Elon Musk Shares New Starship Info at X Takeover [10:30]

Transcript

Chapter 1: Introduction and Context

So, before we jump into more specific things, what’s something that you wish more people would ask you? Well, I don’t really wish people would ask me questions, to be honest. Um, [laughter] I’m not going around saying, “I wish people would ask me more questions.” I’m like, uh, you know, here we go with questions. You know, Elon recently spoke at the X Takeover, and he did answer some questions. But the reason I wanted to make this video is I feel like we got a little bit more information than SpaceX’s press release shared after flight 14, the last flight of Starship.

The pitch and there’s now this talk was at the X Takeover event, uh, at Giga Texas in Austin, where I live, and I had the honor of speaking on a panel alongside Neuralink patient 7. I’ll be sharing my talk soon, but I wanted to give you some information in the meantime. And by the way, this was my first real work event since being postpartum and being a mom. And so, uh, it was definitely overwhelming, but also really nice to be back in the public and talking to people, not in a baby voice, although I do love that. And so anyway, uh, hopefully you enjoy our talk when I get to put that out. But right now, we have to talk about Starship.

Chapter 2: Flight 14 Mission Review

During Elon Musk’s virtual interview with the Tesla owners of Silicon Valley, he revealed critical information about Flight 14, including what really happened during that terrifying engine-out anomaly mid-ascent. You guys remember we were watching, and there was a lot of drama and back and forth about should they or should they not attempt to go to orbit. SpaceX just said scratch that; we may be going to orbit. They are relooking at the data right now. A lot of conversation in the room behind me. Waiting for a final confirmation on if we’re going to make the attempt to go to orbit today or not. A little extra drama as we go through this position, go through this decision. If it’s a condition that isn’t going to violate our launch constraints or our flight rules, we can still make the call to go to orbit.

Okay, so that’s what they’re talking about. So, just continue to hang with me this second. I know. I’ll let all of you know. We were planning on doing the orbital insertion burn about 25 minutes and change into the launch. So, we still have some time. All eyes right now on Starship. It is still in our initial suborbital trajectory. We have not made a final call on whether or not we’re going to orbit. You’re going to hear me start and stop a little bit. It sounds like we’re about three minutes away until they’re going to do their final go/no-go for burn two. So, just a couple of minutes. All right. Coming up on 20 minutes.

That launch honestly feels like it was three hours ago. And we are go for orbit. Oh, all right. And SpaceX is planning something big for flight 15. Elon sounds pretty confident that they will try to catch both the booster and the ship. And SpaceX finally dropped some of their own professional footage of ship 40 finally arriving back at Starbase after its epic journey across the globe. Now, during the ascent phase of flight 14, an unexpected engine loss threatened the entire mission profile, and they were planning to go to orbit for the first time to deploy real Starlink satellites, which they ultimately were successful in doing. But when asked about the critical minutes inside mission control before giving the final go for orbit call, Elon described the tension. Um, well, we’re just trying to see why.

Chapter 3: Technical Mission Analysis

We’re trying to understand what was the reason for the engine failure. Um, was there, say, a common cause where we could expect to see more engine failures? Uh, or would there be the biggest question is like would there be a potential problem with restarting the sea-level Raptor engines, the three ones with the smaller nozzles in the center for, uh, the de-orbit burn, uh, because we don’t want a Starship to get stuck in orbit and then it randomly re-enter and maybe land on someone. You know, that’s our main thing is like trying to make sure things are as safe as possible.

Investigations revealed the anomaly was caused by an engine computer software glitch rather than a mechanical failure, and Elon explained why this distinction was actually a massive relief for the engineering team. The cause of the engine out, I think, was like basically a failure in the flight computer software, or engine computer software, I should say, uh, which it didn’t appear to be anything that was present in any of the other engine computers. So, I thought, okay, well, this it’s probably okay to go to orbit while reaching orbit marked a massive milestone. SpaceX’s delay in going orbital on prior flights was entirely deliberate. Elon clarified the core safety requirement that guided their flight test strategy.

I mean, we could have gone to orbit many times before now. Um, but the reason we didn’t go to orbit before now was because we wanted to be extremely confident of being able to de-orbit safely. Um, so that’s why we only went to orbit on this flight, but all pretty much all of the prior missions, in fact, literally all of the prior missions could have gone to orbit. The thermal protection system held up remarkably well during re-entry, solving one of Starship’s historically toughest engineering hurdles. You know, everything’s looking quite positive. The heat shield is looking robust. Uh, the engines are robust apart from that one glitch, but that glitch doesn’t seem to be too much of an issue. It’s like pretty easy to remedy. Um, but like the heat shield was, uh, extremely robust on this flight. And that’s one of the hardest things. Another really hard thing is, like I said, that the as just getting to extremely high engine reliability.

Chapter 4: Future Flight Expectations

Looking ahead to the next launch attempt targeted in 4 to 6 weeks, SpaceX isn’t just aiming to land the vehicle in the ocean again. They’re finally going to attempt the ultimate leap, and it might happen right around Thanksgiving. The big milestone that’s coming up, uh, hopefully on the next flight, which is we don’t know the exact date because we’re making a bunch of, um, improvements to the rocket. Um, so like between every flight, there’s often hundreds, sometimes thousands of small changes to improve things. In this case, the number of changes is not very many. Um, but some of them take a fair bit of work, and we’ve got to go inside the tank to make some of these changes. So, we don’t know the exact launch date, but probably about 4 weeks or so. 4 to 6 weeks is about right. Um, if launches a little bit before Thanksgiving is my guess. And that one, if it succeeds, is a big one because we’re going to try to catch the booster, which we’ve already proven we can catch the booster twice, but we’re gonna try to catch the ship, which is a super big deal. And if we do so, that’ll be the first time that there’s been full recovery of an orbital-class rocket.

Chapter 5: Chip Manufacturing Strategy

We also got some new information about Terrafab, as you know, Elon and company. Want to make their own chips, and Elon reflected on how SpaceX and Tesla handle manufacturing bottlenecks in-house now with chipm, right, with Terraab and Tesla and SpaceX. What is something you have learned about chipm, uh, that you didn’t appreciate maybe early on?

Well, I still have a tremendous amount to learn about chipmaking. I don’t know how to make chips, to be clear. Um, I have no idea how to make chips, but we’ll figure it out. Um, [laughter] um, go start somewhere. Had no idea how to make cars or rockets as well. And they say making chips is one of the hardest things to do in the world. I don’t think it’s easy, but I also look at the equipment and I’m like, “Okay, there’s not a ton of customized equipment here.” Like the equipment’s all pretty much coming from the same vendors, and those suppliers all kind of know how that equipment works ‘cause they got to service it and debug it and stuff. Um, so it was just an interesting thing that when I tour these chip fabs that, you know, whether it’s Intel or Samsung or TSMC, uh, and they’re very impressive, but I didn’t really see any custom equipment. And you know, whereas if you tour, like say, a Tesla factory, we got tons of custom equipment. Like we, in fact, we have like Tesla Automation Germany, which is awesome. Um, that sort of, well, that grew out of an acquisition of Groman in Germany many years ago, and it’s grown tremendously since then. And we’ve acquired a number of small, not that small, but small relative to Tesla companies that design and make manufacturing equipment because what we found is that we needed, we wanted to improve the manufacturing process, and you can only do that if you make custom manufacturing equipment. So, the thing that I think probably a lot of people don’t realize is Tesla’s really good at making highly specialized, um, and different types of manufacturing equipment, but I didn’t see that in the chip fabs that I toured, which kind of surprised me. So I think what we’re going to do is, you know, we’re going to start with the conventional equipment, and then we’re going to modify that equipment to improve the throughput, and then we’ll start to, you know, where we see the choke points. I think we’ll make customized equipment that allows for much higher throughput of wafers.

Chapter 6: Conclusion

So, thank you. Thank you to the Tesla owners of Silicon Valley for scoring that interview with Elon and for having me be a part of the X Takeover for the third year in a row. I wasn’t sure if I was going to go because, you know, I knew that I would be so, uh, freshly postpartum, and I wasn’t sure if I would want to, but I’m really glad that I went, and it was a great time. And so, hopefully, you enjoyed this video. Thank you so much for supporting my channel, Ellie in Space, and I’ll see you in the next video.

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