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Starship Moon Pivot and Raptor 3 Engines · Elon Musk Podcast

• 0:00
  Welcome back to the Deep Dive and today, wow, we have a
• 0:03
  massive stack of updates on the Starship program.
• 0:07
  It really feels like like the company has just fundamentally
• 0:10
  changed gears. It really does.
• 0:12
  We're not just watching big rockets explode anymore, are we?
• 0:15
  No, not at all. It's a completely different
• 0:17
  phase. It feels less about the
• 0:20
  spectacle, you know, the big fireball, and more about the the
• 0:25
  ruthlessness of the engineering. Ruthlessness.
• 0:28
  That is the perfect word for it, right?
• 0:30
  It is. The pace has shifted from let's
• 0:32
  see what happens to something more like we need to make this
• 0:35
  boring. And we have ton of data today
• 0:37
  covering what, 4 critical pillars, Yeah. 4 big ones.
• 0:41
  The survival testing of Booster 19.
• 0:44
  A pretty physics defying update to the Raptor engines.
• 0:46
  A really aggressive corporate acquisition.
• 0:49
  Oh yeah, we have to get to that one.
• 0:50
  And a strategic pivot that basically changes the road map
• 0:53
  from Mars direct to Moon first. That moon pivot is the one that
• 0:56
  really got me because, you know, the goal is Mars.
• 0:58
  It's on all the T. Shirt.
• 0:59
  It always has been. But we're going to find out why
• 1:02
  maybe, just maybe, taking a detour to the moon is the only
• 1:06
  way to make Mars happen in our lifetime.
• 1:08
  Exactly. And that's the mission for this
• 1:11
  deep dive to connect the technical updates, you know, the
• 1:14
  hardware. The nuts and bolts.
• 1:16
  To the bigger strategy, the dream of making us multi
• 1:19
  planetary. OK, so let's get into it.
• 1:21
  Let's start with the big one, the heavy hitter booster 19 the.
• 1:25
  Juggernaut. Yeah, the sources are calling it
• 1:27
  a juggernaut, but to me, I mean, it looks just like the others.
• 1:31
  It's a big shiny grain silo. What's so different here?
• 1:34
  Well, it's all about what's under the skin.
• 1:36
  Booster 19 is what the sources are calling a version three
• 1:39
  prototype. So not just a small tweet.
• 1:41
  No, this is a structural overhaul and to get why that
• 1:45
  matters, you have to look at what happened to its
• 1:46
  predecessor, Booster 18. Right, Booster 18, that one,
• 1:51
  that one didn't have a great day.
• 1:52
  To put it my wildly it arrived at the Massey test site, which
• 1:55
  is basically their torture chamber for these things, and it
• 1:58
  ruptured almost immediately. So it didn't even get into the
• 2:00
  real testing. It didn't even make it deep into
• 2:03
  the campaign. It failed structurally before
• 2:05
  the real pressure was even on. Wow.
• 2:08
  A day one failure that's a nightmare for any engineering
• 2:10
  team. It is so you can imagine when
• 2:12
  Booster 19 rolled out, they were not taking any chances.
• 2:16
  They had to prove that this version 3 design fixed whatever
• 2:20
  fatal flaw killed Booster 18. So they just threw everything
• 2:24
  at. Me everything.
• 2:24
  The sources described the testing regime as nothing short
• 2:28
  of an impossible test run. Impossible test run.
• 2:31
  I love that I was reading the logs on the frosty campaign.
• 2:34
  It just sounds miserable for a piece of metal.
• 2:37
  Frosty is an understatement. They're running tests daily.
• 2:40
  We're talking cryo tests where they load it with freezing cold
• 2:43
  propellant. And that stuff is what, hundreds
• 2:45
  of degrees below 0? Oh yeah.
• 2:47
  Liquid oxygen, liquid methane. When you pump that into a steel
• 2:50
  tank, the metal shrinks. It gets brittle.
• 2:52
  It wants to crack. And then right after freezing
• 2:55
  it's solid. They do the opposite.
• 2:57
  Right. They hit it with ambient
• 2:58
  pressure tests. They fill it with gas at normal
• 3:01
  temperatures to check for leaks. So you're freezing it, then
• 3:04
  warming it, banding and contracting this giant structure
• 3:08
  over and over again. That's thermal shock.
• 3:10
  It should be creating micro fractures all over the place.
• 3:12
  It should be. And then there was this one
• 3:14
  moment. A photographer named Jordan
• 3:16
  caught it on February 6th. The depressing.
• 3:19
  Oh I saw the pictures. The description was just wild.
• 3:22
  The rapid depressurization event, it's where they simulate
• 3:26
  A catastrophic failure. They fully pressurize the tanks.
• 3:30
  We're talking millions of pounds of force pushing outwards.
• 3:33
  And then just RIP the vents open.
• 3:35
  Just like that, and the photos show these massive chunks of ice
• 3:39
  just shaking loose and falling off the booster, with these
• 3:41
  heavy vapor clouds sinking all around it.
• 3:44
  It sounds incredibly violent. It is.
• 3:46
  The air around the rocket just instantly condenses because of
• 3:49
  the cold gas. It creates this heavy sinking
• 3:52
  fog. Visually it's stunning.
• 3:54
  But from an engineering standpoint.
• 3:56
  Even more impressive, usually when you stress a new airframe
• 3:59
  this hard, especially after the last one failed so badly, you
• 4:03
  expect to see something. A sensor trips, you see a crack,
• 4:06
  something. And with Booster 19.
• 4:08
  The word used in the report was unimpressed.
• 4:11
  The booster was unimpressed. It just marched through these
• 4:14
  tests without a single visible issue.
• 4:16
  No leaks, no ruptures, nothing. That is an insane turn around to
• 4:20
  go from a booster that literally bursts on arrival to one that
• 4:23
  just shrugs off that kind of test.
• 4:25
  It tells you the design changes in version 3 work.
• 4:28
  The cryo campaign is done. It's already back in the mega
• 4:31
  Bay getting its engines installed.
• 4:33
  OK, but let's go back to that failure on Booster 18.
• 4:36
  You said it ruptured. Why?
• 4:38
  What was the actual point of failure?
• 4:40
  So this leads us right into our second pillar vertical
• 4:43
  integration. The failure of 18 wasn't
• 4:45
  actually the main tank design, it was a COPV rupture.
• 4:48
  COPV OK, stop. We need to explain that because
• 4:51
  it sounds like super generic aerospace jargon, but what these
• 4:55
  things are is kind of terrifying.
• 4:57
  They really are. COPD stands for Composite
• 5:00
  Overwrapped Pressure Vessel. So think of like a high pressure
• 5:03
  scuba tank, but instead of just steel, it's wrapped in layers
• 5:07
  and layers of carbon fiber. They hold gases like helium or
• 5:11
  nitrogen at thousands of PSI. So they're basically controlled
• 5:15
  bombs strapped to the inside of the rocket.
• 5:17
  Effectively, yes, and if one of those let's go, it releases an
• 5:22
  enormous amount of energy, it can easily take out the whole
• 5:25
  stage, which is probably what happened with Booster 18.
• 5:27
  So SpaceX bought these tanks from an outside supplier.
• 5:32
  The part fails. The normal corporate playbook is
• 5:34
  you call the supplier, you yell, you demand a refund.
• 5:36
  Maybe you sue them, or you find a new vendor and then you wait
• 5:40
  six months for them to spin up and build you a new prototype.
• 5:43
  But this is SpaceX. So their solution wasn't to ask
• 5:45
  for a fix, their solution was to buy the company.
• 5:48
  Wait, they actually bought the supplier?
• 5:50
  Yep. They acquired the aerospace
• 5:52
  subsidiary of a company called Hexagon Puris ASA for $15
• 5:56
  million. This was the company making
• 5:59
  those exact cylinders. That is the ultimate I'll do it
• 6:01
  myself move. It's not by the part, it's by
• 6:04
  the factory. It's classic vertical
• 6:06
  integration and it makes perfect sense.
• 6:08
  First, you just eliminate all the communication lag.
• 6:11
  No more waiting for emails. Exactly.
• 6:13
  You don't have SpaceX engineers emailing some external vendor
• 6:17
  about a valve fitting and waiting three days for a reply.
• 6:20
  Those engineers are now in the same building.
• 6:22
  They're on the internal Slack. Right, the per my last e-mail
• 6:25
  delay is gone. Gone.
• 6:27
  But more importantly, it lets you customize everything.
• 6:31
  Before Hexagon was making these cylinders for general aerospace,
• 6:34
  you know, satellites, maybe other rockets.
• 6:36
  They were kind of off the shelf. They know.
• 6:38
  Now they're making them specifically for Starship.
• 6:41
  They can change the carbon fiber weave to handle the exact
• 6:44
  thermal stresses of a Starship launch.
• 6:46
  They're not stuck with what's in a catalog.
• 6:48
  That shows just how serious they are about quality control, the
• 6:51
  sources hinted that may be previous issues were just, you
• 6:53
  know, ground handling mistakes or something lost in translation
• 6:56
  and by. Bringing it in house, they
• 6:58
  control everything. If a faulty part is holding up a
• 7:01
  multi billion dollar program, well spending 15,000,000 to own
• 7:05
  the solution is actually pretty cheap.
• 7:07
  It's an. Investment in speed And Speaking
• 7:10
  of speed and power, let's shift to the engines, the shiny new
• 7:13
  toys, the. Raptor threes, yes.
• 7:16
  The reports say SpaceX just produced its 100th Raptor 3.
• 7:20
  I think it was engine #1O2 spotted down at McGregor and.
• 7:23
  This is where the engineering nerds, myself included, start to
• 7:26
  get really excited. Well, count.
• 7:27
  Me in because the stats on Raptor 3 versus Raptor 2, they
• 7:31
  just look impossible on paper. It's smaller, it's lighter, but
• 7:35
  it's way more powerful. How does that even work?
• 7:38
  It's a. Total paradox.
• 7:39
  OK, let's run the numbers. Raptor 2 was an incredible
• 7:42
  engine, pushing around 230 metric tons of force.
• 7:45
  A workhorse. But to hold a workhorse Raptor
• 7:48
  3, it's hitting about 280 metric puns.
• 7:50
  That's a 22% jump in raw power. Do they?
• 7:53
  Just turn up the dial. How do you get that in a?
• 7:55
  Way yeah, they crank the chamber pressure they went from 300 bar
• 7:59
  in Raptor 2 up to 330 bar in Raptor 3.
• 8:01
  Some tests are even hitting 350. That's.
• 8:03
  Just I can't even imagine that kind of pressure.
• 8:05
  It's like having an elephant stand on your gum, but the
• 8:07
  elephant is also on fire. That's.
• 8:09
  A pretty good analogy. Now, usually when you pump that
• 8:12
  much more fuel and pressure through an engine, you just
• 8:14
  destroy your efficiency, yeah. Dumping fuel for raw power like
• 8:17
  a drag racer. And the mass flow, which is the
• 8:20
  amount of fuel rushing through it did go up.
• 8:22
  It went from about 1600 kilograms per second to almost
• 8:25
  2000. So it.
• 8:26
  Is guzzling more fuel it? Is but, and this is the really
• 8:30
  crazy insight, the specific impulse or ISP which is the
• 8:35
  efficiency metric also went up it.
• 8:37
  Got more efficient? Yes.
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  It went from about 330 seconds to 350 seconds.
• 8:42
  That's a 5% increase in efficiency.
• 8:44
  Hold on. It's burning more fuel per
• 8:46
  second, but it's getting more thrust.
• 8:48
  For every drop of fuel, it burns you.
• 8:50
  Got it. Despite that higher flow rate,
• 8:52
  it actually burns about 4% less fuel for every ton of push it
• 8:56
  generates. It's leaner and meaner.
• 8:57
  How is that? Possible more power and better
• 9:00
  mileage at the same time it comes.
• 9:01
  Down to how they built it. If you look at a picture of a
• 9:04
  Raptor 2 engine, it's just this tangled mess of plumbing.
• 9:07
  Oh yeah. It looks like the back of a
• 9:09
  washing machine exploded. Tubes and wires everywhere.
• 9:12
  Total chaos. Now look at Raptor 3.
• 9:14
  It looks naked. It looks like 1 sleek piece of
• 9:17
  metal. OK, yeah.
• 9:18
  Where do? All the pipes go they're.
• 9:20
  Inside the walls of the engine, they're using this advanced 3D
• 9:23
  printing to print the cooling channels and the manifolds
• 9:26
  directly into the structure so. Instead of welding a tube onto
• 9:30
  the outside, the tube is now a tunnel running through the metal
• 9:34
  skin. Exactly.
• 9:35
  And because of that one change, they got a roughly 75% reduction
• 9:40
  in joints 70. 5% fewer joints, yeah, OK.
• 9:43
  That is the killer stat for me, right?
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  Think about the plumbing in your house.
• 9:47
  Where does it leak? Always.
• 9:48
  At the connection, the elbow, the valve.
• 9:50
  Never in the middle of a straight pipe, it's always at
• 9:52
  the joint. By basically printing the system
• 9:55
  as one piece, they just deleted 75% of the potential failure
• 9:59
  points and I'm. Guessing fewer joints also means
• 10:01
  less weight, A huge. Weight reduction Raptor 2 was
• 10:04
  about 1630 kilograms. Raptor 3 is down to 1525.
• 10:10
  They shaved over 100 kilos off the engine Which?
• 10:13
  Doesn't sound like a lot until you remember there are 30, three
• 10:15
  of them on the booster. Exactly. 100 kilos times 33
• 10:19
  engines is 3.3 metric tons. That's 3.3 tons of free payload
• 10:25
  capacity you just created. That's an entire pickup truck
• 10:28
  full of supplies you can now take to orbit just from making
• 10:31
  the engine lighter. That's.
• 10:33
  Incredible. But the engineering is just the
• 10:35
  tool, right? The big question is where are we
• 10:38
  pointing this thing? And that brings us to the
• 10:40
  biggest strategic shift in this whole update, the moon pivot
• 10:45
  this. One has caused was a lot of
• 10:46
  waves online. For years Elon Musk has been
• 10:49
  laser focused on Mars. Mars city occupy Mars.
• 10:53
  It's a whole brand. It is, but recently all the
• 10:56
  rhetoric has shifted. The new focus is a
• 10:58
  self-sustaining lunar base before the Mars City.
• 11:01
  And I could. Already hear the Internet
• 11:02
  screaming? Mars is cancelled, but that's
• 11:05
  not really what's happening, is it?
• 11:06
  No. Not at all.
• 11:07
  Mars is not cancelled, but the path to Mars has changed because
• 11:10
  of a really brutal reality of orbital mechanics.
• 11:12
  It's called the alignment window, right?
• 11:14
  The. Home and transfer window
• 11:15
  exactly. Earth and Mars, they're like 2
• 11:17
  runners on a circular track. They only line up for an
• 11:19
  efficient throw from one to the other once every 20-6 months
• 11:22
  over. Two years.
• 11:24
  That's a long time to wait for the bunts.
• 11:26
  It's. A complete disaster for
• 11:27
  innovation. Imagine this.
• 11:30
  You launch a ship to Mars. It takes six months to get
• 11:32
  there. What if it crashes on landing or
• 11:35
  a life support seal fails? You can't just send a repair
• 11:38
  crew you. Have to wait almost two years
• 11:40
  for the planets to line up again just to try sending a fix the.
• 11:43
  Feedback loop is just agonizingly slow.
• 11:46
  It's. The iteration killer.
• 11:48
  SpaceX thrives on rapid iteration.
• 11:51
  Test, break, fix, repeat. You can't do that on a 26 month
• 11:55
  cycle. You'll be dead of old age before
• 11:57
  you get the prototype right So. Enter the moon.
• 12:00
  Enter. The moon loop.
• 12:01
  The moon is only three days away.
• 12:02
  If you refuel in orbit, you can get there and maybe 2 and you.
• 12:05
  Can go pretty much anytime you want.
• 12:07
  You can. Launch three times a week if you
• 12:08
  had the Rockets ready, so if. Something breaks on the moon,
• 12:11
  you get. The data back instantly.
• 12:13
  You fix the design, you launch the new version next week.
• 12:16
  Not in two years. That makes.
• 12:17
  Perfect sense. It's a training ground that's
• 12:19
  right in our backyard, they call.
• 12:21
  It a tech accelerator, all the stuff you need for Mars
• 12:23
  habitats, radiation shielding, water recycling, growing food.
• 12:27
  Developing that on Mars for the first time is terrifyingly
• 12:31
  risky. But.
• 12:32
  Developing it on the moon is just and inconvenienced if it
• 12:36
  fails, right? If your toilet breaks on the
• 12:38
  moon, you can abort the mission and be home in three days.
• 12:40
  If your toilet breaks on Mars, that.
• 12:42
  Is a very, very bad day. So the moon lets them perfect
• 12:46
  all the survival tech, but the sources also mention a pretty
• 12:48
  big economic angle to this off planet production.
• 12:52
  Yeah, this. Is where it starts to sound like
• 12:53
  science fiction, but the physics checks out it.
• 12:56
  Really does. If you have a base on the moon,
• 12:58
  you can start manufacturing things there.
• 13:00
  The source specifically mentioned AI satellites.
• 13:03
  Why would? You build a satellite on the
• 13:04
  moon. Gravity.
• 13:05
  The moon has 1/6 of Earth's gravity and basically no
• 13:09
  atmosphere. Launching from Earth is hard.
• 13:12
  You're fighting thick air and a deep gravity well.
• 13:15
  It's why rockets are 90% fuel. But.
• 13:17
  On the moon on. The moon you might not even need
• 13:20
  a big rocket for cargo you could use a mast driver, which.
• 13:24
  Is essentially a giant electromagnetic rail gun.
• 13:26
  That's it. You use solar powered rails to
• 13:29
  just shoot the finished satellite into orbit or even
• 13:31
  back towards Earth. You're not burning tons of
• 13:33
  chemical fuel, the potential output is immense.
• 13:36
  So by. Going to the moon first.
• 13:39
  They aren't giving up on Mars. They're building the factory
• 13:42
  that builds the technology to get to Mars.
• 13:44
  Precisely building the moon base builds the capital and the tech
• 13:48
  to make that Mars timeline, which is still the twenty 30s,
• 13:52
  actually feasible. Instead of just a pipe dream.
• 13:55
  It turns a crusade into a supply chain supply.
• 13:57
  Chain. Yeah, that sounds boring.
• 13:59
  But boring is how you actually get big things done.
• 14:01
  It is. And that really brings us full
• 14:03
  circle. Look at what we've covered.
• 14:05
  We have a frost covered Juggernaut Booster 19 that
• 14:08
  survived these impossible tests because of a better design we
• 14:12
  have. Them literally buying a company
• 14:13
  just to stop leaks and get better quality control on one
• 14:16
  component we. Have a lighter, stronger joint
• 14:19
  free engine in Raptor 3 that basically prints its own veins
• 14:22
  to be more efficient and. It all culminates in this
• 14:25
  strategic pivot to the Moon to speed up the whole development
• 14:28
  cycle by escaping that 26 month Mars window.
• 14:31
  It's a. Lot of moving parts, but they
• 14:32
  are all finally moving in the same direction.
• 14:35
  That's. The big take away The So what
• 14:38
  for someone listening to this I. Think it redefines what we think
• 14:41
  of as progress in space. Progress isn't just planting a
• 14:45
  flag anymore. Progress is building a
• 14:47
  logistical system. It's factories, reusable
• 14:50
  engines, rapid transit. It's about making space travel
• 14:54
  mundane. Mundane.
• 14:55
  Is good mundane means reliable? Mundane means maybe I can buy a
• 14:59
  ticket one day. Exactly but.
• 15:01
  Before we sign off, I want to leave you with one last thought.
• 15:04
  It came from some notes on the Crew 12 mission, and it really
• 15:06
  stuck with me. We talked about all this amazing
• 15:08
  hardware, but the human element has these bizarre challenges we
• 15:11
  haven't even solved. Oh, this?
• 15:12
  Is a good one the medical supply problem, right?
• 15:15
  As we look at these long missions to Mars or even long
• 15:18
  stays on the Moon, think about this.
• 15:21
  We can't even take IV fluids to Mars because.
• 15:23
  They expire. Exactly.
• 15:25
  Saline bags, antibiotics, all of it has a shelf life of about two
• 15:29
  years. A round trip to Mars could
• 15:32
  easily take longer than that. So the next Great frontier isn't
• 15:35
  just a bigger rocket, it's. Space Pharmacy.
• 15:37
  It's. Figuring out how to manufacture
• 15:39
  medicine from scratch using recycled water in 0 gravity.
• 15:44
  Because if you get a simple infection on day 800 of the
• 15:46
  mission, the medicine you packed on earth might just be useless.
• 15:50
  Chalk dust it. Really just highlights the
• 15:52
  incredible fragility of keeping humans alive away from Earth.
• 15:56
  The hardware is hard, but keeping the squishy people
• 15:59
  insight it alive, that's the real challenge it sure.
• 16:01
  Is, but that is a deep dive for another day.
• 16:03
  Thanks for listening. Stay curious and we'll see you
• 16:05
  on the next one.