okay so I started playing it in like 2014 I think around as I'm like falling in love with space and I became obsessed with this game like literally you you know you you you take a like you getop a little Command Module click you click on a fuel tank Boop you choose your engine Boop you choose a stage connector Boop you connect more tanks and build these space planes and Fantastical things and it's all like physics based it's Avail this sounds like a commercial it's available on PC Mac and and console like it's it's available everywhere but wait there's more but wait there's more and you you uh you said like you streamed yourself playing those any of those videos up oh yeah yeah yeah there's some of my actually the first videos I ever uploaded to YouTube were re like recaptured streams from twitch that I just physically uploaded to YouTube this is awesome and so it's it's me playing C we I used to do this kind of like a podcast style thing uh I should get back into this because it's one of my favorite things I ever did it's called we called it today in space fight history but these days I'd probably just play kerb but I had my friend come sit next to me his name's Jacob M and he is a former professional P valter just this really knows nothing about Rockets yes knows nothing about space hilarious like in the sweetest most fun way he know like he you know as an adult asked me which is bigger the Earth or the moon and I love that for him you know that's that's fantastic he's just a delightful human he would sit next to me we would recreate a historical space fight mission in Kerbal Space Program and he would just sit there and play guitar and sing about what I'm like doing and asking questions and it's still one of my favorite things I've ever done yeah you should definitely do something something like that so basically just uh yeah shoot the shit with a friend get their curiosity going let them just sit there and ask questions and it was awesome like I mean yeah those are some I I I've done it a handful of times I think we probably did like 20 or 30 episodes or something and is it's definitely something I would like to get back to doing can you in the in the game like go to go to the Moon Yeah so it's it's technically a different solar system it's the Kerbal system and you're on the planet curban so there's the mun mu y there's a second moon in the system on this planet uh it's called minmus they didn't want to pay licensing fuse or what well it's just a little easier it's a little bit smaller so the physics are easier um oh so it tries to be consistent with physics yeah oh yeah yeah the physics are all are all like real world physics and I mean there's Aeros simulations there's all of its like one to one you know for Earth physics AES it's just on on a easier scale solar system so it's easier to to navigate but there's still like there's a planet called Eve that's kind of like Venus so it has a really thick atmosphere really thick really soupy it's um it's and a lot more gravity so it's just really really hard to get off of um it's easy relatively easy to land on Eve but like that's kind of like the ultimate boss in the game is like getting off of Eve so that's one of my favorite things to do is build these crafts to to get to Eve and and try to return home you mentioned that there almost like a podcast thing you also did our our ludicrous future what uh is there a podcast in your future are you are you thinking do you enjoy the media you're so incredibly good at talking it's less effort to uh sort of to produce are you is that something in the in the back of your mind also oh man I love talking and you're very good at it I mean yeah um I I find that I it's just the problem with for me with with podcasts and and I guess the podcasts that I've done have tried to be relatively topical about like the current space flight Affairs and four three or four years ago that was actually you know manageable for me to keep up with these days man I can't keep I just can't keep up with it I gave up on trying to be super topical and I realized that maybe my my biggest talent and the things that resonate most with people is just trying to explain the like the basics and the and the the root really get so I'm really just trying to like I'm trying to do less live streams if I can but then again like Starship I got to stream that there's no way I'm not going to do that but I'm really just trying to get back to like making the Deep dive videos where I have no limit on how long and how deep and and just really go for it because that's actually what I love to do the yeah I mean this like uh views aside those are just works of genius and you're getting better and better at them and like that's the that in terms of the beautiful things you can create in this world those are that so like if you continue especially where the the way space travel is developing right like that your voice is very much needed so I think it's wise to um to do what you do best and I I think I'm feeling more and more especially this last year I did a lot of like live streaming and traveling back and forth between Florida and California and here and just handling major like big live streams really stress myself out and at the end of the day I was like all of this is taking away from my ability to make videos and that's I ideally honestly if I like had my choice of things I would just ignore everything else and just sit and lock myself in a in in my house for a year and just sit there and make videos and and go and travel every every other month you know for fun like not for space stuff just go and and do some light traveling you know some like on the moon or what yeah just some light traveling uh what advice would you give to Young Folks um or just folks struggling to find their way in life uh whether they're in high school college or Beyond like how to have a life they can be proud of how how to have a career they can be proud of you've had a really interesting Journey yourself what what from that can you draw give advice to others to be honest like I feel like it's so painfully obvious to follow your heart and follow like what makes you happy that I'm just shocked that people allow themselves to sit on like mediocrity you know like to just sit there and be like well this is just what I do you know and some and for a lot of people that's perfectly fine like I have you know some of my best friends are clocking in and out and they're perfectly happy they have a wonderful life absolutely no judgment there of course um but for people that are stuck feeling like they're not sure of you know what's next and how to bring light into their world uh you really just got to listen to like what does make you happy you know people feel guilty about oh I play video games for eight hours then start learning how to make a video game learn how to do reviews of video games or make there's so many you can work in the video game industry you know you don't have to isolate your love from your work you know and it's just funny that we you know maybe uh maybe you feel guilty that you drink too much okay I don't know if this a good advice go go learn how to make alcohol you know be start a liquor company yeah start a liquor company I mean that's terrible advice no it's a it's great advice but it's also in your own story it seems like you've almost stumbled on like some of it is just exploration and keeping your mind and heart open to discovering that thing that grabs you right what do you fall asleep thinking about you know like but you you stumbled on the space almost accidentally right I mean yeah yeah would you when you were doing a being a professional photographer would you have known oh no well do you want to know what I wanted to be when I was a kid what's that well first when I was young I wanted to be a tractor I'm not quite sure I understood yeah how that works thats then I wanted to be a scorpion trainer yeah yeah thought I could train him to cut people's Lawns better and better yep yep and then honestly the majority of my childhood people's Lawns got I think you understanding of physics early on was just a little the Pinchers man pin I know uh then uh from like probably six until like early college I wanted to be a prosthetic engineer and never once did I think about anything Rockets really you know I had like a I had like a space shuttle poster I had some space shuttle Legos you know I liked space and you know I knew of the Space Shuttle but I you know it was a far down the list as far as things that I thought were cool ninja turtles Lamborghini Kos b7g Flying Fortress Yeah I guess I guess that means if you just keep your heart open to falling in love with an idea with a passion yeah you could start from that from Ninja Turtles and scorpions F lawn to uh being one of the best one of the top Educators inspirational figures in space and actually uh traveling around the moon and who knows maybe one day stepping foot on the moon and Mars even though you say you're not interested it seems like you stating that you're not interested in certain things somehow results in you in you're doing those things my friends joke that like I'm going to be the first person to go to the Moon against their will like like I guess all right this is uh all right what's the food guys we're going to start a fundraiser please like like Tim just doesn't want to have to doesn't want to go you know definitely don't want to do it all right Tim you're an incredible person thank you so much for everything you do I've I've been a fan of yours for a long time not just the the content but just who you are as a human being just how excited you are for everything it's it's just an inspiration your joy to watch thank you for being you thank you for doing the stuff you're doing uh I can't wait to see what you do next man thank you so much for talking with me today that was awesome thank you so much it's my pleasure thanks for listening to this conversation with Tim Dodd to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from HG Wells life forever dying to be born aresh forever young and eager will presently stand upon this Earth as upon a foot stol and stretched out its realm amidst the Stars thank you for listening and hope to see you next time