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SpaceX Starship Had massive design flaws · Elon Musk Podcast

• 0:00
  Hi, everybody. Welcome back to the show.
• 0:02
  My name is Will Walden. I'm your host, and today we're
• 0:04
  going to be talking about Spacex's Starship, But not only
• 0:07
  the flight and the landing and the explosion of IFT 7, but some
• 0:12
  things that went on behind the scenes at SpaceX.
• 0:18
  Some insiders have tipped me off to a few things that have
• 0:20
  happened with Starship in the past.
• 0:22
  Now, whether that's IFT one through IFT 7, I can't tell you
• 0:26
  this because this person needs to be hidden.
• 0:31
  They weren't supposed to tell anybody this, but they told me
• 0:34
  this. So some of the things that have
• 0:36
  happened to Starship during the flights that could have gone
• 0:39
  horribly wrong, but luckily they didn't in these circumstances
• 0:45
  for some of this stuff. So I have to be very vague here
• 0:48
  because I'm kind of protecting somebody.
• 0:49
  This is an insider that's telling me things that have gone
• 0:52
  wrong with some Starships. OK, so you know, there's a
• 0:57
  booster on Starship. There's a giant booster.
• 1:00
  It's about 250 feet tall and the ship itself is about 150 ish
• 1:04
  feet tall. So the whole thing is about 400
• 1:07
  feet tall. The booster is the part of the
• 1:09
  bottom, if you're not familiar, and the top part is called
• 1:12
  Starship. So in between there there is
• 1:16
  what's it called? There's a, there's a a, a, a
• 1:20
  stage in between there too. And the stage in between there,
• 1:24
  the it's so it's a hot staging. So when the booster in the top
• 1:30
  stage separate this part kind of takes all the energy from the
• 1:34
  top stage when it kicks off and it pushes it to the side and the
• 1:39
  hot staging ring flies off into, you know, into the abyss.
• 1:44
  But the booster would come back and land eventually in one of
• 1:47
  these flights. But I can't tell you which one
• 1:49
  this is for. I mean, this isn't the one that
• 1:52
  actually landed. So I'll let you speculate all
• 1:54
  you want. So there's a thing, and I'm
• 1:57
  looking over here because this is where my information is here.
• 2:00
  During the separation of the Starship from a Super Heavy
• 2:03
  booster, unexpected harmonic vibrations developed in the
• 2:07
  interstage connection points. So everything's moving around,
• 2:11
  everything's shaking. It's a very violent place
• 2:14
  between the booster and the ship at all times during the flight.
• 2:19
  Now, the oscillations caused a three second delay in a clean
• 2:24
  separation. So if you go back and you watch
• 2:26
  some of this footage and I can't show you the footage, but if you
• 2:29
  watch some of the footage, you'll see there might be a
• 2:31
  little bit of a delay and they might not even show it on the
• 2:35
  camera. I've looked through a lot of the
• 2:37
  footage here and I couldn't find the exact time that they were
• 2:40
  talking about, but there was a three second delay between the
• 2:45
  clean separation, which forced the flight computer to adjust
• 2:49
  the vehicle's trajectory just enough to compensate for the
• 2:53
  altered flight path. So what this is telling us is
• 2:57
  that all systems, even if they go awry, the systems that are in
• 3:03
  place to fix these things, they're there and they work.
• 3:08
  So that was number one of about, I think I have 5 things here.
• 3:12
  Yeah, five things that they sent me.
• 3:14
  And these are for past launches. And like I said before, I can't
• 3:18
  tell you which one it is because you could might be able to track
• 3:22
  it to who this person is. There's a methane header tank
• 3:26
  pressure anomaly as well. Header tank maintaining pressure
• 3:30
  for the Raptor engines. Methane supply experienced micro
• 3:34
  fluctuations causing brief thrust instability.
• 3:39
  Flight computer constantly adjusted the engine mixture
• 3:43
  ratio to maintain stable combustion, reducing overall
• 3:48
  efficiency by about 4% for this one flight so that again it
• 3:54
  means that there wasn't an explosion.
• 3:56
  Nothing blew up during this time during the methane head or tank
• 4:01
  anomaly, but it did reduce overall efficiency by about 4%.
• 4:08
  And that could be a big deal if you're sending cargo for
• 4:11
  somebody else into orbit. And if that 4% keeps you away
• 4:15
  from the orbit that you need to go to, or makes the Starship
• 4:19
  itself actually push harder and maybe not get you to the orbit
• 4:24
  that you need to get to, because that 4% is a huge deal. 4 out of
• 4:27
  100 is a pretty big deal. It's not huge, but it's 4%
• 4:31
  nonetheless. And there's been problems
• 4:36
  throughout all of these flights with the heat shield of the
• 4:41
  Starship. We've seen these things blow up,
• 4:43
  we've seen them meltdown, we've seen them burn to a crisp.
• 4:49
  There's been heat shield problems since day one with this
• 4:53
  thing. And it's impossible to get this
• 4:55
  absolutely perfect because mind you, this is about seven flights
• 5:00
  in at this point. At the time of this video, it's
• 5:02
  seven flights in, so seven flights of an experimental
• 5:05
  rocket. And they're still figuring out
• 5:07
  the heat shield tiles and it's OK.
• 5:10
  It's still a still not a production vehicle yet.
• 5:14
  So they're still learning and they're still working on the
• 5:17
  heat Shields. Now, before I go any further
• 5:19
  with this, I want to ask you if you're subscribed yet because
• 5:22
  I've noticed when I look back at the stats that only like like
• 5:27
  10% of you are subscribed to the show when you watch the video.
• 5:31
  So that means about 90% of you just come for this one video.
• 5:35
  So if you could do me a favor and click the like and the
• 5:38
  subscribe button to help out the channel, I would really
• 5:40
  appreciate it because not only do you get my content, but you
• 5:43
  get content that's similar to this that will be in your feed.
• 5:47
  So let's go on to the next with the heat shield.
• 5:49
  So several tiles on the windward side of Starship showed
• 5:53
  unexpected thermal gradient patterns during re entry, with
• 5:58
  localized hotspots reaching 1800°C instead of around 1500
• 6:03
  ish. While still within safety
• 6:05
  margins. Requires the vehicle to adjust
• 6:07
  its re entry angle by an additional .7°.
• 6:13
  This could be a big deal in the future if SpaceX was going to
• 6:17
  land these rockets. That .7° could mean that they
• 6:22
  might not be able to land the rocket back at Star Base or back
• 6:26
  at Kennedy Space Center because they're off target.
• 6:29
  So that could be a big deal in the future when Spacex's
• 6:32
  Starship is trying to land. Now .7° could also, depending on
• 6:40
  where it is in the flight, could send it over land and over
• 6:44
  people and over a scary place. If it does blow up.
• 6:48
  If it does have a Rudd, a rapid unscheduled disassembly, and if
• 6:53
  that's the case, it could shatter, could blow up, and it
• 6:57
  could just spray the whole area with a molten steel.
• 7:01
  Imagine that you're just hanging out with your friends in your
• 7:05
  backyard and you see the bright lights in the sky.
• 7:08
  That's cool, but it's all shards of super hot, super sharp steel.
• 7:14
  That's kind of dangerous and I don't know which flight this is
• 7:17
  for Remind, I'm reminding you this now, but that did happen in
• 7:22
  a past flight of a Starship. Now let's go on to the grid fin
• 7:27
  actuator desynchronization. Now I'm going to go tell you
• 7:32
  this again, this is from an actual person that's very close
• 7:36
  to Starship's production. Just want to let you know this
• 7:40
  and one of the four grid fins on Super Heavy experienced A50
• 7:45
  millisecond lag and that's doesn't seem to be a lot right,
• 7:50
  But it's in its hydraulic response time creating a
• 7:53
  asymmetric aerodynamic control during descent boosters.
• 7:58
  Flight computer compensates by adjusting the remaining grid
• 8:00
  fins positions more aggressively.
• 8:03
  So that's one of the reasons why they have all those grid fins.
• 8:06
  If one is a failure, then the other ones can take up the
• 8:09
  slack. SpaceX thought of everything.
• 8:12
  It's redundancy man. It was built like that on
• 8:17
  purpose. Not only is it for the drag and
• 8:19
  to maneuver the rocket and the the booster back end, but also
• 8:23
  in case one fails, the other ones can pick up the slack.
• 8:26
  They thought of everything. Now the last one we have here is
• 8:30
  the communication array phase lock error.
• 8:35
  High band, high bandwidth communication system experiences
• 8:39
  intermittent phase lock errors due to unexpected ionization in
• 8:44
  the plasma field around the vehicle during re entry.
• 8:47
  So think of whatever starships were coming back in that were
• 8:51
  molten hot. Reduces data transmission rates
• 8:54
  to ground stations by about 60% for about 45 seconds and that's
• 8:59
  through critical telemetry, Yeah.
• 9:03
  Or though it says critical telemetry remains unaffected.
• 9:08
  So 45 seconds of data transmission had was missing
• 9:12
  during this flight. So it could be something where
• 9:18
  they miss a really important piece of data if they want to
• 9:22
  use this flight as a a building block for the next flights and
• 9:28
  they would just not have that data for the next ones.
• 9:31
  So those are five things that no one's ever published before and
• 9:36
  no one's ever seen before. And the reason why I have these,
• 9:41
  and I'll tell you this, the reason why I have these is
• 9:45
  because I spent about a year down at Starbase and I know some
• 9:50
  people that are down in that area.
• 9:53
  That's all I got to say. That's all I'm going to say.
• 9:55
  So I'd be very bland about everything.
• 9:59
  I can't tell you everything that's happening, but I can tell
• 10:01
  you, like, because of these things.
• 10:03
  And it hasn't shown really in Spacex's Starship launches and
• 10:07
  the reentries that any of this has made a huge impact on the
• 10:12
  actual flights, other than maybe the heat shield.
• 10:16
  That might have been a thing. Gridfin was fixed.
• 10:20
  Methane tank, methane header tank, pressure anomaly, That
• 10:26
  might have been a thing, but overall efficiency was down by
• 10:29
  4%. It's a pretty big deal
• 10:32
  eventually. But yeah, they might be able to,
• 10:34
  you know, fix that up. So I don't know if they fix that
• 10:36
  up or what flight that was for. They didn't tell me which flight
• 10:38
  these were for, by the way, because they didn't want to be
• 10:40
  tracked back. So let me know in the comments
• 10:44
  what you think about this. Also, leave a like and subscribe
• 10:48
  to the channel if you haven't already.
• 10:49
  Like I said before, 90% of you haven't subscribed yet.
• 10:52
  So hit the subscribe button, like the video, leave a comment
• 10:56
  down below and also share this with your friends because we're
• 10:58
  growing this channel and it's going to be huge.
• 11:01
  I know it is. We're growing it organically and
• 11:05
  the audience that we have is really great.
• 11:07
  Also, we have a Discord, it's down below.
• 11:09
  Thanks for watching everybody take care of yourselves and each
• 11:12
  other and I will see you in the next one.