SpaceX Finally Gives Out The BIG Starship News!!! This Changes Everything About Starship Flight 12 — Transcript

The most powerful rocket engine test ever conducted on Earth happened 10 days ago. 33 Raptor 3 engines, 6 seconds. We talked about it on the show. What we didn’t talk about is what happened before that, because we didn’t know. Nobody outside SpaceX knew. >> So, there’s a lot of stuff that can go wrong. Until this [music] week, when SpaceX released a 24-minute documentary and showed us the two static fire attempts that didn’t work. This documentary changes how I’m thinking about flight 12. Let me show you why. My name is Felix. Welcome to What About It. Let’s dive right in. Starship updates. So, SpaceX released something outright crazy. A 25-minute monumental documentary about Starship flight 12. I’ll put a link to it in the description. It contains so much info between the lines that I decided to give it a whole episode. Before we get into the details, possibly like never before,

[00:01:01] take a second to appreciate something. No other launch provider releases content like this. Booster 18 rupturing at Massey’s, ship 36 detonating on the test stand, engineers on camera saying things like we don’t really know how to deal with parts of the new architecture. Traditional aerospace would lock all of this behind PR and lawyers. SpaceX releases it for us in 4K. That alone is a story. Thank you, SpaceX. Now, let’s do the breakdown. Let’s find every last bit of info there is, because this was genuinely nuts. The opening sequences include some of the coolest views of Starship tiles ever shown publicly. What I noticed, comparing what’s on screen to the actual S24 and S25 tiles I have here in the studio, is that these tiles look thinner. Likely a newer version. That’s good for mass. But, on the tiles in the documentary, you can also see what looks like cracks and reflection patterns that

[00:02:01] suggest brackets into the tile material. Same brackets as on the ones I have here. Now, this is my read, not the documentary’s. SpaceX doesn’t say a word about the cracks. They just show the tiles up close and let you draw your own conclusions. That itself is interesting. They aren’t hiding the problem. They are just letting the footage speak. If they did end up making the tiles thinner for some time, that is very likely why they cracked. And then, on ship 39 in the close-ups during the production sequence, I spotted something new. Some of those tiles on the nosecone have a distinct pattern of three small dots. Roughly half of one side of the cone is covered with these. Other tiles next to them are clean. My guess is sensor tiles. Each one with embedded instrumentation gathering data on temperature, pressure, vibration, and bond integrity during flight. We’ve seen SpaceX do this before in small patches all over the shield. On the ship 39

[00:03:00] nosecone, the pattern is much larger, though. Again, the documentary doesn’t explain this. It just shows you the tiles. The interpretation is mine, but it lines up with everything we know about how SpaceX uses Starship as a flying testbed. The interior shots of Starfactory are stunning, and I want to point out something most people will scroll past. Look at the colors. Everything is white and black. The walls, the floor, the equipment. That isn’t how a normal factory looks. Why? Because this is supposed to look like the future, not like a factory. And you can’t build the future in a building that looks like the past. Inspiration matters. Without it, you don’t make it happen. The looks are part of why the SpaceX workers work as they do, and why we are amazed when we look in from the outside. Also, at 2 minutes and 36 seconds, you see robots welding the new super heavy grid fins. These are steel, not titanium like the ones on Falcon 9. Heavier, but dramatically cheaper and

[00:04:00] easier to manufacture at scale. When you’re aiming for hundreds of boosters, that material choice matters. Charlie Cox, director of Starship engineering, says it out loud. >> Version 3 is basically a clean sheet design of the ship. We essentially took a bunch of lessons from version 1 and version 2, and we took a step back and said, “What were the things that were really problematic, either from a performance perspective or from a reliability perspective on the previous rockets?” Every problem SpaceX had with earlier ships, every reliability issue, every performance limitation, version 3 redesigned. This isn’t an iteration. This is a rebuild. The manufacturing footage that follows is gorgeous. Common dome sections suspended on cables inside Megabay 2, while teams weld them together. Nosecone components, forward sections, all of it floating in midair during the joint process. The level of manufacturing quality on display is in a different league from what we saw at Boca Chica in 2020. Version 3 is the

[00:05:00] most important puzzle piece, since everything started with Starhopper. And it can do propellant transfers, which is really the core technology that you need to unlock Starship. Once you unlock that capability, the whole solar system is on your doorstep. This is key to Starship’s ability. Orbital refueling is the missing capability between rockets that go to orbit and rockets that go anywhere else. Amazing. Amazing. Amazing. Version 3 going forward is built for it. Up to 48 hours in orbit, vehicle-to-vehicle rendezvous, and propellant transfer. Ship 39’s docking ports aren’t functional, so this isn’t happening on flight 12, but the architecture from here on is built to do it. The documentary also gives us another look at the mystery pipes running through the aft flap hinge area. We still don’t know what they’re for. The documentary doesn’t explain them, either. The Y community theory bin is still wide open. Ship 39 is currently in preflight checkouts. The documentary confirms it. The shot they show alongside this is

[00:06:01] unreal. Ship 39 next to ship 40, filmed from a work platform above the nose tips. You can see it all in one frame. Edward Jacobs, lead Starship engineer, says it all. “We’ve never built a ship V3 before and gotten it to this stage of production. This is all undiscovered country. Every Starship test pushes the software, the simulations, and the engineering workstations behind it to their absolute limits. When you’re iterating that fast, your tools simply cannot be the bottleneck.” Most of us aren’t designing the next Mars rocket, but we are running complex workflows on our personal machines that accumulate chunks, slow down, and pick the worst possible moments to act up. I want to keep my Mac up to spec all of the time, and that’s where CleanMyMac comes in. It clears system cache, kills background processes hogging your RAM, and keeps your Mac running the way it should. All without you having to babysit it. It’s smart care routinely performs scans, cleans, and updates your system while

[00:07:01] boosting your Mac’s performance. The cloud cleanup feature restores order in your remote storage on iCloud, OneDrive, Google Drive, or Dropbox, finds large space wasters, synced and unsynced files in cloud storage and on device. All scanning happens locally on your Mac, so your data stays safe. The space lens feature gives you a visual map of exactly what’s eating your storage, and the performance module tackles background strain with a simple checklist, so your focus stays where it belongs. Get tidy today. Try 7 days free and use my code What About It for 20% off using the link in the description. But, there’s also things about the architecture as a whole that we don’t really know how to deal with, because we’ve only done simulations, we’ve only built fluid models how we think a ship V3 operates. Now, we have the real deal next to us. Listen to that twice, because it is a remarkable thing for a launch provider to admit on camera. This is essentially confirmation that flight 12 is going to feel like integrated

[00:08:01] flight test one again. New rockets, new engines, new pad, new ground systems, all firing together for the first time. The combination is the test. The documentary also gives us the first close-up view of a Starship payload bay door cycling. Slides down, translates forward, very firm motion. Earlier version 2 ships had real problems with this mechanism. This new one looks much more robust. At least, I think it’s a new one. Joe Petterzelka, VP of Starship engineering, says SpaceX started with the ship because it was the more novel piece. They understood boosters from Falcon 9. During development, they discovered Super Heavy was actually hotter than they had expected. The documentary takes us back through the program’s history, and the speed of progress is mind-blowing. Flight 1, April 2023, fired onto bare concrete. The crater it carved into the steel-reinforced pad is shown in the documentary with someone walking up to

[00:09:01] it. Massive. A perfect example of why you need a flame diverter, and why I thought it was a water tower and not a marvel of engineering at all. Then comes the deluge plate installation between flight 1 and flight 2. Combined with the integrated hot stage ring, those upgrades drove progress fast. Flight 2 achieved most engines cut-off, successful stage separation, and boost back initiation. Flight 3 completed the boost back burn. Flight 4 successfully demonstrated a water landing, and flight 5, the first ever booster catch. Five flights, 18 months from firing onto bare concrete to catching a 70-m booster between two robot arms. We’re in the middle. Yay! Thank you from the bottom of my heart for watching and liking the video. If you’re among the 40% who haven’t subscribed yet, and there was at least one video you learned something new from, it would mean the world to me if you did. It is free and it’s genuinely helps more people find my channel to spread the word about

[00:10:01] spaceflight. Want to make my world even easier? There is only one place you’d rather be, the Y members club on Patreon and right here on YouTube. Click the card or the join button right here under the video. You are the reason we keep doing this. Thank you so much. You rock. People often ask why Starship is taking so long. The answer is that SpaceX is operating at a pace no organization in history has ever matched. We’re spoiled, my friends. This isn’t taking long at all. And now we’re getting to one of the things I can’t believe SpaceX put in this documentary. Booster 18 was actually the first version 3 booster. Booster 19, the one that just static fired, is the second. Booster 18 had an anomaly while testing at Massey’s. We did talk about this, but the documentary shows it. Sure hope it works. Famous last words. This is direct surveillance camera footage, never seen before. The booster sits on the test

[00:11:00] stand. Something fails. Massive rupture. White vapor blows out both sides of the vehicle. The metal visibly deforms and splatters outward. The audio captures a loud bang. A version 3 super heavy anomaly on camera in 4K. SpaceX could have edited this out completely. They didn’t. The cause, a COPV failure inside the chines while teams were pressurizing the nitrogen system. We covered this when it happened. The documentary confirms what we reported. The test was designed to be safe in this kind of failure. No propellants on the vehicle, no reactive components. The test site took very little damage. Nobody was hurt, but it did cost them time. And here is the iteration speed. 3 months later, booster 19 sits on the same test stand and passes the same test. 3 months from anomaly to recovery. The documentary takes us to McGregor next. The opening shot includes the grasshopper memorial

[00:12:01] in the foreground. A nice touch given how much of SpaceX’s reusability story traces back to this very special vehicle. Then we get the best Raptor 3 firing footage we have ever seen. Raptor 30 marked dev only on the bell on a vertical test stand. The flame coming out of the trench from one engine is huge. Keep in mind that a super heavy booster runs 33 of these at once. Inside the Raptor operations center, dozens of finished Raptor 3 engines sit on pallets. We see numbers 81, 63, 62, 55, 50 and others. Jacob Mackenzie, VP of Raptor, gives us a number to anchor this. SpaceX produced around 600 Raptor 2 engines over that program’s lifetime. To put that in perspective, that is more engines than most rocket programs produce in their entire history. Total across all customers. And then a side by side, the amount of simplification on

[00:13:02] Raptor 3 is genuinely incredible. Fewer parts, higher integration, cleaner design. Raptor 2 flew flights 1 through 11. Raptor 3 flies for the first time on flight 12. And Raptor 1 was only ever used for the high altitude tests. The documentary also drops never before seen onboard camera footage from booster 12’s return. That historic first catch. We see the booster falling through cloud layers from a camera near a grid fin, then a tracking shot of the engines from underneath with bright yellow re-entry glow visible between them. And here’s another detail not mentioned by SpaceX. Look closely and some of the engine bells aren’t round anymore. They are visibly massively deformed by re-entry forces. The documentary doesn’t comment on this, but it is right there in the footage. That deformation actually buffs out under thrust loads when the engine fires again, but each cycle still stresses the metal. Mackenzie’s framing

[00:14:02] on the goal is exactly right. Achieving full reusability of an engine like this is really something that people haven’t done before. The goal is to get the engine to behave in a similar way to the engines on commercial airplanes. That’s the bar. Rapid reuse with minimal maintenance, the same way airline engines work. Now we get to the part of the documentary that absolutely blew my mind. SpaceX shows us in detail both static fire aborts on booster 19. Both of the failures. Yeah, that is new info, right? The 10 engine static fire on March 16th was the first attempt. They lit all 10 engines, ramped up to power, everything was looking good, then a sensor tripped on the pad side and the computers triggered a fast shutdown. After the abort, inspections found out

[00:15:00] that about half of those 10 engines had taken mechanical damage from the very fast shutdown. SpaceX’s response, rather than wait around for repairs, pull all 10 engines and backfill with engines from booster 20. That’s on its own a remarkable detail. The next booster’s engine pipeline is being cannibalized to keep this one moving fast. And if you make it through that, you have pretty good confidence that you’re in a good position to go fly. Then comes the 33 engine static fire on April 15th. And the footage SpaceX releases here is genuinely stunning. Multiple camera angles including a camera underneath the booster looking up at all 33 engines firing. We have never seen this angle on pad 2 before. This is like Christmas. A beautiful detail. The documentary cuts

[00:16:01] to inside the control room as the static fire is happening. You see the firing through the window in the distance. Silent at first, then a few seconds later the entire control room starts vibrating as the shock waves arrive from the pad. Physics in action captured on camera, but here is what I wasn’t expecting. We kicked out early. All teams triage alerts. Prepare for offload. The seemingly successful 33 engine static fire we celebrated on the show was actually preceded by a second abort. And I had a feeling it was. The first 33 engine attempt also stopped. They went through engine startup, then lost some sensors on a diverter ramp manifold. The system reported manifold pressure was lower than what the engineers believed it actually was. That kicked them out at T plus 1.88 seconds. They likely wanted to go for 5 or 6 seconds. That’s less than a third. The engineers framing is

[00:17:02] honest. This is exactly the kind of issue you can’t test without actually firing engines. Sensor behavior under real condition loads is its own discipline. And there is a small visible detail in the documentary. A SpaceX mousepad on a desk reads only the paranoid survive. That is an internal motto at SpaceX, no joke. Be paranoid enough to find every mistake before it becomes a real problem. Then the documentary shows ship 36 exploding. Again, this is direct surveillance footage from Massey’s. We have never seen this before. Ship 36 is fully fueled sitting on the test stand. Everything is consumed by a massive ball of flames. As the flames pass, the pad becomes visible again. The ship is gone. The test stand is in ruins. A COPV explosion took out ship 36, but the bigger problem for the program was the loss of the test infrastructure. Ships can be replaced from the production

[00:18:01] line. Test pads take much longer to rebuild. And this is what SpaceX did. The new Massey’s stand has visible improvements. The GSE bunker next to the test stand is now packed in thick concrete. The wall facing the stand is angled to deflect blasts. SpaceX took the lessons from ship 36 and built protection into the next generation of the stand. And then came ship 39 static fire, 60 seconds. Spectacular. Footage again showing the test from every angle possible. Intense footage when you know what happened to ship 36 before. But this time everything worked out just fine. So here is what I take away from this documentary and especially from the parts SpaceX could have left out and chose not to. Booster 19’s first static fire aborted. Half the engines took damage from a fast shutdown. They were swapped from booster 20. Then the first 33 engine attempt on

[00:19:01] April 15th also aborted at T plus 1.88 seconds because of a sensor issue on a flame diverter ramp manifold. We never reported on this. The documentary is the first time this has been made public. And here’s the question this raises. If half the engines on the 10 engine static fire took damage from a fast shutdown, what happened on the second 33 engine abort at T plus 1.88 seconds? The documentary doesn’t tell us. It is plausible that some engines took similar damage. We just don’t know. If they did, SpaceX may need to swap engines from booster 20 again. And if they do, do they need another static fire to validate the new configuration? The documentary’s final card says, “Next up, flight 12.” That phrasing implies SpaceX believes another static fire isn’t needed, or does it? What’s absolutely clear is this. SpaceX is by far the most transparent space flight company in the

[00:20:00] world. Booster 18 rupturing, ship 36 exploding, two static fire aborts on booster 19 that we’re only learning about from this release, lead engineers on camera saying we don’t know how V3 will behave in some areas. There is nothing else like this documentary in space flight history. I sincerely hope SpaceX releases more of this. Flight 12 is next and I sure can’t wait anymore. How are you holding up? Let me know in the comments. How about we open up a group, anonymous rocket addicts or something. And that’s it for today. Smash the like button, subscribe for more. This is what fuels the algorithm and this is how you can help us for free. Check out our epic shirts in your favorite space nerd store. Our brand new Raptor emblem design and countless others are there for you to explore. Click the card or the US or worldwide link in the description. And if you want to know how SpaceX is planning to build a self-sustained moon base in the next 10 years, watch this video next to continue your journey. Thank you very

[00:21:00] much for watching and I’ll see you again in the next episode.