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Elon Musk Weekly News Update: Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and More · Elon Musk Podcast

0:01
Hey everybody, welcome back to the Elon Musk Podcast.
0:05
This is a show where we discuss the critical crossroads that
0:08
shape SpaceX, Tesla X, The Boring Company, and Neuralink.
0:13
And I'm your host. Will Walden Elon Musk has openly
0:17
discussed his prescriptions for ketamine, asserting its positive
0:20
impact on his mental health and consequently its benefits for
0:25
his company's investors. And Musk emphasized the
0:29
importance of consistent performance for his investors,
0:32
suggesting that his medication plays a crucial role in
0:36
maintaining his effectiveness. Now this all happened because of
0:40
a conversation with Don Lemon, formerly of CNN.
0:43
Musk explained that his intermittent use of ketamine
0:47
helps him manage what he terms chemical tides that can lead to
0:51
depression like symptoms, and this admission came during a
0:54
YouTube streamed interview highlighting Musk's transparency
0:57
about his mental health management strategies recently
1:01
Now, concerns about Musk's drug use were previously reported by
1:05
the Wall Street Journal studying apprehensions among executives
1:09
at Tesla and SpaceX, and Musk, however, counter these claims by
1:12
highlighting his clean drug test records and advocated for the
1:16
continuation of his current regimen on X.
1:20
Now, following this interview with Lemon, Musk's media company
1:23
X, formerly Twitter, decided to terminate a planned
1:26
collaboration with Lemon and this decision abruptly ended
1:29
what was intended to be the launch of Lemon's new talk show
1:33
on X. The interview, which lasted just
1:36
over an hour, saw Musk had Lemon engaging discussions on a
1:39
variety of topics, including immigration, politics, content,
1:43
moderation on social media, and Musk's personal experiences with
1:47
depression and also ketamine use.
1:50
Now, Musk went on to say that his social media platform is
1:56
competitive in the environment, similar to player versus player
1:59
video games, suggesting it's a space for robust engagement and
2:03
debates between people. He related this to his own use
2:06
of the platform for various types of posts, from humor and
2:09
memes to significant discussions about world politics.
2:13
And during the interview, Musk revealed his routine of late
2:16
night posting on X, stating he's almost always sober.
2:20
During these sessions, touched upon his lifestyle choices,
2:23
including abstaining from alcohol and his prescribed use
2:25
of ketamine for managing his depressive states.
2:28
While he posts now. Most candid discussion about
2:31
ketamine with Lemon raised some questions about privacy and
2:34
medical ethics as he noted the personal nature of inquiries
2:37
into one's medical prescriptions.
2:39
And despite this, he provided insight into how ketamine helps
2:42
him combat periods of negative mental health.
2:46
And on a separate note, Musk mentioned an unplanned meeting
2:49
with former President Donald Trump in Florida.
2:51
During the interview, describing it as a chance encounter, he
2:56
recounted that the meeting was dominated by Trump's
2:58
conversation without any significant topics discussed.
3:02
Musk has remained neutral during political endorsements,
3:06
specifically noting his current stance of not supporting Joe
3:09
Biden while keeping open the possibility of endorsing a
3:12
candidate. Later in the electoral process
3:15
and addressing the contentious issue of immigration and the
3:18
Great Replacement Theory, Musk clarified his disapproval of the
3:22
racist ideology. However, he speculated on the
3:25
potential impact of undocumented immigrants on the US elections
3:29
through their inclusion in the census count.
3:31
Despite the lack of evidence supporting this claim now, Lemon
3:35
countered Musk's immigration argument by pointing out that
3:37
undocumented immigrants are ineligible to vote, thereby
3:40
minimizing their direct influence on election outcomes.
3:44
Musk's theory hinges on the increased congressional
3:46
representation that could theoretically result from higher
3:50
population counts in states with large immigration populations at
3:54
The interview eliminated Musk's multifaceted personality, from
3:58
his innovative leadership in technology and space exploration
4:01
with SpaceX to his personal health management and political
4:04
viewpoints. And Musk's openness about his
4:07
Academy news shows that he's kind of into his own well-being
4:14
and taking care of himself now. Musk engagement with political
4:19
and social issues, though, alongside his leadership roles,
4:23
paints a picture of the CEO deeply involved in contemporary
4:27
debates, extending his influence beyond the realms of business
4:31
and technology. And the dialogue between Musk
4:34
and Lemon, especially on topics like mental health and substance
4:37
use, contributes to broader discussions about the
4:40
responsibilities and the lifestyles of high.
4:42
Profile corporate leaders. Musk's perspectives offer kind
4:46
of a glimpse into the challenges and considerations of leading
4:50
major technological ventures, and the termination of the
4:54
partnership between X and Don Lemon.
4:56
Post interview signals the unpredictable nature of Musk's
5:00
decisions for his businesses, and he sometimes makes swift
5:05
decisions based on interactions, evolving circumstances, and
5:10
possibly even emotions. Now, Musk personal health
5:15
disclosures and his interactions with meaty figures and political
5:19
personalities encapsulates the complexities of managing a
5:22
public persona while steering some of the most innovative
5:25
companies in the world. And his own disclosure of his
5:30
Academy news and his perceived benefits for his mental health
5:32
and work performance has sparked discussions on his personal
5:36
well-being and his professional obligations.
5:40
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Today's episode will feature one of my favorite interviews from a
7:30
few years ago. It's from a company called
7:32
Moonmark and the purpose of this company is to send remote
7:36
control cars and have a competition, a race on the lunar
7:41
surface. Enjoy.
7:43
Because we're we're here to share the information.
7:45
So Munmarg is a competition between high school teams across
7:51
the country and we are already getting a lot of interest from
7:55
across the world and students grades nine through 12 are going
8:00
to compete to become the final two teams that create built to
8:06
space worthy racers. They're not Rovers, they're
8:10
racers and they will go up on the intuitive machines known as
8:14
Sealander, which is going up October 11th of 2021.
8:21
Very, very cool. Yeah, like I'm said in chat, he
8:25
said. Oh, high schools, yeah.
8:26
Is it only open to high school people or can people outside of
8:30
high school older than high school, like college teams or
8:32
something like that? And or.
8:34
So about the the actual teams that are going to build these
8:38
racers are going to be high school students.
8:42
We are reaching out to those, like I say, in grades nine
8:45
through 12. However, the purpose is for
8:49
them, they're to, you know, if you get to, if you get to build
8:52
something, it's going to land on the moon and race on the moon.
8:55
There's a little bit of, you know, skin you got to put in the
8:57
game, right, or in the sport. And in this particular case, the
9:03
tuition, so to speak, is that they have to reach out and they
9:06
have to engage people across the globe and and what they're
9:10
doing, how they're doing it and why they're doing it.
9:14
And so there's a lot of opportunity for people of all
9:18
ages to engage with the students as they go through this process.
9:23
Now Moon, what Moon Mark is going to do is to capture the
9:27
content and the adventures of these young people and share it
9:32
in across television, digital streaming.
9:37
But you know our purpose is really to share what is about to
9:40
help and if you might kind through the eyes of these
9:43
students, meaning the accessibility of space, the
9:47
commercialization of space. So we're really excited about
9:51
this and we also right now I do want to mention we had a learner
9:55
race car design challenge that's going on.
9:58
We're working with intuitive machines.
10:01
We worked with them to develop the space specifications of what
10:07
these racers will need so that when they land on the mode,
10:11
they'll have the the, the right stuff, so to speak.
10:14
And then there those that are competing in the the design
10:19
challenge in the next few weeks actually through the end of
10:22
June, they will be able to put their own mark on those races
10:28
and we'll have a panel of judges that will judge the design, the
10:33
space worthiness and we'll also have an audience voting
10:38
worldwide. So we're pretty excited about
10:41
the the Lunar Race Bar Design Challenge.
10:43
As well, is this open to anybody around the globe or is it just
10:47
US based? No, it's open to anyone.
10:51
We we have had like a man mentioned a lot of really great
10:55
international interest so students really want to
11:00
participate and and we actually started the the design challenge
11:04
a little sooner than we anticipated and we did that
11:08
because so many young people and all all of us but mostly or
11:13
house them So and and we're looking to provide young people
11:19
and people that are interested in engaging with these young
11:22
people with something that has a really positive and exciting
11:26
focus at a time when we really need it.
11:30
Oh, very cool. So we have a.
11:32
Couple, and I do want to mention because I get this question very
11:35
often, is there a registration fee or a participation fee?
11:38
And the answer is no. You know what you have to have
11:41
is you have to have access to a computer and you have to have
11:44
access to the answer now and then.
11:46
You have to have some really cool and smart friends to get
11:49
together and and and you know, put the good stuff on the moon.
11:55
Oh cool. So we have a couple questions in
11:58
chat. What?
12:01
What is the race? What is the actual race?
12:04
Will they be racing for a target or an obstacle or what?
12:08
So is there a finish line of a great?
12:10
Question. So we we just this past week
12:15
heard from an intuitive machines as to where the the Lander is
12:20
going to touchdown and that's going to be in the the the
12:24
oceans or the store, the oceans of storms.
12:28
And so now what's going to happen is that when the Lander
12:34
is about 30 meters off the circles of the mill, it will
12:39
eject a sphere of 360° cameras. And that we don't know exactly
12:46
where that's going to land. But those cameras are #1 point
12:51
to capture the app to landing itself, which I believe will be
12:56
the first of its kind. And then that sphere of cameras
13:00
will serve as the rallying point where the the point at which we
13:04
will direct the races. So they will drive from the
13:08
Lander probably we will have some Geo about geometric
13:14
requirements along the way, but they're going to head to that
13:17
camera and they're going to turn around and they're going to come
13:19
back. Oh, wow.
13:21
OK. Yeah.
13:22
That's cool. So the actual, the actual race
13:25
track itself is still yet to be determined and there's a lot
13:29
that we won't know. I I say there's a lot of bulk
13:32
moments in this well, and there's certainly will be, no
13:35
doubt about it. It sounds challenging.
13:37
Is going to. Be where that sphere lands and
13:40
how we can line up. Yeah, sounds like a challenging
13:43
problem to solve for the racers, especially when you don't know
13:46
where that sphere is. Like, how are you going to find
13:48
the sphere? You know, you have to design a
13:51
vehicle that's going to be able to not alone, you know, go
13:54
across the lunar surface. Like, that's hard enough.
13:57
But you have to find this sphere of cameras and then you have to
14:00
then turn around and come back to the Lander.
14:03
What? That sounds incredibly
14:05
difficult. Well, it certainly does have its
14:08
challenges The the, the advantage that we have is that
14:13
the the experts that we're working with that intuitive
14:16
machines not only do they know how to build spacecraft and
14:22
launch it along with human flight.
14:25
They have years and years of experience both the NASA and and
14:29
and in commercial space. But they actually are working
14:32
with us to make sure that those erasures are space worthy.
14:37
And what we've discovered in in this process is that there are
14:41
some significant challenges and there are some things that we
14:45
we've determined that are a little bit easier than we
14:47
thought they would be. One of the things that I'm
14:50
really excited about is that we're going to be able to
14:54
perhaps accelerate some application of technology with
14:57
this project that would not we're going to be able to
15:02
accelerate, for example, communications.
15:05
Currently, the data streams or communication from the Moon and
15:11
elsewhere have a very, very specific scientific purpose.
15:15
Our purpose is to capture that race, which is going to require
15:20
much higher bandwidth or both on the Moon, on the lunar surface
15:24
and then back to Earth's. And so the companies that we are
15:28
are working with in the various communications aspects of this,
15:33
it's been clear that we are able to you know what what we one of
15:38
the outcomes of this is that we will be able to test and prove
15:43
communications on the runner's surface that will serve others
15:46
when they get there. OK, so this is a forward
15:49
thinking mission. It's not just just get the
15:51
racers of the moon race around, but it's actually to serve a
15:54
purpose for the future landing and other Rover missions in the
15:58
future, or racers even. And could we possibly see a
16:03
racing circuit like NASCAR on the moon in the future?
16:06
How cool would that be? That would be awesome.
16:10
You're you're, you're, you're talking to someone who truly,
16:13
truly enjoys motorsport and I also very much enjoy high
16:20
performance driving. And so that is a reason, because
16:24
of the of my involvement in the sport, it became clear to me
16:28
that there was really, you know, a really wonderful, you know,
16:34
analogy or analogous kind of set of disciplines that was
16:38
necessary both in in aerospace and in auto sports.
16:43
So you've got the, the teamwork that's necessary you, you've got
16:47
the physics, you've got the engineering, you've got the
16:50
timing, you've got the, the discipline and all of that and
16:54
and that belongs in, in in both of these areas and both of these
16:58
industries. And we thought that it would be
17:00
very interesting to apply those particular skills, science,
17:05
technology, engineering and arts as well as mathematics in this
17:10
competition. So not only are we, we are
17:14
forward thinking in terms of how along the way we can accelerate
17:18
technology and use of this for those that come behind us on on
17:23
the lunar surface. But also the journey along the
17:26
way, which is really, really exciting of an adventure for
17:30
these young people and and many people that they touch.
17:34
Well, that's very cool. I'm I'm glad you guys are doing
17:36
this because this is so. When I was a kid, I always
17:40
thought about, you know, having a moon colony and having
17:43
something like this, like sports on the moon.
17:45
You know, we, I had these books when I was a kid and they're all
17:47
illustrated and they're really cool.
17:50
And I would open them up and I would imagine something like
17:52
this happening, you know, and just that somebody's actually
17:56
doing this in my lifetime is insane in the in the best kind
18:01
of way, like in the happiest way that you could imagine that
18:05
there's going to be race vehicles on the moon.
18:09
Like that doesn't to me as a normal person that has nothing
18:13
to do with the engineering part of this.
18:15
And I'm I'm kind of like heading the clouds kind of person.
18:18
This is awesome and I really want to thank you for coming out
18:23
today. Now we have one last question
18:24
though. What is the winner win from this
18:30
race? Oh, that's a that's a great
18:33
question. The winner, the the two racers
18:39
that get there, OK are are both winners.
18:42
They will have gone through a a more really, really rigorous set
18:47
of qualifying rounds in order to get to the mouth.
18:51
And you know the what what they're going with the the team
18:57
that takes the checkered flag is going to get the checkered flag
19:01
and it's also going to have the the the honor of being the first
19:07
race winner on the MO. So we don't have a a cash prize
19:11
or something like that. This is much actually more of
19:16
them. He's deeper than that.
19:18
It's. Just.
19:21
They're not going to be motivated by cash.
19:23
That's that's if someone wants to.
19:24
Come and give them cash, then you know we'll we'll make it a
19:28
good scholarship. Yeah, and I'm sure somebody
19:31
might be interested in that something, you know, some sort
19:33
of sports drink or something like that might be interested,
19:35
or some sort of energy drink. May I share one more thing will
19:38
sure of what you you just shared about your your dream when you
19:43
were a kid. So when we when we looked at at
19:46
at women marketing we looked at the and and what we wanted to
19:50
achieve. Things have not occurred in like
19:54
what you experienced for many, many years and there's there's
19:59
lots of reasons for that. It's not that we haven't had
20:02
space heroes. It's not that we haven't had
20:05
incredible stories. There hasn't been a a an Apollo
20:10
moment since 19691972. OK.
20:15
Since then we we kind of let them run behind and and all of
20:19
that sort of thing. We want to create because we
20:23
can. Now we want to create an Apollo
20:26
effect for kids. We want kids to look at other
20:30
kids and say, wait a minute, if they can do that, I can do that.
20:35
And that is something that hasn't occurred for many, many
20:38
years. We can do that because yes, we
20:41
have accessibility through space technology that that civilians
20:46
haven't had before and we also have the ability through our
20:49
communications and technology to engage for worldwide.
20:53
So that's what we're going oh. That's great.
20:56
Yeah. You know, the the, the reality
21:01
of the situation is that, you know, these kind of things are
21:04
going to be happening more so in the future, you know, than what
21:07
I ever expected. Because we had, like you said,
21:09
we had the Arpella moment when we were, you know, in the 70s,
21:13
sixties and 70s and then we had the space shuttle.
21:15
We have people on the International Space Station.
21:18
We don't have anything that's like a big, big idea anymore.
21:22
And I think this is one of those big ideas where people can get
21:25
really inspired and get behind. And young people, especially the
21:29
way that you're marketing this and pushing this for young kids
21:33
to get involved with all of those amazing, amazing
21:37
techniques that they'll be using to get a racer to the freaking
21:41
moon and then race it and then race it and then maybe wind.
21:45
Who knows? I mean, if if they get one, if
21:48
they get the racer to the moon, that is huge.
21:50
That's a huge, huge deal for humanity.
21:53
Like it's not just a a huge deal for for your company or
21:57
intuitive machines or anything. Like it's a it's a huge deal for
22:00
people, and for young people in particular, to move these little
22:05
machines, you know, on the moon, like just getting in there and
22:09
having them land, That's kind. Of amazing.
22:11
That is absolutely our, our intent and we have all, since
22:17
we've been born, we have had every human on Earth has had an
22:22
experience with the moon and by and large it's been a positive
22:25
experience. And So what what we're doing
22:28
here is an intent is to, you know, a unifying experience
22:33
that's positive. And because we can, as I
22:36
mentioned, you know, communicate globally, we have the ability to
22:41
touch people in the way that that's meaningful to them and
22:45
that's that's something that we really aspire to.
22:49
That's really great. Well, I want to wrap this up for
22:52
you, Mary. Thank you so much for showing up
22:55
to the show today. And oh.
22:57
Thank you. Yeah, you're more than welcome.
22:59
And if anybody wants to check out the race, you can go to
23:02
Moon, Mark, dot, Space and get more information.
23:04
Is there any other place they can find you on the Internet,
23:09
social media, etcetera? We're we're on all all the usual
23:13
suspect places. We're on Twitter and Facebook
23:17
and LinkedIn and Instagram and check out Tiktok.
23:21
Coming up. Oh, cool.
23:23
OK. Oh, yeah.
23:24
All right. Well, thanks so much, Mary.
23:26
Appreciate it. And hopefully we will speak to
23:28
you soon. Thank you very much.
23:31
You'll appreciate being here. Have a great.
23:33
Day. Yeah, you too.
23:34
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Hey everybody, welcome back to the show.
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I'm feeling a little bit under the weather for the last few
25:28
days, so I'm going to post this really cool podcast I did a
25:35
while ago with my friend Neil Thorne, and we discuss the
25:39
Starship as a space station. It's absolutely riveting to
25:45
think about a Starship you can launch to orbit and it's
25:49
immediately a space station. It's a huge, huge rocket.
25:52
So please enjoy this conversation I had with Neil
25:55
Thorne about Spacex's Starship as a space station.
26:00
SpaceX is collaborating with NASA on an integrated low Earth
26:04
orbit architecture to provide a growing portfolio of technology
26:08
with near term Dragon evolution and concurrent Starship
26:12
development. Now this architecture includes
26:15
Starship as a transportation and in space low Earth orbit
26:19
destination element supported by Super heavy.
26:22
That's the Starship Dragon and Starlink and constituent
26:27
capabilities including crew and cargo transportation,
26:31
communications and operational and ground support.
26:34
So joining me today is Neil Thorne.
26:36
And we're going to be talking about what this means from NASA
26:40
and what SpaceX is capable of, and how this is going to change
26:45
space travel and space exploration forever, and how
26:49
this can eventually turn into a thing that SpaceX could use for
26:53
their Mars transportation, be a Starship.
26:56
But before we get into this conversation, let's take a
26:58
moment and listen to a word from our sponsors.
27:01
How you doing today, Neil? I'm doing just great.
27:03
How are you? I am doing fantastic, thank you
27:05
for asking. So the Starship going into low
27:08
Earth orbit and it seems like base X and NASA are working
27:11
together to use this as some sort of transportation hub or
27:15
some sort of space station in the near term.
27:20
And do you think that's what they're looking at here?
27:22
I don't know. It's a very vague sort of
27:24
approach that NASA's taking. They're they're not saying build
27:27
us a space station, they're just saying help us out in low Earth
27:31
orbit. Hard to say exactly what it is
27:34
they're expecting out of this. I haven't thought for ever since
27:38
the Starship became a thing that putting this huge object into
27:44
space. This the Starship.
27:46
Which One Starship has more interior volume than the space
27:49
station does right now, but you link three or four of those
27:52
together, and suddenly you've got quite a bit of space up
27:54
there to your activities. Yeah, it'll be an interesting
27:59
next few years for the Starship and for NASA, because eventually
28:03
NASA will be the orbiting the International Space Station.
28:07
What is it, 20-30? I believe 20302032 or something
28:11
somewhere around there? It always seems to be a flexible
28:14
number. Yeah, that's it always seems
28:16
like. I think they wanted to do it in
28:18
2026 at some point. Yeah.
28:20
And then they. I think it's as long as it's
28:21
useful though. They're going to keep it going,
28:23
but. Yeah, I think so too.
28:25
I think as long as the taxpayers can pay for it and as long as
28:30
the they're seeing some returns. From it.
28:32
It's such an expensive thing to run every day to keep six people
28:38
up there. It's just such an expense and
28:42
everything in there is so outdated at this point.
28:45
The technology is advancing so fast here on Earth that even
28:49
something they've they started building 6 years ago that got
28:52
sent up there two years ago is so far beyond the technology
28:56
right now that it almost becomes irrelevant.
28:59
Yeah, and SpaceX is working currently on their Starship
29:02
program. And in the next, hopefully we
29:05
can see this in the next, as Elon said, 6 to 8 weeks, another
29:09
launch of Starship. And when that happens, we'll see
29:12
if it's actually going to be a possibility or feasibility that
29:15
this will make it to orbit. And once it does make it to
29:18
orbit, these studies that SpaceX and NASA will be working
29:21
together on could become a thing.
29:23
And they have to work together to get Space XS Starship onto
29:28
the moon as well for Artemis 3. So maybe this could be part of
29:30
that because they need to dock with the SpaceX Starship in
29:34
order to get to the Moon, so. As you say, everything that they
29:39
need to do to help NASA here, they have to do for the moon as
29:43
well. So it's going to be being built
29:46
in sequence, I think. In parallel I should say.
29:49
Yeah, they're going to be using Super Heavy, which is the
29:51
Starship program, a Dragon and Starlink.
29:55
So the Dragon will more than likely be docking with it and I
29:59
think the Polaris program will be using a Dragon to dock with
30:03
the Starship. I think what the what's going to
30:05
happen is they're going to send a Starship to orbit.
30:08
They're going to get it up there.
30:09
Then they're going to send the crew of Polaris program in a
30:13
capsule Dragon capsule on a Falcon Nine and then dock with
30:16
the Starship kind of mimicking what they're going to be doing
30:19
with the Starship in the Orion capsule.
30:22
And then they're going to, they're going to go inside the
30:25
Starship and do some testing and do some science and some
30:29
experimenting, some engineering and see if it's actually
30:33
feasible to live in one for a little bit and then do some
30:36
more, some more testing inside and maybe outside of the
30:40
Starship. So I think that's what they're
30:44
thinking here. I'm not 100% sure.
30:47
But yeah, it's very vague. It really is very vague this
30:50
whole wording. I think they kept it that way,
30:52
so. I think so.
30:54
So they can't be like Starship is going to replace the
30:56
International Space Station. Exactly.
30:58
And I think that would make a lot of companies very angry.
31:02
The blue origins, the Axiom space, all these people would be
31:07
very upset at that. So I think you keep it vague.
31:10
They're going to help us out. We're going to use their
31:13
capabilities to to further our goals.
31:17
That's it. Yeah.
31:18
And maybe if goal happens to be a new space station, then it has
31:21
to be a new space station. Yeah, maybe eventually they
31:23
will. Maybe eventually they will turn
31:26
a International Space Station, turn it away, get rid of it, and
31:30
then they'll put couple starships together.
31:32
Or even 1. Starship is a there's 1000 cubic
31:36
meters estimated in interior volume of a Starship, which if
31:41
built right can hold for Earth to Earth transport 100 people
31:45
according to Elon Musk. More than likely for these kind
31:48
of missions it'll be something similar to the International
31:51
Space Station where it's about 6 people.
31:54
Maybe the Starship can hold a little bit more because the
31:56
space station has 915 cubic meters of internal space and
32:03
it's not that much different. It's 85 cubic meters of
32:06
difference. So you could put some more
32:07
supplies in the Starship, but. Yeah, it's not much, though.
32:11
The space in the space station is more compartmentalized, so
32:16
it's more usable space. Yeah, than the Starship, which
32:19
would be a more open plan, but obviously much probably much
32:24
better for people's psyches as well.
32:27
Yeah, I think so. Most of the renderings we've
32:30
seen have has been a tube it through the middle with a ladder
32:34
or some sort of transport in the middle where you can go from
32:37
section to section. But it's pretty wide open
32:39
through the whole Starship. And I think just people spend a
32:43
year plus on the International Space Station and they're
32:46
segmented off doing their experiments.
32:48
Don't see anybody maybe all day, maybe throughout the day they
32:51
might see one or two people, but if they maybe there's 7-8 people
32:56
in a Starship. Maybe you can see all the way
32:58
through the Starship while people are working.
33:00
I think that'll be really neat. I don't know if that's how it's
33:02
going to. Actually have to.
33:03
I think it would be a much more enjoyable atmosphere to, even if
33:08
you're not working with somebody that they happen to be across
33:10
the 9m gap between you working on something else and you can
33:13
see them, I think that camaraderie gets built and then
33:18
again, people can also get on your nerves much faster.
33:21
That's true. So obviously when they select an
33:24
astronaut, they do a lot of psychological studies to make
33:26
sure they're going to live and play well with others.
33:28
So that will have to continue, yeah.
33:32
And sending 100 people in Starship to any long distances
33:35
is really difficult to conceive of.
33:38
What are we talking? 17/16/17 people per sort of
33:44
Starship if you all? I can't imagine traveling a very
33:47
long distance stuck in the same room my my sort of bedroom if
33:50
you will, the entire time. That would be very difficult
33:53
because it wouldn't be much room for anything else.
33:55
Yeah, that's true there. So there there's been talks of
33:58
how many people could go on of Mars ship to from any anywhere
34:05
from six people to some people were saying 30 people and there
34:10
were some people that were saying up words of 100 people to
34:14
Mars. I don't think it's going to be
34:16
100 people. I think that's ridiculous.
34:17
I think that's way too many. But I think if you have
34:21
something like this where SpaceX and NASA are working together
34:24
low Earth orbit, they can try different configurations for the
34:28
long term Mars transport because you could have two starships
34:34
docked together. What they're going to be doing
34:36
with the refuelling of the tankers for the Artemis
34:38
missions, instead of a tanker, you have just another Starship
34:42
where people can float between the starships.
34:44
There's a port, and there could be a section where it's like a
34:48
living section, where it's just you work out, you sleep, there's
34:52
maybe some entertainment, there's big windows.
34:55
And also there could be a variant where it's just cargo,
34:58
where there's just a like, so much food and you're gonna have
35:02
to bring a lot of water to Mars or even to low Earth orbit.
35:06
So sure, there's a possibility that's what they're gonna be
35:09
working on as well. And it's going to take, I wish
35:11
it were to happen really fast, but space transport, space
35:15
technology, engineering and science all take a long time.
35:19
So what they're building now, maybe 50 years from now, we'll
35:23
see the ultimate gain of we're going to be taking normal trips
35:27
to Mars. There's going to be just
35:30
numerous trips per year to get to Mars.
35:33
And I believe the next, the closest that Mars is going to be
35:38
to Earth is going to be 2024. So maybe if Starship gets to
35:44
orbit this year and then maybe next year, who knows, maybe
35:48
they're going to start trying to get to Mars.
35:51
Just shoot a Starship. Yeah, shoot a Starship without
35:55
any intention of landing it. Yeah, and.
35:57
Just. Try try to get into Mars orbit,
35:59
or at least use the orbit to slow you down so you could land
36:02
if you wanted to. Yep.
36:04
Obviously that's the hardest part about any trip to Mars,
36:07
it's making sure you hit the right spot so you don't burn up
36:10
in the atmosphere or get slingshotted out into space,
36:13
bounce off the atmosphere. So it's very difficult to do.
36:18
And that's where the majority of sort of things being shot at
36:22
Mars fail. So it's they're going to have to
36:25
practice that for sure. Yeah, right now they're
36:28
practicing getting things to orbit around Earth, which is
36:31
comparatively way easier. So it's gonna take some time and
36:37
some, yeah, who knows, Who knows?
36:40
We'll see what happens with the next Starship launch to see
36:43
whether they actually get to orbit and there's no
36:45
complications, and destroy the pad.
36:47
And if that all goes to plan, then yeah, I could potentially
36:52
see them trying to stretch themselves.
36:54
Obviously SpaceX is an iterative design company, and they're not
36:59
afraid to say, OK, we did it, let's move on.
37:02
Ship 15 was the first one to land.
37:04
They didn't bother trying to land another one.
37:07
They said good, let's move on. Yeah.
37:10
I could see them getting to orbit and saying good, let's
37:12
move on. I can see that too.
37:15
Yeah, and saying, OK, we made the orbit, now we need a tanker
37:19
up there. Let's do that.
37:20
OK, now that's done. We don't need to do it 100 times
37:23
before they put people in the Starship.
37:25
They'll have to do it 100 times. But if they're just doing tests,
37:29
they're gonna be happy with what they got and move on to the next
37:31
challenge. Yeah.
37:33
And even between the first launch and this next launch
37:36
that's coming up, they switched. I think it, I think Elon said
37:40
hundreds of things, maybe 1000 things, something like that
37:44
between the Last Starship and a Super Heavy and the next one
37:48
that's going up. One of the most important things
37:51
is that they're going to be doing hot staging between the
37:54
booster and the ship, which is. I'm not sold on that just yet,
37:58
but we'll see how it goes, yeah. That seems like an incredible
38:01
feat. I don't see the the a lot of
38:04
Russian spacecraft have done that in the past, and it seems
38:06
to be pretty pretty well documented, but I think SpaceX
38:10
could pull it off. I don't know if it's going to
38:12
work this time. It's the first trial and error.
38:14
Exactly right. This is all trial.
38:16
This is all to be done, to be determined.
38:19
They'll have to. They'll figure it out.
38:20
It's not impossible to do, just a matter of figuring out how to
38:24
make their current build sustain that sort of blast as as they
38:31
separate. Yeah, obviously they'll need
38:34
some way to exhaust the flame as it comes out, but also the top
38:38
the Dome of the the booster's gonna be have to withstand the
38:42
all those engines lighting as well.
38:45
Yeah, I don't understand how they're gonna do it.
38:46
I don't really understand that technology that much, but it
38:49
seems like they have to reinforce like it's a stainless
38:53
steel Dome on this thing, so they have to reinforce like
38:56
something, yes. Yeah, it's not a thick stainless
38:59
steel either. Plus they want to reuse these
39:02
100 times. Yeah, So there really can't be
39:05
any damage from this separation. For this to be successful, there
39:09
can't be any damage. It has to be 100% perfect.
39:12
If it starts to wear away from the heat or there's any damage
39:16
whatsoever, then it's unsuccessful.
39:18
It's not going to be a long term solution.
39:20
Then fix it. So do you think this could be
39:22
something like a, for lack of a better term, a puck that they
39:25
put on top of the booster and they could replace it if needed?
39:29
So it's not going to be, it might not be 100% reusable right
39:32
away, but they could just use it just for that one time and then
39:38
the next booster is going to have a different puck on it and.
39:41
They could do something like the heat tiles that they've got on
39:43
the outside of the ship. They could plaster those over
39:46
the top of the booster and use those as an abrading,
39:51
replaceable part. Yeah, that.
39:54
But it would take some time to inspect those every time that it
39:57
lands. Yeah, that's true.
39:58
It's similar to the space shuttle.
40:00
So yeah, I think the, I think we're going to see some wild
40:04
stuff in this next lodge. But yeah, the NASA and SpaceX
40:09
collaboration here with this space station is going to be a
40:12
huge thing. And The funny thing is, NASA is
40:15
a government agency and for. Forever they've been using
40:20
taxpayers money to do things like this, experiments like
40:22
this. And Phil McAllister, the
40:25
director of commercial Space Flight at NASA, said it is great
40:29
to see companies invest their own capital toward innovative
40:32
commercial space capabilities. We've seen how these types of
40:35
partnerships benefit both the private sector and NASA.
40:38
So basically they're saying, hey, all of you companies out
40:42
here, Blue Origin, Northrop Grumman, Sierra Space, SpaceX,
40:46
Special Aerospace Services, Think Orbital and Fast space.
40:50
You spend your money, you figure this out and then we're going to
40:53
partner with you to use your technology in the future and
40:56
we're going to pay for it. But you have to figure it out
40:58
like you're going to have to have a minimum viable product,
41:01
the MVP, so we can use it for our own services for the future,
41:06
whether that's a space station with SpaceX or if they're going
41:09
to be using it, of course for HLS and further missions.
41:13
But it's different than what it used to be for the longest time.
41:17
It's very different, absolutely. And it's really is a great
41:20
solution. NASA put so much money and
41:24
effort into developing things like the SLS and everything that
41:28
came before it, space shuttle and whatnot.
41:32
To have commercial companies do all that research, development
41:36
and testing, and then to just pay them a bunch of money at the
41:40
end or during it as a sort of seed money, it's just so much
41:44
easier for everybody as far as the government is concerned and
41:49
a lot less risk as well. Yeah.
41:53
And then you hand off that risk to private companies.
41:56
Absolutely. It leaves so much more, so much
41:59
more room for NASA to play around with different ideas,
42:02
too. They don't have to stick with
42:03
one thing like the SLS. They're stuck with the SLS.
42:07
They can't really diverge from that and say we're going to stop
42:10
doing that because Starship works now they have a contract.
42:14
They're going to be building these SLS rockets for the
42:16
foreseeable future. And what Starship surpasses the
42:20
SLS and technology and weight to orbit ratio, weight ratio to
42:26
orbit, but they don't care because they have these
42:28
contracts in place with Boeing and other companies, Northrop,
42:31
Brahman, etcetera, to build these SLS rockets and they can't
42:36
change it, you know? What I really like about the con
42:39
this commercial partnerships is that some someone who likes
42:43
SpaceX is going to pay for their materials what they should be
42:48
paying as opposed to what NASA pays for materials.
42:50
A screw, NASA's paying for a screw might cost them $100 a
42:54
screw because the companies that are selling them that screw know
42:57
that they can get away with it. Whereas SpaceX is saying we're
43:01
not paying, that we'll build a machine and make these for a
43:04
dime a piece, if that's what you're going to bother charging
43:07
us. It's a much more efficient from
43:08
an economic standpoint to have the commercial partners take
43:14
care of all the stuff because they're not going to get
43:17
overcharged the way NASA has traditionally been overcharged.
43:21
Yeah, I think that's an important step forward for NASA
43:23
and an important step forward for these companies because not
43:26
only do they get money for these initial projects, but they can
43:30
add things on to it eventually. So SpaceX could say, OK, we have
43:34
the Starship, we have a crew Starship, but we can also make a
43:37
space station Starship. Would you be interested in the
43:41
space station? NASA could be like, yeah, we
43:44
like that idea. That's a great idea.
43:46
We're going to give you the money for it, even if it's just
43:49
a concept right now. But since SpaceX brought it to
43:52
them in a capability in like in the capacity of a like a
43:56
commercial project, then they're going to pay like SpaceX is
44:00
going to pay for it and then NASA will pay them whatever
44:04
SpaceX wants to charge them. So for sure, I think it's going
44:08
to be a huge boost to the low Earth orbit economy, but also
44:13
the economy of deep space exploration as well.
44:16
Yeah. And keep in mind as well that
44:18
SpaceX has never had any interest in space stations orbit
44:23
beyond Starling. So this that would be a change
44:27
of tune and it would have to come with a obviously a big
44:29
check behind it for them to do something like that or they see
44:32
some benefit in having a station in orbit and they're willing to
44:35
work with NASA to get one. Does Is it a good starting off
44:39
point for a mission to Mars or something like that to have all
44:42
the tankers take all their fuel there and then you dock a ship
44:46
there and launch it from there? They'd have to determine whether
44:49
that makes sense or not. Yeah, I guess the tankers in
44:53
space will eventually assemble or serve the same purpose as
44:58
that space station, right? Just having a ship in space
45:01
that's gets refueled to refuel another space ship that's a
45:06
space station right there. Yeah, very basic one.
45:09
Yeah, minus the people. Yeah.
45:11
But yeah, I also think that if SpaceX does make some sort of
45:16
space station out of the Starship, they can charge rent
45:19
to NASA and that could be recurring income for SpaceX.
45:22
If they can see the ROI on a Starship that's in orbit and
45:26
they can make X amount of dollars per year from it to
45:29
continue development of better starships, Mars starships,
45:34
ground systems, infrastructure, whatever.
45:37
If it's going to pay for part of the development of these new
45:40
systems or even Starlink, then that might be something that you
45:44
would be interested in. Because it seems I wouldn't say
45:46
free money because they still have to have people manning the
45:49
systems and fixing up the ships and stuff as time goes by.
45:53
But once the once the ships are decommissioned they could in
45:59
theory outfit the ships with. I don't know like I wouldn't.
46:04
I don't want to say plug and play, but it could be a very
46:06
compartmentalized systems that they could take out of 1
46:09
Starship and put into a newer Starship.
46:12
And it could be really easy to transfer those things because
46:15
the docking mechanisms for the HLS Starship, it's pretty big.
46:20
If you think of not the docking the the elevator systems, it's
46:24
pretty big. So maybe that could be as part
46:27
of the docking system. It could be big enough that they
46:29
could transfer A people and B supplies from 1 Starship to
46:32
another. So decommission one, take it
46:35
back down to earth, refurb it, do whatever you got to do, and
46:39
then upgrade your Starship to a new one.
46:41
And it seems like you could have a.
46:43
You could have a space station forever in that case.
46:46
For sure, the beauty of Starship has, from day one has been its
46:50
cost effectiveness. It's extremely relatively
46:53
extremely cheap to make and to they could put up another one on
46:59
a moment's notice at some point, right.
47:01
Replace a part that of a ship that is malfunctioning can bring
47:04
it back down. What not as you say before,
47:07
there's a lot of others companies that are involved in
47:10
this partnership with NASA. So it's SpaceX is just one part
47:13
of that. There's all kinds of ship of
47:15
companies that would be doing similar things with them and for
47:18
them. Yeah, Blue Origin.
47:19
The project the Blue Origin is going to be used for with his
47:22
NASA liberation is integrated commercial space transportation
47:26
capability that ensures safe, affordable and high frequency US
47:29
access to orbit for crew and other missions.
47:32
That just does that mean that they're going to be using a
47:35
rocket to get to lower theraband the commercial space
47:38
transportation? Origin is the taxi.
47:40
That sounds like it. Or at least one of the taxis.
47:43
Yeah, sure, and nothing. It really says nothing else.
47:47
It says other missions, whatever that means, but it doesn't
47:50
really give them anything else. There's no other harder piece of
47:53
this future NASA, the space that they get out of this, you're
47:59
ferrying people back and forth. Yeah, Sierra Space looks
48:03
similarly too. Sierra's got Sierra gets the in
48:07
space superstructure as well. They're actually primed for that
48:11
next generation space station, so they'll get the space
48:16
transportation in space infrastructure and tailored
48:19
space facilities to provide a human a presence in orbit.
48:23
They are really the space station, provided that they can
48:26
meet all of their deadlines and whatnot.
48:28
To be honest, at that point SpaceX seems like they're in the
48:31
wings in case Sierra can't provide what they need.
48:35
And they could work together. This is is collaborative efforts
48:37
with NASA. So anyway.
48:39
Everything that goes up into space needs to work with
48:41
together. Yeah, universal locks and
48:44
universal lists and universal that you can't have anything
48:47
that is proprietary when you're when you talk about NASA and
48:50
space, it's all got to work together, yeah.
48:52
So one that's very interesting is VAST, and this is some cool
48:56
wording. Collaborating with NASA on
48:58
technologies and operations required for its microgravity
49:01
and artificial gravity stations includes the Haven One, which
49:05
will provide a microgravity environment for crew research
49:08
and in space manufacturing. The first crude mission, called
49:11
Vast One to the platform development activities for
49:13
larger space station modules will also take place out of the
49:16
Space Act agreement. So artificial gravity stations.
49:21
Pretty sci-fi if you ask me. That's very sci-fi.
49:24
That's your rotating stations for sure.
49:27
Yeah, and that'll take. That'll pretty cool.
49:29
Yeah, it'll be cool. They're gonna have to.
49:31
I think what they'll do is they'll set up a smaller version
49:36
of they're gonna have to incrementally set up smaller,
49:39
medium, large, etcetera. Anti gravity.
49:43
Artificial not anti but artificial gravity stations.
49:46
Anti gravity would be wild. Proof of concept is was one of
49:51
the first things right. You gotta get up there and prove
49:53
that it's gonna work and it's gonna be able to be stable and
49:56
and what do people how do people react in that situation.
50:00
We don't actually know why. We can guess based on experience
50:03
that we've done on Earth with spinning people around in a
50:05
circle, but how long term effects of somebody being spun
50:10
and just observing around them, right?
50:13
This part of the station is spinning slower than that part
50:15
of the station and it's all curved and how does that affect
50:18
somebody? Yeah, Curious to see.
50:21
Yeah. And they're gonna be, oh, go
50:23
ahead. Go, no, go please.
50:25
Oh, I believe they're gonna be using Starship as a
50:27
transportation system for the Vast one as well, or the Haven
50:30
one, so to. Get it up there.
50:32
Yeah, Nice. And they're gonna be using, I
50:35
believe, this Falcon Nine. Yeah.
50:37
So they're gonna be doing the Haven One on the Falcon Nine,
50:40
and then they're gonna be using the Starship eventually too.
50:43
So that's pretty cool. They're all going to be
50:46
collaborating with each other and also NASA.
50:48
So it's going to be, it's that's going to happen in 2025.
50:52
S Yeah. August 2025.
50:56
Apparently. That's going to be pretty soon,
50:59
Yeah. Couple years from now, yeah.
51:02
And the other ones we haven't talked about are the ones that
51:04
kind of interest me quite a bit. Northrop Grumman and Space,
51:08
Aerospace Services, special aerospace Aerospace services and
51:12
think Orbital are all on the robotic side of things.
51:15
That's getting things up there to build stations and to
51:19
manufacture things and not put people in danger of getting lost
51:23
in space or being subject to being out in space with the
51:26
radiation what not. So it's I'd like that side of it
51:29
as well. Curious to see how that helps.
51:33
So the the north of Grumman, the persistent platform to provide
51:37
autonomous and robotic capabilities for commercial
51:40
science research and manufacturing capabilities in
51:43
lower orbit. The manufacturing capabilities
51:45
part of that is pretty cool. I'm interested to see what they
51:48
do if they're going to 3D print things or if they're going to be
51:52
doing just take parts from Earth, like just say beams and
51:57
trusses and pieces and then put them together robotically.
52:00
I don't know what the actual mission is.
52:02
They don't have any more information about it, but it
52:05
seems like that would be something that they could do up
52:07
there, as many manufacture parts of a station or parts of
52:11
something with robots. Yeah, that's the dream we always
52:14
see, right? We always see in the future the
52:15
sci-fi things are being built right in space, that you've got
52:19
your sort of space dock where the ship is being built in place
52:22
up in space around in Earth's orbit, and that would be cool to
52:25
see something I was when I was a kid, I was really fascinated by
52:28
space welding, where you put two pieces of steel together that
52:32
are perfectly flat and as soon as they go together, there's
52:37
nothing stopping them from joining.
52:39
So it's a Weld that just happens because they're the molecules
52:42
just pass from one piece of metal to the other.
52:45
Oh wow, 'cause there's nothing stopping them.
52:46
There's no, there's no oxygen, there's nothing in the way these
52:50
molecules just passing from one piece of the next and the joins
52:53
pretty cool. I might have that wrong.
52:55
It's been a long time since I looked into that, but that was
52:58
one thing when I was a kid. It was really cool.
53:00
That would be wild. That would open up so many, so
53:04
many doors to stations and architecture and space.
53:08
And that's cool. That's really cool and
53:10
everything. I didn't even know about that
53:12
space welding. I'll have to look into that.
53:13
That's cool. I can look it up again too.
53:15
I could be totally wrong being completely ridiculed.
53:19
But that's OK. Leave it.
53:20
Leave it in the comments, people.
53:25
Yeah, I think we've touched on everything here.
53:27
Is there any, are there any other companies you'd like to
53:29
talk about? I know we talked about Sierra
53:31
Space, but you didn't get to talk about special aerospace
53:34
services much, but they. All do the same kind of thing.
53:37
Special Aerospace Services is is looking at autonomous
53:40
maneuvering units, astronaut assistance units.
53:43
So it's all servicing the station outside, helping
53:47
astronauts as well as perhaps doing autonomous work as well to
53:51
keep things running. Keep it serviced.
53:53
If somebody drops a hammer, if this thing can go and get it,
53:56
rather than astronaut having to risk something or it being one
54:00
more piece of space junk, maybe they're out there collecting
54:02
that stuff as well. That would be really cool to
54:04
see. That would be yeah.
54:06
And then think orbital, similar to just another piece of a space
54:10
station, but they do the orbital platforms and research
54:15
manufacturing astronaut missions, that sort of thing.
54:17
So it's building stuff in space, building more things on there.
54:21
So there's the the autonomous builders, if you will.
54:25
This is really cool to see, and it'll be interesting to see how
54:29
these all work together as well. Can they?
54:31
Can Blue Origin and SpaceX sit down in the same room and figure
54:34
out the best way to move humanity forward?
54:37
Wouldn't that be nice? That would be really cool.
54:40
I think all of these companies working together, building
54:42
platforms and building stations and sending things, they're
54:46
going to be working together in buying trips to space from
54:50
different companies, Blue Origin or through SpaceX or through
54:54
Sierra Space, If they need to send something up there, they're
54:57
going to be working together to send part of their send, part of
55:01
their space station or part of part of their platforms up
55:05
there. So it'll be an interesting time
55:08
for all of these companies to work together and also to work
55:12
with NASA. And they're going to be using
55:14
NASA's technology. They're going to be using NASA's
55:16
capabilities to innovate in space.
55:19
And all of the stuff that NASA has learned throughout their
55:23
time with the International Space Station and through their
55:25
time with the Apollo programs and the Space shuttle, all of
55:29
that, all of these companies can use that to better their
55:32
platforms too. So it's going to be really cool.
55:35
Very exciting, yeah. I hope that's the next 20 or 30
55:37
years are going to be very interesting space field and
55:40
hopefully humanity's still around to take advantage of it.
55:44
Yeah, I think we will be. I think there's we're not going
55:47
to stop. I think this is going to be a
55:48
really cool, interesting time. This is the stuff that I dreamed
55:51
of when I was a kid like like this.
55:53
It's finally coming true that we're going to people are going
55:56
to start building their own space stations like companies
55:58
are going to start building their own private space
56:01
stations. Who knows?
56:02
Eventually we'll be to the point where there's going to be a
56:05
private mission to another star system like Prometheus or
56:09
something like that Show the movie Prometheus, except maybe
56:13
they won't be bringing DNA down to Earth and dumping it into a
56:16
river be a little bit different. But it's going to, it's going to
56:20
be wild in the next 20-30 years what happens up there, because
56:24
not only is it SpaceX, it's all these other companies that want
56:26
to make money and they get, they make billions of dollars per
56:29
year from NASA and also from each other.
56:31
So it's going to be cool. Can't wait to see it.
56:34
Happen. Yeah, same here.
56:35
Thanks, Neil. Thank you very much for having
56:37
me on here. Will, yeah, of course.
56:39
Anytime. We're going to take a trip back
56:44
all the way to December 13th, 2022 when Elon Musk said he was
56:48
going to remove 1.5 billion Twitter accounts.
56:52
It's from the archives. Take a listen.
56:55
It's interesting. So, Elon?
56:57
Musk bought Twitter a little bit ago for about $45 billion, and
57:00
ever since the purchase it's been kind of a roller coaster of
57:03
emotions. He fired half of the staff, so
57:07
half of the people that were on the moderation team and also
57:10
engineers and also business people behind the scenes,
57:14
they're all gone. So it's a slim line team and
57:18
they're working forward in a way that is going to bring Elon's
57:23
vision to life. And this vision is going to be
57:25
something that's never really been done before, which is an
57:28
all in one platform, which is going to be chatting, text,
57:32
crypto king, video, audio, everything under one platform.
57:36
So that really hasn't been done. It's been done in WhatsApp, but
57:39
it's also something that's never been done sort of in America at
57:42
this point. So Elon is building that
57:44
platform and this gets back to SpaceX eventually.
57:47
So I wanted to let you know that that is not just about Twitter
57:50
today, but we have to set it up so we know what's going on with
57:54
Twitter and how it's going to affect SpaceX.
57:56
So Elon can have the staff trying to cut money, you know,
58:00
trying to trying to get the money situated because he spent
58:04
$45 billion on this and he has to move forward with his plan to
58:08
build this thing and to make it profitable.
58:11
But since he has joined up, there's been other things that
58:14
have been happening at Twitter as well.
58:17
So Elon kind of opened up the floodgates for all the people
58:20
that have been banned before to come back out of the platform.
58:23
You know, all the people with hate speech etcetera have been
58:27
let back on the platform. And he's a, you know, he's a
58:31
absolutist when it comes to free speech.
58:33
So he wants everybody to speak their mind.
58:36
He wants everybody to talk about the things that they want to
58:38
talk about and he wants to give everybody no matter what your
58:42
leaning is. And he wants to give you a
58:45
platform to talk about what you want to talk about.
58:47
And I understand that. You know, it's it's a noble
58:50
thing to do. Everybody should be free to say
58:52
whatever they want to say. Then the consequences of those
58:55
things should be with the other people that are on the platform.
58:59
And you should be able to talk it out.
59:01
You know, like that's how that's how he feels.
59:03
You know, just talk it out, figure it out.
59:04
Now, some of this stuff, some of this speech is, you know,
59:08
protected under the Constitution.
59:09
Of course you can't incite violence, things like that.
59:13
You're not supposed to do that stuff.
59:15
There's laws about that. You're not supposed to do that.
59:17
And he said he's going to follow the law of the land as much as
59:20
possible on his platform. Right.
59:22
But this is where it gets kind of dicey.
59:25
When those people came back in, there was a flood of trolls as
59:29
well that came back through. And apparently those trolls
59:32
started off on 4 Chan, which is a place where if you're not
59:35
familiar with it, it's full of trolls.
59:37
And if if you've never been there, don't.
59:40
It's like if you don't want to see it, don't go there.
59:42
It's it's not a not a pleasant place but it is an interesting
59:45
place to visit on the Internet and if you, if you're really
59:49
inclined, go check it out. But I would, I would suggest
59:52
highly against it. But it's it's interesting.
59:54
So they all hung out there and they thought of an idea, hey,
59:59
let's troll the Internet and let's make a fake Eli Lilly
1:00:04
account, right. And this account is a
1:00:07
pharmaceutical manufacturer. So they said, hey, we're going
1:00:10
to make insulin free. This was a fake account, a
1:00:14
verified fake account. You know, you can pay the $8 to
1:00:17
get a verified account. They paid the $8, got a verified
1:00:20
account and duped everybody into thinking that that's the real
1:00:24
Eli Lilly. And the real Eli Lilly was like,
1:00:27
no, we didn't say that. What are you talking about?
1:00:29
So the $8 check mark thing on Twitter kind of got canned,
1:00:33
right? Immediately it got cut off.
1:00:36
Eli Lilly lost a bunch of money. Investors pulled out of the
1:00:38
company because they thought that this was real.
1:00:42
So the stock price tanked a little bit and people pulled out
1:00:46
and they were like, we can't really trust this.
1:00:48
So Elon in his wisdom said, OK, $8 check mark not good enough.
1:00:52
So we're going to put more check marks.
1:00:55
We're going to check mark the people that are paying the $8
1:00:58
just to verify that you're a human, you're going to have to
1:01:00
pay more if you are. You know, if you work at a
1:01:03
company, say if you're an executive at a company, you're
1:01:05
going to pay X amount of dollars, you're going to get an
1:01:07
executive check mark and the name of the company will be in a
1:01:10
little icon underneath your profile.
1:01:13
And also a government person, you know, somebody that works in
1:01:16
the government, you can have that attached to your Twitter
1:01:19
profile. So you're going to have to pay
1:01:20
for that check mark as well. So different check marks for
1:01:22
different people. Understandable.
1:01:24
You know, hey, if you could take a second and hit the subscribe
1:01:27
button and the like button, it would really help out the
1:01:28
channel. But it's going to help you out
1:01:30
even more because you're going to start seeing more SpaceX NASA
1:01:34
Space Flight content in your feed, not just for myself, but
1:01:37
from other creators as well. And it's going to help you out
1:01:40
actually a lot more than it's going to help me out.
1:01:42
So please just take a second hit, subscribe, hit like and
1:01:45
let's get back into the Elon Musk content.
1:01:48
So you can discern between a real account and not a real
1:01:51
account. And you have to have those
1:01:53
certain sort of e-mail addresses or some sort of way to identify
1:01:56
yourself in order to get that check mark.
1:01:59
So if you're Eli Lilly, you know, for, for instance, you'd
1:02:03
have to have an Eli Lilly e-mail address verify your Twitter
1:02:07
account so you can verify that you work there.
1:02:10
OK. So no more of the trolls getting
1:02:13
a hold of the other people's accounts because they're not
1:02:16
secure anymore. OK.
1:02:18
So that's the thing that Elon's working on right now.
1:02:21
OK, so this all comes back to SpaceX, I promise.
1:02:24
So those are the things that advertisers on the platform on
1:02:28
Twitter looked at and they said, hey, this doesn't look like it's
1:02:32
very stable anymore. And we don't really want to
1:02:35
spend our money on a place that is going to give everybody,
1:02:39
including the trolls, ways to say racist things and bigoted
1:02:43
things and horrible things to other people.
1:02:45
We don't want to be associated with that.
1:02:47
So we're going to pull all of our money out.
1:02:49
Half of the advertisers, the big advertisers that were spending
1:02:52
millions of dollars per month pulled out of Twitter and said
1:02:55
we don't want this anymore, we're going to pause our ad
1:02:58
spend on Twitter, right. So there goes millions of
1:03:01
dollars down the drain for Twitter immediately since Elon
1:03:05
took over. Now when Elon saw this, he got,
1:03:10
he got mad. You know, he was just like, how
1:03:12
can't, like, why can't you understand what I'm doing here?
1:03:15
And also, look, we've had these working relationships for a long
1:03:19
time. There's always been trolls.
1:03:20
So he confronted the people and he berated them, according to
1:03:25
some news article that I read. I can't remember where I read
1:03:27
it. I'm sorry, could be the
1:03:28
Financial Times. I apologize.
1:03:30
I don't have that up right now. But I read it this morning and
1:03:32
it was a reputable source. So take my word for it.
1:03:35
Sorry, I don't have it up. The fact is that apparently he
1:03:39
went in there and he kind of yelled at people and, you know,
1:03:43
kind of said, hey, you should be spending your millions of
1:03:45
dollars here and not postponing it because I got this under
1:03:49
control. So take that with a grain of
1:03:52
salt as well because you never know where the Internet
1:03:55
information is coming from, right?
1:03:57
Could be just somebody, also a troll, could also be somebody
1:04:00
that works there but also has a, you know, has a vendetta against
1:04:04
Elon or one of his companies or something like this, right.
1:04:07
So millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars are going
1:04:11
away from Twitter. So I think you know where I'm
1:04:13
going with this moving forward, the Internet has kind of turned
1:04:20
on Eli Eli Elon and has turned him from this person who's going
1:04:28
to rise up and pull people out of horrible places such as, you
1:04:35
know, with Tesla, you know, you're trying to remove carbon
1:04:39
emissions from the, from the auto industry, right, by using
1:04:43
electric vehicles. That's cool.
1:04:45
Like EVs are great for that, you know, and they're like they're
1:04:48
great technology. So moving that forward was a
1:04:51
huge deal. And also, you know, solar panel
1:04:54
roofs, great idea, use the energy from the sun, renewable
1:04:58
sun comes out every day. You know, there's there's
1:05:03
unlimited source of power from the sun.
1:05:05
Use that power from the sun to generate battery power and your
1:05:09
house, and you continue to have continuous operation of your
1:05:13
home and the energy and that you need for your appliances and the
1:05:17
other things in your house. OK, that sounds like an awesome
1:05:20
idea, right? And then you have SpaceX, which
1:05:22
is this gigantic rocket company that's sending rockets to the
1:05:28
International Space Station. People on board those rockets,
1:05:31
they're going to be sending people to the moon in a lunar
1:05:34
Starship variant. And also people that are
1:05:38
investing in SpaceX think, you know where I'm going here, the
1:05:41
people that are investing in SpaceX are investing billions of
1:05:45
dollars every year to keep the company moving forward.
1:05:50
So some of those people, and I'm not saying this is actually
1:05:54
happening yet, I'm just saying this could happen in the future.
1:05:57
Some of the people that may have wanted to invest in Tesla and
1:06:01
there could be, you know, since let's just put a a random number
1:06:04
on here, let's just say 1 billion dollars, 1 billion with
1:06:08
AB dollars and that's a a certain amount of people.
1:06:13
That said, I don't know what Elon's up to now I'm kind of
1:06:16
sketched out. I don't know what's happening.
1:06:19
So I'm gonna pull back my 300 million or yeah, my $300 million
1:06:24
for now and I'm not going to put it in the next round of funding
1:06:28
for SpaceX. Now, can Elon bring in other
1:06:32
investors to help him out and get that funding anyway, or
1:06:37
could he sell off some of his stock in Tesla to fund SpaceX
1:06:41
going forward? There's a possibility of that,
1:06:44
but the sentiment about Elon, Elon has changed tremendously
1:06:50
from this person that was going to help revolutionize everything
1:06:54
and change humanity as a whole to somebody who's cutting jobs
1:06:59
and also now he's a horrible person.
1:07:02
And the sentiment online is that it it's completely changed.
1:07:07
If you look at the rhetoric on even on Reddit from the last
1:07:12
three to four years, even a couple months ago, everyone was
1:07:16
100% for Eli. You know, there was a a couple
1:07:20
of detractors here and there, but most people were like, hey,
1:07:23
that's a there's a guy doing some cool stuff, you know, he's
1:07:26
making those rockets. That's cool, including myself.
1:07:28
I'm like, hey, he's doing some cool stuff.
1:07:30
He's making those rockets. He's making those rockets go to
1:07:32
the International Space Station and also Starship, etcetera.
1:07:36
But now people are kind of changing their tune.
1:07:40
You know, they're they're saying things like he's not fit to run
1:07:44
so many companies because he's so, he's so stretched between
1:07:48
all of these companies doing all these things that he can't do
1:07:51
all of it. You know, they've they've been
1:07:53
saying that for a long time, but now it's kind of showing through
1:07:57
a little bit. People are seeing it through the
1:07:59
cracks, but it's out public. And Elon even puts it out in the
1:08:03
public and talks about it in the public on Twitter all the time.
1:08:08
Like he's he's kind of a guy that was like, hey, I love
1:08:12
Twitter, I love to talk on here. I love to make memes, I love to
1:08:16
make funny things go on on Twitter.
1:08:17
But now he owns it so he can kind of do whatever he wants
1:08:20
with him. So it's a private company now.
1:08:23
He owns, you know, Twitter, so he can make it whatever he wants
1:08:27
to make it. And he doesn't need to rely on
1:08:30
outside investment other than advertisers or the investment
1:08:34
that was already put into Twitter in the 1st place.
1:08:36
And the reason why he bought Twitter, The user base is huge
1:08:40
one and if it was the technology that they had, you can build
1:08:44
that. Like I could build Twitter.
1:08:46
If I really want to do it, I can sit down and I can read a or
1:08:52
watch a a React build, build Twitter with React JS tutorial
1:08:56
on YouTube. So it's not the technology.
1:08:59
I can get that done in an afternoon, you know, that's no
1:09:02
big deal. Elon could do that himself if
1:09:05
you wanted to. But it was for the user base,
1:09:07
the millions and millions of people of active users that he
1:09:11
bought Twitter so he can build his x.com platform moving
1:09:15
forward. Now is this going to hamper some
1:09:17
people from investing in SpaceX in the future?
1:09:20
I think the diehards will always be there.
1:09:22
I think people that are interested in Space Flight and
1:09:25
interested in Starship will always be there.
1:09:28
And possibly this could shift the focus from private
1:09:33
investment of SpaceX into SpaceX going to a more public route if
1:09:38
the sentiment dies down from the private investors.
1:09:41
And I'm not an an investment guy, you know, so this is not
1:09:44
financial advice. I wanted to let you know that
1:09:46
now, not financial advice, but I want to let you know that
1:09:51
there's a possibility that within the next X amount of
1:09:54
years, SpaceX could be thinking about going public where you
1:09:58
could buy shares of test or sorry, SpaceX, and you could buy
1:10:01
shares of SpaceX because of this fallout from something like
1:10:06
Twitter is if Twitter goes bust, if Elon just goes like, I can't
1:10:10
save it and we're going to lose a bunch of money.
1:10:13
Sorry everybody, you know, what are you going to do?
1:10:16
But you know, Elon's, you know, he's not perfect and nobody is.
1:10:20
So moving forward, if that happens, maybe the vision of
1:10:27
Elon, maybe the outlook of of Elon is going to be a little bit
1:10:30
changed. And maybe they're going to have
1:10:32
to move SpaceX from, say, a privately owned company and
1:10:38
privately funded company to something that's more public
1:10:41
like Tesla, where you can have thousands of investors and, you
1:10:48
know, you could, you could build a gigantic successful company
1:10:51
sort of like Boeing. So maybe SpaceX is going to be
1:10:55
the next Boeing, who knows. But I'm, I'm excited and I'm
1:10:59
eager to see what happens in the near future because it could be
1:11:03
really interesting or it could just be nothing.
1:11:05
You know, there's there's a whole part of it that's just
1:11:08
like, maybe this is just Internet drama, you know, maybe
1:11:10
it's just Internet drama for now.
1:11:12
And people will wake up and they'll say, hey, you know, this
1:11:15
is going to be a a, like, no big deal.
1:11:17
And we're still gonna invest in SpaceX because we understand the
1:11:21
value of SpaceX, which is bringing humanity to space and
1:11:25
bringing like sending humanity to Mars and sending people back
1:11:30
to the moon and sending people to the International Space
1:11:32
Station and also launching satellites, launching Starlink
1:11:36
satellites, bringing connectivity to everybody in the
1:11:39
rural areas of of the world. There's a possibility people are
1:11:43
just gonna be like, yeah, we understand, like that's cool,
1:11:46
and we're going to spend our money there because we know that
1:11:49
that's a successful business. They keep making money, and it's
1:11:52
a whole other thing than Twitter.
1:11:55
Like, Twitter's kind of a it's a technology company.
1:11:58
SpaceX is a technology company, too, but they're a very
1:12:01
successful technology company. And Twitter is his new kind of
1:12:05
hobby thing. You know, like that.
1:12:06
You think? A lot of people think like that
1:12:07
too. Good morning, and welcome back
1:12:12
to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston for a second in a
1:12:15
series of three briefings today, all talking about NASA's Boeing
1:12:19
Crew Flight Test. This mission is a flight test of
1:12:21
the Boeing Starliner spacecraft scheduled to launch in early May
1:12:25
with our two NASA astronauts, Sonny Williams and Butch
1:12:29
Wilmore. Our briefing today will focus on
1:12:31
the details of that mission. Our guests here with us today.
1:12:34
We'll discuss the timeline and all phases of flight that
1:12:37
they'll be keeping an eye on here with us today we have Mike
1:12:40
Lammers, Starliner Ascent Flight Director, Ed Vance ICE,
1:12:44
Starliner Rendezvous Flight Director, and Vincent Lacourt,
1:12:48
International Space Station Flight Director.
1:12:51
We'll be taking some questions here in the room, on the phone
1:12:54
and on social media. If you're joining us from the
1:12:57
phone bridge, please press * one to enter our question queue.
1:13:00
And on social media, if you have a question, please use hashtag.
1:13:04
Ask NASA. When you're asking your
1:13:06
question, please state your name and media affiliation as well as
1:13:10
who you would like to address your question to.
1:13:12
But first, we're going to start off with some opening remarks.
1:13:15
I'll kick it off with Mike Lammers.
1:13:17
OK. Thank you, Chelsea.
1:13:19
Again, I'm, I'm Mike Lammers. I've, I've been a flight
1:13:22
director in Houston for about 15 years and a number of programs.
1:13:25
But today I'm kind of excited to come talk to you as the
1:13:28
Starliner Flight Director. I'm the lead Flight director and
1:13:31
I also do the ascent phase of the flight and in that role I I
1:13:37
lead the Boeing and ULA United Launch Alliance operations team
1:13:42
that gets the the crew both into the vehicle pre launch as well
1:13:48
as gets them into space. And it's it's been a culmination
1:13:54
of a number of years of developing how this flight
1:13:59
system works with Boeing and United Launch Alliance as well
1:14:02
as developing procedures operation techniques and
1:14:07
training especially here at the end where we go through a lot of
1:14:10
the details of the mission and it's it's it's really just
1:14:15
outstanding to to talk to you about and I know we're all we're
1:14:18
all really excited to get into the details of the mission.
1:14:22
Just up top again we're we're targeting launch of the early
1:14:26
May and we will have a rendezvous 24 hours later and
1:14:31
we're going to do a minimum of an 8 day mission and test
1:14:34
flight. And I stress it's it's a test
1:14:37
flight right. The the mission is to shake down
1:14:41
the vehicle with the crew on board.
1:14:42
We've flown it twice before, but this will be the first time with
1:14:45
the crew when we want to learn about it and and make it
1:14:49
available as a tool to transport crew up and down to the
1:14:53
International Space Station. Again, it's targeting a minimum
1:14:57
of an 8 day mission, but the total length is going to be
1:15:00
defined by orbital mechanics and the weather at our landing
1:15:05
locations which are in the Southwest United States.
1:15:08
I'll talk about that in a little bit.
1:15:10
Again, I'm here with with Ed and Vincent.
1:15:14
What we're going to do is we'll talk about each phase of flight.
1:15:17
I'll start with ascent. Ed will go into the rendezvous.
1:15:20
Vincent will talk about what what we're doing docked, then
1:15:24
I'll hand back over to me, I'll go through kind of the landing
1:15:27
phase and then we'll get into questions.
1:15:31
Again, real happy to go into all sorts of detail.
1:15:35
We we, we live and breathe this stuff.
1:15:37
So if you have any questions or things that you want more
1:15:41
amplification on, we're we're more than happy to go into that.
1:15:45
So what I'll do is I'll talk verbally a little bit before we
1:15:48
go into the video, but I'm going to start with the day before
1:15:53
launch. The way this system works is the
1:15:56
the vehicle's going to be stacked on the Atlas Five at the
1:16:00
at what we called the VIF, the vertical integration facility.
1:16:03
I believe that stands for out at pad 41.
1:16:07
And the day before launch, in the morning, the stack will be
1:16:13
rolled out to the launchpad, brought down hard on the
1:16:16
launchpad and they'll do some checkouts.
1:16:20
And then we have a Boeing team in Florida at the Boeing mission
1:16:25
BMCC, Boeing Mission Control Center.
1:16:27
They actually handle. They're the team of engineers
1:16:31
and technicians that do all the integration and test of the
1:16:34
spacecraft. They power up the spacecraft,
1:16:36
powered up and down all the time.
1:16:38
In fact, just over these last few days, they've been doing
1:16:41
that to fuel the spacecraft. They will power up the
1:16:45
spacecraft. My team in Houston will come on
1:16:49
and watch with that as well as the Boeing engineering team
1:16:54
that's that's based in Houston will be right down the hall from
1:16:57
me and we'll bring the vehicle up.
1:17:00
We'll do some checkouts. We'll make sure it can
1:17:01
communicate through T Driss and the communications network and
1:17:05
do some file up links to the vehicle and just generally make
1:17:09
sure it's ready for launch the next day.
1:17:11
We'll also do a briefing for the crew just to give them any last
1:17:17
minute things that may have come up and kind of a look at the
1:17:20
what the weather. What we're going to do on launch
1:17:25
day is Butch and Sunny will will wake up on launch day, go
1:17:31
through some of their preliminary activities.
1:17:33
They're turned over to Boeing at about 4 1/2 hours before flight,
1:17:39
right? Then Boeing manages all the crew
1:17:43
activities both to get them ready and out to the pad.
1:17:46
At that time we'll do a, we'll do a basically a weather check
1:17:50
with the crew. I'll run out a weather briefing
1:17:52
with them and then they'll go ahead and go into the suit room
1:17:55
and get suited up with the the Boeing and that David Clark
1:17:58
technicians that do that. As the crew is getting ready,
1:18:05
the Boeing team in Florida will do the final activation of the
1:18:08
spacecraft and that involves bringing the propulsion system
1:18:12
up to pressure and activated and then they're ready to turn it
1:18:16
over to the team in Houston who will manage the spacecraft.
1:18:20
Keep in mind that the way that this system works is we've got
1:18:22
the spacecraft managed from Houston in flight and then of
1:18:25
course the launch vehicle is is activated and run in Florida
1:18:33
until we hit the point of launch.
1:18:36
At 4 hours before launch, again, we're going to hand over to
1:18:40
Houston, a little bit different than Shuttle and Artemis.
1:18:43
We manage a lot of the last activities as far as commanding
1:18:49
to the spacecraft actually from Houston, the there's also
1:18:55
besides that Boeing team in Houston and Florida, we also
1:18:57
have a small team in Denver that works for United Launch Alliance
1:19:01
that handles what gives me some information on what the rocket
1:19:04
is going to be doing during flights.
1:19:06
So we're all coordinating. The crew arrives at the pad two
1:19:12
hours and 50 minutes before launch.
1:19:14
They'll go up to the white room. You'll see the padtechs help
1:19:18
them strap in. That process takes a little bit
1:19:21
over an hour. They'll start closing the Hatch
1:19:25
at one hour and 20 minutes before flight.
1:19:28
I should note too, that the the rocket is actually fully fueled
1:19:32
before the crew gets out there. So that's one of the last things
1:19:34
we do is we load the rocket with the cryogenic propulsion while
1:19:41
we suit up the crew. Again, we're at an hour and 20
1:19:45
before launch. We'll get the crew in and then
1:19:48
the get the Hatch closed. We'll do a leak check on the
1:19:50
spacecraft and the pad team will clear the pad about 50 minutes
1:19:55
before launch. OK.
1:19:56
The real meat of the countdown where you'll hear a lot of
1:20:00
things on the on the audio that they provide, that's.
1:20:05
At l -, 18 minutes, we'll begin the transfer to internal power.
1:20:09
That's where we go from the external power to the onboard
1:20:13
batteries. That's commanded from Houston.
1:20:15
You'll hear some calm checks between the crew and the ULA
1:20:19
launch conductor Doug Libo. A number of poles going through
1:20:23
the count and then in the final four minutes you'll hear the
1:20:30
launch conductor give the crew an instruction to do a switch
1:20:34
throw. It's called last arm to auto.
1:20:36
That'll that's last is the launch abort system.
1:20:38
The crew will alarm the abort system at 75 seconds and then
1:20:43
they'll go ahead and launch. OK, so it's already been a a
1:20:48
busy day but now we have liftoff.
1:20:51
So that's where my real work starts.
1:20:53
This is going to be the first crude ascent that's been flown
1:20:59
out of Mission Control in Houston since the STS 135 in
1:21:03
2011. Can we go ahead and roll the
1:21:07
first video? I'll just talk for about a
1:21:09
minute and 1/2 through the ascent activities on the Atlas
1:21:11
5, the animation ascent. OK, again, we've got the Atlas 5
1:21:19
on the pad. Crew access arms retracted at 11
1:21:23
minutes, by the way, so there's a liftoff from pad 41.
1:21:27
OK, On the Atlas 5, most of your energy to make orbit actually
1:21:31
comes from the first stage with those two SRBS and the RD180
1:21:36
engine. Actually, one of the first
1:21:37
things you'll hear from the crew here is roll program while we're
1:21:40
going through Ascent. Looking forward to hearing Butch
1:21:42
talk to us right off the pad again.
1:21:50
RD180's got 2 engine bells. That's actually a single engine
1:21:53
there in the first stage. First stage will burn.
1:21:56
The Sr. BS will burn for about a minute
1:21:58
and a half. You'll see them burn out.
1:21:59
We actually carry the empty casings for another minute.
1:22:01
Goes a little faster on the video, but we got to get above
1:22:04
the atmosphere to jettison them. We'll get through first stage at
1:22:09
4 1/2 minutes. There's about a 15 second pause
1:22:12
as first stage separates. That's the ascent cover that
1:22:15
covers the docking system. It'll be jettisoned and the
1:22:18
Arrow skirt will jettison as well.
1:22:20
And then the two RL 10s on the Centaur will take us on a nice
1:22:25
easy cruise to space. That'll take us up to about 12
1:22:29
minutes into the mission. Miko is 12 minutes.
1:22:34
We'll stay on the booster for about 3 minutes, and then we'll
1:22:37
have a separation at 15 minutes into the mission.
1:22:41
Again, we're sub orbital still here.
1:22:44
We got to do another burn. Starliners actually got a pretty
1:22:47
spectacular orbital maneuvering system.
1:22:50
You'll see the four engines kick in there.
1:22:52
We'll do that at 31 minutes into the mission, and that'll push
1:22:55
the crew into orbit and get a get them heading on to
1:22:59
rendezvous. OK, so with that, as in the real
1:23:03
world, we do one more burn at an hour and 15 minutes.
1:23:06
But then I had it handed over to Ed and his rendezvous team.
1:23:10
All right. Thanks, Mike.
1:23:11
My name is Ed Van Sis and I've been a flight director since
1:23:15
class of 2009, certified in 2010.
1:23:18
So like Mike, about 14 or 15 years as a flight director.
1:23:21
Experience International Space Station, Artemis 1A, little bit
1:23:27
gateway flight director for for about a year.
1:23:30
Lots of projects inside the space station and now I've been
1:23:34
working Starliner since 2016. So really all three of us up
1:23:38
here have maybe different exact projects that we've worked on,
1:23:42
but we all have significant experience across multiple
1:23:45
programs for the agency and also been working Starliner for for
1:23:49
quite some time. It's been really an honor and
1:23:52
actually humbling to be able to work on Starliner from the days
1:23:56
of when it was a PowerPoint presentation all the way up now
1:23:59
to having two flights behind us to get ready to go put crew into
1:24:02
orbit on on this third flight. The the teams that we get to
1:24:07
work with are are truly amazing and highly capable and
1:24:10
everything that they do and getting to be at the forefront
1:24:14
of leading the teams, not just the flight controllers but and
1:24:18
and the real time engineering teams as well.
1:24:20
But all the all the folks that are working in the factory and
1:24:23
with ULA and and all the other organizations we work with and
1:24:26
of course with NASA as well and the commercial crew program and
1:24:29
and the ISS program, just having that capability and and
1:24:34
experiences is just quite a pleasure.
1:24:38
Like Mike said, we're we're getting ready to put this
1:24:41
vehicle and this crew through a test flight and various phases
1:24:44
of of a test. So that's what you're going to
1:24:47
hear a lot about as we are working through the missions.
1:24:51
Obviously the primary goal is to get the crew up to the space
1:24:53
station and to get them back home to the Southwest US safely.
1:24:59
But in that process we are doing a lot of purposely, doing a lot
1:25:03
of tests of the vehicle as you would with the test flight of an
1:25:06
aircraft or anything else. So you'll you'll hear a lot
1:25:10
about from Vincent, you'll hear a lot about different test
1:25:12
things that we're going to do while we're docked.
1:25:14
But we also want to put the vehicle through some some
1:25:18
experiences that we don't anticipate being needed on a on
1:25:22
a normal 6 month mission to the space station.
1:25:24
But we know the vehicle should be capable of handling them if
1:25:27
the crew were to to need them. And so we want to check them out
1:25:31
on this test flight as well just to be able to say that yes, not
1:25:35
only then the normal mission will go fine, but then all of
1:25:38
the capabilities the vehicle has on maybe not a good day, all of
1:25:42
those work as well. So that's going to be the focus
1:25:45
of the bulk of the cruise afternoon after launch.
1:25:49
So they they got up early, they went through everything that
1:25:52
Mike just described. Now they're in space.
1:25:54
They just completed the the first Co elliptic burn and you'd
1:25:58
think that now it's just a a great relaxing ride to the space
1:26:01
station and it will be for that six month increment mission.
1:26:05
But like I said, we're putting the crew right to work getting
1:26:09
them out of their seats, out of their suits and then right into
1:26:11
some demonstrations. And we will be doing a bunch of
1:26:15
things with the spacecraft to make sure that it can help the
1:26:19
crew and the crew can also maneuver the spacecraft as they
1:26:23
need to. So we'll be doing things like
1:26:25
purposefully pointing it in a in an orientation that's say, not
1:26:30
exactly the the nominal the normal orientation for the
1:26:34
mission, and then having the crew manually fly the spacecraft
1:26:37
back into the the direction it should be pointing.
1:26:41
We also want to make sure that if for some reason the vehicle
1:26:44
doesn't know where the communication satellites are
1:26:46
located, that the crew can manually fly the spacecraft to
1:26:52
point the antennas at the satellite.
1:26:55
Another another thing that we'll be doing this day is tricking,
1:27:00
if you will, the spacecraft into thinking that it doesn't know
1:27:02
where it is in space. So we're going to deallocate a
1:27:06
couple of its Inertial measurement systems to they're
1:27:11
still running, but the vehicle computers are not actually
1:27:15
looking at them. So effectively the the computers
1:27:17
don't necessarily know where they are.
1:27:19
And then the crew will manually fly the spacecraft to look at
1:27:24
stars and use our star tracker to then rebuild its inertial
1:27:28
navigation base. And we'll see how their manual,
1:27:32
manual way of doing it compares with what the still running
1:27:37
computers are are seeing and see how well that compares.
1:27:40
And they should all compare very equally and we should be able to
1:27:45
run off of that solution that the crew comes up with.
1:27:48
But again, it's a test flight, So we want to see how well the
1:27:50
vehicle does and all these scenarios that we've thoroughly
1:27:52
tested out on the ground with all our avionics systems down
1:27:57
here, but want to see how the spacecraft is really performing.
1:28:01
And one other final thing that what we're doing is we're
1:28:04
putting all all of our thrusters through a a human manual flying
1:28:09
checkout. So we want to make sure that not
1:28:11
only can we point in space, but also can we do translations as
1:28:14
well. So if we're close to the space
1:28:16
station and the computers have a hard time controlling Starliner,
1:28:20
we want to make sure the astronauts can manually fly
1:28:23
away. And to ensure we have that
1:28:25
capability, we're going to give the crew full manual control on
1:28:30
this first day and just test everything out.
1:28:32
So we'll do some demonstrations of that and that last part is
1:28:36
really important for the safety of the space stations.
1:28:39
We have that manual capability and we talked about the, the
1:28:42
engineering teams that are here in Houston, the ones that are in
1:28:45
Florida as well and the other NASA programs involved.
1:28:48
We're going to take a look at all this data while the crew's
1:28:50
sleeping and have the the Boeing teams that that we are embedded
1:28:55
with. We'll take a look at all that
1:28:56
data, bring recommendations to our mission management team and
1:28:59
ultimately take that to NASA to certify that this manual flying
1:29:03
capability is also something we're ready to use in proximity
1:29:06
to the space station if we were to need it.
1:29:09
So all that's happening while the crew's asleep and then
1:29:12
they'll wake up the next morning and we can go ahead and show the
1:29:15
video here for the free flight and the orbit.
1:29:19
So this is kind of the end of the cruise day.
1:29:22
There is the kind of representation of what they're
1:29:25
doing at the in those tests that I was talking about.
1:29:29
So we're pointing the nose towards the Earth trying to see
1:29:32
where we are with respect to the communication satellites.
1:29:35
We also fly in this tail to the sun attitude.
1:29:37
So our our solar arrays are at the the back of the Starliners.
1:29:41
We want to make sure we keep those pointed at the sun.
1:29:44
But the crews inside there and they're getting ready for bed,
1:29:47
and we'll do some more checkouts overnight while they're
1:29:50
sleeping. They'll wake up in the morning.
1:29:52
We'll be pretty close, you know, a couple couple 1000 kilometers
1:29:56
away from ISS and do a rendezvous.
1:29:58
That was exactly the same automated rendezvous we did for
1:30:01
the last flight. We'll fly up underneath the
1:30:04
space station and then around out in front.
1:30:06
And we'll we'll actually pause a little bit out in front of the
1:30:09
space station, do some more manual flying just to make sure
1:30:13
that's exactly the way the crew expects it.
1:30:14
Then we'll press in, and at 10 meters we'll do our final
1:30:18
approach and dock. And then Sunny and Butch will
1:30:21
get to get everything situated inside the cabin and get ready
1:30:25
to come into their new home for the next few days.
1:30:27
And Vincent's the expert on the space station side, so I'll hand
1:30:30
it over to him to explain all that to you.
1:30:32
Thanks, Ed. So good afternoon, everybody.
1:30:34
My name is Vincent Lacorde. I'm the lead International Space
1:30:37
Station Flight Director for CFT. I was selected into the office
1:30:41
in 2015. I'm going to walk through our
1:30:43
dock time frame with International Space Station.
1:30:46
Our main goals of the dock mission are a few.
1:30:49
There's the practice and validate the planned operations
1:30:52
for long duration missions. We're also going to perform some
1:30:55
contingency operations just in case we were ever to need those
1:30:59
in contingencies. And then we'll do some cargo
1:31:01
operations. Our lead planners who are Richie
1:31:05
Chantlos and Izzy Lasky did a great job of trying to fit all
1:31:08
the puzzle pieces together and have figured out that we can do
1:31:11
our mission in a minimum of eight dock days.
1:31:14
So we have a few graphics I'm going to show you to kind of
1:31:16
show you how the mission will look day by day.
1:31:20
So the first of all, just as Mike said, we usually dock about
1:31:23
24 hours after launch. Once you arrive and dock to the
1:31:27
space station, you're going to get the crew is going to egress,
1:31:31
get out of their asset and entry suits.
1:31:35
Then they're going to repress the vestibules and be able to
1:31:40
open the hatches. And then they'll go on to the
1:31:42
space station and we'll have our welcome ceremony that you'll get
1:31:45
to watch on NASA TV. Then the ISIS crew members
1:31:48
conduct a safety briefing. Will they'll be able to take
1:31:50
Butch and Sunny and remind them of where all the emergency
1:31:53
hardware lives on the International Space Station, in
1:31:56
case we have any contingencies when they're on board.
1:31:59
Now let's go ahead and go to flight day three, which is dock
1:32:02
day #2. On this day, we're unloading all
1:32:05
of the cargo and we're also configuring the vehicle for
1:32:08
quiescent operations. If you can imagine when you're
1:32:11
when the Starliner is there for six months, you don't want to
1:32:15
use all the power and leave all of your equipment running the
1:32:17
whole time. So what the quiescent OPS does
1:32:19
is it basically powers off all the redundant equipment that you
1:32:22
don't really need. The crew will still be able to
1:32:24
go inside the capsule. They have good lights, good
1:32:26
displays, good ventilation, things like that, but all of the
1:32:29
extra computers and stuff like that will be powered off.
1:32:32
We'll also get to do some emergency hardware transfer.
1:32:35
I'm getting ready again for some of the contingency operations
1:32:38
that we're going to practice later in the mission.
1:32:41
Let's go again to dock day #3. On dock day #3, we're going to
1:32:45
do some of our operational checkouts.
1:32:47
The first main one we're going to do is called our Safe Haven
1:32:50
Checkout. If you can imagine if you have
1:32:52
an emergency on ISS, you want to be able to get in your Earth
1:32:55
return vehicle, isolate yourself and make sure you're in a safe
1:32:58
environment. So that's what we'll practice.
1:33:00
Butch and Sonny will go into Starliner, they'll close the
1:33:03
Hatch. They'll basically completely
1:33:05
power up the vehicle on their own to practice if they were
1:33:09
getting ready for an emergency undock and return.
1:33:12
So basically, make sure all that all that stuff works in a kind
1:33:16
of a steady environment. On entry, we have a system
1:33:20
called a supplementer that provides cooling for the vehicle
1:33:23
that uses water. If for some reason there's any
1:33:25
kind of leak or any kind of where we need additional water,
1:33:29
we have the capability to refill that on board even though you
1:33:33
normally would not need to do that.
1:33:34
So we'll get to practice that again, just to make sure all the
1:33:37
hardware connects correctly, make sure all the procedures are
1:33:39
accurate. So that way if we need that in a
1:33:41
contingency, we're ready for that.
1:33:43
On a long duration mission, we'll have 4 crew members.
1:33:46
And So what we'll do is we'll borrow a few ISIS crew members,
1:33:49
have them float into Starliner with Butch and Sunny, and we'll
1:33:52
practice that that day of free flight to see how would we
1:33:55
Orient ourselves with four crew members.
1:33:57
So we'll get to practice that before the the long duration
1:34:00
mission. And then we'll get to do a
1:34:02
Boeing event where we'll have all of the engineers and
1:34:05
employees who worked really hard to get Starliner on board.
1:34:07
They'll get to interact with the crew and spend some time with
1:34:10
them and see all that great hardware they built in space.
1:34:14
We'll go to the next day, dock day #4, so usually seven day in
1:34:20
the six month mission. Seven days before the mission
1:34:22
ends, you'll take that quiescent config and do a complete power
1:34:26
up and basically check out all the missions systems to make
1:34:29
sure all the computers come on, make sure all the the equipment
1:34:31
is working. We're basically going to test
1:34:33
that out on dock day #4. Butch and Sonny will basically
1:34:36
sit in the capsule and watch all of displays and watch all the
1:34:39
units come up so that way they can understand how all the
1:34:41
systems are working. Now let's go to flight day
1:34:44
number 6, which is dock day #5. We put this sample day in there.
1:34:49
As Mike said, Orbital Dynamics will really drive what day we're
1:34:53
able to undock. So if it's longer than eight day
1:34:55
mission, this is one of the days we'll put in.
1:34:58
So we'll give the crew 1/2 day off.
1:35:00
Again, they're very busy on all these days, so they'll get a
1:35:02
little bit of rest. We've also trained Butch and
1:35:05
Sonny to be able to do basically all of the key International
1:35:09
Space Station tasks that could exist for them.
1:35:12
So they're ready for any preventive maintenance,
1:35:13
corrective maintenance tasks as well as a lot of science tasks.
1:35:17
So we'll we'll ask the space station program what extra
1:35:20
activities are available and Butch and Sonny will go back to
1:35:23
their International Space Station lives on their previous
1:35:25
missions and get to do some of those tasks that they remember
1:35:29
doing. Let's say, let's go to dock day
1:35:31
number six. At this point, we're really now
1:35:34
focused on the end of the mission.
1:35:36
So we're going to load all the cargo that's going to come home
1:35:39
on the Starliner and start some of that undock preparations.
1:35:42
That emergency equipment that was in Starliner, when I'll take
1:35:45
that out and put it back on the the ISS where it lives.
1:35:48
One of the other training simulations we fly on Starliner
1:35:51
is on entry. It's all automated, but there is
1:35:55
the capability that if needed the crew can take manual control
1:35:58
and fly an entry for Butch. He's just going to practice that
1:36:02
right before a launch. So he doesn't need a lot of
1:36:03
practice, but on six month mission you want the crew to be
1:36:06
able to to get in that simulator and really practice those
1:36:09
entries to make sure they're ready in case they need it.
1:36:12
We'll get to practice that on dock day number six.
1:36:16
Let's go to the next day. Now we'll really do a full
1:36:20
undocked power up, make sure the vehicle is completely ready.
1:36:23
We're going to have a conference with the crew to walk through
1:36:26
all of their flight test objectives, make sure they give
1:36:28
us feedback. So that way if we need to adjust
1:36:30
any procedures or just any hardware, we can do that before
1:36:34
Starliner 1 and then we'll have our standard departure news
1:36:37
conference. Then we go to our next day.
1:36:42
What we did is we went ahead and put in a sleep shift day because
1:36:46
again because of order dynamics, you don't always get to undock
1:36:49
at the same time of day. So this give us a chance to
1:36:52
sleep shift the crew for any anytime we need.
1:36:56
And then we go to dock Day #9, which will be our last day on
1:36:59
the International Space Station. We'll get to do our farewell TV
1:37:03
events. The crew will get in there as an
1:37:05
entry suit. We'll close the Hatch, and then
1:37:09
we'll get ready to leave. And at this point, we'll hand
1:37:12
back over to Mike who will kind of walk you through the
1:37:14
operations of how you undock and how you entry and land.
1:37:20
OK. Thank you, Vincent.
1:37:21
So again, we mentioned where we are now.
1:37:24
It's we're on, we're on undocking day and the crew is in
1:37:27
the vehicle. I'll show a short video here in
1:37:30
a second. But undocking happens about 6
1:37:34
1/2 hours prior to landing. That's a little bit longer on
1:37:39
this test flight than it would be for a direct descent mission
1:37:44
at the end of a six month increment.
1:37:45
We added some time for the crew to do a couple more flight tests
1:37:50
and these are really important ones.
1:37:52
Starliner is really unique in that it has a backup system.
1:37:57
We called it a backup system where the crew, you know, they
1:38:00
have a rotational and a translational hand controller
1:38:03
and they normally go through three flight computers that fly
1:38:08
the vehicle automated. But as it turns out, we can have
1:38:13
the crew engage backup control where they're actually firing.
1:38:18
The the commander can fire The Jets directly, bypassing the
1:38:22
computers. And that's just designed so if
1:38:24
you had a really unlikely computer failure, the crew can
1:38:29
actually manually control the vehicle in this backup mode by
1:38:34
what I like to call stick and rudder flying.
1:38:37
In fact, they can even de orbit and and land in that mode.
1:38:41
So what we're going to do is we're going to spend about an
1:38:44
orbit with the Butch, engaging the various.
1:38:51
There's a couple of different jet manifolds that they can they
1:38:53
can engage to get some experience flying and back up
1:38:57
And just to make sure that get some feedback on how the vehicle
1:39:01
flies with respect to all the experience that he has, both,
1:39:05
you know, and our training Sims on the ground.
1:39:07
And then, of course, the other spacecraft and even aircraft
1:39:11
that he's flown before. So again, we'll go ahead and do
1:39:15
that. Over a couple of Revs, we do a
1:39:19
deorbit burn, and you'll see this in the video.
1:39:21
But we do a deorbit burn over the Pacific and we target a
1:39:25
landing in the Southwest United States.
1:39:28
We've got 3 landing areas, White Sands Missile Range in New
1:39:32
Mexico. There's actually two spots that
1:39:33
we can land there. It's a it's a really quite a big
1:39:36
place and the the other and that's where the previous two
1:39:40
Starliners have landed. There's also a landing area at
1:39:44
Wilcox Playa that's an area east of Tucson, AZ.
1:39:48
It's actually just off of I-10 or a Dugway proving Ground which
1:39:53
is West of Salt Lake City and that gives us kind of a spread,
1:39:57
geographical spread that allows us to to get.
1:40:02
Opportunities every day depending on where orbital
1:40:04
mechanics puts us. So we'll go ahead, we'll roll
1:40:07
the video here. This is only about a minute and
1:40:10
then we'll be finished. OK, so there's undocking.
1:40:14
I think you'll see. Right after we undock, we back
1:40:16
down the corridor. There's a cover that this is a
1:40:19
little early in the video. There's a cover that closes over
1:40:21
the docking system. We fly 1/4 lap, we get go up
1:40:24
over the zenith of ISS and then we do a departure burn.
1:40:29
I don't believe we show the deorbit burn here, but this is
1:40:32
some of the tests that we're doing with the the backup
1:40:35
control that I mentioned. When we do the deorbit burn,
1:40:40
it's pretty quick. It's less than a minute and the
1:40:43
deorbit burn will happen. The service module is separated,
1:40:47
it does a disposal burn and it burns up over the Pacific.
1:40:51
The capsule will go ahead and do a guided the orbit using its own
1:40:56
propulsion system, which was activated shortly before this
1:41:00
landing sequence begins at 30,000 feet.
1:41:03
There goes the forward heat shield and then we put out a
1:41:05
couple of drogues. You'll see those jettison here
1:41:10
in a second. Hopefully we'll have video from
1:41:12
the NASA WB 57 for this when it happens.
1:41:16
Mains go out reefed at 8000 feet and then they'll dis reef 3
1:41:20
mains and takes about. That's the bucket handle that
1:41:25
gets us in the correct attitude for landing.
1:41:30
Running the mains for about 3 minutes.
1:41:33
You should see here in a second the forward heat shield is
1:41:36
dropped and then the airbags deploy and the crew touches down
1:41:48
and the crew will jettison the chutes manually.
1:41:51
They do a switch throw. That'll cause a lot of the
1:41:55
vehicle systems to power down. Well, as they power down, we'll
1:41:59
bring the crew up. Actually on a satellite phone.
1:42:02
The landing team is 4 kilometer on a on an offset on on a on the
1:42:07
edge of something we call the four kilometer circle just to
1:42:10
make sure that they're safe from the falling parts that are
1:42:13
coming off the vehicle. There are things like mortar
1:42:15
lids and those droves that you saw before.
1:42:18
Once the vehicle's on the ground, that team will approach
1:42:23
and they're actually on the SAT phone call with me and the and
1:42:27
the crew. And they'll we'll go ahead and
1:42:30
turn the vehicle over once they're at the location.
1:42:34
And then they'll go ahead and make sure that do the usual
1:42:37
safety checks that you do around the capsule.
1:42:39
And they'll take the crew out, they'll do the medical checks
1:42:42
and then the crew will be helicoptered to a landing field
1:42:47
and then they'll be flown back to Houston.
1:42:49
So that's that is the mission summary.
1:42:53
Great. Thank you so much.
1:42:54
That was a huge wealth of information.
1:42:56
Thank you to all of our briefers for that in depth.
1:42:59
Going over of the timeline, we're going to switch over to
1:43:01
some questions now. We're going to be taking
1:43:03
questions here in the room. So if you have one, go ahead and
1:43:06
raise your hand. We'll also be taking questions
1:43:08
on our phone bridge. So if you are on the phone, go
1:43:11
ahead and press * one. If you've got a question for one
1:43:15
of our briefers, again please state your name, affiliation and
1:43:18
who you'd like to address your question to.
1:43:20
We can go ahead and start right here in the room.
1:43:24
Hey Mike, I made Rick Wall Street Journal, not sure who
1:43:27
this would go to. Steve and Mark talked a little
1:43:30
bit earlier about how Boeing is using NASA flight OPS for for
1:43:33
this mission. First of all, just to be crystal
1:43:35
clear, that's you guys, that's your team's and then second.
1:43:40
Could you talk a little bit about decision making during the
1:43:42
mission if there is an anomaly given that given NASA flight OPS
1:43:46
role in the Boeing's like ultimate responsibility and
1:43:50
authority and management over CFD, how does decision making
1:43:55
work and something goes wrong? Thanks.
1:44:03
So I'll take a little bit of that, but I'll also let like
1:44:05
Vincent to weigh in too. So what you really have up here,
1:44:09
you have three members of the Johnson Space Center Flight
1:44:13
Operations Directorate that are NASA civil servants.
1:44:16
But we also have APR 2 Starliner mission operations flight
1:44:20
directors that are operating out of the white flight control room
1:44:24
embedded with Boeing for design, development, test flight mission
1:44:29
execution of Starliner. And you have one space station
1:44:32
flight directors. He's running his flight.
1:44:35
Vincent's running his team down on flight control Room 1 just
1:44:40
like space station 24/7. 365 is being run from there and his
1:44:45
focus and his responsibilities are for the safety and
1:44:48
protection of the space station and execution of the entire NASA
1:44:51
mission. So I'll let and I'll let him go
1:44:53
into details on that versus our side of things is focused on the
1:44:59
crew safety vehicle safety mission success of the Starliner
1:45:02
mission for and with Boeing. But also of course since we are
1:45:08
providing a service to NASA and the commercial crew program
1:45:12
primary focus for us too is of course safety and and mission
1:45:15
success for the space station. So it is a partnership with
1:45:19
Vincent and his team and NASA and ISS team but there are some
1:45:24
pretty clear distinctions. So we have for those of you
1:45:28
familiar with our operational products, we have flight rules,
1:45:30
we have launched commit criteria that are Boeing products that
1:45:34
tell us the limitations going on goes things like that for
1:45:38
Starliner that are part of Boeing process.
1:45:42
We we work in developing those with our mission operations,
1:45:44
flight control teams, the mission engineer, the Boeing
1:45:48
engineers and then the Boeing management.
1:45:50
So Mark and Leroy that you talked with earlier and we get
1:45:54
all those approved so that we know how to go operate in the
1:45:59
Starliner spacecraft at the nitty gritty level.
1:46:02
But we also then work with commercial crew program and ISS
1:46:05
to ensure that what we're doing is within the requirements and
1:46:09
and safety paradigm of of what NASA needs for really taking
1:46:13
care of their astronauts. Even though they're our friends,
1:46:16
they're the NASA astronauts, we need to take good care of them
1:46:19
so that it is a collaboration. But there's still a distinction
1:46:23
on the the extent to which were embedded within Boeing and and
1:46:26
their design and development test versus Vincent's role.
1:46:33
Yeah. So I think from the
1:46:35
International Space Station flight director role, it's very
1:46:38
similar to how we do SpaceX, right.
1:46:40
Once we get inside integrated operations, the International
1:46:44
Space Station Flight Director has operational authority and
1:46:47
they're making the ultimate calls on, again, go being go to
1:46:49
dock, go to undock. Those kind of decisions.
1:46:53
The same way we would work with a SpaceX mission director
1:46:56
because they are the experts in the SpaceX capsule.
1:46:59
The same way I'd work with Ed and Mike that they're the expert
1:47:02
in the Starliner capsule. So if there's any anomalies on
1:47:04
the Starliner vehicle, again, my team is not the expert.
1:47:08
We will listen to them and get their to get their advice.
1:47:10
And then we have space station flight rules where we document
1:47:15
if they have failure of X computer or we still go or we
1:47:18
not go based on what we're done and see what risk we will take.
1:47:21
So again in a lot of ways for us we've practiced this for years
1:47:25
but it's very similar how we do other vehicles where again my
1:47:28
job is to make sure the ISS is in the right configuration for
1:47:31
docking, make sure all of our systems are at the right
1:47:34
redundancies and then to communicate with Ed, Mike, Chloe
1:47:38
and Rick and on their side to make sure that I understand the
1:47:42
situation and what what their vehicle is doing.
1:47:45
And again the the good news for us is we we sit right down the
1:47:50
hall from each other right so off console it's very easy to
1:47:53
work together and and get good situation where it's on any
1:47:56
anything they're working. So that's the benefit right of
1:47:59
working at Johnson Space Center where Boeing has has contracted
1:48:03
NASA to fly their vehicle. It's easier to be sometimes
1:48:06
easier to be on the same page because we do work at the same
1:48:09
place and and see each other all the time.
1:48:12
Great. Thank you.
1:48:13
We'll take a question on the phone real quick.
1:48:15
Marsha Dunn with The Associated Press.
1:48:19
Hi, I'm wondering how long could the Starliner and it's crew stay
1:48:23
at the space station if something goes amiss during AS
1:48:27
then in the initial part of the flight?
1:48:30
Are you taking up extra rations just in case?
1:48:33
And is Boeing, NASA working with SpaceX to be on emergency
1:48:37
standby just in case? I'm just wondering the backup
1:48:39
plans. Thanks.
1:48:43
I can go to answer first like the cargo so we have, we
1:48:47
basically bring a lot of supplies for the crew for for
1:48:50
kind of that initial mission. We have some extended supplies
1:48:54
and caves they stay, but obviously ISS has has plenty of
1:48:58
food and water for example. So really we're prepared for
1:49:01
them to stay as long as they need to.
1:49:03
Obviously there's certain weather requirements that we
1:49:05
need to meet on on CFT and so we have no issues if we need to
1:49:10
stay stay any longer. Yep.
1:49:12
As far as duration goes, this this is there's really no hard
1:49:18
constraint on the vehicle. This is the spacecraft that's
1:49:22
designed to stay at space station for six months, and
1:49:25
there's nothing essentially limiting that if you needed to.
1:49:31
As far as being on standby, you know those are.
1:49:39
I'm not aware of of any of that. OK.
1:49:43
We're going to go to a question in the room.
1:49:45
Go ahead. Hi Elizabeth Howell from
1:49:47
space.com. This is probably for Ed.
1:49:49
So can you talk about during the close proximity operations to
1:49:53
the ISS aside from obviously the flight activities of flight
1:49:57
activities Sunny and Butcher doing, are there any key
1:50:00
difference with how a SpaceX direct and close proximity
1:50:03
operations those? So I'm first going to admit that
1:50:10
I've been focused on Starliner for a long time and have not
1:50:13
been a flight a NASA flight director for a Crew Dragon
1:50:16
mission. So I don't have tremendous depth
1:50:19
of detail to really give you a point by point comparison.
1:50:23
But I have worked a couple of Dragon cargo missions in in
1:50:27
previous years. So at a high level, the
1:50:30
trajectories are basically the same because largely because of
1:50:34
what Benson described with the way that ISS wants to have
1:50:37
vehicles approaching and the way they want to manage the traffic
1:50:39
plans. So at a very high level, all the
1:50:43
spacecraft that come up to the ISS are going to come up from
1:50:46
below and behind and then do some sort of rendezvous.
1:50:50
If you're docking to the forward part of ISS, obviously you'll go
1:50:53
below, behind, in front and then and then kind of come up.
1:50:56
The way that we do that with Starliner is a little bit
1:50:59
different than with the Dragon. So the profiles will look a
1:51:03
little bit different just because the sensors that we use,
1:51:06
the sensor suites for rendezvous are all, you know, different
1:51:11
technologies, different way of doing things, different mission
1:51:13
rules, different waypoints if you will to to to get on that
1:51:18
trajectory. The way that the space station
1:51:23
is monitoring the approaching vehicle is very similar.
1:51:26
It's obviously not exactly the same, but it's very similar and
1:51:32
then largely from that level I can say that it's pretty close
1:51:37
to the same. I can't really do a good
1:51:40
comparison for you on you know timeline of events or the the
1:51:46
manual capabilities of the manual actions that crews might
1:51:49
be doing. But from that perspective it's
1:51:51
it's pretty pretty similar. We'll take another question in
1:51:55
the room. Thanks.
1:51:58
Hi, Irene Klotz with Aviation Week from Mike.
1:52:02
Two questions. The first one is considering
1:52:04
that redundancy in Starliner, do all systems need to be
1:52:09
operational to meet the launch commit criteria or are you able
1:52:13
to fly? If something is operational, you
1:52:17
can provide any detail on that? And then the second, just to
1:52:20
clarify again the relationship between Boeing and NASA for the
1:52:24
Starliner missions, for all intents and purposes, are you
1:52:28
all sort of on leave from NASA on your official jobs and
1:52:32
working as subcontractors to Boeing?
1:52:35
So Boeing is your customer during these missions?
1:52:38
You're no longer sort of representing NASA as you would
1:52:42
if it wasn't a Starliner mission going on?
1:52:44
Thanks. Yeah, I'll good questions.
1:52:47
I'll I'll take your second question first because maybe
1:52:50
here's here's another way of of of of thinking about it and I
1:52:55
realized that that it it can be it's challenging to describe
1:53:01
sometimes the relationship but I'll give it to you another way.
1:53:03
When when I'm working Starliner right Ed and I, we actually have
1:53:07
a charge code right and that that that is you know funded by
1:53:13
Boeing. I mean ultimately it's part of a
1:53:14
NASA contract but but but it's it's being managed by Boeing and
1:53:19
we're providing them service right.
1:53:21
And then that goes into even how the mission is run.
1:53:24
When I report to the mission management team, the mission
1:53:26
management team is chaired by Leroy Cain who's a Boeing
1:53:30
employee. Boeing runs the mission until we
1:53:33
get into the joint OPS with with with Vincent as he as he
1:53:38
described then you know NASA's got an oversight role like they
1:53:42
do for all of the of the vehicles.
1:53:44
But, but once, if we're outside of this area around ISS, it's
1:53:49
it's a Boeing run mission that is done in partnership with
1:53:53
their customer who is NASA. As far as the launch commit
1:53:59
criteria, you know there's kind of two sets.
1:54:01
There's the ones that ULA has United Launch Alliance on the
1:54:05
Atlas Five. I'm not as familiar with those
1:54:09
except to say that they do their own set of checks that's
1:54:11
identical to all the commercial and government missions that
1:54:14
that they do for the rocket for the spacecraft In general, all
1:54:19
the systems have to be up and running.
1:54:22
I think I could probably get into some details where there's
1:54:25
there's some small things that we can fly without.
1:54:29
I was just you know talking yesterday about about 1 criteria
1:54:33
is how many. You know the crew uses tablets
1:54:35
for their procedures, right. And we fly with four of them.
1:54:39
Well if something happened to one of them we can fly with
1:54:41
three. So there's there's there's a few
1:54:45
places where there's sufficient redundant systems that can go
1:54:47
ahead and launch. But, but in general all the
1:54:50
flight computers, all the Imus have to be running to to to
1:54:55
launch and we, I mean we're evaluating those right down to
1:54:59
liftoff. Thank you, Mike.
1:55:01
We're going to switch to a question on our phone bridge,
1:55:04
Jeff Faust with Space News. Right.
1:55:10
One, is there anything like the dry dress rehearsal that SpaceX
1:55:15
does for true Dragon missions for Starliner?
1:55:18
And then you mentioned the timeline for undocking the
1:55:22
landing is a little bit longer on CFT versus an operational
1:55:26
mission. What would be the the time from
1:55:28
undocking to landing for an operational mission?
1:55:30
Thanks. Let's see for the the dry dress,
1:55:37
the answer is yes, there is an activity and I forget the exact
1:55:43
date right now, but it's about 8:00.
1:55:46
It's it's eight days before launch, seven or eight days
1:55:49
before launch and it's called the crew training activity.
1:55:53
It's really a full up run where the crew we we have the whole
1:56:00
team there. The crew suits up in the suit
1:56:04
room. They get get in the suits we
1:56:07
take them down to the spacecraft.
1:56:09
The one difference is is the the spacecraft and the rocket aren't
1:56:12
at the pad, they're in the VIF, the the integration building.
1:56:16
But we we have them practice out in the pad in the white room on
1:56:20
some other activities. But the crew will get into the
1:56:22
spacecraft. The spacecraft is going to be
1:56:24
powered. In fact, we're commanding it
1:56:26
from Houston just as we would on launch day and we go through the
1:56:30
entire launch count, including things like having the crew do
1:56:36
suit checks, working with the pad team.
1:56:40
We'll do all of that and get a chance to to practice it.
1:56:44
So that is being done and is similar.
1:56:47
It is a dry dress. Let's see, the second question
1:56:51
was the amount of time for a post certification mission as we
1:57:00
call it, when when Starliners coming down it would be the
1:57:04
shortest possible time to get from undocked to landing would
1:57:07
be about four hours. There's a little bit of a
1:57:10
dependency on whether or not there's a fly around done.
1:57:14
So Starliners got the capability to do a full fly around of the
1:57:18
entire space station to to do photography of space station.
1:57:23
We're not doing that on this mission.
1:57:25
Potential to do it on the next mission if NASA requested, and
1:57:29
if they do, it'd be, I think, closer to the six hours.
1:57:35
Thank you. Got a question right here in the
1:57:37
front ABC News for Matt. What are the weather and
1:57:41
lighting constraints for landing?
1:57:44
Was that so the question was weather and lighting
1:57:47
constraints. The the weather constraints for
1:57:51
landing are we essentially want the lowest wind that we can to
1:57:59
to undock and then that's just to give it a gentle, the
1:58:05
gentler, not not have a a large lateral component.
1:58:11
When we hit the ground also we do things like we account for if
1:58:16
a parachute fails or an airbag fails.
1:58:18
And so you tend to be a little bit more conservative right now.
1:58:20
I think we, we want limits that are less than 10 knots for that.
1:58:27
And that kind of ties into the second part of your question
1:58:31
which was lighting. There are no requirements for
1:58:36
lighting. In fact we tend to like to land
1:58:38
at night and that's because two reasons, one is the wind is
1:58:43
lower at night in the places that we're landing.
1:58:45
Also you got to think about the safety of the of the people that
1:58:50
go out and meet the spacecraft after it lands.
1:58:54
Some of them are in things called scape suits which are to
1:58:57
protect them if there's a leak of of fuel or oxidizer from the
1:59:01
vehicle. They're actually pretty hot and
1:59:03
you know we land in the desert and so we it's a lot easier on
1:59:07
the landing team to land at night.
1:59:08
And it turns out we found in previous missions it's actually
1:59:13
I when I started working this program years ago.
1:59:15
We're a little bit worried about operating at night, but they've
1:59:17
actually come up with a really nice setup with the lights and
1:59:22
of course if you see the the video we've got the infrared
1:59:24
tracking both from the ground and the and the aircraft it's
1:59:27
it's it's it's kind of funny. We've got to the point where we
1:59:30
almost prefer the night so. OK, got another question right
1:59:35
here. Or with CVS.
1:59:36
Well, we prefer the daytime, but that's OK.
1:59:39
It is prettier. I I will give you that.
1:59:41
Two quick ones from me and I know this isn't about, this
1:59:45
isn't a dragon briefing, obviously, it's it's, it's star
1:59:47
liner. But are there any things in your
1:59:49
minds that are clear advantages that Starliner brings to the
1:59:53
table, things that you particularly appreciate in terms
1:59:56
of how it flies and how you control the spacecraft, how the
1:59:59
crew does that? And secondly, can do any of you
2:00:02
have any idea what what sort of TV we can expect from the
2:00:05
mission between launch and docking?
2:00:07
I know what we get on once it's at station, but is there any
2:00:10
live down links during the mission that you're aware of or
2:00:13
do they have the capability to do that?
2:00:15
Thanks. I haven't talked lately the the
2:00:25
the for the second question there is with the the current
2:00:29
Starlight for CFT, there is not the capability to do live video
2:00:32
downlink. We do have the camera system
2:00:35
that you saw on the last flight that'll provide streaming video
2:00:39
when we're docked to the space station.
2:00:40
And that camera system is running during the free flight
2:00:44
phases as well. And the crew will actually be
2:00:47
conducting some public affair affair events during the free
2:00:50
flight on both the 1st and 2nd day of the mission.
2:00:53
But they'll be recorded on the video system and then played
2:00:56
back after we've docked. So there might be some some
2:01:00
audio of that that comes down live, but there's for this
2:01:04
flight, there's no live TV capability in the free flight
2:01:07
phase. Comparing capabilities between
2:01:12
Dragon and Starliner, again I have to plead a little bit of of
2:01:17
Dragon lack of knowledge just because I haven't really worked
2:01:20
in depth on those vehicles to really give a good comparison.
2:01:25
But I can tell you that they are different and some obvious
2:01:29
differences are the fact that Starliner lands on the land
2:01:33
versus in the ocean. Starliner has tactile hand
2:01:38
controllers for manual flying, whereas Dragon doesn't, and
2:01:43
those are those are kind of some of the more obvious aspects and
2:01:47
they're just differences. They're not.
2:01:49
One's not really better than the other, one's not necessarily
2:01:51
more capable than the other, but they are different capabilities.
2:01:54
The rendezvous sensor suite is different between the two
2:01:57
vehicles. Just the way that the two
2:02:00
companies have approached how they want to approach and depart
2:02:03
from space station are also differences.
2:02:07
And that that then factors into how you train the crews, what
2:02:11
you focus on with the crew training and that really rolls
2:02:15
into exactly what NASA of course wanted with the commercial crew
2:02:18
program is you didn't you didn't want just one spacecraft or one
2:02:23
provider that you know all your eggs are in that basket.
2:02:26
You provide a couple of different capability from access
2:02:30
to space perspective but you also provide a couple of
2:02:33
different venues for industry to design solutions in their own
2:02:38
way using their own ideas that are different from each other.
2:02:41
And you you start to have this low earth, low Earth orbit
2:02:45
economy that NASA has been talking a lot about where now
2:02:48
you have different options if you want to get a ride into
2:02:51
space. So we we are definitely going to
2:02:55
be exercising those that Starliner has as much as we can.
2:02:59
And then maybe the best way to answer your question is going to
2:03:02
be after the mission when the the services they're looking to
2:03:07
provide access to the Earth orbit can then compare between
2:03:09
the two and and see which of the two menu options, if you will,
2:03:14
for accessing space are are to their liking and meet their
2:03:16
mission needs. Thank you, Ed.
2:03:19
We do look forward to seeing those live down links once they
2:03:22
get to the space station. We have a question here in the
2:03:26
room in the back. Thank you.
2:03:31
Stephen Clark, Ars Technica. Just a follow up on Bill's
2:03:34
question, what is the vehicle lacking on this particular
2:03:38
flight that doesn't allow you to do the live video downlink and
2:03:42
will that come online like with Starliner wine?
2:03:45
And secondly, my main question, Mike, can you talk about the
2:03:50
abort modes during ascent? Can you walk me through
2:03:53
different abort phases, different types of aborts you
2:03:56
would conduct if you have to, hopefully not at different
2:04:00
stages? Thanks.
2:04:03
I can answer the first part and then I'll let Mike do your part.
2:04:06
Really the only thing that the system is lacking is just
2:04:09
connection from the the data, the video recorder to a
2:04:13
transmission system. So the transmission antennas and
2:04:17
the ground stations to receive those transmission transmissions
2:04:21
are just not online yet. So the the capability within the
2:04:25
capsule, the infrastructure for it is all there.
2:04:29
They just we just haven't progressed enough into getting
2:04:32
the the operational post certification piece to where we
2:04:37
have that capability yet to. Answer the second part of the
2:04:41
question, the aborts. So we spent a lot of time
2:04:45
working on aborts. Boeing and United Launch
2:04:48
Alliance have spent a great deal of effort making a safe system.
2:04:55
The the way aborts work is it's kind of joint between the
2:04:59
spacecraft and the launch vehicle.
2:05:00
The launch vehicle is monitoring itself and if it needs to abort,
2:05:05
it will tell the Starliner to abort.
2:05:07
Additionally, we've got, you know, I've got a team of United
2:05:12
Launch Alliance flight controllers are actually in
2:05:14
Denver and they're reporting to me in real time and they will
2:05:18
tell me if they see an abort approaching.
2:05:20
We can do some things like perhaps abort early if we need
2:05:23
to, just to put the crew in better weather over the ocean.
2:05:26
It's a very large swath of the world we're flying over.
2:05:29
But what you'll hear is that lift off, as I mentioned
2:05:32
earlier, the abort system goes active 75 seconds before launch.
2:05:36
And then as we lift off and you gain more energy, you land at
2:05:40
different places, right? So the one of the you'll hear
2:05:43
them call the abort boundaries one of them is CM forward and
2:05:46
that's just has to do with how how the the service modules
2:05:52
jettisoned after an abort but that's still in the in the pad
2:05:54
area around Florida as you get more energy right when the first
2:06:00
stage goes at 4 1/2 minutes you'll hear Ecal that's East
2:06:03
Coast abort landing. The it's a heritage term you
2:06:07
actually end up in the ocean generally east of Cape Cod and
2:06:13
then as you gain more energy you will hear a call for St.
2:06:17
John's and that is in the area of the ocean near St.
2:06:21
John's NL. You'll do a guided landing there
2:06:24
and then once you have enough energy to get up over the North
2:06:27
Atlantic, which is by design vehicles designed to avoid that,
2:06:31
you'll hear Shannon and that's your Shannon, Ireland.
2:06:37
And then once you obtain enough energy to make orbit, we've
2:06:42
actually got a mode called Ato or abort to orbit and that'll
2:06:47
get the the Starliner. If if there's a low performance
2:06:51
case, the Starliner can burn its own engines and get into into a
2:06:54
low orbit that's 200 kilometers high.
2:06:58
And actually in a lot of cases we can give it a little bit of
2:07:01
time. We can actually figure out how
2:07:02
to get a rendezvous out of that if we need to.
2:07:04
But those those are the kind of the top level how abort modes
2:07:08
work. So I want to go to our phone
2:07:12
bridge because I know we don't have all that much time left.
2:07:14
We'll go to Robert Pearlman with Collect Space.
2:07:20
Great. Thank you.
2:07:22
Two questions. Given the flight rate, is there
2:07:24
just one NASA team assigned to Boeing for all of the Starliner
2:07:29
flights in terms of Mission Control?
2:07:31
Or are there different assignments of different people
2:07:33
assigned as you progress from CFT to Starliner One?
2:07:37
And second quick second question in terms of referring to the
2:07:41
vehicle on orbit, since there is a name of this spacecraft
2:07:44
Calypso once you see me referring to it as Calypso or as
2:07:48
Starliner as you call back and forth from space to ground, I'll
2:07:54
get the first one. So I'll get a book.
2:07:57
Hey, the first question as far as the NASA team we that that
2:08:02
supports Starliner. This is a really good question
2:08:05
actually because you talk about the flight rate and Starliner is
2:08:07
kind of interesting in that you know Boeing flies this crude
2:08:12
mission and the the team that we use, we have a very small core
2:08:20
group of people that work this full time.
2:08:23
But actually most of the team that flies this vehicle does
2:08:28
other things right. Both Ed and I do space station
2:08:33
shifts and we do, we've done Artemis shifts and it actually
2:08:36
really helps with this flight rate because as I'm a guy that
2:08:40
does operations, one of the things that's really important
2:08:43
for people that does the kind of work that we do is you got to
2:08:46
fly things right and it and it's all about how often you get to
2:08:49
fly things that really builds a team that knows how to manage a
2:08:53
spacecraft and space and do it safely.
2:08:56
And the way this works out is that we can almost ebb and flow
2:09:03
on this program as we're needed, right?
2:09:08
So right now we're coming up to a flight and we surge.
2:09:10
When you get into some of the time in between these, in
2:09:14
between these year long missions, we can allocate people
2:09:18
to do other things And that ultimately, you know, saves
2:09:25
resources as far as having a team that otherwise you'd need
2:09:28
that have completely stood up to cover you know 24/7 OPS of a
2:09:33
spacecraft that that is free flying only a very short short
2:09:39
period of time. As far as the naming, what we've
2:09:43
been using in all of our simulations is, is Starliner.
2:09:46
That's kind of what we're used to and what we've been training.
2:09:49
So I'm sure the the, the name that Sunny used will come up.
2:09:56
But in general, in our training we've been using Starliner and I
2:09:58
think I expect that's generally what you'll hear.
2:10:02
Great. So we only have a couple of
2:10:03
minutes left, but I do want to get one more question in the
2:10:05
room if it could be a quick one. Yeah, hopefully this will be
2:10:08
brief. Will Robinson Smith for Space
2:10:10
Flight. Now for Mike, assuming that the
2:10:13
airbags deploy as nominally, can you describe what the the impact
2:10:18
the Butch and Sonny will feel like, what that sensation will
2:10:21
be? And if one of them only
2:10:24
partially inflates or doesn't fully inflate, what the
2:10:26
difference for that might be? Thanks.
2:10:27
That'd be an excellent question for Butch and Sonny this
2:10:31
afternoon because they have both landed in well Butch has landed
2:10:36
in a Soyuz which has got an interesting way of landing as as
2:10:41
as we've we've seen you know they land on land too and but
2:10:45
they're using rockets instead of airbags but I believe the
2:10:49
descent rate is about 25 feet per second.
2:10:53
I would say that it's likely a firm landing but but you know
2:10:59
the requirements for these vehicles that both the NASA
2:11:04
crude vehicles as far as the conditions that the crew see it
2:11:10
impact is fairly gentle. It's it's not going to be I
2:11:18
think something that is puts the crew at risk in any way and that
2:11:21
includes with an airbag out, right.
2:11:23
All those requirements there, we call them the Health and Human
2:11:27
performance requirements, but they were all there and the
2:11:29
vehicle is certified to do all these things even with an airbag
2:11:33
out and that was part of the requirements to to build it.
2:11:37
So I I suspect it's going to be pretty gentle.
2:11:42
Great. Thank you so much.
2:11:43
That is all of the time that we have today.
2:11:45
Thank you to our awesome briefers for talking about an
2:11:48
overview of NASA's Boeing crew flight test mission.
2:11:51
Hey, thank you so much for listening today.
2:11:53
I really do appreciate your support.
2:11:55
If you could take a second and hit the subscribe or the follow
2:11:58
button on whatever podcast platform that you're listening
2:12:00
on right now, I greatly appreciate it.
2:12:03
It helps out the show tremendously and you'll never
2:12:05
miss an episode and each episode is about 10 minutes or less to
2:12:10
get you caught up quickly. And please, if you want to
2:12:13
support the show even more, go to patreon.com/stage Zero and
2:12:19
please take care of yourselves and each other and I'll see you
2:12:21
tomorrow. A lawsuit filed by X, owned by
2:12:29
Elon Musk against the group studying online hate speech was
2:12:33
dismissed by a federal judge, with the ruling emphasizing the
2:12:36
protection afforded by the 1st Amendment to the research
2:12:39
group's reports on the platform, previously known as Twitter.
2:12:42
Now the judge's decision articulated that the suit aimed
2:12:45
to penalize the researchers for their findings on the increase
2:12:48
in hate speech on X. The judge, Charles Breyer, in
2:12:51
his Monday ruling stated unequivocally that the lawsuit's
2:12:55
objective was to reprimand the Center for Countering Digital
2:12:58
Hate, or CCDH, for their expressive activities.
2:13:02
He highlighted that the case centered around retribution
2:13:05
against the defendants for their critical speech.
2:13:07
Now the CCDH faced legal action from Musk following their
2:13:11
publication of research indicating a rise in racist,
2:13:14
homophobic, Neo Nazi, anti-Semitic or conspiracy
2:13:18
content on X, particularly from paid accounts which allegedly
2:13:23
remain unmoderated now. This action came during a period
2:13:27
when advertisers were withdrawing their support from X
2:13:31
Musk's legal team, during a court hearing in February hinted
2:13:34
at the possibility of refiling the lawsuit against CCDH.
2:13:37
However, Judge Breyer dismissed the suggestion, finding the
2:13:41
argument that the group's data collection methods threatened
2:13:44
the platform's security unconvincing.
2:13:47
The judge expressed doubt regarding the lawsuit's basis,
2:13:50
suggesting that X's concerns lay more with CCDH's express
2:13:54
viewpoints than with the actual methods of data collection
2:13:57
employed by the group. The skepticism was apparent
2:14:00
during the February hearing and was reiterated in Breyer's final
2:14:03
ruling. Now, despite Musk's public
2:14:06
commitment to absolute freedom of speech on X, the lawsuit
2:14:09
against CCDH reveals a less tolerant stance towards
2:14:13
criticism, particularly when directed at Musk himself.
2:14:16
This is further exemplified by Musk's legal action against
2:14:19
Media Matters for America, another group that reported on
2:14:22
the platform's failure to filter out anti sabetic content on the
2:14:27
CCDH. Victorious under California anti
2:14:30
slap statutes, which aim to prevent baseless lawsuits that
2:14:33
suppress free speech, is set to receive coverage for the legal
2:14:36
expenses from Musk. The exact amount is yet to be
2:14:39
determined through court proceedings, though, and Musk's
2:14:42
purchase of Twitter in 2022 led to several controversial
2:14:45
decisions, including the reinstatement of accounts
2:14:48
previously banned for harmful contact and changes to the
2:14:52
platform verification system. These decisions have sparked
2:14:55
discussions about Musk's management and the platform's
2:14:58
direction under his leadership. Now, Musk's inconsistent
2:15:01
commentary on X's financial health further complicates this.
2:15:05
While he occasionally claims the business is thriving, he's also
2:15:08
acknowledged a significant drop in advertising revenue and
2:15:12
speculated about potential bankruptcy.
2:15:14
The CCDH's work which led to the lawsuit involved using third
2:15:17
party tools to analyze publicly available data on X, and Musk
2:15:21
contended that this constituted unauthorized data scraping,
2:15:24
thereby infringing on the platform's terms of service and
2:15:27
contributing to financial losses.
2:15:30
The legal dispute between X and CCDH shows that there are big
2:15:34
concerns here regarding the accountability of social media
2:15:37
platforms for the content that they host now.
2:15:40
This case in particular focuses on the tension between corporate
2:15:43
interests and public research on digital platforms and their
2:15:48
societal impact. Now, the court's dismissal of
2:15:51
the lawsuits, It kind of. It reinforces the importance of
2:15:54
protecting research and discourse on the rule of social
2:15:57
media. In propagating hate speech, it
2:16:00
emphasizes the legal protections afforded to such work,
2:16:03
especially when it challenges powerful entities.
2:16:06
Now, Musk's aggressive legal strategy against organizations
2:16:09
like CCDH and Media Matters is a broader attempt to control the
2:16:14
narrative surrounding X and its handling of contentious content.
2:16:18
This approach has raised questions about the balance
2:16:20
between free speech and the responsibility of the social
2:16:24
media platforms themselves, and the CCDH's victory in this case
2:16:28
is seen as a significant affirmation to the right to
2:16:31
conduct public interest. Research on social media's
2:16:34
influence highlights the legal safeguards in place for entities
2:16:38
investigating and critiquing the operations of platforms like
2:16:42
Musk. I have to ask you, is this
2:16:45
freedom of speech? Is using the data that you find
2:16:50
on a platform and creating speech out of it?
2:16:55
Is that freedom of speech? Are they allowed to talk about
2:16:57
this? And it seems like in some ways
2:17:00
Musk is trying to stifle their freedom of speech.
2:17:04
I'm not sure if that's the case, but it seems like he may be
2:17:08
trying to silence them with his court case now.
2:17:11
The ongoing legal battles here involving Musk and X, including
2:17:14
disputes over former executive severance and accusations
2:17:17
against a law firm for excessive billing, show a picture of a
2:17:21
platform embroiled in controversy and litigation.
2:17:25
The outcome of this lawsuit may set a precedent for how research
2:17:28
organizations can study and report on social media platforms
2:17:32
without fear of retribution. Now, the judiciary's role in
2:17:36
upholding free speech and research in the face of
2:17:38
corporate opposition is paramount.
2:17:41
Here, we have to make sure that free speech, including research
2:17:46
organizations, are protected. This ruling also draws attention
2:17:50
to the broader implications for social media governance,
2:17:54
particularly regarding how platforms manage and respond to
2:17:57
hate speech calls into question the effectiveness of self
2:18:00
regulation and the potential need for more stringent
2:18:02
oversight. Now, the dismissal of Musk's
2:18:06
lawsuit against the CCDH by a federal judge affirms the
2:18:09
essential role of free speech and research in scrutinizing and
2:18:12
holding social media platforms accountable.
2:18:14
This case highlights the legal protections available to those
2:18:17
who critically examine the impacts of digital platforms on
2:18:21
society, reinforcing the importance of transparency and
2:18:24
accountability and our digital age.
2:18:27
Hey, thank you so much for listening today.
2:18:29
I really do appreciate your support.
2:18:31
If you could take a second and hit the subscribe or the follow
2:18:34
button on whatever podcast platform that you're listening
2:18:36
on right now, I greatly appreciate it.
2:18:39
It helps out the show tremendously and you'll never
2:18:41
miss an episode and each episode is about 10 minutes or less to
2:18:46
get you caught up quickly. And please, if you want to
2:18:49
support the show even more, go to patreon.com/stage Zero and
2:18:55
please take care of yourselves and each other and I'll see you
2:18:57
tomorrow.