 And it's doing the swirly thing and apparently we should be on the internet to loads of people with an empty station 204. It's like a lonely heartbreak. Nothing. We are on. Hello everybody. Let me know if you can hear us okay. A bit of a different show this week. It's a community show. So if you want to become the show just hit the zoom link that should be yes it's in the chat and then you can join us. We're going to be talking about some starshipy kind of things. But if the conversation diverges to something else then we can diverge into that as well. This is a brilliant idea. No flaws at all. Nothing can go wrong. I think we should get right into it. We've got a few familiar faces in the room with us. We've got a few new ones as well. So I think I'm just going to throw it straight over to Alex. If you'd like to introduce yourself to people who yes to you if you'd like to introduce yourself for people who may not know who you are. Okay well so I'm a writer and live stream commentator at NSF not a space flight. And well I've been following space flight for quite a bit of time. You know I'm here tomorrow. I'm also following tomorrow for a long time. So hey I said why not I'll come here. And obviously at NASA space flight we know you do a lot of the 24 seven coverage of Starbase and McGregor and all the testing that's happening. So I'm curious what is your personal favorite or I don't know most inspiring moment of starship testing so far. What moment really stands out to you. It's like the best moment that you've got an excited for. Oh man it's an eight. Like I remember the build up to a sing eight like a year and a half ago. It was crazy. And like all the build up to every well except. Yeah more or less every every build up to the to the hops was like. This this thing inside you there was like it's going to come it's going to come it's going to come he's going to land it's going to land like. I'm really hopeful we get to see that soon with the overall flight hopefully the next few months are really waiting for that. And Jack Byers saying in the chat that for them the star hopper 150 meter flight and SN8 where they're stand out moments and I'm going to have to kind of agree with that because it's like the first flight and then it's also like the. I don't know the most memorable flight of a starship prototype so far. Yeah. And also, I remember now that the jack said that star hopper 150 meter I remember you. The live stream that I watched was actually from Tim Dodd. And he was with Jack out there at the star base it was crazy. Like, it was it was just a very, very primitive moment in the development of a starship and even from the live streams and everything. It really felt like I don't know like compared to the to the big production streams that we see now from as a space flight and every other people you know down there it's like it's it's crazy you know how how were you even able to see all of that padding out back then you know with very crappy internet and in the middle, you know, like, like out there with with very shitty connection and everything it was like. It's really cool to see that in action. And Murray Pearson saying in chat that the detonation of SN 11 was pretty exciting and I would agree with that. However, the the weather conditions around the SN 11 flight kind of ruined it a bit for me because we will never know what it actually looked like because it was just covered in fog. And I think that's a big shame. Man, the views that we will have gotten if it hadn't been fogged, it's like, yeah, SpaceX should have tried a little bit later. Yeah, that would have been that would have been very useful for us the fans. Yeah, it's a bit of a shame that that happened. Rockets don't wait for the weather. Yeah, rockets don't wait for the weather. But then again, the Starship test campaign at that time was also kind of I'd say it was also equally like generating public hype. And I think it would have just been like a nice courtesy of SN 11 just to wait a little bit. But that's just my opinion. I'd like to know your thoughts, however, on the recent revelations with the environmental review. We obviously we know it's been delayed several times for one month each time. So, yeah, what do you think about the environmental review? And are you hoping it will be done soon? Because I think we all are. I thought, okay. Well, there's there's there's still a couple of steps to be done, right? I think I've mentioned this a few times in the NSF streams. We do now the raptor set chats and everything. So I went a few weeks ago saying that it seems like they are getting there. That apparently all the steps are being approved and everything. We've also seen some indications that are modifying stuff around there. So perhaps that's, you know, in with a with a thinking that by modifying certain stuff, they're going to be able to, you know, be approved with a mitigated fancy. That means finding of no significant impact from an environmental standpoint. And so, hey, look, if we get to the end of the month and we get a final review already done, that's going to be okay for me at least. I'm really looking forward to what the heck we're going to get from there. You know, it's like, it's always like, I don't I don't really care much about the timeline as in when is it going to be released, but more like, what's the outcome? Because if it's an EIS released in January of this year, that will mean he isn't cleared until January or whatever like until next year, basically. But if it is mitigated fancy in May, that means it's it's better that it keeps delayed, you know, but they can introduce modifications and things like that and mitigations and I don't know, like it seems like they're getting there. We have May 20th section for F to be completed. And that's the last thing, you know, between us in the moment where they should be able to say, hey, we completed the review and this is our outcome. This is what we think, you know, and once that is complete, they still need, you know, launch license and everything, but that should take a little bit less of time than the whole environmental review. That's at least the whole. Yeah. And Harry Stranger saying in chat that they're not late. I arrived precisely when I meant to. And well, we have only been going for a few minutes. And if you do want to join us, the link is open. It should be in chat somewhere. I'll probably I'll get it in a second and pin it. But next I want to go over to Simon. You're a new face. I haven't met you before. I don't believe. What are you most looking forward to in the future of the Starship program, excluding the orbital flight test? That's the rule. So is it like lunar Starship? Is it the first flight to Mars? What in your opinion is the most exciting thing that will happen next for Starship other than the orbital flight test? I've seen you so many times. It's weird that you haven't seen me. Hi, Simon here. I moved to Florida from Germany and I moved from Germany to Florida. I'm super excited for Starship to launch out of Florida, which I think will be so cool because it's just three hours down the road. And most exciting, I think, is the fact that it can carry such massive payloads. I'm working on a space mission myself from a local university here. But thinking of big spacecraft, massive telescopes to be launched in like trans-Earth orbits. That will be absolutely amazing. I would love that. So currently we are struggling ourselves to get the mass of our satellite down so we can launch with an Arian-6. And if we wouldn't care about Mars getting bigger telescope mirrors up there, that would be cool. And Apollo saying in the chat room that for them it would have to be seeing the landing of ship on booster on the tower. I'm going to assume they meant ship or booster because I'm not sure seeing a ship land on a booster on the tower would be practical or even possible, but you never know. So what do you, are you thinking like telescopes similar to James Webb or kind of Hubble sized? Or what are you thinking about being launched on Starship? What is that, what in that is exciting you? The James Webb successor I'm pretty sure will go on Starship because there's just no competitor, like there's no competitor out there that can launch anything bigger at the moment. What about Blue Origin? What about when they come online? Smaller payload fairing, isn't it? I'm not sure. I think so. And then the fact that you could theoretically capture spacecraft and bring it back to Earth if something goes wrong. Like if the projections of Starship launch costs really hold true, flying up there, grabbing a satellite and landing it back on Earth if something goes wrong with your multi-billion dollar space mission. And the launch cost is really just like a couple of million dollars. That would be so much easier to develop and produce spacecraft if you don't need to go through like 10 years of testing to make sure absolutely nothing can go wrong. Because you have an option to get them back to Earth and fix them and launch them bigger. And Araveil saying in chat that New Glenn does have a smaller fairing than Starship. And Murray saying that there's no 9 meter fairings other than Starship, so Dutta in response to your query. Starship does have the bigger payload capacity, which would make sense for larger telescopes. Because they'll even have more space to unfold. How big is Electron's new rocket? Seven meters, I think. So New Glenn says. I think so. But then again, New Glenn's the same. Okay, so both seven meters, but New Glenn is also a slightly bigger rocket than Neutron. But Neutron is seven meters on the base, not the fairing. The fairing is five meters, I think. That's also a good point. It tapers in. I don't know if it'd be four meters. It kind of looks like, because it does taper in, but it looks kind of shallow. So I think it is four, four and a half meters fairing for Neutron. And then New Glenn is seven meters too. But you've got to count for the interior volume and everything. It's probably like six and a half. You could also do the delta thing and have a larger fairing than the body of your rocket. Yes. If RocketGab were willing to, I don't know, make a new version of the first stage, because the fairing is on Neutron and are attached to the first stage for recovery purposes, so I'm going to be willing to make an expendable version of that or make like an upgraded version of Neutron, like a block two or whatever, that has a massive fairing. I don't know, it might be something in the works. They have a similar, oh yeah, no. I was thinking that I think Electron actually has somewhat similar with the fairing, you know, tapering out or like there's a configuration I've seen on the user's guide that actually tapers out and then again, like it's wider than the body of the rocket. Just like Falcon Knight for example. But I wouldn't even say it's just the fairing capacity like the effect that you can refuel it and bring telescopes or whatever missions into their final orbit directly. Like we have to work currently on propulsion modules that propel our satellites in like basically Earth orbit, solar orbit behind the Earth's training. Like there's no rocket that can bring us to the final destination. So we have to build our own propulsion modules on top of that. And if Starship could just dump us out where we need to go, this would cut our costs significantly, it would make everything so much easier and developing of these big telescopes so much easier and faster hopefully. That's another good point that I didn't even consider being able to actually refuel, I feel like refilling or refueling whatever you want to say Starship, that's going to be the biggest selling point of the vehicle being able to have a 100% fueled vehicle in low Earth orbit to go practically like wherever you want really. And then if you want to send, I think if you want to send out like another tank or something with it, then maybe you could do that as well, I'm not sure. I'm not an expert on the fuel to fuel expenditure ratio or whatever. But yeah, I'm not an expert on those physics. I don't know how to describe it. Anyway, moving on, who should we go to next? Mark, do you want to come in with something about the environmental review? What are your thoughts on that? I don't have a whole lot to say, it's interesting because the job I work in, we're the people that run the environmental reviews, not me in particular, but my coworkers. And so it's kind of fun watching this happen in some other situation. I don't know. I haven't really closely followed the environmental review on this. So I don't have a lot to say, but it's neat to hear all the terms and stuff that we deal with. Yeah, our reviews. And what are your... It's a frustrating part of it. It's a frustrating part of the process of any project is getting through that environmental. It's a type of thing and you got to work with a lot of different people and get things through basically somehow. And what are your personal... I'll give you the same question. What are your personal... What are you most excited to see in the future for Starship to do, excluding the orbital flight test? What are your favorite, most inspirational capabilities or events that Starship will do? I'm looking forward to Starship to... Starship being like watching Falcon 9 operate now is just like, yep, they're launching another Starship. And it's out there bringing whatever it is up into orbit and just functioning great and doing its stuff and everything's working. I don't know, I'm really excited for SpaceX to get to that point where Starship is just working, you know, like everything's working and whatever it is they're doing, it's going well. And I don't know, it's going to be exciting. I'm really looking forward to that. I think the excitement part of Starship is kind of the... One of the biggest points around the vehicle because I've never... I don't think anybody has ever seen a rocket get so much hype as Starship. And I really think that this new generation of spaceflight is just bringing so many more people into the community, so many more people being excited about going to different places. And I think that that part of Starship development just being able to generate so much excitement for spaceflight is just very, very cool to see. And it's very exciting to see as a spaceflight fan, so many other people sharing an interest in what you have an interest in. I agree. I love that they've taken... For sure with the Falcon 9, they're landing the boosters with really good precision and it's pretty... Looks easy, I'm sure it's not. But I think that kind of stuff is what's generated so much excitement just that they'll try these crazy things. They've got this great software background and control systems and things like that and they're applying it to these huge rockets and getting them to do stuff that you never would have dreamed. It's so not Apollo, I guess. It's really fun. Yeah. And Ray saying in the chat room that they want to see these Starlink satellites dispensed from the Starship PES launcher. I think if we could get live views of that, that would look very interesting. I can see... I forgot your name, Nerd, in the zoom room, nodding your head along there. What is that something you're going to be excited about? Can you tell us your name? What do you do? Is that something you're excited about? Yeah. I've just seen gifts from the NASA spaceflight video, just seeing the Starlink's just shoot out. I just thought it was funny to see and I'm looking forward to that as well. Is there anything particular with that kind of deployment we've never really seen before that intrigues you? I think more along the lines of one, you've seen regular fairings just separate off. You've never seen something like a door just raising and all of a sudden you see satellites just going out. Granted, you might have seen it with CubeSats, but nothing like how large StarlinkSats are. And would you say that's your moment which you're most excited for in the future of the program or is there anything else that inspires you as a spaceflight fan? What I think the future of Starship is vast. Let's just say that because I am looking forward to see how Starship will be adapted for each mission that it is purchased for. There's been rumors around expendable where it's just no flaps, just a large fairing. So something like materials not being used, like the heat shields, they might not be on the expendable. Yeah, and not having a heat shield on the expendable variant will also save mass, which then also drives up the amount of stuff that you can put into orbit, which then makes the vehicle cheaper because you can put more mass to orbit for the price of that launch, even if you're losing the vehicle. Exactly, and I think they want to get it to the point where it's so cheap to manufacture that that would be irrelevant in terms of mass you can actually put into orbit. Yeah, that's bringing the cost down to the integral part of the future of Starship and SpaceX being able to get stuff into orbit for super cheap. And it's also kind of the future of humanity. If we want to get off Earth and go and live in other places, you need to be able to do that cheaply. That's very important. And that is saying in chat, you get a starting, you get a starting. It is a bit like that. It is a bit like that. Jack in the chat saying that crude Starship is what they're most looking forward to, the big enchirada. I think, especially now that, say, we know, well, if Jared Isaacman decides to go on the flight, we kind of know who the crew are going to be on that. I think that makes it a little bit more exciting. David, you just joined us. Are you excited about the crew going on Starship for the first time? Yeah, I'm very excited in regards to Starship. For me, the most exciting possibility is more so what we don't know. We know all the claims of, oh, we can fly a ship like three times a day. We can send maybe 150 tons. Hell, there's been claims of 200 tons at one point into orbit. I'm wondering, what are the possibilities of future variants? We've heard, like, talks about, say, strict tanks or whatever, or six engine and six Raptor vacuums. I think about Falcon 9 where, I don't think anyone around in, like, 2010 has all blocked one-fly. I could have imagined what it was like to have imagined block five, or even Falcon Heavy as it is now. So I wonder what Starship might be like in 2030. Mm-hmm. And Apollo's saying in the chat that they believe a crewed Starship would be terrifying, and I can kind of relate to that because it is the first crew going on a crewed vehicle. Obviously, these test flights, you have to be a certain kind of person. I'll put it that way in order to put yourself on a yet unproven crewed vehicle. Buckle up, your apartment building just started flying. Yeah, I mean... I'd say it's a bit bigger than an apartment building. Starship is absolutely gargaduant as when you, especially when you consider you're going to be initially propelled by Super Heavy as well. Your high-rise apartment building just... So, like, for me, even for me, New Shepherd kind of terrifies me, let alone Starship. I can only imagine how it felt during the Shuttle era, especially during the second half of the program after Challenger and Columbia happened. People knew the program was coming to an end and everything, but it's still a very terrifying prospect that people were on something like the Shuttle. And one of my hopes with Starship is that it can improve upon it. And, like, it's pointed out a lot that Starship is kind of like Shuttle 2.0, regardless of what you think about that. It is true in many ways. Like, the crew capability, the current capability, the return capability... like, return capability is something that doesn't get mentioned a lot. Like, that I'm really excited about. But if there are talks about comparisons to the Shuttle or with things like lack of a board system or the next scale, or I'm trying to think of something else and drawing blanks here, but especially the... as much a read joke about it, it is immensely complex and high-risk. Yeah. That's exactly what Apollo just said in chat, especially with no launch escape system. And I believe Elon said at the... what was it, the update event in February that they're going to try and get the Starship thrust-to-weight ratio low enough that just igniting the Raptors underneath Starship would be enough for a launch escape system. But I... Should be the other way. That is my hope. What did you say? The thrust-to-weight ratio is set as low enough or something like that. It shouldn't be the other way, high enough. Yes, it should be the other way. It's late. It's late. I know it's late to where you are, but it's still late for me. I've been up for a long time, but the joke doesn't work then. I've read that very much as a aspiration rather than a, we're going towards this. I'm not sure what anyone else really thought about that. I have one thing to say about that, about the whole escape system thing. And... It's more about what the Starship is supposed to be in the long-term rather than what it could be in the sense of... Yeah. They should be supposed to go to the moon or to Mars. When you're on the moon or on Mars, you don't have no way to abort like escape systems because if you have bored a launch at Mars, it's like, where do you abort? You don't have any parachutes and splashdown or something like that. You do have redundancies. You'll probably have multiple engines, and if one fails, you can basically continue to orbit with the other ones. Moon landings, for example. If you use multiple engines and one goes out, you can keep going and land on the moon still with less engines, but you can still land on the moon. At the end of the day, all you have is just redundancies, and you can abort system per se, or escape system of sorts. And this whole thing, Starship, goes from the surface of the Earth all the way to those destinations. So you either put some kind of janky sort of launch escape system in the fly, and then do some kind of launch escape tower of sorts. It'd be very weird to add some kind of escape system to Starship with that in mind, just because of the concept of operations, the con-ops, basically. I can understand that also being a reason why you don't have a escape system on Starship. Also, an escape system, I'd say, isn't entirely the best... If you think launch escape tower, it's not the best route for reusability because it's quite difficult to retrieve that once it's been... if they decide to jettison something like that. That's not the idea. The ideology of Starship is to have a fully reusable vehicle if you're expending, like, motors and an entire tower because it would have to be a pretty big tower for Starship. But even ignoring the physics, even if that worked, getting rid of that would be a large chunk of non-reusable rockets, which would still, even, manually drive up the cost of the launch. Yeah. Were you saying something? I'm really wondering if at least for the first test flights, like, if Jared is up there and in orbit and they figure out we can't survive re-entry, will there be an option to send a crew dragon up to A and get the astronauts down? Would they have an airlock in the first test Starships to do something like that? I think they could dock, actually. At least the second plurist mission, I think the goal is to dock crew dragon to the Starship rather than EVA over. I have no clue because... I don't know. But if that's something that is possible for the first, sort of, if they need to escape, then theoretically it sounds possible. Just get your Clamp-a-tron junior or whatever from KSMC. Actually, so one thing with the abort system that we all saw the Astra conference with the big curve which starts from one side, Astra on the other. I kind of had that thought with the abort system, such as the lack of an abort system ultimately comes down to like, is it worth it based on the reliability? Like, if you have a really, like, reliability close to like, say, one in a hundred, just hypothetically, I'd say it's worth it to invest in that abort system. But if you have something that's like one in 10,000 or one in 100,000, then I'd say it's not worth it. That's the same thing that NASA engineers came up with with the shuttle. But the problem is, if you do the abort system and you end up having that super reliable rocket, that's some massive waste of money that you had or you end up like NASA where you believe it's going to be super reliable and not with the abort system and then ultimately realize down the line that you needed it. So where along that curve do you lie? It's a massive risk that you take. But in the future of the program, bringing this comment in from Eddie Joker on YouTube in the chat room, they said you can't just abort an aircraft up in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. And that is kind of the... Elon Musk has used the... You don't throw away a Boeing 747 every time you use it and that actually quite a lot. And that does owe to the... the eventual, I wouldn't say end, but the, I'd say the constant part of the Starship program when it's got into that phase where it's launching constantly and it has the same reliability as an aircraft, obviously there are still... there's still aviation accidents, however, they're extremely, extremely rare. So when we're in a point with that with Starship, I'd say that's kind of the point where you could take an abort system off, but especially for the first few flights, an abort system is kind of, at least I'd say mandatory for a crew unless you're like definitely, definitely sure that nothing wrong, nothing will go wrong with that launch. That reminds me of something that there's this, whatever, K space, cargo space video from a few years ago of sticking a Dragon capsule on top of Starship basically where the header tank is and just have the crew riding that, which, I mean, it works, but it's also... Yeah, it's first. What's the point of the big rocket, I guess, if you do that? This is me, you know? I mean, like, like, are you gonna have a... Do you need a hundred? I guess you could just stick, like, it's a clown car. Just stick as many people in the Dragon as you possibly can. Like, who cares about space? So we'll get space later. And that is exactly what this... You'll get space when you get to space. Yeah, I need more space. That's exactly what this very generous $20 super chat from... Let's try to pronounce this. Savereric? Savereric? I believe I'm butchering that horrifically. But yeah, that is exactly what they just said. Would speed up the NASA qualifications just to put a crew Dragon capsule on the top of Starship? I presume that's what they meant there. Let's take it up a notch. Hang it off the side. That's called a lifeboat? True. True. But no. Well, you could easily put the Dragon capsule inside Starship. Starship's giant. Yeah, and just use explosives to blow off the top and it rises up like a Phoenix. And we get our fifth crew Dragon capsule, crew Dragon Phoenix. But even if you don't do any launch abort systems during launch or like no redundancy during landing in every sci-fi movie and every standard ship and every airplane, they have some kind of emergency system. You have Life West, you have like a rescue boat. In the end, Starship will have escape pods. If something goes wrong with flights and people are jettisoned and another Starship comes and picks them up from space or something. I think I'm less so worried about the launch part because launch is pretty well established even throughout about 60 years of flying rockets. Even though this is a new rocket, it's like an environment we do understand. I'm more concerned about the landing where all the Starship prototypes that have launched have gone up perfectly. But three out of four of them, I guess three and a half out of four of them came down such that it did not go well. And unless you can evacuate people fast enough that you don't get an SN10 scenario, then that's also like a potential place where things go wrong. Launch abort has been well established for launches and stuff, but how do you do with a land? Chopsticks. I'm assuming, oh, sorry. I'm guessing they're going to do a lot of flights before they start putting people on them. And the way it seems like this rocket's going to fly a lot. So it'll probably be really easy to get a lot of flights in before they put people on them. Yeah. I keep thinking about those auxiliary engines from HLS, and I'm like, can we just stick a bunch of those on the side of the Starship and have the header tanks feed them and have a couple parachutes or either have the crew jump out when it saves? Like, I know it's probably not going to work, but you know what? It's at least worth a thought. And probably going to ping on the heat shield at the same time. Something we've established on this show with Jamie and Jared's rants on the James Webb Space Telescope is that physics doesn't matter. Just whatever ludicrous idea you come up with with saving something, it'll fly. More boosters. More boosters. Peritron John in the chat has said, if packed as tightly as a Soyuz, which is quite tightly, how many could you fit on a Dragon? 15. I believe Alejandro is holding up their fingers with the answer. Seven. But I know that's the theoretical crew capacity that it's been licensed for or whatever. But if you could just grab people in there. That's the number of certified chairs they've got. How many people could you fit in it? Yeah. That's actually, if you do the math of the volume of the capsule divided by the amount of people, with seven people, you get about the same number as for Soyuz. So, seven people. That question is sort of like one of those beans, jar of beans that you count. You have to figure out how to count them all. 34. You could probably pack them a little bit tighter, but then you wouldn't have any sort of, anything like cargo or consumables just to eat. I think it's hard enough to use the bathroom as it is right now, having seven people in there. They're going to need a bigger joint to cover more of these. Divers. Divers. That's all you need. And also when it comes to the bean thing, like this is a starship thing. So it's 420 beans. All right. Just play it out. 20 beans. All right. Just play it out. Four jars and 20 beans. Just play it out. How strange is saying in chat, just add parachutes psychastically. That obviously in reference to the recovery abort of starship. I would just say that that doesn't really work on the moon. Maybe if you have a rather large parachute on Mars, maybe that would help a little bit. Airform. You got an atmosphere. Vax. The expert is checking that head. Yeah, no. Yeah, the starships just got way too much mass. The parachute. There's no way. And Mars atmosphere is like 1% of Earth. So I mean, you're talking about, you know, about parachute the size of a football field. It would be more than that. You never unfurl it. And it's supersonic. It's supersonic speeds. It would just disintegrate anyway. I think the variance to slow down to like a, like a soft landing on like, like say like a soft landing on Earth. Say like maybe 10 meters per second. Let's, I know that that's actually a really hard impact, but just, I think from what I heard, like to get perseverance, like a one ton object onto the surface at that kind of speed would basically be a parachute the size of a football field. So it, I think for starship, it might even be like at least like the size of like New York City. Yeah. It's not, not a, not a usable design. It would be a really funny record to have though. It would just not physically possible, which is a shame. Time to start like planning out the, like whatever Morse code, the imprint you put on the parachute that JPL did. And Zach, you just joined us. If you'd like to, would you like to introduce yourself and what are your, what are you most looking forward to in the future of the Starship program, excluding the orbital flight test? That's the only rule here. Thanks for having us. My name is Zach. I do a YouTube channel called the Launchpad where we cover space news as well. So glad to be with you guys. Oh, most exciting thing for Starship. I'm excited to see what the, you know, James Webb's been at such a big focus and now looking at like the black holes and stuff with the, the ground based telescopes. I'm excited to see what they can do with, you know, developing some sort of telescope into a Starship for long-term, like let's shoot it out there and send a Hubble, you know, further away in different things like that, or let's send a Hubble, you know, to Mars and then look at research there to get away from the impacts of the Earth. So I think there's a lot of sides of Starship that are maybe not crude and not even just cargo-variated, but let's build into Starship itself and use it kind of as a capsule. So we'll see what happens. Are you thinking like RocketGab's, what's it called, Photon system where customers can kind of like build their own satellite within this already manufactured base from the rocket provider? You're saying like use Starship as a base and build off of the actual vehicle itself? Yeah, so like if you were looking at some of the photos of like the Starlink PES dispenser, you know, if that door could be bigger, what type of, you know, telescope eye or something could you put in there that, you know, you know how much space you've got? If you can build it to fit it, Starship will work. You know, here's how big the opening could be. Yeah, because then the Starship itself necessarily, as long as you're within weight, wouldn't change in its functionality. So sort of like it, yeah. And Eric W in the chat saying that that could replace the SOFIA telescope, which is the 747SP, which very sadly has just had its funding cut and Avery and Jared head also saying in the chat that Starship, if it works, could be a great orbital platform for many things and it's just the fact that the vehicle is so immensely huge compared to anything else launched so far, the amount of stuff you can physically fit into it is just kind of like, it's just, it's historical, it's groundbreaking. You've never been able to do that before within this kind of reusable system. What's the mass to Leo? Is it like 200 tons or something? Stretchable at 200. 100, 150. Yeah, like now it's 150. 150 tons is ridiculous, right? We're, you know, we're in the single to slightly double digits now, right? James Webb, the whole constraint on James Webb was mass, right? Because... Mass and volume, wasn't it? Mostly mass. Yeah, mostly mass. It actually had half the mass of Hubble. Half the mass of Hubble. That was the biggest engineering challenge. Because it's larger than Hubble, but you've got to send it farther away so you've got to make it very lightweight. Yeah, it was... It was totally constrained by the area on 5, right? Yeah. And that, I mean, the amount of money that it cost them, I've actually said this on the show, the amount of money that it cost them in order to get the mass down and the volume, but mostly the mass down, probably cost them as much as it would have cost to build and fly the test campaign for a rocket big enough to put it up there if you didn't care how big it was. Like, we don't have the Sea Dragon episode. I said that on the Sea Dragon episode. I'm thinking that we can fly like Earth-sized telescopes now with the Starship, wouldn't you think? It doesn't seem to be too far away from ground-based-sized telescopes. Yeah, I mean, if you had to reserve 25% of the mass of an object in order to get it out to L2, right? So then you could talk about the telescope itself being 75 tons. Yeah. It's a mind-bending number. I bet a lot of the weight of a telescope on the Earth is like massive stabilization stuff and if it's just floating in space. Ballast. I don't think it's going to be lighter. What? Are you going to put Bill Nelson on our telescope? Oh, boy. You're also talking about only using one. We've talked a lot in kind of my community about what Starship is going to be able to do for multiple, you know, up and build something, you know, build a telescope in four parts that can in space get docked together. We know how to dock stuff. You know, it kind of opens up, you know, we were talking about Starship, you know, for when they want to do these much larger transitions of crews, you know, could you build more of a crude capsule that you then just move back and forth and Starship's just the Earth part. You mean it's kind of like a transfer vehicle, something like a decade, a Mars transfer vehicle and just Starship's like Earth Shuttle? Yeah. I guess that would work. I think that would be more like, the way I have it in my head is that Starship does work really well for something like Mars, but when we start talking about the asteroid bell, Jupiter, Saturn, beyond, I think that's the realm of where you need to start talking about nuclear engines and dedicated spacecraft. So that's what I think. There was this great curvil video on someone built like a whole, like, Callisto mission and built a spacecraft in Earth orbit using Starship. And I think Starship doesn't have to be the vehicle that goes all the way out there. I mean, granted, it can. It's not exactly practical, but it can. But being able to build a massive spacecraft like that is just, especially for, like, eliminating, like, several billion in launch costs to build. Like, the equivalent building something like that for like, like SLS or Aries 5 or even for the Saturn 5, like, would have been astronomical. And so you're saving, maybe like 10 billion plus dollars is just on the launch that you can put into that spacecraft. Yeah, a lot of costs in aerospace is, a lot of costs in aerospace is the engineering and, like I said, on JWST was the mass reduction. They probably spent, I don't know, they probably spent five billion dollars reducing the mass. And an extra 10 years. Yeah, because I got to see, I got to see James Webb before it left California a couple years ago. And the guy who was the Northrop Government Program Manager was actually in the High Bay viewing area. And we talked to him for quite a long time. It was really very, very interesting. I didn't rise, it was half the mass of Hubble until I talked to him. I was like, that's ridiculous, right? It's just like, oh my God. The Hubble is like, what, 15, 20 times? I don't even remember. So how do you think Loewe-R is going to work with Starship then? Oh, God, like, I, Loewe-R is, like, from what I remember, at least the larger version of Loewe-R, like Loewe-R A, A? Yeah, I think that's it. Can't actually fit in a Starship height-wise. And even so, it wouldn't fit out the cargo door. So that would have to be an expendable version. And I've also, like, Loewe-R has been in contention where it's like, it's launching in 2040. And the discussion has been, like, using either Starship or SLS with a 10-meter fairing, which, like, yeah, get your Loewe's out and chat, like, I know. But that's the kind of scale we're talking about. But I wonder how much, what we can do with Loewe-R with Starship, such as, like, there's the consideration between, like, Loewe-R A, B, even in the recent decade all last year, that one of the proposals was even smaller than B, than the Beaver's was. So if we did Starship and, I guess, an expendable version of this case, like, how big could we theoretically make Loewe-R versus the SLS monster? Could Starship ever be edited? I mean, anything could happen as Elon. But, like, that it is a fairing? Basically, that you eject everything with this version? Yeah, I think you can do it. I mean, it would be a bit complicated, but I don't see any reason why you can't say, like, stack, like, just stack a nose-pong with a few extra rings to make it taller than just saw it down the middle and add some explosive bolts. It's more complicated than that, but I don't see any reason why you couldn't do it. And it's 20, 40 give or take about 20 years if NASA still exists. Okay, well, it's like... Yeah, it's not plus or minus 20, it's zero to 20. Minus zero to plus 20. Like, I wonder what Starship looks like in 24, because as there's talk about... I don't think there will be an SLS in 2040. I don't think there will be a Vulcan or a New Glenn in 2040. I don't think Starship, at least the way we think of Starship will be the same in 2040, 2050. It'll be something completely different. Because just the existence of Starship and at least what it promises is such a paradigm shift in the industry that a lot of people are going to attempt to copy it or replicate it. I mean, we see it now with Peren R and Vulcan Blue Origin starting to do stuff with Jarvis and trying to get a fully reusable spacecraft. So I wonder what, like, when the market shifts, like, what happens in... By 2040, like, where is Blue Origin going to be? Where's ULA going to be? Where's SpaceX going to be when they realize that everyone else is catching up? Because they're going to try and get ahead again. I personally believe that around that timeframe, pretty much every orbital launch provider, whether the ones we know now or new ones that spring up in the future, that, like, fully reusable rockets is the future of getting stuff out into space. Whether expendable rockets still exist for, like, gargantuan payloads that just physically, at that point in time, couldn't be flown on a reusable rocket, then those expendable options may still be available. But I think those will be expendable options on vehicles designed to be reusable because not pursuing reusability now or in the future is just kind of pointless because it's already been proven with the Falcon 9 that you can save money with it. And with Starship, it's going to be cheaper than Falcon 1 for the same payload, but it's this massive rocket that you could fly pretty much whatever you want in your wildest dreams on. It's just like, if you're not going down that route, you're, like, what's the point? Is that a direct jab at Astra from yesterday's presentation? I'll be honest with you, it wasn't intentionally, but if it was, I do apologize. I mean, Astra kind, like, I do, I don't disagree with their strategy. I just don't like the way they're going about it at the moment and such as, like, but that's a conversation for another time, but I think when it comes to the whole expendable reusable situation, like, if we're talking about, like, 2100, yeah, I think fully reusable is, like, all the way they maybe get, like, an expendable nuclear stage that to get, to eat something to Pluto or whatever, but I think we're talking 2040, 2050, where most rockets will either be fully reusable or will have a reusable first stage with an expendable second or third which, which I think the best example of this is new moment where they're, where the first stage is reusable and second stage, instead of trying to make it reusable, they're making it as simple and easy to manufacture as possible, such as that it's, like, they're as, as, like, they could be as, like, as common and frequently as, like, a cigarette. Like, there's limitless amounts of it. And, so, it's like, you don't even think about, or even, like, a better example, like, I'm a plastic cop. Like, you don't even think about it. Like, it's just something, you use it and it's gone, and there's, it's more, it takes, like, they're such a, where, but I think the likely outcome with partially expendable vehicles is that you will see, like, like, a fully reusable rye, like, starship carrying something, like, a third stage that's expendable, like, Centaur or whatever, or whatever other stage you like. Like, so, where a starship or whatever rye gets into orbit and that Centaur is, or whatever is cheap, and cheap enough, light enough, using the effector enough that you can pump out limitless amounts of them and you're not really losing it. Mm-hmm. I think definitely in order to get stuff way out there, if you want to go for a reusable system, refueling is going to be, it's just going to be crucial because actually getting off of Earth is the hardest part of it. And if you can refill once you're in low Earth orbit, then you can go so much further than if you can. And Matty, saying here in the chat that starship is entirely reliant on refueling in orbit efficiently, do we think that's really going to happen? And I'm going to ask Simon about this because they first originally proposed the idea of sending large telescopes out, onboard starship, actually being able to deliver those telescopes to their intended orbits. Do you think that the refilling or refueling, whatever you want to call it, in orbit is going to happen? And if you do, when do you think it will first happen? Do you think it will happen on their first attempt or do you think it will require a little bit more development because it's... You don't make data, Ryan. Just lost the room? I can't tell what's happened. There you go. I can hear. I can't see anything. I think I just caught back up. Oh, there we go. Everyone's jumping around. Simon seems to have left. I'm not sure if there are other things to do with that. Anyway, who wants to take that? Do you think refueling in orbit will happen? And if so, when? And do you think extra development will be needed? Well, it has to happen, absolutely. Hold on. My camera keeps getting loose. It has to happen. It has to happen. And the cryogenic onboard storage and boil-off testing and all that kind of stuff is going forward right now with a lot of different companies. Nuclear rocket motors were mentioned earlier. Even the rover and NERVA programs were talking about wanting to have on the order of a million gallons of liquid hydrogen on orbit, which is an insane number, right? 500 tons. And with that a rover or NERVA engine could run for like an hour. Right? So you're talking about Mars in two weeks on those kinds of numbers. Right? And the other thing about nuclear rocket motors is all they need is fuel. They're just literally a valve and a pump. There's not much to them. And so you've really got to have a way to just take fuel up and store it on orbit. So it's definitely on SpaceX's not immediate but pretty near-term. I mean, it has to be. You've got to have it. Are they going to refuel the starships in order to have one on orbit and then they take up another one to refill it? Well, they're going to have to do that just in order to get to the moon, right? Their moon lander's going to have to have that. So they got to do that. You know, it's like part of their contract. Yeah. Yeah. And Simon, hopefully, Zoom should work now. What are your thoughts on that? I can still hear you. So I think it works. Yeah, I absolutely agree. If starship refueling and refilling doesn't work, it's a project. It's not viable anymore. That's the entire premise how to do it, how to recover starship. They're losing so much launch capacity just in order to bring it back that they need this refilling in orbit in order to do all these missions they want to do. How long it will take? I don't know. Longer than Elon thinks, I'm pretty sure. But they will get it done eventually. And Jared has said in the chat that refueling an orbit has already happened. It's just not cryogenic refueling, which is cryogenic temperatures just kind of make everything a bit more difficult. No matter what you want to do with the fuel. A lot bit more difficult. I've got a bit more difficult. Hey, I've got a question. How are they, SpaceX, how are they dealing with cryogenic fuels going to Mars, not boiling off mostly by the time they get there? I don't understand how that works exactly. To my understanding, when it comes to going to Mars, the only other burn after doing trans-Mars injection, the only burn after that is literally the landing burn on Mars. And the fuel is stored in the header tanks for that landing. So the header tanks are the things that have to be insulated while the rest of the tanks boil off freely. Though, that does come up with a big issue when you say make course correction where at that point you're going to need to draw a fuel from the main tanks and also when it comes to HLS because there's no header tanks and even if there were header tanks there's not enough fuel to do a full mission with just that. So you're going to need insulation. I believe that's why HLS version of Starship is white. Whether that's paint or insulation layer, I think it's to prevent the boil off. Well, it helps. The biggest thing about boil off is the size of the molecules that you have. Oxygen is hard. Methane is not nearly as hard. Methane is a much larger cross-sectional area than oxygen which is basically O2. Hydrogen is bloody hard. Hydrogen is really bad and of course they have helium pressurization tanks right. So helium is kind of hard but we store helium all the time here on Earth. The tanks are just heavy. Doing it lightweight, that's you know, that's difficult. I think the... Yeah, continue. I do think methane is going to become fuel choice of the future but when it comes... The problem is the moon more so. Mars, you can get methane and you can get methane out of the surface no problem. You can get hydrogen you get pretty much any fuel you need except for kerosene but who cares about kerosene? You're on Mars. When it comes to the moon, there's no really accessible sources of CO2 or methane or serious amounts of carbon to where you can do research utilization. So that's where I think hydrogen is really going to take cold on the moon moon more so because at a point, yeah we can keep sending up tankers all day long but I think at some point as more and more landings happen and more of an economy fills up hydrogen is going to become more prevalent so I don't think that's a place where a starship is going to be able to succeed long term other than say delivering the stuff to lunar orbit and then whatever the payload it delivers stays here itself. So starship is a lot better suited to a Mars landing than a moon or I guess if it does a moon landing, it's really good to sharing a massive amount of cargo down and just expend it and leave on the surface, don't reveal it and take as much down as possible but if you're going to do a reusable lander or at least a long term reusable lander for both crew and cargo and a future lunar economy hydrogen is really the fuel you're going to want. Yeah, absolutely yeah, carbon, you're right, absolutely right carbon is really kind of scarce on the moon hydrogen is readily available with oxygen, all the white that you see on the moon is titanium oxide and silicon oxide and aluminum oxide. You think you had plenty of oxygen? Yeah, plenty of oxygen. But it was cheese. Well, they tell us but in fact they've done some experiments with regular simulants where they think that they can just pretty much microwave the surface of the moon and basically boil the volatiles off disassociate the oxygen from the metals and just basically capture it you know, just with electric, you know, microwave it's pretty interesting work done by a guy named Dennis Wingo in the early 2000s actually he was on space bed casting over years ago, it was a good show Yeah, I wanted to say two things just because you guys were talking about it earlier I wanted to you know, mule it a little bit on my own in my head and you know, one of the things that we were talking about was about telescopes and things like that but Chad made a good comment in the chat mentioning interferometers and I love the idea of just putting like a large sort of a leical thing in space you know, the just that it's like miles, like millions of miles apart and just able to detect like even the tiniest of the gravitational waves you know, it's like that's what I'm working on doesn't Issa have this in studying that like a concept of like three satellites and a bunch of laser links yeah just still on it I'm a member of the Lisa project we're trying to send out three spacecraft 2.5 million kilometers apart sending out laser lights in like flying information and measuring the distance fluctuations due to disturbances in space time to detect back holes at the edge of the universe at the beginning of time I'm very excited for that mission I could go like egg down a hole or have a hole with questions I think that's best there for another time yeah so missions like that, like you could check out like a bunch of those out there and just like create like a whole mesh of like different you know, because sometimes like you could get with just the L-shaped thingy that they have for example at LIGO you can get really precise measurements but it's actually when you get like a whole mesh for example, when you actually can get some stuff related with the polarization of the wave, like you can get a lot more data by having more paths one of the things that they're doing in the ground side for example is just having multiple observatories and try to put together the signals so to speak and be able to run the the whole like try to get more data out of that however, if you have the raw data like out there in space with like a mesh of satellites, you know with links lasers and everything that would be really cool like, oh man it's something that now that we know that gravitational waves can be detected and like that are out there and there are many of them I'm really looking forward to something like that in the future and about refueling we obviously know that Starship needs refueling, right, because you know, they have the Lunar Lender contract, but say they didn't have that and Starship refueling didn't work you still have a rocket that can chuck into low Earth orbit like 150 times you know and it can launch really frequently it's reusable, it's low cost it's like what's the heaviest upper stage out there that you can put into orbit put it inside the Starship and put it into low Earth orbit with some kind of payload on top and you can send payloads everywhere else right now, I think the heaviest upper stage right now is probably the Falcon 9 upper stage which is about 105 tons in mass with all the bits and everything the fuel and all that actually, Mike, more or less do you want to try to pop hyperbolic stages heavier? yeah, well yeah, and less efficient yeah, like a center upper stage is I think 30 tons or something like that, a little bit less than 30 tons center 5 I think it's going to be like 50 tons so it's going to be a decently sized upper stage but yeah, like you could put a decently sized upper stage inside Starship and still send payloads way out there, you know even if refueling didn't work you still have a really capable rocket once it demonstrates that it could actually go into orbit which I think SpaceX kind of knows about putting rockets into orbit by now I don't think that's going to be the case just now because we're talking about the Scandinavian I don't think that's going to be a really complicated challenge for them. The challenge will be to actually make it come back, you know, refurbish it, relaunch it and everything like all of those operations and everything. That's going to be the real challenge now for them. Go from Falcon 9 operations to Starship operations, how to do all of them and everything. Yeah, I can agree with that. We have a comment in social yay community show. I like the smoke sale saying yay community show. Well, now that smoke scale has arrived, I think I'm going to use this perfect opportunity to wrap up the main show. So I'm going to say a big thank you to all of the citizens who do support us. I feel like I'm now making data quickly rushed to put up the skates. There we go. Escape velocity first. These people pay, I think, 50 USD a month, something around that roughly whatever it converts to in your local currency. These people, he knows because he's one of them. These people are very generous. These people are very generous. They help support the show. We also have our next tier down, which are our orbital citizens. These people contribute roughly $25 a month, I think. These people also very much help keep Station 204 on orbit, which is currently empty. Apart from data who's pushing buttons behind the scenes, he's just not on the observation deck. And then down from orbital, we have the suborbital citizens. These people contribute $10 USD a month, something like that. They also very much help the show keep going as well. I can see Zac, you're on there as well. We've got a lot of members in this week's community show. And then the final tier that gets your name in the show are all of these wonderful ground support citizens. This is five USD a month or whatever that converts to. We've got loads of people in here. And then we also have our system support members for $1 a month. However, that doesn't get your name in the show. It's a premium you've got to pay for. However, everybody who supports financially, your support is greatly appreciated. It does help bring some of the costs down because as you'd imagine, running a space station, it isn't very cheap. So your finances do help keep station 204 operating. And also, I'd just like to say personally, I'm currently running a GoFundMe campaign to try head out to Florida in August to watch Psyche launch atop a Falcon Heavy. So if you'd like to contribute to that as well, I'd be very greatly appreciative of that. I'll put the link in the chat in a second. But for now, from me, from everybody who's joined me in this week's community show, thank you very much for watching. If you're a YouTube member, you can hop over to the member stream. We'll keep on chatting. But yeah, for this week, we should be back next week, I think. I believe. I'm not sure. I believe so. We're back next week. We should be. Anyway, we'll see you then. Thank you very much for watching, everybody. And bye-bye. I just realized that I'm the one who's got to end the show. So this is very awkward. Oh, we're waving. The only one screen. Bye. There we go.