Hey kids! It's time for an update about Starship and StarLink. Elon Musk and
Gwynne Shotwell were both interviewed recently about Starship and StarLink.
They discussed these both in great depth and no one noticed because of the Crew
Dragon mission to the International Space Station. I'm going to show you what
they said and why it matters and how cool it is that Starship and StarLink
are making so much progress. Are you ready? Let's go! It's like basically we
need to improve things from where Falcon 9 is by between 1000 and
10,000 percent. In late May Irene Klotz talked with both Elon Musk and
Gwynne Shotwell. You can see on the right side of this picture
Gwynne Shotwell is the SpaceX COO. They both spoke with her in podcast
interviews and like I said no one caught on because they were all watching the
Crew Dragon. In these first audio clips that you're going to hear Elon talks
about how Starship is making progress, what the goal is this massive, massive
reduction in cost of getting kilograms to orbit. And what is special about
Starship, how they're going to get there and how he seems very confident that they
are going to get here. More to come. Get ready. This architecture from a physics
standpoint- it does achieve the 1000 percent plus improvement over Falcon 9.
The full reusability is critical. With Falcon 9 out of that $50 Million
marginal cost basis, the upper stage is about $10 Million of that.
The difficulty of recovering the fairing and the booster from out to sea adds cost to
the operations. And using helium as a pressurant, and using rocket propellant grade
kerosene also adds to the cost. Call it a million dollars of refurbishment
needed for the booster. Elon just listed some factors in Falcon 9 that make it
more expensive to do launches than it will be for Starship. One of the things I
noticed in particular there was the cost of recovering the Falcon 9 booster from
the sea. That if they're able to recover Starship by having it land on land,
that saves a lot of money. There are other factors like recovering the whole
second stage, not having to chase the fairings, and all that. But this is a big
thing. It sounds like the plan is that Starship will return - the Starship
booster Super Heavy and Starship will land on land rather than in the ocean.
Starship should avoid all of these issues. Just fully reusable, low-cost
propellant, autogenously pressurized with gaseous oxygen, gaseous methane.
So no helium. There is no cheaper fuel than liquid methane. The OF ratio of Starship is
roughly 3 1/2 so it means 3 1/2 tons of oxygen per ton of
fuel. Whereas for Falcon it's 2 1/2 roughly, and oxygen is much cheaper
and denser than the fuel. So you'll actually want a high O-F ratio.
This is an important detail about Starship that we already knew. But this
makes it a little more clear. Methane is cheaper than regular rocket fuel - than
RP-1. Oxygen is cheaper. And oxygen is cheaper than methane. And by increasing
the oxygen to methane ratio - the oxygen to fuel ratio - that makes the launching
even cheaper. It's just saving more and more money. And all these things end up
leading to Starship being just a much more effective - cost-effective way of
getting into space, getting to Mars and so on.
The cost of oxygen is just basically cost of electricity. So you can
create the oxygen just with very low cost like wind power, for example
and in Texas, especially when they're generating excess power you can get out like
two cents a kilowatt hour or less. And roughly 3 1/2, maybe 3.6 O-F ratio you're
around a 78% propellant mass oxygen versus fuel. Having a fully reusable system
with low cost of propellant, predominantly oxygen is absolutely the
right way to from an architecture standpoint. Well I'm really excited about Starship.
Gwynne Shotwell also talked about Starship she was very optimistic. She talked about
the propulsive landing feature instead of having to use parachutes.
She talked about a lot of other advantages for Starship as compared to
Falcon 9. Check it out. The propulsive landing for the crew piece which is
Starship, as opposed to the Super-Heavy lift, is really important.
Parachutes are not great. So I'm excited to not have parachutes on crew vehicles
It's really striking to hear her optimism. We're so used to thinking about
SpaceX and Tesla operating on Elon Time and here's Gwynee about to talk about how
fast she sees things coming. Really exciting stuff. We've learned so much in
these six years I'm sure we will have people flying in Starship in less than
six years. Yes. I mean it would be a major company fail if we're not flying
people in like half that amount of time or less. You know you gotta (have to) get better right?
If it takes us six years to do this one then we haven't gotten any better.
Shotwell made the point that when they started with Crew Dragon, NASA was
uncomfortable with propulsive landing, and was much more comfortable with
parachutes. Now that SpaceX has tremendous
experience with propulsive landing, it should be much easier to do with
Starship and she's much more confident about it.
Now we know how to propulsively land a rocket body because
we've been doing it so many times with Falcon. So we got that part down now. So we'll
be much quicker to Starship. In fact at three years in we decided to pull that
up, and not be that in parachutes. Another critical detail is all the
learning from Dragon and particularly Crew Dragon 2 but also Crew Dragon 1,
made SpaceX more ready for what they're going to be doing with Starship in the
future. For carrying passengers, for carrying crew on Starship in the future.
All this that they've been doing with Crew Dragon has helped. Even Cargo Dragon
has helped. And put all that together and SpaceX is ever more ready for what
they're trying to do with Dragon. The benefit of Dragon Dragon 1 was a huge benefit - was a great machine but
we learned a lot flying that and it was, it took a lot of effort and time to
refurbish it for replay. So we rolled a lot of those lessons into Dragon 2
already. And so it gave us the ability to go ahead and spin that architecture. So
we're going to build a fleet of Dragon 2s and we'll be able to refurbish them
much faster. And so we can leverage those Dragons,
those flight proven Dragons very quickly for other customers. In fact I
think we're going to fly a mission pretty quickly after I think it'll be
PCM 2. We'll do a commercial mission before PCM 3. Would that be a free-flying
or a station mission? Station mission. I think that'll be the movie mission. Another interesting thing that
came up in the interview with Gwynne Shotwell was whether SpaceX would have
crew operating Crew Dragon along with the passengers, and also whether they
would have crew operating Starship. Shotwell explains coming up that Dragon
will fly autonomously and doesn't have enough space to accommodate crew along
with it, because the need for passengers is so high. But Starship will be bigger
and will have more room. So it is likely that SpaceX will have crew on Starships
that are carrying passengers. We'll fly Dragon 2 autonomously and we'll have to
work on ensuring that at least one of the astronauts - one of the private
passengers - are trained up enough to be in charge. We might
have our own folks on Starship passenger missions. There's more room. It'll be
easier to take along a SpaceXer for that. But right now we don't have
plans to put a SpaceX astronaut on Dragon 2. They also talked about whether
passengers would be a significant source of revenue for SpaceX. And she indicated
they're not really counting on that. We're going to find out. They're going to do
some missions. And they're going to see - Is there more interest in passengers who
want to go up on SpaceX rockets. She doesn't think that'll be a significant
source of revenue. But we'll see. We are not counting on much private passenger
revenue right now. But I think we're being conservative in our planning. We have
three, maybe four
missions, three of which I think will go through. And then we'll see what the
demand is. And I do think this upcoming Demo 2 flight and then follow
quickly in PCM, I think that will energize the market. And then I
think we'll know better. You know late summer, early fall, to see what the market
actually is. The conversation also included a brief discussion of Bigelow
Aerospace which has this great technology for using expandable features
to make a potential space station. It doesn't appear that they're making
progress with the ISS but SpaceX is still interested. Bigelow Aerospace
did a deal and put money down. But he pulled back. So I think he may be looking
to figure out how to move forward without the ISS. I love his technology. Yeah.
Because these inflatables are so much roomier than some of the other
stuff that I've seen. Not as roomy as Starship.
But pretty roomy. Yeah it would be cool to see their big ones flying for
sure. She also talked briefly about the
current architecture for Starship and the number of Raptor engines that it will
have. The Starship architecture is evolving. I think there's currently six engines on
the - 6 Raptors on the Starship vehicle. But it's vacillating between 6 and 7 so I
think there's 6 right now. But it could change. She also talked
about how fast SpaceX has grown as a company, particularly with hiring at Boca
Chica where Starship is being built. And she related that to the growth of
StarLink. And if they can manage StarLink well they won't need to hire too many
people and further grow the company much more. She likes working in a smaller
company as much as possible. We hired rapidly at Boca
I think we've hired 900 people in the last 6 months. Think it's maybe
like 7500, 7600. I don't think SpaceX needs to
grow a lot more. No I don't think it needs to grow a lot
more. It depends largely on how successful we are operating Starlink, and
managing the user terminal. You know hopefully we don't have to hire a million
people, running around in little white vans, fixing or installing user
terminals on folks' house. Another cool moment is when Shotwell
talked about when Starlink service will roll out. She said after the 8th launch
they'll have global coverage. Around the 12th or 14th launch they'll be able to
start rolling out full service. But even before that she believes they'll be able
to start going into beta and that should be very very soon. So this is very very
exciting. After the 8th launch we'll have continuous global coverage. But
not a ton of bandwidth. We'll need - I think through the 12th and 14th launches -
After we have 14 launches we'll rollout service in a more public way we'll
probably do some beta rollouts before that. Some final details
from recent news: Elon told employees that Starship is the top priority now. I
really didn't think that was very surprising. Of course Starship is a huge
priority. It seems very clear from everything he's talked about. They're
still planning a cargo mission to Mars in 2022 and a crewed mission to Mars in
2024. That is consistent with what Gwynne said about the timeline for using
Starship for crewed missions. For the rocket engine geeks,
it appears that SpaceX has already made the 30th Raptor engine. They have plans
for iterating changes up through number 50. And they're making great progress.
They're improving all kinds of performance, and particularly they're
working on improving the manufacturability - making it easier to
make them better faster and cheaper. One last thing for the engineering junkies:
Shotwell talked about some of the internal processes about how SpaceX
works, how that conflicted initially with NASA. And I just thought this was an
interesting way to end. If you're really into this stuff listen to this last bit
from her. What we have tried to maintain is kind of blog style documentation.
It's dynamic. It's not static. So we use
almost like Wikis, confluence pages, or our issue system kind of gets a
running dialogue. People get to chime in with their pieces. And so it's
a very dynamic system. And that was - that's very unusual. I know our
government customers struggled a little bit with that. Because they felt it was informal. But
it was quite effective. And luckily we've maintained that dynamic documentation still.