- First is this piece from Elon,
where he Tweeted about the new SpaceX
option package for the Tesla Roadster.
And as you guys know, I'm getting one
and I'm not sure if I'm gonna be getting this option or not.
The idea is that there will be 10 small rocket thrusters
arranged seamlessly around the car,
which I'm really curious how that'll happen.
And they will help improve acceleration,
top speed braking, and cornering.
Maybe they will even allow the Tesla to fly.
Now, I thought this was another one
of those kind of jokes that he does.
You know, maybe a little tongue in cheek.
And then Marques Brownlee, MKBHD as you know him,
one of the biggest YouTubers out there,
asked him more about it and he said,
you have my word, the next gen Roadster
will absolutely be out of this world.
Which to be clear, the first Roadster's
also technically out of this world, but you know,
it'll be for those who love to drive.
And there is no finer car in history,
we do not think there will be another.
Wow, okay.
So before I invite my guest on
to talk about this and figure it out,
I do have a video which someone posted on Reddit,
explaining what this might be.
And so this is somethin' from Bosch,
where they have a motorcycle here
that is sliding on this gravel that they added here.
And they are using these rocket-like thrusters
to help it recover so it doesn't tip over.
And so you can kinda see that example here.
It's kinda crazy when it looks like it,
but it's just like this little compressed air
that shoots out and it helps it stabilize.
So someone posted this and I thought it would be interesting
just to give the only visual representation I can think of,
of what this might actually look like.
So there you have it.
And Bosch, by the way if you don't know,
makes a ton of the parts that are in all of these cars,
all the self-driving stuff from Mercedes,
and a lot from Tesla, and everyone else.
So yeah, that's kind of nutty.
Now I'm gonna bring up my friend, Tim Dodd,
who you may know as The Everyday Astronaut,
and ask him what the hell is Elon talking about here.
So Tim, welcome to the program, man.
Please help me understand what is going on
because I'm lost and you're a rocket guy.
So break this down for me, what is he talkin' about?
- Well first off, thanks for havin' me, Ben.
Yeah, there's actually a lot to digest here.
And you were right to bring up that Bosch motorcycle thing
because that is actually an example I used
in a video I just posted today.
I kinda did an in-depth rundown.
But what they're going to be using
is essentially a cold-gas thruster.
So, these are all over space flight, it's normal.
And people might think of the Dragon Capsule
that goes up to the International Space Station.
That does not use cold gas,
that uses RCS or reaction controls.
Those actually are hot-gas thrusters,
the chemical reactions.
But cold-gas thrusters are seen on the upper stage
of the Falcon 9 as well as the first stage of the Falcon 9.
And it's literally just compressed nitrogen.
And nitrogen makes up like 70% of our atmosphere.
So they can just pull it out of the atmosphere,
compress it into like insane, insane,
I think 350 times or more atmosphere.
So we're talkin' about crazy numbers.
And then literally, they just let it out inverse
and it can be pretty powerful.
The ones on the Falcon 9 first stage
are estimated to have about 1,500 pounds of thrust.
- Okay, okay, hold on, hold on.
So, we're turning a Tesla into a gas car?
- No.
- Nitrogen, come on.
- I mean, it's inert gas, it's not being burned off.
There would be no hydrocarbons.
And actually, they probably won't even be,
my guess is they're just going to pull straight air
and compress all air, they're not gonna
try to filter down to just nitrogen.
- Right, and so it's still zero emission, technically?
- Yeah, oh yeah.
So it would use the regenerative braking.
You know, especially if your car
is anywhere near or above 90%, I believe,
it will not let it recharge the battery anymore.
And there's times where you have to use
the physical brake pads in a Tesla
because the battery pack
can't accept more of a charge, right?
- Right.
- So there's room there to actually
take some of the electricity those motors can generate
and spin up literally a high-powered electric pump
and start forcing air into what's called a COPV,
which is a composite overwrapped pressure vessel.
- Alright, so yeah.
Elon Tweeted about that because there were more...
And you and your video,
I haven't got through all of it yet,
I was prepping just as it came out.
But explain to me, what is that?
The COPV, it sounds like something
from eating bad food or something,
I'm not sure what I'm doing.
- (laughs) Well, it might have a bad name to some people
who aren't terribly familiar them,
because it actually was the failure in September 1st, 2016
when SpaceX had that big explosion on the launchpad.
It was due to a failure of a COPV.
But don't expect that to happen on these cars
because I know they'll be
well underneath that operating pressure
and they won't be in cryogenic temperatures either,
experiencing things like solid oxygen.
That's just not going to be the case.
But what we do have is literally
like an aluminum bottle wrapped with carbon fiber,
so composite overwrapped, that's the carbon fiber.
Pressure Vessel, the pressure vessel can be anything
that holds pressure, in this case like an aluminum tank.
And so SpaceX has tons of these all over their rockets.
Literally anything from life-support uses this.
They have T-TEB, which is triethylaluminum triethylborane,
that lights the engines uses this.
Nitrogen obviously, it's all over the place.
And the helium that replenishes the tanks
as the liquid oxygen, and as the RP1 gets drained out,
they replenish those tanks with compressed helium.
So these things are all over the place.
And they're all over the place kind of everywhere.
If you'd start payin' attention...
- It seems like this is something,
maybe from a SpaceX standpoint,
that is pretty simple to make.
- Yes, well...
- How do you integrate these into the car?
How is this possible?
'Cause the car is so beautifully designed and sleek.
Any idea how that would actually work?
- Yeah, maybe you saw Elon replied to my Tweet
when I asked him exactly that.
(laughing)
And he said he's going to be replacing the back seats.
You know it has the two plus two configuration,
so there's like baby backseats basically.
According to the math we actually ran,
some of my Discord members helped me crunch all the numbers,
and we did find out two relatively small bottles
could actually hold enough compressed air
to really do a couple zero to 60 blasts, too.
- Yeah, and so (sighs).
Okay, a couple things here.
First off, I think that's cheating on your zero to 60 time.
(laughing)
You're literally strapping a rocket to your car.
I don't think that's allowed.
- Why, who says?
- (laughs) Otherwise, like a drag car
or something would be, yeah okay.
So you take away the back seat and you throw in the tanks
and then how do you get the pressure out from there?
So is it like little tubes running out
or the actual thing that does it,
is there like a nozzle that has to be
really strong or something?
- No, there would actually be really high-pressure lines
run to all the different thrusters.
And then there's a valve that can actuate
really, really, really quickly and react to milliseconds
and would be throttleable and all this stuff, too.
Yeah, those tanks can stay stationary
and then just be able to have...
And my thought is, it doesn't even need
to be pointing necessarily out of the car.
Yes, one example would be having the thrusters
on the back of the car pushing it forward.
That is a little cheaty to me,
but what about having it be,
instead of active aerodynamics,
it can still be kind of active downforce
by literally just firing straight up,
pushing the car down to the ground,
giving the tires additional traction
for a temporary amount of time.
- Yeah, which is kinda like a spoiler
or other things that you have to do that.
There's a guy who has a great channel,
I forget his name, but it's called Engineering Explained.
- Yeah.
- And he's done some really great calculations
on basically zero to 60 times
and how the physics of that work.
And often, what it comes down to,
as far as I understand from watchin' his videos,
is traction on your tires.
- Yes.
- Because in a car like a Tesla Roadster
or a handful of these other cars
that have a thousand horsepower,
horsepower no longer plays a role because you could...
- Just (mumbles) tires.
- Yeah, you could effectively have infinite horsepower
and it wouldn't matter if your tires can't grip the ground
- Exactly.
- and the torque can't be applied
in the right way to not slip.
- Right.
- So yeah, okay, so I could see that.
So if you had some kind of rockets,
just making the traction batter.
- Yeah.
- You know, okay.
- And that would work for cornering
and can offset a lot of different things.
And unlike active aerodynamics...
Even the best active aerodynamics,
you still have to be going a certain speed
for those to really be taking hold, you know?
If you're going 20 mile an hour,
you're not getting nearly as much downforce.
And sometimes there's certain cases, like with an F1 car,
where if you go slower through a turn,
you're gonna fly off.
You actually have to go fast enough
to get the aerodynamics to be giving it enough downforce
to physically make the turn at that speed.
- Wow.
- There's a threshold where,
if you're not going fast enough,
you're actually gonna wipe out.
- Yeah.
- And this can avoid that because this
would be able to work even stationary.
- It could like detect that and instantly (air puffing),
you know, shoot a little, yeah.
- Yeah.
- Now what happens to me if I'm standing next
to one of these when they fire?
- You know, (laughing)
that's definitely could be an issue.
It would be cold inert gas.
It's not gonna be like hot and light you on fire.
You might go momentarily deaf
'cause these things could be extremely loud.
- Mmm hmm.
- You know, 'cause it's nitrogen horn, basically.
And as matter of fact, NASA's Plum Brook Station,
they have nitrogen horns that blast
156 decibels at spacecraft to make sure
they're ready to go for space.
And it's literally just that,
it's just highly compressed nitrogen, they go (honks).
So might be that (laughs).
Maybe you have to have some hearing protection
and off-road use only or something.
- Yeah.
Well and that goes to a little bit of the concern
of having it be a street-legal production car, right?
I mean, I'm not sure that this is gonna pass
whatever kind of, you know, committees it needs to,
to be allowed out on the street
with literally nitrogen horns.
Yeah, it's insane to me.
- But then again, it's not illegal to have nitrous oxide
and they have purge valves on those
that are fairly loud, you know?
Stuff like that where, I mean,
you might have to discern a little bit
safety on your own, which is always a scary thing.
But they could also software-lock it out.
Like, hey you're in a metropolitan area,
you can't use this right now, or something you know?
You're not on a drag strip or private property or whatever.
- Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.
I'm not sure how people would handle that.
From like, hey I paid so much money for this,
I'm gonna use it how I want.
- Well it's better than, there's a Ferrari
that you don't even get to keep.
They keep it at a racetrack for you.
- Oh really?
- It's like the FXXX, I think.
You literally couldn't own it and take it home.
They kept it for you.
(laughs) You just get to go use it.
- Why not just get a race car at that point?
- So it's better than that! - Yeah (laughs).
Oh man, okay, so a couple more questions.
How much will it cost?
- No idea.
(laughing)
I'm assuming really expensive.
- Yeah, like how much is one of the COPV tanks
and, you know, nitrogen horns cost, any clue?
- I honestly have no, I mean, I would,
just total me totally just dumpin' out my butt here,
but I'm guessin' a hundred grand for a system like that.
I have no idea.
- Wow.
- That to me seems pretty conservative
if you're talking about space-grade material.
But they don't need to be space, I have no idea.
- Yeah. - I have no idea.
- Yeah, I wonder if the engineering of it
is different at all because, obviously,
you don't have to deal with the vacuum of space,
right, things like that.
- (mumbles) thing, yeah.
- Yeah, yeah, huh, interesting.
- I (mumbles) no idea, but yeah.
- So will this let all of us be Starman, technically?
- That is my one true hope in life.
(laughing)
I think I'm gonna have to start saving up for this
'cause I don't know of anything that satisfies,
ticks off more of the boxes than that for me.
- Well guaranteed, when I get my Roadster,
we'll get together and you can ride around in it
in a spacesuit and we can kinda do some stuff like that.
I don't know if I'm gonna get the SpaceX.
If I have to pay 100 grand for it,
there's no way I would do it.
- I will chip in, I don't care.
- (laughs) We'll do a GoFundMe, there you go.
- Yes, yes.
- And I'll get more crap for that, oh man.
Okay, well that's awesome.
Thank you for all of that.
I think that helps at least, us all understand it a bit.
The next piece of news, I was just gonna switch back to,
but I thought since you're here,
why don't I ask you about it.
There's a report I found on Teslarati
about the Falcon Heavy trying to launch in November.
- Yep.
- And I'll read you the little blip from it
and then just give me your thoughts.
It says, according to several of its satellite passengers,
SpaceX' second launch of Falcon Heavy,
this time with three Falcon 9 Block 5 boosters,
is understood to be targeted
for no earlier than November 2018
and will mark the first commercial mission
for the world's most powerful operational rocket.
- Mmm hmm.
- So, thoughts of it actually happening in November?
Or this year?
- I think I told you last time
we were chatting about this stuff,
that you just never know with timelines,
especially this far out.
I tell people, don't even plan
on a launch until two weeks ahead of time.
And then, wait to buy your tickets
until they've static fired.
- Yeah.
- And that's normally like three days ahead of time.
So, if you can.
Honestly this far away, there's really no way of knowing.
We do know they're going to be
doing another Block 5 launch soon.
I still would speculate that they're not going to launch
a Block 5 version of Falcon Heavy
until they at least have the new COPVs
that we just learned about.
(laughing)
They have this new 2.0 version that they're going
to be using on Block 5 boosters this summer.
And they need to launch seven of those
with those upgraded COPVs
in order to be certified for humans,
which they're hoping to do ASAP.
- Yeah, so the Falcon Heavy won't
have humans, though, right?
It'll just be a bunch of satellites?
- It won't and it won't even be human rated,
but it's going to be entirely based off the Block 5.
So like, everything kinda depends
on how, you know, all leading up to that.
- And then, when is the first planned
manned mission from SpaceX?
Isn't that next year?
- (sighs) I mean, there's still some people
reporting it could even be this year.
We're getting closer.
This is the closest we've ever been.
- Yeah.
- By far, but I'm still thinking
it'll probably be like Q1,
maybe like early Q2 next year, would be my guess.
But I think we're under a year, finally.
- And that would mean a big deal because,
correct me if I'm wrong, but right now
if we wanna send somebody to space,
if the United States wants to send somebody to space,
we need to go to Russia or India?
- Yeah, we have to go to Russia.
- And it costs a stupid amount of money, right?
- Yeah, it costs a very, very large amount of money, yeah.
- What is it per person, like 5 million dollars
or more than that, even?
- It's about 70 to 75 million dollars
per seat right now on a Soyuz.
- Per seat.
- Yeah, per seat.
And there's up to three.
- There's three seats, that's it?
- Yeah, there's three seats.
And you're so crampily,
you're literally like pumpkins,
smashed inside a small pumpkin jar.
I have no idea a good analogy
for three things cramped together.
Yeah, it's really tight,
it's really crappy, it's really outdated.
As a matter of fact, I think the commander
has to use a stick to poke the buttons
because their ergonomics of spacecraft
are so bad they literally have like a space stick.
Which is the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
So we're talking about very 21st century spacecraft
with cool screens and a whole shebang.
- Yeah, I saw some images of it recently,
of what was it, the Dragon Capsule?
- Yep.
- Where they actually finally had somebody from NASA,
I don't think he's a current astronaut,
but maybe a former one or something,
in there testing the ergonomics out.
- Yeah, oh yeah, these are current astronauts.
They actually have multiple people testing
on SpaceXs spacecraft as well as Boeing,
their CST-100 Starliner,
which will also be launching humans, hopefully.
They're in a race, they're in a tight race, it's crazy.
- And the big deal about SpaceX sending people
is that it will no longer cost
75 million dollars a seat, right?
- Right.
- It'll cost, I don't know, three million dollars a seat
or something crazy cheap.
- Not yet, it'll still be like 50 million, probably.
- Really, wow.
- Or more, for now.
But that's also because the amount
of safety regulations, hardware, blah blah blah
that NASA requires for their astronauts.
- Yeah.
- So it'll be better than Soyuz.
And any step in that direction is a good thing,
any price reduction in space flight's great.
But eventually, over time, we can expect this
to just keep coming down and down.
- Amazing.
Alright, man, well hey, I'm gonna let you go,
but I really appreciate it.
Guys, if you're watching and you don't know who Tim is
or his channel, please go check it out
as well as his video,
really breaking down even in further detail
the whole crazy Roadster with rockets thing,
which you just published that this morning, right?
- Yep, yep, just got it up today.
- Cool, so I will link to that in the description.
If you guys are watchin' this after the fact.
And Tim, thanks thanks again for joining us here.
- No problem, thank you, man. - Talk to you soon, buddy.