Starship aims for rapid, full reusability

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 42:10

   second yes well i wanted to just do one thing on SpaceX which is starship like oh yeah it seems like you're so close so close so close yeah um what's the state right now and you're really putting these up at a at a pretty size a pretty risk answer and elon's answer separate and that's See how they converge on that. So, Elon, how close are we, Gwen? How close are we? Let's get to it here. How many have gone up so far, and how close are you?

2. 42:42

   Well, we've got flight 14 coming up of Starship. And this will be the last flight before we attempt to catch the ship. So if this flight goes well, then on flight 15, we will try to catch the ship. um and uh and then either end of this year or but more likely early next we will refly the ship and refly the booster so we have reflown the booster already but we've not we've not caught the ship with the tower arms nor have we reflown the ship um so once we can refly the ship we will have made the first fully reusable orbital rocket so that the shuttle was partly reusable but but even the parts that were reused were so difficult to reuse that the shuttle costs more per time to orbit than an expendable rocket now Falcon 9 is mostly reusable but we lose the output stage every time which is about the cost

3. 43:39

   of a medium sized jet so that obviously puts the floor on the cost per flight of like well you throw away a medium sized jet every time that's still pretty expensive and the rocket Falcon 9, the booster lens down often that's out to sea it takes several days to get back And the fairing lands even further up to sea. into and takes several days to get back. And they need some amount of refurbishment, at least a small amount. So whereas starship, the booster lands back at the launchpad, the ship will land back at the launchpad. And and so it's it's designed for not just full reusability, but also rapid reusability like an aircraft. So this is this is a very important breakthrough.

4. 44:26

   It's really the critical breakthrough that's necessary to extend life beyond Earth. Chances of success? Catching it on first shot? Do you think about that at all? Do you handicap it? Pretty good. I'd say it's at least 50 or 60%. Okay. I like the odds. Yeah. So on the last flight, if there had been a tower, so we did a simulated landing as though it was going to get caught by a tower in the ocean about a thousand miles northwest of australia and if there had been a tower at that at that location it would have caught the ship on the last flight fantastic so we're yeah so we're going to do one more flight to just confirm that that everything just to double check that everything works um because what what we're most concerned about is if the ship were to break up over land and rain debris on people uh um

5. 45:21

   Our popularity would diminish very rapidly. So you really can't rain debris on people without them being very unhappy. So we need to make sure that when the ship comes back, that it comes back and lands intact at the launch tower. That's why we're being extremely cautious here. But the design is capable of full reusability. Of that I am certain. And I'd say, I don't want to tempt fate here, but I think it's extremely likely that we will achieve full reusability with rapid reflight next year in 2027.

6. 46:05

   Wow. Significant.