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SpaceX Tower Could Take a Long Time · Elon Musk Podcast

• 0:01
  Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Elon Musk
• 0:04
  Podcast. This is a show where we discuss
• 0:07
  the critical crossroads, the shape, SpaceX, Tesla X, The
• 0:11
  Boring Company and Neuralink. I'm your host, Will Walden.
• 0:15
  Can we talk for a second about Space XS Starship in Starbase,
• 0:20
  Texas? Because they're building the
• 0:22
  most massive launch tower at Starbase.
• 0:26
  It's going to be over 400 feet tall.
• 0:29
  It'll launch and catch Starships on the Gulf of Mexico.
• 0:34
  It's going to be the wildest thing that's going to happen in
• 0:37
  the next some amount of time. We're not exactly sure yet, but
• 0:41
  let's go back in history if we can.
• 0:43
  Let's rewind a little bit in the journey to Spacex's Starbase's
• 0:48
  first launch tower, the Mechazilla, if you will, complex
• 0:52
  process. It was about 13 months from the
• 0:56
  beginning phases until they actually stacked the Starship on
• 1:01
  the launch tower. Then it took them a while to
• 1:03
  actually launch a Starship. But we're not gonna talk about
• 1:05
  the actual launch. We're gonna talk about how long
• 1:08
  it may take them to do Starships tower #2 at Starbase. 13 months
• 1:15
  for the first one. The tower began mid 2020 ish and
• 1:21
  significant process and milestones were achieved
• 1:24
  throughout 2021. So think about this, in the
• 1:28
  middle of the year, August ish, they started construction.
• 1:33
  First significant structures began to rise in 2020.
• 1:36
  So the the base of the tower started being put together.
• 1:40
  The tower assembly, the structure of the launch tower
• 1:43
  started taking shape in early of 2021.
• 1:46
  But by August, the major components, including the
• 1:50
  chopsticks. I was there for the delivery of
• 1:52
  the chopsticks. Actually, I watched the
• 1:54
  chopsticks drive down the road right past me and they're used
• 1:59
  for catching and stacking of rockets.
• 2:01
  And that's when they were installed about August 2021, I
• 2:05
  believe was August 2021 that they got all of the major
• 2:08
  components together. And then by January 2022, the
• 2:13
  tower was fully constructed and underwent various testing.
• 2:17
  You know, it was integration of the launch or the catch arms,
• 2:20
  the the lift arms, if you will, the chopsticks and other systems
• 2:24
  which actually controlled the launch systems and the tower
• 2:28
  itself, including venting and lighting and the the pneumatics
• 2:34
  to raise up the rocket when you put it on those arms.
• 2:37
  All of that was being built about early 22.
• 2:43
  The tower was fully construction and underwent numerous tests for
• 2:47
  for months, you know, integration of the towers other
• 2:50
  systems and they finally lifted a a test fully stacked rocket in
• 2:56
  February of 2022 and I believe it's February 10th of 2022.
• 3:01
  I was there in Brownsville at Starbase when they did this
• 3:06
  first lift. I went down February 14th and I
• 3:11
  got footage of it. February 10th, after they
• 3:13
  stacked it and they open up the roads again, I got some footage
• 3:15
  of it. And then this was what we all
• 3:18
  thought was going to be the first Test article that was
• 3:21
  going to launch from Starbase Ship 20 and Booster 4.
• 3:27
  So 4/20 was going to be in all right, the first rocket to
• 3:33
  launch. But that wasn't the case, so
• 3:36
  they took it all down. It was a beautiful sight.
• 3:37
  I get to see it from numerous angles.
• 3:39
  I got really close to it. It was wonderful.
• 3:42
  And Elon did a talk from there too.
• 3:44
  Now what we're going to talk about today is how much time
• 3:47
  it's going to take for them to complete Tower Two as Starbase.
• 3:52
  So now that we have a back story here, about 13 months from the
• 3:56
  initial groundwork around the first tower till the complete
• 4:02
  construction and stacking around 13 months, we're already into
• 4:08
  tower two. All of the, the major components
• 4:13
  have been delivered of the, of the core of the tower to
• 4:18
  Starbase, at least most of them as far as we know.
• 4:21
  And there could be more because they haven't shown us exactly
• 4:26
  how tall this is going to be. And they also, Elon hinted that
• 4:30
  this is going to be more complex than the first one.
• 4:32
  So we actually don't know all of the components for this yet.
• 4:35
  We know a lot of them. We know there's going to be
• 4:38
  catch arms. We know there's going to be a
• 4:40
  pneumatic system to raise and lower it.
• 4:42
  We don't know what's going to be used as the actual kind of
• 4:47
  engine to push the rocket up and down.
• 4:51
  You know, we're not exactly sure because there's more piping
• 4:54
  more, it might be actually a, a very more, a much more simple
• 5:00
  process than tower one. Because Elon said his engineers
• 5:03
  came to him and said, hey, the, the tower one, let's just kind
• 5:09
  of throw everything away and let's start over.
• 5:13
  We have this really great design which we think will be better
• 5:16
  than Tower One. So what they're doing is they're
• 5:19
  probably simplifying all of the parts.
• 5:22
  Elon has said this so many times, the best part is no part.
• 5:27
  And as an engineer myself, I'm a front end developer engineer, I
• 5:33
  know this is true. The less amount of code that I
• 5:36
  can use to get the job done, the better off the final product is.
• 5:40
  So that's exactly what they're doing here with Starbase's Tower
• 5:43
  Two. Now, a lot of us in the media
• 5:46
  here have thought that Starbase's catch tower, which
• 5:50
  was going to be tower two, we thought tower two was going to
• 5:53
  be just catching and tower one was going to be launching and
• 5:57
  stacking. But that's not the case.
• 6:00
  Elan has said Tower 2 will be for launching, catching,
• 6:04
  refurbishing, basically everything you need to do for
• 6:07
  the tower, you know, as far as the tower goes.
• 6:11
  And then of course, well, it won't be refurbishing, but you
• 6:13
  know, doing some, a little bit of Labor to get it ready for
• 6:16
  launches. But if there needs to be a
• 6:18
  really like massive refurbishing, it can go back to
• 6:23
  the production facility right down the road about a mile away.
• 6:26
  And Starbase is becoming a massive city almost.
• 6:31
  It's crazy. They're, they're building new
• 6:32
  housing down there. So the, the people that work
• 6:37
  there will have a place to live nearby because Brownsville, TX
• 6:41
  is actually about 30 minutes away.
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  And you have to drive down this crazy long highway in the middle
• 6:48
  of nowhere with no facilities, there's no gas, there's no
• 6:52
  chargers for Teslas or anything along the way.
• 6:54
  It's like 25 minutes of nothing. And then finally at the very,
• 6:58
  very, very end of this road, literally at the Gulf of Mexico,
• 7:01
  you get to Starbase. So they were, they're building
• 7:06
  these, this launch tower, the quick release, everything's
• 7:09
  going to be completely different.
• 7:11
  And the engineers at SpaceX are literally the best in the
• 7:15
  business. So when they start stacking
• 7:18
  this, we're gonna see pieces of this stacking atop of each
• 7:21
  other, of course, like a normal tower.
• 7:23
  But we'll see it simplified. And we're it's gonna be a
• 7:26
  megastructure. It's gonna be over 400 feet
• 7:28
  tall. The Starship itself is about 400
• 7:31
  feet. So if they wanna do Starship
• 7:33
  version 2, Starship version three, it has to be a massive
• 7:38
  tower down there. So it could be 450, almost 500
• 7:44
  feet tall by the end of the stack.
• 7:47
  I'm not sure. They haven't told us what
• 7:49
  they're going to how high they're going to stack this
• 7:51
  thing yet. I haven't heard anything from
• 7:53
  Elon or anybody at Starbase how tall they're going to make this
• 7:57
  thing. I've seen drafts of this
• 8:01
  blueprints that I've I've gotten behind the scenes.
• 8:03
  I can't show them to you, but somebody's shown me some, some
• 8:07
  items that I, I can't really talk about too much, but it
• 8:13
  looks massive. That's all I can say.
• 8:14
  That's all I can say. I was, I wasn't even supposed to
• 8:16
  tell you that I got those blueprints.
• 8:17
  But we're going to keep it in there because, yeah, it's, it's
• 8:22
  a fun, it's a fun thing to know. But it could be massive.
• 8:26
  The second tower could be much bigger than the first tower.
• 8:28
  And we've had hints of that from Elon.
• 8:30
  He said, yeah, it's going to be bigger.
• 8:32
  We but we don't know exactly how big it's going to be, right.
• 8:34
  We can guess. All we can do right now is guess
• 8:37
  because the components that they have now stack those up and
• 8:41
  we'll have pretty similar to what we have now, probably a
• 8:44
  little bit bigger and then they might add more components in the
• 8:48
  future. So who knows?
• 8:51
  We've had, I've had a comment on my last video of somebody that
• 8:56
  said they're not gonna catch the booster until the next tower is
• 9:03
  done. Elon said the next booster will
• 9:07
  be caught at Starbase. So tower one, which you see over
• 9:12
  there, over that side, over there, that's tower one.
• 9:16
  They they want to catch it for IFT 5.
• 9:20
  And if that's the case, if they want to catch it for IFT 5 and
• 9:23
  something goes wrong, it could be months before they rebuild it
• 9:28
  and they're not going to be ready for IFT 6 or tower two
• 9:31
  isn't going to be ready for IFT 6.
• 9:33
  It's going to take, if they do a similar strategy to the first
• 9:39
  one, which I think they're gonna have a streamlined process.
• 9:42
  So I don't think it's gonna take 13 months this time.
• 9:44
  It may because it might be more complex but simpler, if that
• 9:47
  makes sense. Like a much more complex
• 9:50
  structure, but with simpler hardware and simpler piping and
• 9:57
  electronics and stuff. So it it could be just the, the
• 10:01
  build of a thing is simpler, but it could take preparation and
• 10:05
  could take months, almost a year to get this thing completed.
• 10:09
  So if they do catch it, if they go for it on IF T5 and Kathy
• 10:13
  leaders has said we're not sure yet, but then Elon came out on
• 10:18
  Twitter or on X saying we're going to catch it on IF for IFT
• 10:23
  5. So it's all still up in the air.
• 10:26
  If they run the numbers and they think they can do it and it
• 10:28
  looks good during the flight, they'll probably do it for IFT
• 10:32
  5. Also, Elon's the biggest hype
• 10:36
  man. So we all know that Elon is up
• 10:39
  in his head thinking we can figure it out.
• 10:41
  Like, why don't we? Why can't we figure this out?
• 10:44
  And for him, that's how he thinks.
• 10:46
  He doesn't think in absolutes. He thinks of what happens if we
• 10:52
  don't do it. Well, then we failed.
• 10:55
  You know what? Why can't we do it?
• 10:57
  That's how he thinks. Like, why can't we?
• 11:00
  He never thinks like, oh, there's all these roadblocks in
• 11:02
  the way. He doesn't think like that, and
• 11:04
  that's why he's so successful. It's not about the roadblocks.
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  It's not about the things that the engineers and typical
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  engineering, typical engineers put up roadblocks to themselves.
• 11:15
  Well, these systems work. So we can't go around these
• 11:18
  systems and build something new. We can't innovate 'cause our
• 11:21
  systems work. Why do you think ula and Blue
• 11:25
  Origin are so mad at SpaceX because that's how they think.
• 11:30
  They're boring. You know it they're they're they
• 11:34
  think like strict guidelines. They have strict guidelines.
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  SpaceX, Elon especially goes, what are these strict
• 11:43
  guidelines? OK, engineering guidelines
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  definitely have a purpose. If you don't have these strict
• 11:49
  guidelines, then things go wrong.
• 11:52
  But if those strict guidelines get in the way of progress, get
• 11:56
  rid of those guidelines, throw them out the window and move
• 11:59
  forward. So this next tower, the
• 12:02
  engineers were like, we're throwing all this stuff out of
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  the window that we did for IFT or for the tower one, and we're
• 12:08
  gonna build our dream tower. We're gonna build an engineering
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  marvel that's going to put us so far ahead of ula Blue Origin,
• 12:22
  basically the only other heavy lift rockets out there that
• 12:26
  nobody can compete for a very long time.
• 12:29
  Modern marvel. That's what this thing is.
• 12:31
  It's going to be a modern marvel.
• 12:32
  It's going to be an engineering feat that no one's seen before.
• 12:37
  The SLS tower, massive. And the cool.
• 12:41
  You know what's cool about the SLS tower too?
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  It moves the whole rocket like it.
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  It moves it incredibly slow. The crawler moves a giant 300
• 12:52
  some odd foot tall rocket from the production facility from the
• 12:56
  high Bay all the way to the launch site.
• 13:00
  SpaceX doesn't do that. They take the booster and the
• 13:03
  ship separately. They raise them up with the
• 13:05
  arms, they stack them on top of each other and then they're
• 13:07
  ready. Of course, there's things in
• 13:09
  between like they're not just ready.
• 13:10
  They have to, you know, do some testing or whatever, but they
• 13:15
  they don't drive it down the road all put together, which is
• 13:18
  a smart thing to do. You know, you don't need a
• 13:21
  massive tower. Plus they only have the little
• 13:22
  Rd. They have like A2 lane Rd. to
• 13:24
  get down and they're like, how do we do this?
• 13:27
  And their rocket is as big as a road is A2 lane Rd.
• 13:30
  It's like 30 feet wide. The thing is massive.
• 13:33
  So they couldn't do that. There were there were
• 13:36
  constraints for them to build here.
• 13:39
  So they had to build what you know, the basically like a a is
• 13:44
  a barge, like a, a land barge basically to move this thing
• 13:48
  down or they they hired one or they rent one or whatever.
• 13:51
  So, and then they finally have their own.
• 13:53
  So The funny thing about this next tower is that we don't
• 13:59
  really know what it's gonna look like.
• 14:01
  We know actually, we, we know one thing, Elon, Elon has said
• 14:04
  this. The the arms are going to be a
• 14:07
  little bit smaller. They're gonna be just big enough
• 14:10
  for the rocket or the booster, I should say, or the rocket too,
• 14:15
  to be caught on. So the rapid reusability of the
• 14:20
  booster and the rocket itself, the Starship, it, we may start
• 14:26
  to see that happen really soon. And the reason why we need this
• 14:32
  is because SpaceX wants to go to Mars eventually.
• 14:37
  But the first step is to get to the moon.
• 14:40
  Artemis 3, they'll be sending people to the moon.
• 14:43
  SpaceX needs to refuel Starship numerous times.
• 14:47
  And the only way they can do that is to catch the boosters,
• 14:50
  refurbish them, you know, send up another Starship.
• 14:54
  They could have a fleet of 50 boosters in 50 starships or
• 14:59
  whatever you know, or 20 Starship or whatever, you know,
• 15:02
  it depends on the ratio there. But could they just have 4
• 15:07
  boosters that work really well? It's just continuously launch
• 15:11
  land, launch land, launch land and send up 10 starships to to
• 15:17
  the refuelling station. That's a possibility.
• 15:21
  All they have to do is stack them up.
• 15:24
  It would take, especially for the Artemis program, it would
• 15:26
  take them about a week to do all the launches.
• 15:29
  I think 7 days to a week or something, somewhere somewhere
• 15:32
  around 7-7 days. I think the calculations were
• 15:35
  that SpaceX could possibly get all of the boosters and all of
• 15:40
  the Starship fueling Starships into orbit, the tankers, and
• 15:46
  also they need the tankers. They need to test the tankers at
• 15:48
  Starbase before they launch them from KSC.
• 15:52
  So we're probably not gonna see the tower at Kennedy Space
• 15:56
  Center be built until after tower two at Starbase is
• 16:01
  completely finished and tested rigorously with different
• 16:05
  variations of starships, because they need to know that it works.
• 16:10
  You know, they could probably start it and realize that the
• 16:13
  design works really well, and then they can build it over at
• 16:18
  Kennedy Space Center. They'll go through all the
• 16:19
  testing, make sure everything is great, and then they'll start
• 16:22
  building over a Kennedy Space Center.
• 16:24
  But I'm guessing tower two. I mean, tower one was 13 months
• 16:29
  until full stack around 13 months from 2020, like mid 2020
• 16:34
  to February 2022. That's a long time.
• 16:37
  So somebody said they're not gonna catch the the booster
• 16:41
  until tower two. Yeah, if you want to wait a
• 16:45
  year, you know, I have T6. No, they're not gonna wait a
• 16:49
  year for IFT 6, but there will only be a few launch attempts
• 16:52
  left in this year at Starbase. So there's a possibility they
• 16:57
  continue to launch from Starbase in the beginning of next year.
• 17:00
  They also continue to build the the tower two.
• 17:05
  They'll refine tower one because they're gonna need both towers,
• 17:08
  You know, they're gonna need both towers to continue testing.
• 17:11
  So one of them will probably primarily before catching tower
• 17:16
  two, I think is going to be more of a catch tower or more
• 17:19
  something that they can catch with because that's going to be
• 17:21
  their final design Tower one, they could probably catch with
• 17:25
  that too. I'm not 100% sure.
• 17:26
  I'm not. So that's that's where I differ
• 17:28
  from a lot of Youtubers out there is that like, I'm not 100%
• 17:32
  sure about this stuff. And people that say that they're
• 17:35
  sure about this stuff are full of crap.
• 17:38
  Like they have some data, right? But like we know everybody
• 17:43
  that's, you know, that's been right.
• 17:44
  Eric Berger is like the only dude you can trust 100% Think
• 17:48
  about Eric. So what I what I do with my
• 17:52
  timelines is like, what does Elon say?
• 17:54
  And then what does Eric say? And then it's somewhere near
• 17:58
  what Eric says is when things actually happen.
• 18:02
  Elon is very he's a hype man and he wants stuff done as fast as
• 18:07
  possible. His timelines are ridiculous.
• 18:09
  Like if everybody works as hard as Elon, it would be done by
• 18:13
  now. But then you get Eric Berger in
• 18:16
  the process and he knows engineering, you know, he knows
• 18:18
  what's up. So I kind of look at both of
• 18:21
  those numbers. Elon says it'll fly in four
• 18:24
  weeks. Eric says 8 weeks, probably 7
• 18:27
  weeks. You know, so we're around there.
• 18:29
  So the tower, the second tower probably be done in a year
• 18:35
  somewhere around there just because the first one, unless
• 18:37
  it's massively more complex or they run into something with
• 18:41
  with, you know, building these things out, fabricating
• 18:44
  something. It could take longer, but
• 18:47
  somewhere between somewhere in a year before the actual tower is
• 18:51
  completely constructed. So next year, like mid next
• 18:55
  year, maybe, maybe first four months of next year would be a
• 19:00
  good estimate for this. So let me know in the comments
• 19:05
  down below. And thank you for watching this.
• 19:07
  I really do appreciate you and please take a second.
• 19:11
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• 19:13
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• 19:18
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• 19:21
  just feel like, hey, I just want to listen and watch, just leave
• 19:25
  a rocket emoji down below. But I want to know what
• 19:28
  everybody else thinks. Like when will the tower
• 19:30
  actually be built? Let me know in the comments down
• 19:32
  below what you think and give me a reason if you have one,
• 19:35
  because I know there's information out there.
• 19:39
  And the information I've sifted through, most of it is like it's
• 19:45
  there. You know, the information's out
• 19:47
  there, but there's not a lot of like complete information out
• 19:53
  there. But I can tell you what the
• 19:57
  design I saw of the tower and it was as far as I know was an
• 20:02
  official design. It looks incredible and it looks
• 20:06
  like. There could be, let's just say
• 20:12
  more than meets the eye. That's all I could say.
• 20:17
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