It‘s Not Rocket Science w/ Scott Manley #47

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hello, everybody.

(00:01):
This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to the age of infinite.
Throughout history, humans have made significant transformational changes, which in turn have led to the renaming of periods into what we've called ages.
You've personally just experienced the information age and what a ride it has been.
Now consider that you might now we might now be living into a transition period to the age of infinite, An age that is not defined by scarcity and abundance, but by a redefining lifestyle consisting of infinite possibilities and resources, which will be made possible through a new construct between the moon and the earth as we call it Mearth.

(00:41):
We will create a new ecosystem and economic system to take us into this infinite future.
The ingredients for an amazing sci fi story that will come to life in your lifetime.
The podcast is brought to you by the Project Moonhound Foundation, where we look to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon, a moon hut we were named by NASA, through the accelerated development of an earth and space based ecosystem, then to use the endeavors, the paradigm shifting thinking, and the innovations and turn them back on earth to improve how we live on earth for all species.

(01:14):
Today, we're going to be exploring It's Not Rocket Science.
Love the title.
And we have with us Scott Manley.
Hello, Scott.
Hello.
As always, we do very, very brief introductions, so here is Scott.
He's a YouTube personality.
He's a gamer, a programmer, an astrophysicist, and interestingly enough, he's also a DJ.

(01:40):
Now before I get into we get into this discussion, I do wanna share something, and it is this.
Constantly in discussion, individuals will comment or in in text or talk to me and say, well, how much research have you done?
So let me share with you how the program is put together.

(02:01):
I find a guest that I think is brilliant.
Scott is on that list.
Give him a call, connect.
We have a conversation, and then the guest watches some content to figure out who we are and what we're about.
And then we have this call where we determine only the title.
That's it.
Now for Scott and I, our first conversation was 1 hour and 44 minutes.

(02:24):
We've had creating a title go up to 2 and even 3 hours.
From that point forward, Scott and I have not spoken.
I do not know the outline.
I don't know the content in advance.
All we're doing or all together, you and I as a guest or as a listener, is we're learning together from Scott.

(02:46):
And from there, we will move on to the age of infinite.
That said, let's get started.
Scott, do you have an outline for us?
I do, sort of.
K.
So why don't you give them to me?
What's what's
So the title is it's not rocket science, and I wanna approach this from many angles.

(03:09):
Okay.
First of all, it's not rocket science.
It's it's one of these phrases in language and colloquial speech.
So so is the number 1 Yes.
Languages in our speech or what do you wanna call number 1?
I just the it is a phrase in colloquial speech.
Okay.
Rocket science
Yep.

(03:30):
Go ahead.
Rocket science is held up as this mystic art.
It
is.
Okay.
What's number 2?
Well, the number 2 is actually it's not that mystical.
It's just not It's not quantum mechanics or general relativity.
Mystical.
Okay.
Number 3.

(03:52):
Rocket engineering is where it's at.
Engineering
is where it's at.
Number 4.
Yeah.
I want to actually talk about how I'm not sure how to say this, but I wanna actually talk about rocket technology in detail.

(04:13):
Okay.
So we'll just call it rocket technology.
Yeah.
Okay.
5.
And I wanna cover SpaceX's, well, different model of rocket vehicle development and how that dovetails with what has gone on prior.
Okay.

(04:34):
Next.
I think that's that's a good thing to get started with.
Okay.
And we can go anywhere as our podcasts, always do.
We find new places to really explore.
So let's start with this first one.
The phrase in colloquial colloquial yeah.
Whatever speech.
Yes.
Dialect and and manners of speech.

(04:56):
It is fascinating how the you know, people learning to speak languages, you learn about the words and the grammar, and and what you also understand is to have a real living language is to have figures of speech.
Right?
Like, it's not rocket science.
So that individual is a loose cannon.
Right?

(05:17):
And these things I don't know.
I just find sort of find this linguistics thing on the side kinda fascinating as a science fiction fan, and I'm already going off topic.
No.
No.
No.
That that's okay because
I'm already asking myself.
Do you speak another language, Scott?
I I am terrible.
I barely speak, languages when I'm there.
I I do try.

(05:38):
So so you do speak Scottish because that to me is that is a a language in itself.
Okay.
I can read some Scottish poetry.
Here's a part of the address to the haggis I know off the top of my head.
It's the.
That's that's Scots, and I actually understand that.

(06:00):
That's Robert Brown.
I know you do.
I have a very Erin Gavin who's on our website.
If you look at our image of project moon hut, half of the face is Erin Gavin.
She's a Hollywood person, but she has a a a model agency in Scotland.
And I tease her all the time because I actually pull up the Gaelic, and I write, and I put it in as a translation.

(06:21):
And she laughs.
So, what was interesting the minute you said that is I never I'm not a grammar person.
I learned to speak Spanish, and I learned it from talking to people.
That's how I learned Spanish.
I don't learn it from a grammatical perspective.
And even these colloquial expressions, which is interesting that you brought it up, I don't even think about it.

(06:43):
I just think I they become a part of you when you learn a language.
Yeah.
I I I don't know.
I'm just I was kinda starting with this because, yeah, other languages, they have these constructs and and you'll find that a lot of, like, when people make up languages for TV shows and movies
Yep.
To make them realistic, they actually have to populate the language with these phrases if they're gonna be somewhat, they're not gonna sound like a collection of words and grammar, basically.

(07:14):
But, yeah, it's not rocket science.
Coming back to that, yeah, it has this sort of mystical connotations about it.
And and I get this all the time, because I work in tech, and I'm trying to solve a problem or we're discussing a problem in a meeting and we'll say, that's only gonna be a couple of hours.
It's not rocket science.

(07:37):
And and I'm immediately thinking if this would be so much easier if it was because I actually understand it, Patrick, and this machine learning, thing that's been thrown at me.
Yep.
Yeah.
I I get it.
And the the difference is that I have spent the last sort of 10 years randomly learning bits of this and teaching it.

(08:01):
And I think I I've sort of got one of the I'm known for teaching rocket science.
Even although it's not hard mathematical rocket science, although there is math involved, a lot of the a lot of this mysticism comes from just lack of exposure.
Well, I I share when I'm telling the story of Project Moon Hub.

(08:25):
I share of the first experience that I had, which was in Hawaii, where at the great giant leap, there were about 50 of us in the room.
I I went I was asked to go to this event, and yeah, Buzz Aldrin there, one of the guys who put the rover on the comet.
These are all this was a PhD level event, and I tell people that my laptop caught on fire.

(08:46):
Because in that meeting, I couldn't understand half the words that they were saying.
You take, you take an l 493 to l one, and then it's a b 475, and then there are dragons.
And I'm thinking, there are dragons?
I mean, I had no clue what was going on, and it is a language.
Well, you know and I think the funny thing is that the way you've repeated that back to me clearly shows that you didn't actually understand half the references because if you'd heard those terms enough, you might repeat them in a way that would make sense to me, but this is the game of of Telegram or telephone now.

(09:21):
And I Oh, yeah.
No.
No.
Yeah.
I I had I had no clue what they were saying.
I, Mike, I was typing so fast to get what is an l one?
What is an
l one?
Is probably a Lagrange point.
Right.
It was a Lagrange point.
But if you've never heard this before, if you didn't know anything about rocket science or space, I didn't know what that meant.
And then they started talking about dragons.

(09:42):
This was 2014.
And Game of Thrones is out.
And my first analogy was, what is a dragon?
Right.
Well, it could be here be dragons, and that's something you quite often think about when you're trying to plan or design something that is out pushing the limits where you're like, we don't know what's in this area.
And in old maps, here be dragons.

(10:04):
The mapmaker didn't wanna say they didn't know what's in there.
Yeah.
Just paint a dragon in.
Right?
Yeah.
That that you're absolutely right.
They put a, like, a they put a ship, and it'll be completely engulfed by something or monster.
Or something.
A Kraken.
Yeah.
And so it was actually if you think of 2014, 15, it was Elon Musk's was it was it there's a what's it?

(10:29):
The There's
a he has a spacecraft, the dragon, but
I'm not sure
that would have been involved in a comet mission.
So That was what was being referred to.
But Oh, it was.
Okay.
I felt like the 13th warrior after 2 days because I had to decipher.
And if for, the and I know you know the reference.
I'm just bringing it up.
It is the movie the 13th warrior where anti Antonio Banderas learns a language by hearing people speak.

(10:55):
So, yes, I felt like the 13th warrior.
I had to figure out this language of space and even what is rocket science is, I think it's an assumptive phrase for most people.
Yeah.
And and it's not something to be afraid of having been, you know, around it for a long time, but never having been educated in it, let me tell you.

(11:16):
So as your degree is with,
Physics and astronomy and, you know, the little bit of computational physics on the side.
But But not rocket science.
It's not rocket science because rocket science really isn't that much of a thing, but we can get to that.
Okay.
But, yeah, I what I did do was quantum mechanics and general relativity.

(11:39):
I mean, this is getting on to point 2.
And that stuff, that really did blow my mind.
You know?
You've probably done a bit to that.
Right?
Mhmm.
There's a lot of transformational ways about how you think about things, and that can make it incredibly hostile.
But rocket science is actually you know, I am I'm now saying putting finger quotes up when I'm saying rocket science.

(12:01):
Yeah.
Doesn't it?
Right?
You can't see it, but I sort of finger quote rocket science these days.
It's all classical physics and chemistry, and most importantly, it's it's engineering.
Right?
Yep.
So I I actually like that because I never thought about it that way.

(12:22):
Is it's honestly, I've never thought about it as physics, chemistry, and engineering even though I've taken I I haven't taken engineering per se, but I've done I worked on many projects where engineering was involved.
I never had broken it down into those three components.
Right.
You probably understand Hooke's law and tensile strength
Yes.
And compressive strength.

(12:43):
Right.
Yes.
And bit of
engineering.
Yeah.
No.
I I but I never brought it down to this simplicity even though it's complex.
But the simplicity is it's physics, it's chemistry, and it's engineering.
Yep.
And I never thought about that way.
So thank you.
That that right there is extremely it's a clarity that should have been described or someone should have said 6, 7 years ago, or I'm just not so smart.

(13:16):
Well, so, funnily enough, 6, 7, 8 years ago, I started really making my videos on YouTube.
And I had how I how I got into this position of, people telling other people to look at my videos about rocket science is I actually started playing a video game on the Internet called Kerbal Space Program.

(13:37):
And you may have heard of this.
You may not.
It's a video game where it is a physics simulation where you bolt together rocket parts like engines, propellant tanks, guidance systems, maybe some aerodynamic surfaces, and then you launch them.
And you can fly them according to the laws of physics.
And this started out as a very simple demonstration of the technology, and it's now grown over 10 years to be a very complete simulation, albeit with some compromises to make it easier for people to understand.

(14:12):
So I started playing that and explaining to people about it because the game had come out and a lot of people were starting to play with it and they would launch their rockets straight up, and they would stage them, and they would try to keep going higher.
And eventually, they would fall back to the planet, and so they sort of said, oh, this isn't a real simulation because you can't get into orbit.

(14:33):
And I, of course, was sitting off in the side with my degree in or in astronomy, and I said, no.
You're doing it wrong.
Yeah.
Let me explain.
Right.
Yeah.
It doesn't work because you built it wrong.
Well, no.
Because there it's not getting to space and staying in space isn't about going straight up.
It's about going straight up and then going sideways very fast.

(14:56):
Yeah.
Yeah.
Getting into orbit.
And so I started making these videos just explaining, you know, this is how it works.
This is how orbital mechanics works.
Let me show you how to transfer to the moon where you've gotta find your translunar injection point and swing around and then perform a breaking burn.
And, I had I don't know.
I guess I had a nice voice and people like that, but, I also had some background and could talk about other related pieces.

(15:21):
Speak Gaelic, which also probably helped.
No.
I didn't speak Gaelic.
Oh, so so let me I'm gonna ask you right now because this would be fascinating to hear from you in a, a more simplistic term.
Can you describe without having to go to a video and I I've got a lot of the background, can you describe the trajectory that you just described in 6 seconds, which was going up, turning, going as fast as you can, and then getting out of orbit, and then I think you went all the way to the moon.

(15:54):
Yeah.
So can you please give me your I'm not gonna say it's it's not 101, but, like, 201 or 2 you know, a second level, not a first level, description.
Well, do you wanna talk about the complete process of getting into orbit?
Because I'm there.
No.
I would like to get if you can give as the the reasoning is the reason I'm asking the question is that because I'm not a space person, and I use that term very, loosely.

(16:24):
I know a lot about space.
I've been working in this for 6 years, but I don't wake up in the 7 years.
I don't wake up in the morning and think, I just wanna go to space.
It would be amazing.
I don't do that.
And so I'm often talking to individuals who have no clue about what the and so I'd like I would like to learn from you so that I can do a better job of helping people to understand.

(16:47):
And many of our team members don't know space, so this would be fantastic.
So give me a a quick a primer of a 201 class.
Right.
So let's start with your basic rocket sitting on the launch pad with full propellant tanks.
So the first thing it's gonna do is light those engines, and it's gonna start ascending upwards.
And so there is more thrust coming out of those engines than there is gravity holding the vehicle down.

(17:12):
So because of that, you know, force equals mass times acceleration.
You know?
Yep.
You're gonna be have more force on it than the gravity.
You're gonna accelerate upwards.
So, you know, many rockets actually don't accelerate faster than there are cars that accelerate faster than rockets.
Think about that.
But rockets keep on accelerating.
A car will reach its top speed quickly.

(17:34):
A rocket just keeps going as long as it's burning those engines.
It goes faster and faster and faster and higher and higher.
Now it'll start to turn over because it wants usually wants to start going eastwards or southwards or wherever towards its target orbit.
So the the actual turn is because I've always wondered why it starts to turn, and I didn't realize it was turning to get into orbit.

(17:59):
I just thought there was some mechanical part when it got to that elevation, that altitude, that it would say, okay.
We have to start turning, but I didn't realize it was to push itself into a different trajectory.
Right.
It's aiming downrange along a launch azimuth.
A launch azimuth is a direction you want to go to that will ultimately turn into your orbit.

(18:22):
So the other reason you turn, by the way, is because if you've got a big rocket with propellant in it Yeah.
Don't want it to fall back on the launch pad if there's a a problem.
So you want it to start going sideways pretty quickly, but not go too fast sideways that you lose control.
So there's a balance there, and this is, you know, guidance people will tell you all about this.
So when so let me sorry.

(18:44):
Interrupting.
If, we're going up and we start to make that turn, we're still pushing towards a a higher altitude Yes.
But it but at, let's say, a, a 60 degree angle instead of a 90 degree, which was take off.
Does that sound reasonable?
Yes.
That's pretty much.

(19:05):
Some some rockets actually start off at an angle, but those are very rare.
There are small ones and, you know
So we go up at a sit we go up at a 90.
We go to a high enough altitude.
We start to then roll
or turn.
Technically, it's a yaw or a pitch.
Usually, it's a pitch you describe it.
Okay.
Roll is along the axis of the rocket.
Right.
That's okay.
So it's a pitch.
We and then what we're doing is we're we're aiming ourselves in a direction that will give us an orbital trajectory.

(19:32):
Yes.
Okay.
And so as you go on, you're getting it's getting faster and faster.
And by the time you're up around well past, you know, supersonic speeds, you're generally up at altitudes of maybe about 80 to over a 100 kilometers depending on the rocket design.
Your first stage is gonna burn out.
You're gonna drop that, and your second stage is gonna come online.

(19:55):
And it this will then mostly be concerned with picking up the speed needed for orbital velocity.
So what the first stage does is generally put it into a ballistic trajectory that would carry it maybe a few 100 kilometers down range.
Yeah.
But if the second stage didn't light, it would just fall back.
Right.
So the second stage uses this lift, this loft, and the time that it would take to reach its apex to get faster and faster.

(20:23):
And it's aiming for a speed of about, Mach 25 relative to the surface of the earth or 17,500 miles per hour.
Right?
25,000 kilometers per hour.
That's how fast you have to go.
7.8 kilometers per second.
There you go.
And at that, right, you know physics.
You are in these if you're moving in a circle, you experience, an imaginary force pulling you outwards.

(20:48):
Yes.
So if you're going fast enough around the earth in a circle, that imaginary force can cancel out the force of gravity, and then you are in an orbit.
You won't go up or down.
You will in be in the circular trajectory moving at 7.2 kilometers per second or 7.8 kilometers per second.
It depends on how you measure it.
Right?
Because the earth is rotating and
It it it's interesting because I haven't asked these questions.

(21:14):
It's interesting that the visual that we get on earth for someone who is not going to do the research, which I was not again, it wasn't interest to me.
You asked me other questions.
I'll go real deep.
Is that you see the image of the loss of the first booster burning out and the them falling down to earth, And it feels like you're already so high that you are in space, but what you I think you're kind of alluding is you're high enough to be at a point where the second engine kicking in can get enough orbital velocity.

(21:48):
It's still going at that 60 degree or whatever angle, but it's now accelerating it in a different atmosphere condition, in a different in, a different, and starting to turn into an orbital velocity of a circle around the moon.
Yes.
So we're Does that make sense?
About getting into orbit around the earth first.
Yes.
I mean, I'm sorry.

(22:09):
Around the earth.
That's what I meant.
Yes.
So So Go ahead.
That that first stage is to give you the altitude and the time you need for the 2nd stage to pick up the speed it needs because it takes time to accelerate.
Yep.
That's tip that's your typical rocket design, and there are many, many variations on this.
And you were talking about something going to space versus not going to space.

(22:30):
If we talk about an altitude of, like, a 100 kilometers of space, the boosters on SpaceX rockets, they go the first stage booster, those reach space, but the boosters on the Space Shuttle, those big solid rocket motors that were needed, those never got high enough to reach space, but they were would land and and recover.
So the whole alpha staging is just because this second stage needs to spend a lot of time picking up the velocity needed.

(22:57):
Yeah.
That may, makes sense.
Right.
It just doesn't look that way when you're looking at the camera.
It looks like it's already in orbit because it's so high up, but it's actually not.
It still needs that additional trajectory with a different burn and a different angle to get it to where it needs to be.
Yeah.
It's all about speed.

(23:18):
Getting to space, you can get to space going straight up and straight down by traveling at about Mach 3 and then letting velocity calculate drop track bring you up.
But if you wanna stay in space, you have to hit about Mach 25.
Okay.
Wild.
Yep.
So, so, anyway, that that would be you getting into a stable orbit around the Earth.

(23:42):
And one of the sort of well, I'm sort of moving forwards here in in terms of where I thought I'd be, but one of the sort of basic things in rocket science is the rocket equation.
So this is a bit of an aside.
You understand that a rocket is expelling propellant out a rocket nozzle, and that propellant is going off in one direction at a certain speed and that Newton's third law

(24:06):
Newton's third law.
Yes.
Equal and opposite reaction says the spacecraft has to accelerate in the other direction.
Right?
Mhmm.
Yep.
Now you can imagine that this can do this for a certain amount of time until it runs out of propellant.
Mhmm.
And then it's floating in space, and it just follows whatever trajectory because of Newton's first law and the law of gravity.
Yep.

(24:27):
So you can actually calculate how much time and how much acceleration you get to get a total change in velocity that a spacecraft is capable of.
And it's not totally trivial because if you think about it, when you've got a rocket full of propellant, you have more mass, and so that same engine gets less acceleration.

(24:48):
And as you burn propellant, you get more acceleration out.
Yes.
So there's a little bit of an integration you have to do, but ultimately, you can get some you do something called the rocket equation, which was an equation that's so simple it was derived, in the 19th century by a Russian school teacher called, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.
Mhmm.
And all it does is it tells you how much your rocket can change its speed based upon the dry mass of the vehicle, the velocity of the rocket exhaust, and the mass of the propellant.

(25:23):
But Okay.
What I want you to embrace here is the notion that there is a finite definable change in velocity that a rocket can manage.
We call this delta v, and you probably heard delta v if you've been in space circles.
I I I if you've even watched my writing, whenever I hit the word change, I always write delta.
So, yes, I'm I'm very delta v.

(25:44):
Okay.
Now we've got to space.
We've you we've done those delta v calculations, the first stage and the second stage.
Now to get to the moon, you might need a 3rd stage.
And you have to make sure that it has to be able to reach the moon.
And to do that, it's in a circular orbit.
It wants to go into an elliptical orbit where it starts at, you know, a few 100 kilometers above the earth, and then the ellipse carries its orbit out to where the moon is about 400,000 kilometers out.

(26:14):
Mhmm.
And
to do that, you accelerate.
Yep.
And you need a certain amount of delta v.
You need about 2.8 kilometers per second, I think, or maybe 3.
I I it depends on on a number of factors.
I and I I just understand the concept that you have to you're you're in a velocity and you need to escape that velocity, so you need another fuel source to be able to ignite it.

(26:35):
And it ends up turning it into elliptical shape because it's the it's the way in which the path of orbital or orbits work when you start to ignite.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, all orbits are are conic sections.
Okay.
We're generally talking about we're generally talking about circles or ellipses.
Yep.
And and a circle is a special kind of ellipse.

(26:57):
Yep.
Right?
And so, yeah, you you accelerate so that your orbit will come out and meet the moon at some future time, and you have to do the math on exactly when and where you apply this.
Yeah.
But it's actually not you can actually eyeball this and because I do this in video games.
Right?
Okay.

(27:18):
Oh, I I can fly spacecraft by the seat of my pants.
Let me
tell you.
By the way, do you know the people at curveball?
I do, actually.
Yes.
Okay.
I wanna meet them.
Oh, interesting.
Okay.
They they I mean, I'll tell you what.
The the people behind curveball have revolutionized understanding of rocket science, and it's fascinating that I I go to science events now, and so many of the people coming up have learned all about it.

(27:43):
And there's a fantastic diagram.
I don't know if you know xkcd.
It's the same cartoon.
So there's a a little graph he he drew as one of his cartoons.
This guy worked at JPL.
He is the graph is how much I understand rocket science on the vertical axis.
On the horizontal axis, it's time.
And it sort of goes up slowly, and he says, went to school.

(28:05):
She's got a little got a degree in astrophysics, being a slightly higher I can see
where this is going.
Played the game and learned it all.
Right.
Worked at JPL slightly higher, played Kerbal Space Program, and just shoots off
the top.
Yeah.
That's exact I drew a graph.
That's exactly what I had drawn.
Right.
And this is xkcd.
You should look it up.
And the thing about Kerbal is, as I said, it makes all this available to you and it makes it all available to regular people.

(28:33):
When you drive a car, you are you're you're dealing with forces on the road.
You're dealing with complex friction forces
Mhmm.
Engine power, you're breaking.
All this stuff is actually quite complicated physics.
You know, your body is rolling, you get suspension working
Mhmm.
But you don't care about any of that because you your understanding of driving is an experiential thing you've learned by doing.

(28:59):
Right?
You've built the context in your head and your model for how a car should behave.
Now people that have worked in with rocketry, a lot of the stuff is the mathematics.
Yes.
Right?
You haven't gone to space and tried to maneuver a spacecraft.
In fact, astronauts have gone to space and generally had spacecraft maneuver.
It's all been based on command sent up from the ground.

(29:22):
Right.
They're they're and it's a misnomer that because they're an astronaut that they are also a rocket scientist.
They are
a lot of crossover for
sure.
Right.
They learned some things, but they're in the back seat, And the the mathematics was done.
The rocket science was done.
The engineering was done.
The physics was done on the ground.

(29:43):
Mhmm.
They are now pushing the button at this, at this, at this to make it happen.
And it's their skills that people have.
Yes.
And and so, anyway, Kerbal Space Program allows people to be the astronauts and not bother about most of the math.
They can just guess and aim at the maneuvers and learn about how those change.

(30:05):
And so you get this understanding of the orbital mechanics by doing it by hand.
And, actually, talking about astronauts having, you know, knowing or not knowing this, There's a story I like to tell about Gemini 4.
Right?
So Gemini 4 was the 1st spacewalk.
I'm sure you 1st American spacewalk.
Right?
And but late in that, mission design, they added another mission goal, and that was they wanted to practice some orbital maneuvering.

(30:34):
And now they didn't have another Agena spacecraft up there to practice maneuvering relative to, but they did have the booster that had launched them.
So the booster had disconnected from the spacecraft and was floating away behind them.
And the crew they wanted the spacecraft to turn around and maneuver close to it from several miles out.
So the astronauts at the con controls, they flew the spacecraft like it was an airplane.

(31:00):
They pointed it directly at the booster, and they flew towards it.
Yeah.
And they what they found was as they flew towards the booster, the booster starts to go up relative to them, and they thought that's very strange.
I thought I was going straight towards it.
What was happening was orbital mechanics isn't like flying an airplane.

(31:21):
You're going backwards.
As you slow down, your orb you're slowing your orbit.
Remember how I said you had to accelerate your orbit to go up to the moon?
Well, if you slow down, your orbit will actually go down towards the Earth.
Yes.
And that meant that as they were going down, the does it looked like the booster was going up.
But not only was that, by going backwards towards it, they had actually shrunk their orbit a little, and that meant that their path around the earth was shorter.

(31:47):
Yeah.
So over time, that would mean they would actually go away from the booster.
There's this wacky thing in orbital mechanics.
If you want to go towards something that's ahead of you, then you actually have to slow down.
Right?
You have to fire your thrusters to go away from it so that you fall into a lower orbit and then catch up with it.

(32:09):
Yep.
It's backwards.
No.
It it's backwards, and and that's the part of, a lot of learning is that it's these are often things are counterintuitive.
And I I've only I've got 20 hours in a worrier, and I can tell you I've been in situations not like this, but where I thought I should do one thing, and the instructor would say, no.

(32:30):
No.
No.
No.
No.
You do the opposite.
Why?
Because the opposite gets you to where you need to be.
So that's interesting that that's why it was falling out of orbit or falling out away from
Well, that's why they couldn't rendezvous with it
because
the hadn't thought about the changes that were needed.
And, of course, maneuvering around the space station, this is all something that's understood now.

(32:51):
Right?
There's something called proximity operations where they have to understand that if you go in a certain direction, you're gonna have actually sort of motion in a different direction.
But
Mhmm.
But, anyway, Kerbal Space Program is fantastic because it gives these gives people this sort of hands on experiential, knowledge.
Yep.
And and it's intuitive.
And and you can then take that to the next level if you want and do the math.

(33:15):
You can crunch the numbers.
You can come up with perfect design.
You can even build simulations and models within the simulation and then pull off amazing missions that are analogs of the real thing.
It it so I know I meet so many people that this was the thing that turned them into rocket scientists or rocket engineers.
Mhmm.

(33:36):
Right?
Because I've said talked about this.
Some of them were were gonna do, you know, art or engineering or other worthy causes, but because they thought that rocket science was hard.
But in fact, they realized through a video game that actually, it's something that is quite understandable.
It's not esoteric or, mystic in any way.

(33:58):
Well, part of I I part of that that understanding has to come from the thinking or belief that a lot of the science has been done.
There was Newton created the 1st and third law.
There are laws that are already put into how we think and what we do think, how we live.

(34:20):
So, therefore, you're not starting from scratch.
If you were to do this and we went back 300 years ago, it would be a whole different story.
But we've built on the thoughts and ideas of others and being able to understand these laws enables us to be able to comprehend these changes.
So I think there's an interconnectivity to the ubiquitousness, the the the knowledge base that allows an individual to know, I'm in a car.

(34:48):
It will do this.
I'm in a rocket.
It doesn't act the same way.
Yeah.
And they and and there's there's that connectedness that I think makes it a little easier.
I don't know if that makes sense.
Yeah.
And and, you know, another thing I wanna you're talking about Newton and his very simple laws.
Let let's be clear.
You know?
From Newton's laws, you can get very, very complex results that are something you can easily model.

(35:10):
Right?
So there's a new science to be had even based on those laws.
And I guess, you know, if you look at Nivier Stokes equations are used for fluid dynamics, that's a that's always a place where you're like, here be dragons.
Here's things we still haven't figured out how to simulate.
We can do experiments, but we can't necessarily understand exactly why these basic, very simple laws of conservation of mass and momentum and energy produce some effect in the real world.

(35:38):
I it was why when, calc 3
transitions into theoretical math, I got to that point and I just couldn't keep on going.
I just learned to do, numerical integration, and that solved all my problems from that point onwards.

(35:59):
Well, I also had a a lack of desire to wanna go that far.
But, yes, these type of mathematical equations or these laws, they they go to a point.
And, yes, I know they could be extremely complex.
Yet when you when you can describe something to me, and, Scott, you're describing to me, an understanding of a principle, and then what you did is you have a reference point.

(36:24):
You said, in essence, David, if you're in a car, you understand you don't have to know there's friction.
But in the back of your mind, you know that the tires are causing friction against the ground, and there's an air friction.
And there's other friction, but let's use those as the basics.
You understand that there's an engine in your car that you can press a pedal and put in more of the combustible or use the energy if it's battery.

(36:49):
You know that.
So you're able to translate that to me so that I can grasp it.
And I I'm assuming this curveball also has that integrated understanding of just basic principles that humans have because they exist.
And that helps people to get to this next phase of rocket science.
Yes.

(37:10):
So we're we're, we are trying to go through these bullet points.
And I think, honestly, I'm realizing my bullet points are sort of changing order.
That's okay.
That's okay.
This this
I I do think we wanna get on to the point about rocket engineering.
Okay.
So let's go to
the point.
Mentioned it several times.
Yep.
So let's get into rocket engineering.
And so rocket yeah.
So I've we've talked about rocket science.
So there is such a thing as as rocket science, but it's really actually, you know, material science or trying to solve some particular problem in the lab.

(37:38):
Rocket engineering is where the rubber meets the road.
That's the real meat of what makes space work.
Wait.
Wait.
So rocket rocket science and rocket engineering, would rocket rugged engineering be a subset of rocket science?
No.
No.
I'd say it's the better term.
That's what I wanna say is I think that people shouldn't really be saying rocket science.

(37:59):
Okay.
Not that I've get any great opinion of it, but because rocket engineering is really where it's at.
No.
No.
It's done.
I I would call it rocket engineering from now on.
Is there any
You might you might find it I don't think you would ever be at a science event and see people talking about rocket science except for saying it's not rocket science.
So now we now I know the right word.
So, yeah, you've changed the

(38:20):
world.
Right.
So so the thing about rocket engineering can be exceptionally hard because you're dealing with situations where you are designing something that might have to deal with extreme temperatures or pressures or horribly reactive chemical environments.

(38:41):
You might have structural things where you are trying to get as much, strength as possible at the lowest mass possible.
Right?
It's not rocket engineering.
That makes sense to me.
So, like, built making a rocket engine pardon me.
Sorry.
Getting a little
No worries.
You can edit that out.

(39:02):
Right?
No.
I add we don't edit anything.
Oh, you no.
You can turn the volume down.
No.
No.
No.
We never edit anything.
Anything.
There is never there is never anything that we have ever I've done about 250 interviews, 260 interviews, and I've even have peep I had one individual I won't mention name.
Very, very, very, very famous in another industry.

(39:23):
And he was a jerk, and I won't go into all the details, but he screamed and yell and swore at me and all sorts of things because he had a misunderstanding.
And I just said to him, my my, it was almost like we were gonna lose the interview.
I'd worked on it for 2 years.
And I said, I was in Venice, and I said, we're going live in 3, 2, 1, and I just started.

(39:47):
And Hey.
And he said he just changed.
It was, oh, that's my favorite place in the world.
Amazing to be with you.
He just went on and on and 45 minutes into the interview because it was enjoyable to him, and I challenged him.
That's what I liked.
He apologized on the air, and I didn't know what to do.

(40:08):
So what I I kind of gave a summary, but that is in the interview.
It's never taken out.
So whatever you say, Scott, it is here.
So it's It's not what I'm saying.
It's what my my throat is bringing up that I'm
working for.
Perfectly fine with that.
I'm I'm I don't wanna do the Bob Fleming thing
No.
You're British reference.
What does that mean?
It's it's a character from a British TV show who's always his shows are interrupted by him coughing up stuff.

(40:33):
Like Bob Fleming.
I get it.
So I will call you Scott Fleming Manning.
No.
No.
No.
No.
Yeah.
Okay.
My my my family lives in the same village that, Alexander Fleming grew up in where he, of course, came up with penicillin or is credited with penicillin amongst others.
Anyway, Fleming's a Scottish name.

(40:54):
Yes.
So, anyway, yeah.
So and the other thing about rocket engineering is that it's hard because there are huge consequences for failure.
A rocket has all these multitude of parts.
You know, we see a tank, we see engines, but there's many parts in those engines.
That tank, you know, is hiding the electronics.
It's hiding pressurization system, structural parts.

(41:18):
There's guidance.
There's sensors.
And almost everything has to work.
Right?
There's one thing, one failure can ruin your whole mission.
So there are huge consequences for cutting it the corners too much, right, for buying something that's too cheap or mis designing one thing.
And I have I have, like, huge numbers of stories of vehicles that were lost for all sorts of, you know, small, minor, sometimes hilarious ways.

(41:49):
Right?
And and I'll tell you that sometimes, like, rocket failures can have some very unscientific root causes.
Like
Well, I yes.
I'm completely, you know, understand that.
In, I wrote a small book.
People will say it's not small, but I wrote a small book.

(42:10):
And I the when e when SpaceX's rocket went up and it failed at 2 minutes and 19 seconds or would one of those, it was up at an altitude of 217 kilometers.
It failed because a single line of code did not allow for enough time for commanding main engine shutdown and state separation.

(42:37):
And Yes.
That was, that
was number 3.
Following 1, launch 3.
Oh, I didn't I don't know that.
But it was a single line of code.
It was a variable.
Yeah.
It wasn't even a line of code.
It's that they they set a number tighter than they wanted because, if you think about it, this is a perfect example of a trade off that you might make as an engineer.

(42:58):
Right?
That you are launching your spacecraft and you figured out the trajectory, and though those moments when you're separating the rocket and not under thrust, you're just losing energy.
Mhmm.
So you wanna minimize the amount of time that you're losing energy during this launch.
So they, they basically said that after the main engine shut down, they should wait this amount of time and then separate the rockets and then fire the engine.

(43:25):
And that amount of time they waited between the main engine shutting down and the second stage separating was too short because they wanted to minimize this, but they didn't realize just how much propellant would still be flowing through the engine.
Okay.
I I
mean, you you know, if you want, I can I could probably explain how rocket engines work because, actually, I really like explaining how No?

(43:47):
Go ahead.
I'm I'm I'm I'm here.
We're in rocket engine we're in rocket engineering.
It's it's perfect.
Yeah.
Please explain.
So, yeah, let's start with the let's actually start with the Merlin engine.
So rocket engines, as I've mentioned, they are what we call in in general terms reaction engines.
Right?
They're equal and opposite reactions.
They have to throw material out one side so that the rocket can move.

(44:12):
And that's why it's called a a reaction engine.
A reaction engine.
Really?
That's a yeah.
That's the reason.
Yeah.
I never tied that together.
So you don't need to have a chemical reaction to have a reaction engine.
Yep.
Understood.
About it.
Because you could because, an ion engine.
Right?
An electrical propulsion system could have could be a reaction engine.
So, anyway, the classic rocket engine design, how does it make the the fuel move very quickly?

(44:37):
Because you're wanting speed.
What you do is you burn your liquid oxygen and your liquid kerosene, that's what they use in the Merlin engine, and you burn it inside a combustion chamber.
So you mix these in very quickly.
Now what your goal in there is to get the pressures high enough that you that that they are trying to escape the this chamber.

(45:01):
Right?
So there's a rocky chamber you have to imagine.
It's a sort of, cylindrical shape with curved ends, and at the other end, it constrains down to a narrow throat.
Yep.
And you want this throat to be sufficiently narrow that when you're burning the propellant, it the as it tries to flow through this throat, it has to reach supersonic speeds.

(45:24):
And that's really critical because there's a a thing in Bernoulli's you know, Bernoulli's theorem talks about, liquids or fluids flowing through pipes of different sizes.
There's a bunch of things.
So if you can if you actually shrink it down to the size of a a very small size, it will be flowing supersonic.

(45:45):
And from that point onwards, it can't flow upstream again.
Now you then expand that out.
That's your rocket nozzle.
Think about it.
Right?
It expands out into this bell shaped nozzle.
And the way it expands is because it started supersonic, it'll actually get faster.
And there's a weird inversion of Bernoulli's theorem that I can't really explain with audio, So Okay.

(46:09):
That's right.
Try.
So I do wanna ask a question before you get to that.
In relative size, let's take a an engine.
You can pick 1 or a a rocket that you're thinking about.
How big how big is a typical engine?
I and I know that's a very bad word to use, a typical.

(46:31):
But I'm trying to get a size for how large this hole would be, this throat.
Yeah.
That's interesting.
Yeah.
I I know what you're asking.
And there is a whole range because rocket engines, some of them are the size of people.
Some of them are, you know, twice this the height of people.
The Merlin engine engine
engine engine itself getting us into orbit.

(46:52):
That type that you're
You're talking about engines that can be the size of cars or Yeah.
Or trucks.
Yes.
Or they can be very small things.
Like, I've seen rockets that use engines that are the size of lawnmowers, like the small aim they're very, very small.
So let's take something like the dragon size, I mean,

(47:13):
a large The dragon is the the second is the third stage.
So Okay.
You're talking about the Falcon 9 or the Falcon 1 that we started talking with, and it has a Merlin engine.
Yep.
And I'd actually have to look off numbers, but, you know, you can see there's pictures of people standing next to these, and it's not much taller than them.
Yep.
I've seen that.
So there's the, there's what's called the power head on the top, and then you see the bell shaped nozzle.

(47:38):
Right?
The nozzle, all that's doing is taking the hot gas from the combustion chamber and expanding it out to accelerate it.
So point I wanna make about this is that that process of expanding this hot gas through a nozzle turns the heat and the pressure into velocity.
Mhmm.
And
that's all you're wanting.

(47:59):
You don't care, but you'd you'd prefer it to be cold.
But, unfortunately, laws of physics says that hot gas moves faster.
So you're like, okay.
Make it as hot as possible.
Right?
Make it as high pressure as possible, expand it through this throat, and we get it going.
Okay.
So that's how the Merlin engine is is working.
But now how does that propellant get into that engine?

(48:21):
Right?
You've got these big fuel tanks.
Well, if you think about it, you're trying to put a lot of pressure into this engine.
So you need the pressure that's pushing the propellant into the engine, the combustion chamber, to be higher than what's inside the combustion chamber.
Otherwise, it'll flow backwards.
If you didn't if you didn't have if you just had, like, a regular propellant tank and you open a valve, as soon as it starts burning, the flame would run back up inside your combustion you know, into your fuel tanks.

(48:48):
It wouldn't go it wouldn't go very far.
No.
Yeah.
Right?
Mhmm.
So the Merlin engine there's different ways to do it.
Some in some rockets are very simple, and they just have tanks that are very strong and heavy, and they have very high pressure gas inside them that pushes the propellant in.
That's not efficient because you want your tanks to be super light.

(49:10):
So instead, use pumps.
And a huge part of the design of rocket engines is the pumps.
K.
Because these have to be able to move, you know, sometimes tons of fuel per second.
You you've seen, like, fire engines spraying water out.
Right?
That's nothing.
Like, look at these big trucks blowing, like, water, maybe, you know, hundreds of gallons per second.

(49:36):
The f one engines that are pushing the Saturn 5, those are putting, like, tons of propellant every second into that combustion chamber at incredibly high pressures.
How does that compare to, in relative terms, a military aircraft rock, engine in terms of propellant speed?

(49:59):
So military aircraft, are generally using jet engines.
Yes.
Right?
And so they are actually most of their reaction mass is coming from the atmosphere, from the air.
Okay.
Yeah.
So they they so almost all jet engines get most of their thrust from pushing the air along.
Yep.
And that's why they're sort of limited to, you know, Mach 3 or or, you know, generally not much higher.

(50:23):
If you look at your civilian aircraft, almost all the thrust comes from the big fan blades at the front.
Yeah.
Because there's a small jet engine in there that's driving the high bypass turbofan.
That's how they're what they talk about.
So they they the engines have been getting bigger and wider, and the actual core of the engine has been getting smaller to make them more efficient.

(50:45):
Yep.
So, you know, we're talking kilogram I don't know how many like, kilograms, pounds of fuel per second maybe in jet engines.
Maybe maybe more, probably a lot more, but rocket engines are absolutely in a league of their own.
So how do you build pumps that work that fast?
That's my next question.
Right.
You you use something called a turbo pump.
Oh, okay.

(51:06):
Right?
Oh, yeah.
Well, what is a turbo pump?
Right?
Turbopump is a combination of a turbine and an impeller, a pump.
So you have, like a little jet engine.
You have a series of spinning blades.
You blow hot gas through those blades.
It spins it up, and then that drives your pump, which, is pushing the propellant through.

(51:30):
Now what drives those turbines?
What makes the hot gas?
You have another rocket engine.
So the Merlin rocket engine, the f one rocket engine has what's called a gas generator.
And that's a smaller version of a rocket engine that drives the turbines, pumps the fuel for the main engine.
So you have an you you have an engine within a turbine within an, you have an engine within an engine?

(51:53):
Yes.
Okay.
Right.
And so the the one the the gas generator for the Saturn 5, it was something like a 100000 horsepower to drive just the pump on one of the 5 Saturn 5's engines.
It's wild.
And so that's actually very common to see turbo pumps in almost every rocket engine.

(52:15):
There's a few that use electric pumps.
You get ones which use, electric pumps as well.
Mhmm.
The gas what else?
Yeah.
You you you have a few different things, but turbo pumps are where it's at, where it's always been.
So, anyway, as you can imagine, this means quite a lot of complicated plumbing.
You have propellant lines, oxygen lines.

(52:38):
They have to go and feed the gas generator.
They have to feed the pump.
They have to feed these have to feed into the main engine.
Oh, and by the way, that main engine, remember how I talked about how the combustion chamber is incredibly hot because it makes the gas better?
Well, actually, it's hot enough to melt pretty much any structural material you want.

(52:59):
So you have to figure a way of keeping this cool, and how you do that generally is regenerative cooling.
That's where you flow the propellant that's coming into the engine through little channels in the walls.
Like, you the walls are basically made of pipes.
I I've seen this.
Yes.
You've seen this.
And this is how Yeah.
It goes on
the outside of the the I don't know.

(53:21):
The what do you call the chamber?
The nozzle and the combustion chamber.
Yeah.
I thought about it was arteries and veins Yes.
That are kind of interconnected out on the exterior, and that allows it to keep it cool.
Right.
And this is rocket engineering, extreme temperatures and pressures, and you're dealing with them by cooling it.
You know the space shuttle main engines?

(53:42):
The temperature inside the combustion chamber will boil iron, and yet when that engine is firing, you can have ice forming on the outside of it.
Like, just think of there's a few millimeters separating these environments Yes.
And that's rocket engineering that's doing this.
So I've sort of given you a rough idea of how this engine is working, and there's a lot of piping in it.

(54:06):
So coming back to this flight, the Falcon, 1 third flight, as they shut down that engine, the turbine spins down, the fuel stops flowing, but there's all this piping and there's all this propellant still sitting inside it.
And it sort of has a momentum.
The pump doesn't spin down immediately, so it kept on flowing.

(54:27):
And so that kept on burning, and they kept they kept on having thrust after they turned off the engine.
So it wasn't like full power, but it was decaying off, and that was enough to keep pushing it forwards.
And they had misjudged how long this extra thrust would keep pushing the rocket.
Okay.
And so when they separated, they pushed apart, and then the first stage kept pushing and it crashed into the second stage Oh.

(54:55):
And they lost the rocket.
Okay.
And if they'd waited longer, they would have got to space on their 3rd try.
So, yeah, it's more or less they they disconnected.
They decoupled, but they didn't account for the the momentum that was already there.
They might have propelled it still in all that plumbing.
And it still kept on going, and it just rear ended it.

(55:16):
Yeah.
That's a bad way to say it.
It just rear ended.
Rear ended, and we've seen video.
You can see the video of this.
The thing that you have car
You've seen these big cars.
Right?
You've seen trailers.
You've seen types of things where people didn't account for time, friction, whatever it may be, and it just rear ended it.
Okay.
And that and that's what I, I guess, comes back to there are huge consequences for making getting these things wrong.

(55:40):
Right?
Like, SpaceX almost didn't succeed because of launch 3.
They were very close to failing on launch 4.
Right?
Yes.
And and so I I'd written about this in, the the book that I had.
I've written about how a single decision, a single thought, a single process, a single strategy, a single whatever you wanna do could have huge consequences.

(56:08):
And the role of an individual who's in management, in this case, or leadership, is to make sure all these decisions actually add up.
And it's not always the big things that make things fail.
It could be as simple as a line of code decision.
Yeah.
And there's another, launch 2 for SpaceX has another sort of similar although it's a more engineering story.

(56:30):
So launch 2 failed to achieve orbit as well.
I think I'm I'm hoping I'm remembering this correctly.
This was, again, the Falcon 1.
Now remember what I said, you're trying to maximize the performance of your rocket, so you're minimizing the mass.
And so they were building out the second they were designing the second stage, and it has big fuel tanks in it.

(56:54):
Now one of the problems with fuel is that it's liquid.
Right?
And it flows around.
And, you know, if you imagine trying to balance a cup with liquid in it, it wants to wobble all over the place.
So you want the the fuel to sort of not wobble around in ways that you're not expecting.

(57:16):
So what you'll do is along the sides, you'll put what are called baffles.
These are designed to stop propellant sloshing around in ways that are are nonoptimal.
It's the same thing that they use when they have a a tanker on the road for milk or for, fuel.
They're using technology because that tanker would just slosh all over.

(57:38):
So they actually use walls and separations to Yep.
To make sure they're not sloshing.
So it's the same thing, I'm assuming?
Yep.
Pretty much the same thing.
Now the problem is, of course, adding these internal baffles adds mass to your rocket.
Yep.
But not having enough of them or not the proper design of them means the fuel can slosh around, and that can modify the center of mass of your rocket.

(58:01):
Yep.
And so what happened were on their 2nd launch was they separated cleanly, and they actually didn't have this separation issue.
The second stage started firing, and they were all very excited.
It was accelerating towards space.
But there was a combination of the baffles not being sufficient and the some of the guidance system coupling in a way to the the harmonics of the fuel.

(58:26):
So the fuel started essentially sloshing around in a spiral pattern.
Mhmm.
And the vehicle started wobbling.
And, eventually, it just started wobbling out of control, and they never made orbit.
And this came down to, you know, do we need these baffles?
You know, like, maybe we could cut them down.
And so they needed to then they they realized that by making that engineering trade off that they had lost the mission.

(58:50):
Mhmm.
And it's expensive, and it's time consuming, and everything
Expensive and time consuming.
Yeah.
So
when this how did they know it was in a spiral that the fluid dynamics internally were in a
I'm not sure if they had I'm not saying it was a spiral.
It was more like a slot a circular slot pattern, but I they probably had, cameras in the tanks.

(59:14):
Oh, okay.
Or a sensor some type of sensor.
It could be
Or or the fluid motion.
Vehicles spinning because they would have seen attitude control information.
They might have decided.
Right.
Now they have cameras in the tanks.
I know that in the current version of the Falcon nines.
I don't know if they had that on the Falcon 9.
I never would have thought that that individuals who put cameras in tanks, but it makes sense.
Oh, yeah.

(59:35):
They're amazing.
So I I just never would have thought of that.
That's, it just sounds it's amazing to do that because now you would know.
But that first time through, I wondered when the way you said it, I was asking, did they yes.
You could probably take the data, and you could see certain types of motion or movements that you could pull or you could yeah.

(59:57):
Very good.
Okay.
Cameras.
Yeah.
They actually had, so they had cameras in the tanks on the Saturn 5 as well, like, back in the sixties.
Yeah.
They had there's great footage showing this.
Again, remember, I'm talking about tons of propellant per second.
You just see this liquid level just drop over a couple of minutes, and this is like a cavernous propellant tank that you're looking inside.

(01:00:20):
You you know, another example, of fuel slosh, by the way, being interesting is you've seen Apollo 11th's landing.
Right?
Yes.
You've heard the stories about, you know, they got a bunch of guys about to turn blue here.
We're breathing again.
Right?
That's one of my favorite quotes because they have this low propellant light come on as they're descending towards the surface.
They they were way too high, and they were taking way too long, and they were very worried.

(01:00:45):
Well, turns out that was actually that light shouldn't have come on.
They had plenty of propellant.
And and the reason why it came on was because the the fuel the propellant baffles inside those tanks were insufficient.
Oh, yep.
So it wasn't it didn't it didn't hit the sensor.
Right.
So uncovered the sensor early, and they got this warning.

(01:01:08):
They actually had about an at least another minute's worth of margin beyond what they thought they had.
It wasn't great.
And, you know, Neil Armstrong, absolute legend.
Right?
But he he kept cool and he landed it perfectly and safely.
And, actually, he did made a better landing than many of the other, Apollos.
But they figured this out in time for Apollo 14.

(01:01:31):
And they want so, they wanted to fit better baffles to the tanks.
And the thing is they'd already made the propellant tanks for number 14, and they didn't wanna cut them open.
So they figured out a way of doing keyhole surgery, keyhole rocket surgery on propellant tanks.
And there's these great pictures of an engineer accessing these tanks from underneath to put in this very special, you know, slosh reduction system.

(01:01:58):
That that that's just one of my cool stories.
Rock because you get to say, rocket surgery.
So so is this is this your term or a real term?
Slosh?
Slosh is absolutely a real term.
Yes.
A reduction system.
So there's something called a slosh reduction system.
Well, maybe not slosh reduction, but slosh is a real thing.

(01:02:19):
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
No.
I understood slosh is
is just Anti slosh measures, anti slosh baffles.
I I showed to you before we started that I take notes, right, on the last one.
So I I'm on page, going on 8 pages of notes already.
So I'm writing words, and I'm writing sloshed reduction system.
Yeah.
In space, that would be called an SRS.

(01:02:40):
Yeah.
Let's not go there.
Let's not go there.
So that's the the going back to our Gaelic and our colloquial speech.
So so the Yeah.
They're it's a it's an art to know how to be able to you to manage the fluid dynamics.
Yeah.
And so if you wanna change your notes, I'm gonna say anti slosh baffles is

(01:03:01):
the thing to look for.
Anti slosh baffles.
And and I the a part of this that now you can understand, I think, why we don't have the video on because you when we describe something on when you could see somebody, you can use your hands.
You can use pictures.

(01:03:22):
You could do but when you're not, you're describing it in words, you have to be more precise.
So, yes, anti slash baffle.
So I will that it's an ASB.
No.
I'm just joking.
Yeah.
Well, I'm trying gonna try and avoid using, dumb or awfully forced astronomical acronyms.
Yeah.
No.
This is great.
The you this is fantastic.
This is fantastic.
These are pieces that I had not explored.

(01:03:44):
And I just because wasn't timing wasn't right, and this is perfect.
So I'm I'm loving this.
So anything else with, that we could hit on in this rocket we went to rockets, but we actually started with turbo pumps.
We went
back to What do you what do you wanna know about?
Because there's there's some all sorts of interesting stories.

(01:04:05):
Have you ever seen, the Saturn 5 launches and looked at the rocket flames in detail?
I'm so what do you think my answer is?
I well, I'm I'm just saying I have not.
I I encourage people that don't know about this, to take a look at footage of the Saturn 5 launching.
Obviously, it is one of the most amazing things to see.
And if you've the Apollo 11 documentary a couple of years ago is just staggering.

(01:04:30):
I saw it on Imax.
Now the the the way the flames, the exhaust comes out of those rockets on the first stage gets a lot of questions, and I love to talk about this.
No.
I'm I'm in I'm interested to know why why is
this Why do people notice it?
Because when that flame comes out, it's actually black first.

(01:04:53):
Right?
There's no light.
It's solid black.
And then, like, 20 feet past the nozzle, that's when you start to see the actual intense flame from these rocket engines.
People wonder what is going on with that.
So what's going on there is another remember we've talked about, you know, regenerative cooling and trying to keep the engines from melting?

(01:05:18):
Yeah.
They use something called film cooling, and that's where you flow a thin layer of cooling material inside the rocket nozzle to protect the exterior.
So you don't need to run the cooling through it anymore.
You just have a a separating layer.
And that is cold it's basically fuel rich exhaust.

(01:05:41):
So it's black.
It's sooty and absorbs all the heat and protects it.
Now where does it get
So so let me get this right straight.
What's happening is you're getting your you're already getting the exhaust and the acceleration you need.
So what you've done is you've mixed it with a, another additive.
And that additive at this point, because you're already getting the velocity, of the propellant, So you what you're doing is you're cooling it immediately.

(01:06:10):
Well And it gives it a different color.
It's not quite the same thing, though.
If you
think about it, the shape of the rocket nozzle is what makes your rocket exhaust go faster.
So you want your rocket nozzle to be bigger and longer.
But as you make it bigger, do you wanna have coolant inside it?
Because that makes it more complex.
So you could have instead, what you're doing is you're flowing a thin layer of the cooler gas along the wall on the inside, and that protects

(01:06:38):
It's just on it's so it's not ins it's not in
the It's not mixing ideally.
Oh, it's so it's just a coating on the outside, kind of like a
And you're blowing it on the inside.
Like a lubricant that it is, and it's it's it's protecting it.
It's thin enough.
It's cold enough.
But when it comes out on the outside, you don't see the flame.

(01:07:00):
You see the blower.
Because it's so thick.
It's optically thick because you wanted it to do that to protect the material.
Now now where do you get that from?
Walmart.
Yeah.
So remember I told you about that, turbo pump and the gas generator where it's a miniature rocket engine?
Yep.
Well, one of the problems with that, if you think about it, is if you burn your propellant at the same super hot ratio that you've got inside the tank will melt anything, then you would actually melt your turbine.

(01:07:32):
Right?
Yes.
Yep.
So instead, you draw you burn that fuel rich.
You have about 10 times the amount of fuel compared to oxygen.
And that means the combustion temperature is lower because you've got less energy and more material to heat.
So that means your turbine can survive that environment.
Now that exhaust gas is very thick, black, sooty, and they take that, and that's how they cool the final section of the engine.

(01:08:01):
So this is done on the f one engine on the, Saturn 5.
It's also done on the 2nd stage engine on the Falcon 9, the Merlin engine, on this only on the 2nd stage where they blow this around it to help protect the very long extra nozzle.
So that's film cooling.
That's like another engineering decision that can help improve your rocket design.

(01:08:25):
And I don't know if you plan on going over this later on.
These are
how I could build plans.
No.
Yeah.
These are how this is how we're doing it today.
In your opinion, this and I know this is just opinion.
Did we could we have did we make decisions about engines that I'm gonna use these words.

(01:08:50):
It's not exactly, I will explain in a minute, come back to haunt us, that we missed opportunities.
And let me share with you your reason why I'm asking.
Is in 9 before 1900, the most ubiquitous, the most prevalent, most used car was an electric vehicle.
In the early 1900, the combustion engine came about, and the men and it was known so as, from from sociology, that the men really enjoyed the loud sound, the power, the and the influence of it, and they veered toward this more powerful device as a as a car.

(01:09:31):
And they gave their women the electric car.
And the combustion engine became the number one most prominent v vehicle partially because of the psychology of men.
So my question is when looking through the past, because we're looking to the future, is there something in your opinion that we missed or could have taken on and done it better?

(01:09:59):
Is that a good question, Harrison?
There's a
lot of questions.
There's a lot of things that in retrospect, have shaped the way that our our rocket launch systems have developed.
The the yeah.
They did sort of force us into certain, ways of thinking.
And Yep.
And I'm gonna say actually that one of the sort of more important, divides okay.

(01:10:23):
How how am I gonna put this?
In the US and the Soviet Union, both rocket designed the both groups went in different directions.
And after the cold war, we sort of came back together with different takes on how booster engines should be designed on rockets.
And what we see out of SpaceX and Vulcan, you know, there's ULA and the the, you know, forthcoming engines actually takes a lot more from Soviet designs than US designs in many ways.

(01:10:53):
So the the US was really interested in going to the moon Mhmm.
Because that's what, Kennedy said.
And so the US really focused on hydrogen technology.
Hydrogen is problematic for all sorts of reasons.
It's this very extremely cryogenic gas, liquid gas, that has to be cooled way below the temperature of liquid oxygen.

(01:11:19):
It is very low density.
In a gas form, it just the the atoms are so tiny they will fit between the spaces of your metal lattice and you will get metal and brittle.
It'll leak out through containers that shouldn't have leaks in them.
But US spent its time and it solved all those problems because it wanted to have the most efficient rocket engines.

(01:11:45):
Mhmm.
But that wasn't necessarily the best way to build a booster rocket engine.
In the Soviet Union, Korolyev was really interested in sticking with kerosene and liquid oxygen.
They didn't have the money to spend to to actually figure out hydrogen.
Instead, they looked at oxidizer rich staged combustion.

(01:12:07):
This is again, we're gonna have come back to a little bit of rocket science.
Mhmm.
But anyway, this is rocket Wait.
Wait.
Rocket engineering?
Rocket engineering.
Yes.
Okay.
I just so I got lost because we don't have rocket science.
We have rocket engineering.
So the so the so the Soviet developed engines ultimately were the ones that were came back to the US to power the Atlas 5 and the Antares rocket.

(01:12:30):
Now what what did the Soviets do that were different that made them really good for first stage engines?
So remember how I described this miniature rocket engine, the gas generator, and how we use it with film cooling on the f one?
But on a lot of other rockets, this thick exhaust from the gas generator is just dumped overboard and it doesn't provide any thrust.

(01:12:52):
In the Soviet Union, they were really interested in figuring out how to take the exhaust from the gas generator and feed that into the main combustion chamber so that they could then burn it and get more thrust.
Right?
So they would have more efficient engines.
Mhmm.
Yep.
Now the problem with that is remember how we used a fuel rich combustion to lower the temperature so that the turbine blades wouldn't be destroyed.

(01:13:18):
Yeah.
If you do that and then try to feed that into the combustion chamber, the pressures involved are so high that all that soot starts, polymerizing.
You start to form this gunk.
It's called this is a coking problem is what they say, and it gums up all your systems.
So you can't do fuel rich and feed that into your combustion chamber.

(01:13:41):
Mhmm.
Understood.
So instead, how do you reduce the temperature?
Well, they go the other way.
They made it oxidizer rich.
And if you have an oxidizer or oxygen rich flame, that is a really hostile chemical environment.
Have you ever seen an oxyacetylene torte cutting through steel?
Yeah.
I've actually used one.
Yeah.
I mean, you understand that it's it's not the heat.

(01:14:02):
It's the oxygen that is just burning that steel.
Mhmm.
So now Soviet Unions, they spent the time to develop the metallurgy, to come up with materials that could handle this hot, oxidizer rich environment.
The US didn't look at it.
And if you ask their engineers, they didn't think it was possible.
Right?
They didn't think there was a way to make this work.

(01:14:25):
But Soviet Union, they developed it, and instead, their, engines which are running kerosene and liquid oxygen got much more performance, much more thrust and efficiency.
So we talk about efficiency in terms of specific impulse.
I should have probably mentioned that before now.

(01:14:46):
No.
It's okay.
Specific impulse is, essentially the velocity of the exhaust.
Right?
That's one way of saying.
The other way to think about it is if you've got a rocket engine that, say, generates 1 ton of thrust, the specific impulse tells you how long it can generate 1 ton of thrust for 1 ton of propellant.

(01:15:07):
So specific impulse is a engineering term?
Yeah.
It's a measurement in seconds.
Always in seconds.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's very convenient if you work in metric and or imperial because you just multiply it by the acceleration of gravity, which can be either feet per second or meter per second.
And whether you're imperial or standard or metric, everybody agrees on specific impulse because it's measured in seconds.

(01:15:31):
Yep.
Most rocket engines have thrust of about 300 to maybe as high as 340 or whatever.
So these are the ones that are burning kerosene and liquid oxygen.
Hydrogen is much more efficient.
Remember how I said the US was really interested in hydrogen?
That's because those can be up around 400, 500 even seconds.

(01:15:54):
So these are significantly more efficient per unit mass of propellant.
So, anyway, the Soviet engine design that used this closed loop for the exhaust going into the main combustion chamber, we call this stage combustion or closed cycle, they got about 10% better specific impulse than the American designed open, open loop gas generators.

(01:16:19):
And that's why after the Cold War, when the US starts to look at technology sharing, this was one of the things that came back to the US.
And for the last, 20 years, the US Atlas 5 Rocket has an Atlas 4 3 were using these engines from the Soviet Union.

(01:16:40):
Originally, the Soviet Union from Russia.
And right now, we're we have an order for, like, 24, and then we're done?
Yeah.
I think there's 20 20.
Left.
Something like that.
And they're all spoken for.
So the Atlas 5, this icon that started out with the Atlas missile is has a limited lifespan on it.
Now we know how long it's gonna fly, and and we know that, like, 6 or 7 of those launches are assigned to Boeing for their Starliner.

(01:17:08):
We know that there's 11 of them assigned to Amazon for Kuiper.
You know, we can actually tick off what they're all gonna do now.
The
the the reason I I I'm asked the question is, and I I believe you'd see some of our work, we are trying to or our directive is we're going to establish this box with a roof and a door on the moon.

(01:17:29):
We've designed the phases.
We've got all sorts of things I'll share with you at another time, in terms of what we're building.
And one of the challenges is how do we make sure we create this Mearth ecosystem and the consistency of deployment of materials supplies to the moon and back.
And so I'm asking the question to say, what is tomorrow bringing that would be in terms of engines or rockets that you might be saying we could have, should have, might have done Yeah.

(01:17:58):
To get Well, I get I get
more points on that for sure.
Go ahead.
I'm I'm I'm all Excellent.
I'm all ears.
Okay.
You can keep me
on track or not.
No.
No.
No.
This is this is, this is amazing because in the almost 50 interviews we've done, we've never dealt into this area.
And the one reason that I, honestly, I wanted you on the program is I listened to you describe things in just maybe I saw 10 minutes of you of some clip, and I really like the simplicity of the narrative.

(01:18:30):
And it wasn't about the rocket science or the rocket engineering.
It was about unders the individual understanding what was happening so that they could rethink what they know about space and the work that's being done.
Well, I'm I'm hoping this is gonna be useful to you.
No.
It's already everything so far, so keep on going.
So, anyway, yeah, the so, anyway, this, this closed cycle stage combustion, this is what everyone's moving to.

(01:18:55):
Right?
The the new Vulcan rocket that ULA is building is gonna use, the BE 4 engine, which uses staged combustion.
It uses methane instead of, you know, kerosene.
And, you know, talking about this decision that had far reaching consequences was the decision early on for the US to switch to using r p 1, kerosene as a propellant.

(01:19:16):
Right?
That was largely chosen because they thought that it was too much trouble to have 2 cryogenic propellants on a single vehicle.
Turns out there's many advantages to using methane and liquid oxygen both being cryogenic, and methane is where everybody is evolving their rockets towards.
The SpaceX are building out Starship.
They're gonna use what's called a they're using lithium and liquid oxygen as well.

(01:19:42):
And their engine is the Raptor, which uses a full flow stage combustion cycle.
We we don't need to go into it, but it has twice as many pumps and turbines because it allows them to run them at lower temperatures and, therefore, perhaps have them last longer.
Mhmm.
So where was it?
Oh, yeah.

(01:20:03):
And so another another interesting decision that sort of so for reusability, there's this everybody talks about, oh, reusability in rockets.
It's such a new cool thing.
Right?
And and you know it is.
It's great that it's finally worked, but people have been trying to design reusable rockets going back to the fifties.

(01:20:24):
Right?
If you look at von Braun's early visions of space flight with the conical rockets and tons of engine, those were all supposed to be recovered.
Of
course, he was interested in building the engines.
He hadn't quite figured out the mechanics, the engineering required to land these huge stages.
The Redstone Rocket, which carried, Alan Shepard into space.

(01:20:46):
Right?
That was originally designed with a space for parachutes inside there.
There was nothing in there because by the time they flew, they realized the parachutes just wouldn't be able to land a rocket like this.
Yep.
SpaceX, they even built their early falcons with parachutes and were unable you know, the parachute just tore off and and, they ended up having to land them on the rockets.

(01:21:11):
Now when SpaceX had come onto the market, they their obviously, their Falcon 1 proved that they could do it, and then they came up with the Falcon 9, which NASA came along with where it was interested in supporting.
They had 9 engines.
And at the time, there were a lot of, you know, well meaning individuals in rocket industry who said that having 9 engines was just a huge gamble.

(01:21:37):
It shouldn't be done.
Why don't you build yourself a proper sized rocket engine?
So through a lot of rocket development for the last, 50, 60 years, the evolution has been towards fewer engines.
But because having one engine fail in the 19 sixties, typically, it was a very explosive failure that would take out neighboring engines.

(01:22:02):
So having multiple engines just increases your chance of failure.
But in the intervening years, the engines got much smarter.
They had more onboard technology.
They get they get better at nondestructive testing, and so that became less of a gamble.
So SpaceX didn't really necessarily think this way at the time.
It just had one engine and it could only afford to develop that one engine.

(01:22:27):
Right?
They couldn't afford to spend a lot of time building something bigger.
Mhmm.
So they put 9 of them on a rocket, and that proved to be an exceptionally good decision, although they may not have realized it when they first did it because it allowed them to land the rockets on just one engine.
Now one of the things I've talked about is how you're throwing this propellant into this combustion chamber to get high pressures, and it has to be high enough pressure that you create this choke flow condition so that the nozzle can amplify your rocket thrust.

(01:23:01):
Right?
Yep.
And this means there's a minimum amount of thrust that you can put into that engine before you lose that condition, and then it just starts it just starts, like, misfiring.
That's one way to put it.
Yep.
So if you have a really big engine, it's very hard to make it throttle down.
Most rocket engines when they were first, you know, going back, they they've ran at one performance.

(01:23:26):
They wouldn't throttle.
And, you know, the special engines could throttle down to, like, 70% or they are about it's actually they could throttle up to a 111% in some situations.
But
it's an it's an interesting concept if you think about it.
You can only go to a 100%.
So to have a 111% means that that is the 100%.

(01:23:52):
Yes.
So what?
They operated at 11% lower, not exactly 11 because it's not the the equation doesn't work out as 11, but they actually operated it lower.
But it's a 110 a 111 is the 100%.
Yes.
When they were designing the space shuttle, they had certain specifications and requirements that specified what a 100% should be.

(01:24:13):
Ah.
And in the end, the engine was able to push past that, and that helped because having more thrust early on helps you in all sorts of ways.
Yeah.
But you understand the concept.
I totally understand the concept.
When people say that, well, the person gave a 120%.
How?
Yeah.
But they were misspec their specification was incorrect.
Right.
How their specification.

(01:24:35):
But in anything in life, the person gave 200 percent.
How?
They increased themselves to the limit.
You can't, but that's still a 100%.
That is the end.
So you can't It's specifications versus reality.
Right.
So no one can ever give 200%.
No one can give a 1000%.
You can't give a 111 percent because that is the 100%.
So I'm laughing as you're saying.

(01:24:56):
So, yes, miss okay.
So So, anyway, point is
you throttling down is extraordinarily hard.
And so SpaceX, by sort of being forced to use 9 engines because that's what they had the money for,
They ended up with
a rocket that could throttle down to 1 eighth of its thrust.
Because you have now control over 4 9 different variables simultaneously, and you can turn them on at different levels, whatever that variable is within it.

(01:25:23):
But just by taking off an engine, you have got 1 you've got 8.
You don't have a 100 you don't have your 100% of 9.
So, yeah, they they ended up creating options.
This is probably the way I would say it.
Yeah.
They created options.
And by doing that, that meant that they actually had a rocket that could, throttle or produce reduce its thrust low enough that they could land it on the rocket flame.

(01:25:47):
Mhmm.
And that would that sort of it's it's their own impetus.
I don't think it was intentional, but it became it became a key part of what makes SpaceX, Falcon 9 a very special rocket.
So I would probably, if I was analyzing the situation, is that the individuals who are involved in rocket design had become so indoctrinated with a certain way of building.

(01:26:13):
Always the fear, always making it bigger, that they without even knowing it, that when someone gave an idea, they'd say, no.
No.
No.
We have to make sure we're safe, but they weren't incorporating the fact that the advancements in all of the engineering had enabled safer engines.
Therefore, you could create smaller, and they're still large, but smaller engines and multiples of them and not have the same damage that would have possibly occurred in 1960, 77 or 985.

(01:26:47):
So the variable was accidental, and it was the the analogy that I'll often use is if if we always proceeded in the same way and you looked at car design, in the 19 fifties, they put on fins.
Maybe it was not
It's marketing.
Yeah.
It was mark but it was also that these fins look at one point, if you consider that the trajectory was fins were getting bigger and bigger, then today they would be 7 meters high.

(01:27:18):
But in the reality, when someone looked at it one day and said, why do we have those fins?
And they said because fins sell.
No.
No.
No.
Let's take off the fin.
And they went into a different a different trajectory.
So what you're saying here is this was an ax possibly an accidental financial decision, a whatever forces caused that decision to be made, and it's ended up being hugely beneficial.

(01:27:42):
Yeah.
It's it's ended up being key to their design.
And nowadays, you know, you'll see Falcon 9 launches with 27 Merlin engines simultaneously firing flawlessly.
Yep.
So we we've reached I mean, there's it's very there's very rare to see an engine failure on the first stage on a Falcon.
And we've I think we've seen one during ascent, and we've seen a couple during descent, you know, as they've pushed the limits and figured out where where, you know, where their limits are on landing and reuse.

(01:28:16):
Okay.
So, and, of course, now, of course, they're looking at Starship.
They're building 1 engine design, the Raptor.
I mean, there's a few variants of the Raptor, but they're talking about 30 engines on the first stage of that thing.
And people are like, oh my god.
30 engines.
Well, SpaceX are flying with 27 engines on the Falcon Heavy, so it's not a big leap.

(01:28:40):
Right?
But the the 30 engines is about control.
It's not about 30 engines.
So I think when individuals hear it, they're like, that's massive.
Instead of saying, no.
It's a better control situation.
And we Yeah.
We we know that they don't fail.
We're pretty confident we're not gonna have an explosion with them.

(01:29:02):
So, therefore, the 30 engines gives us, variations of possibilities we couldn't have had otherwise.
Well, the other thing that having many small engines has that's worked for SpaceX is that it it's helped them become a production line.
You know, building 1, if anything, is much, much more expensive than building a 1,000.

(01:29:23):
Right?
Although you know what I mean?
It's like the unit cost goes down as you increase volume.
And so having to build 9 engines for every every rocket wasn't such a hit in the end.
Yep.
So how do you, how much does a Raptor engine or how much do you know is there a cost that they've put out?

(01:29:44):
There's there's wow.
Well, I mean, I think we're talking I think Elon talked about getting the cost down to 200,000, but that's not where they are now.
Well, I think that's what I heard.
If they can get the cost down to $200,000 per unit, that's their target.
I think they're more likely very it's a very expensive program right now.
They put a lot of effort into making the raptor the bestest of the best in all sorts of ways.

(01:30:09):
Like, they they made a point of running it at higher temperatures and pressures than or higher chamber pressure than the existing record holder.
Just more or less on a dare, I think.
But that sort of that's an interesting side of SpaceX is that they have been very willing to push the limits just even for, you know, swagger.

(01:30:35):
Mhmm.
Right?
For showing off.
But also just being interested to try new things, and that actually, I guess, leads into my almost my final point.
Although, I didn't get into any points about how some very unscientific changes can lead to failures that
Do you want to?
I don't know.
Can can I just stop for a second and Sure.
Talk about how, Russia is hasn't quite been as glorious as it has been as, in their past.

(01:31:02):
Obviously, they once had an amazing world beating space program.
In recent years, they've not really been living up to that, which is a shame for many, many reasons.
But for the this is just gonna be my one example of how really dumb stuff can ruin a perfectly high-tech piece of amazing hardware.
That is there was a Proton launch, which, Proton is a Russian rocket, and it was their heavy lift vehicle.

(01:31:30):
It took off, and it started to wobble back and forth and eventually flipped upside down and crashed into the the ground.
It's one of the most famous rocket failures.
If you look at it on YouTube, it's there.
And the proton is full of the most horribly toxic rocket propellant.
It uses hydrazine and oh, sorry.
It uses unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine and dinitrogen tetroxide, and both of those are horribly toxic carcinogenic explosive corrosive propellants.

(01:32:00):
But, anyway, why did this thing go out of control?
It's because, somebody assembling the rocket put in one of the, inertial motion sensors, the IMUs.
Mhmm.
Inertial measurement units upside down.
Right?
So it's basically it thought it was upside down.
And now you might think that, well, how did that happen?

(01:32:21):
Surely, they would design these things to put be put in only in one direction because the whole rocket relies on this.
Yeah.
They did.
They had special plates that had keyed bumps in it so that they would lock into place in only one orientation.
But, of course, if you try to make something idiot proof, then nature will create a better idiot.

(01:32:44):
And and they know that it was put in upside down.
They found it, and they found that it had been hammered into place to secure it.
Yeah.
There were marks on it.
So, like, this is the extent to which you're still dealing with everyday random luck.
And there's other examples where there was a an Arianon Did

(01:33:05):
you bring that up because you felt that that was a better technology, the, proton?
No.
I I I just I didn't necessarily bring it up.
I just wanted to provide some context for dumb failures.
Oh, okay.
Because they're also funny stories.
But my the reason I ask is when you think of what they had built, that proton launch, the broken was it did it have better design in it because of its failure?

(01:33:31):
No.
It's cause other cascading, cascading impact that people didn't do something because of it.
I mean, Proton has essentially ceased to be a commercially viable launch vehicle now.
Okay.
Because it was very it was expensive.
Russia used to be the place to go just to launch stuff because they were the cheapest, game in town.

(01:33:54):
Mhmm.
And now that they don't have Proton, it's it's less of, they've got less options.
They're trying to bring Angora online.
Not sure when that's gonna happen.
And Soyuz is a fine launch vehicle, but it has very limited mass limits and doesn't reach all the orbits it needs to.
That's why they they run Soyuz with the European Space Agent sorry, Arianne Space out of Kuru in Brazil.

(01:34:21):
It that's that was I was just trying to tell someone that's a really dumb failure.
No.
No.
It's it's great.
I I'm I'm loving hearing it.
And one of our team members who, Andreas Bergweiler, who's been working with us on designing the entire four phases of the moon hut.
He has run an organization you might it's called Space Affairs.
You might have seen the name.

(01:34:42):
And he has a, Facebook and a YouTube channel also, and he is absolutely an amazing person.
And he has done over 3,000, of the zero gravity flights.
Wow.
And he is he works and does a lot has done a lot with Russia.
So, my background, my grandfather was Russian Belarusian.

(01:35:06):
So they're humans on Earth trying to accomplish something, and we have our mega challenges we talk about.
So I'd like to hear whatever comes to mind that you think is valuable to know because it helps it helps to connect the world.
It helps helps us, me, to be able to have a dialogue with somebody if I know what worked and what didn't work.
And we can have civil conversations to move project Moon Hut forward.

(01:35:28):
So thank you.
I do appreciate every one of these stories.
So, yeah, I mean, I guess, and and you're going forward, trying to come back to, you know, so SpaceX, on the other hand, some of those failures that they've had have been really hard to figure out.
And and the classic one is there was a rocket with the AMOS 6 satellite, which exploded on the pad when they were doing a, like, a static fire.

(01:35:55):
They were fueling it up, and then it just exploded.
And there weren't any camera coverage on it.
It was one person that was a Rocket fan that just happened to have a camera.
He was expecting to see a static fire.
Instead, he saw one of the most, shared rocket explosions ever.
Really?
Yeah.
And so So he so

(01:36:16):
he had a camera.
He was taking a picture that ended up being the answer.
Well, it didn't it wasn't the answer, but it was one of the most shared pieces of footage I've ever seen of a rocket.
Right?
It is and the other one, I think, that's most shared explosion is the Antares, which is, another story about that.
But so the AMOS 6 failure is a fine example of how SpaceX pushes the limits and somehow sometimes does stuff that is a learning experience, let's say, because this was very much a learning experience.

(01:36:50):
SpaceX with the Falcon 9, they wanted to get more performance from the rocket.
And the very first Falcon 9 was slightly shorter.
And so the next iteration, they stretched the tanks to make it longer.
Right?
So you could put more fuel on board.
Yep.
And they've improved the engines over time.
The Falcon 9 has been a slow evolution.
Right?

(01:37:11):
Everyone, they've changed it slightly here and there to make it better.
NASA has tried to help them freeze the design into a state that is good for the human launch, but SpaceX still has this reputation for, you know, treating flights as potential experiments when possible so that they can advance their design.
And and that is, in my opinion, it is what's necessary to move the new innovations coming out of these experimentation.

(01:37:39):
Some of them are not massive, but they're enough to make a difference in the long term.
Yeah.
So one of the, you know, one of the things that SpaceX did was well, first of all, they have switched to using, composite overwrapped pressure vessels.
This so when you Say
it again.
It's composite or composite?

(01:38:00):
C o p v.
That's to look that up.
Yep.
Right?
Yeah.
I know what it is.
Okay.
So they, so when you've got a a rocket propellant tank, as the fuel and the drains out of it, then it leaves a space at the top, and you need to fill that space in with pressurized gas.
Otherwise, you'll get a vacuum and your fuel will stop slowing.

(01:38:23):
Right.
Yep.
So you fill that in with helium typically, and you store that helium in pressure tanks.
And to maximize the performance, they decided to put the pressure vessels into the liquid oxygen tank, like, surrounded by liquid oxygen.
So that would lower the temperature
Mhmm.
Of the helium because helium, when you squeeze it down, you know, you get better performance if you can keep it at a lower temperature.

(01:38:49):
You can put more helium in your tanks.
You can use less tanks.
Therefore, you can have, yeah, more payload.
Yes.
And and NASA, there were people that were not, were a little skeptical of this because you're putting they've never tried it before.
Right?
Another thing that SpaceX did later on was they switched to using densified propellants.

(01:39:14):
That means that they instead of having they basically cool the liquid oxygen to even lower temperatures.
And when you cool something, it shrinks down.
So by cooling it to near to its freezing point, you get more propellant in the same tank.
Therefore, you can get more performance out of your rocket.

(01:39:35):
SpaceX is the only company using densified propellants.
Everybody uses propellant that is close to its boiling point.
But it seems it seems like a smart idea.
It seems like a smart idea, but they it came back to bite them in the ass for AMOS 6.
Because what had happened was when they loaded this very cold liquid helium into these pressure vessels inside the oxygen tank, the propellant was actually colder than the freezing point, sorry.

(01:40:07):
The helium was colder than the freezing point of the oxygen.
Now composite overwrap pressure vessels, the way they're designed is you've got a very thin pressure vessel and then you wrap that in carbon fiber.
So you get the really good tensile strength of the carbon fiber, the really good strength to mass ratio, and you get this impervious liner that just has to stop the gas from leaking through.

(01:40:32):
That gets you a better, you know, lighter tank than you would otherwise have.
But that means that the liquid oxygen flow between the gaps in those fibers, the carbon fiber, and touch that inner tank.
So when they filled this tank with the very cold liquid helium, it caused the oxygen to freeze into a solid in amongst those carbon fibers.

(01:40:57):
And when the pressure increased inside that tank, suddenly the tank was pushing out against this these crystals or these pieces of of solid oxygen against carbon fibers, and that was creating points where there was more stress.
And that one of those points, a carbon fiber broke, and the energy of that carbon fiber breaking, it created a tiny spark in an environment where you've got carbon and solid oxygen ice, and it just exploded.

(01:41:30):
Right?
This is something they hadn't figured on.
They thought that they were gonna get a bit more efficient loading process by loading liquid helium into their helium tanks and then letting it expand.
No.
They they they shouldn't have done that.
Right?
That was the thing that they figured out was wrong.
But it caused an explosion in the tank, ruptured it, caused the whole rocket to explode.
And it's one of the coolest failures ever.

(01:41:51):
I've I've heard that, like, they, they tested this at, like, the McGregor test range.
They put a a pressure vessel inside liquid oxygen and then shot it with a gun to see what would happen, and the whole thing exploded.
Like, apparently, they had a very long line of volunteers to shoot that gun.
Yeah.
Of course they did.
They didn't think anything would happen initially.

(01:42:12):
But, yeah, they in the end, they solved this problem, and they still use dense pipe propellant.
They still have their, tanks inside the oxygen tank, but they solved that problem because of that.
And this Someone had decided to make it to to try something, and that that's what needs to progress any type of research into developing new forms of transportation.

(01:42:35):
And so SpaceX, of course, they've been doing this the whole time, and Starship is now the most visual example of SpaceX working the way SpaceX does.
Now SpaceX is run by Elon Musk who comes from Silicon Valley.
Right?
He that's where he really got his, you know, tech start in tech.

(01:42:58):
And I've I've I'm here as well.
Right?
We are a bunch of hackers.
We do have meetings where we come up with design docs and specifications, but frequently, we will just build something very quickly, test it, see how it breaks, improve it, and use that to make it work.
So much of the fabric of what has made Silicon Valley comes from people willing to build something very quickly in software and test it, right, and suffer the consequences.

(01:43:28):
And SpaceX has sort of taken that, and they're doing it with 100 meter tall pieces of stainless steel rocket hardware.
Yeah.
Because they've got the capital to be able to to They're they're they're building they're building shells.
And I think the way I've kind of imagined it is they are building a shell of what they plan on using to be able to experiment with it at rapid speed.

(01:43:53):
So it's rapid iteration.
They try it.
It doesn't destroy everything.
It's not as expensive.
They see what happens.
They take the data, and then they re reorient themselves to a new reality of, for example, densified propellants.
And they're they're able to say, oh, that's why it failed.
Now we can change it.
We can fix this.

(01:44:14):
We don't use this carbon fiber.
We use a double layer of carbon fiber, or we use another nanotechnology that will enable that coating to not be able to make that thing happen.
And that is that is rapid innovation, and it comes from a dis it comes from decision making, leadership saying, hey.
Go out there.
Try it.

(01:44:36):
Yeah.
We can handle the failure.
It requires, an organization that is comfortable with having failure.
And that wasn't necessarily the case in the early American space program.
For a start, they were seeing Russia doing all these launches.
And they were exploding on the pads, and you were getting headlines like Kaputnik.
Right?
Yep.
So aerospace is very risk averse.

(01:44:59):
And if you look at the the SLS is what, the US is sort of trying to build as its big rocket for NASA's deep space missions.
And they have been working from specifications.
They've been doing aerospace style design.
So SpaceX went and welded their big tank together out of stainless steel using a bunch of people that used to build water tanks.

(01:45:24):
Mhmm.
The SLS main tank was designed and spec by aerospace engineers.
They built test models.
They did simulations.
They eventually took all that and then passed it on to a group that then figured out how to actually build this tank, build a machine to build.
So they built this massive welding machine that's the size of a building that can take the tank sections and weld them together and make sure that it uses, like, perfect welds all the way up.

(01:45:56):
They they only started doing this, like, 10 years or whatever, 8 years into their design.
So they spent all this time designing it before they could even build the machine to build it.
Mhmm.
Yep.
And even then, they still discovered a problem with the welds afterwards.
I've had to go back and redesign the thing, whereas SpaceX is, of course, building it.
Now I'm gonna say if you don't want your rocket to explode the first time you fly it, doing all the the testing and whatever s that you're seeing with SLS, fantastic.

(01:46:25):
But if you're willing to burn things and make mistakes and accept those mistakes, then there's absolutely an argument that what they're doing is perhaps a better way to do it.
Well, I would argue it's not atypical of when you do experimentation in a lab on a small scale.

(01:46:46):
You are willing to try to do multiple experiments to see what happens.
And because of the cost variance as well as the, let's call it the, political clout or the the the societal view of spending money from a government agency, what you're doing is there's alternative pressures.

(01:47:07):
And those alternative pressures are, you must do it.
You must do it right instead of let's going back instead of going back to the 1900, the 19 twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, is instead of saying, let's figure this out.
Let's do this as fast as possible.
Let's try a series of, of activities to make them work and, come up with getting to the moon within, by 1969.

(01:47:35):
They were willing to do things that they wouldn't do today.
Yeah.
You know, the back then, they also didn't have as many options.
The f one engine, which I've talked about a lot in this already, to build those, one of the problems they had was they had combustion instability inside that combustion chamber.
Right?
Mhmm.
They would set up these oscillations, and they didn't know what caused them, but the oscillations would frequently destroy the engines.

(01:48:01):
And they didn't know what was causing them.
So what did they do was they redesigned their injector plate.
They built a new engine.
They would try it.
It would explode.
They put, like, an explosive charge in there to try and set up the oscillations in a way and see if their baffles would stop it.
It blew up the engine.
They they blew up tons of engines.
We don't see any of this because it was all in test ranges, but that was what you had to do back then.

(01:48:24):
Nowadays But you have to do model it.
You but in essence, whether it be modeling or not, you still have to do it.
And
that still had to move it out to do it ultimately to prove that it worked.
It's it's rapid innovation concepts.
There's many of them out there of moving yourselves forward.
And I think as I'm I think on a global scale, we have because of the political nature of and the fact that many of these are agencies involved, you agencies involved in decision making, there is a fear of the retribution of either a cost or an accident or something else that the humankind spirit in many regards does not have that same positioning that they did 50 years ago.

(01:49:14):
Yeah.
And and, you know, another thing that that helps is it's a lot easier to do things autonomously now than it used to be.
So Yeah.
Doing big experiments that could result in explosions, less less of a problem these days.
I mean, you know, the space shuttle when it first flew, they had to know that that would work because they it couldn't fly without people on board.
Right.
And it had a it had a challenge of human life in it.

(01:49:38):
Yeah.
So, let me ask you a different question.
I and I'm not looking at the list.
I'd you're you're a very bright guy, and you've you've been able to figure out on your own and through resources.
You've been able to figure out a lot.
If you were I I know I've gotta believe you're having conversations outside of the normal on air.

(01:50:04):
And in those conversations, you're saying we should be doing, we should not be doing, and and and not just the SpaceX, but I'm I'm asking you, Scott.
When you sit down and you say, I wanna get us to here, and why aren't we doing what are you saying, because in private?
I'm not that's not the word, but what are you saying when you're having that private dialogue with somebody?

(01:50:26):
What are you thinking about?
Boy, I mean, look.
That that's actually I I I've certainly a lot of criticism for how, the US has managed its space program in recent years, but that's, Yeah.
That that's that's sort of neither of you nor of the

(01:50:47):
Right.
That's a criticism, and we can all I'm asking I'm seriously asking because that's what project Moon has about is I'm seriously asking, what could we do?
What are you sitting saying?
Oh my god.
If people just understood this or if if this was done this way and I've gotta believe there are some nights you go to bed and say, oh my god.

(01:51:08):
This is so in front of me.
You might not have the platform.
You might not have the capital.
You might not have the time to do it, but I've gotta believe you put together 2 +2 to make 8 here, there, and everywhere.
You see the thing that I actually talk about and it isn't about going from here to there.
It's it's just about making sure that here is fine.
I'm the one thing I talk about a lot is natural hazards and the asteroid hazard and and and how we are so close to actually being able to solve these things, you know, because this is the the threat of an asteroid hitting the Earth is not 0.

(01:51:44):
Yep.
But, that's sort of been that's sort of my thing.
And that that came from me way before I was talking about rocket science on the Internet.
That, back, you know, 20 years ago, I I looked at the solar system and I realized that there was a non zero chance that a chunk of rock could come out of nowhere and seriously threaten civilization or at least threaten large numbers of people.

(01:52:10):
And we had come as humanity to this juncture where we actually understood this threat, and we also, with our 8 brains, had conceived ways to avert this threat.
So this was a unique moment in human history where we where we could understand a potentially existential threat and also can see how to change humanity's destiny on that front.

(01:52:37):
And I believe that we should be looking, you know, making sure that that just doesn't happen.
Now I don't think we should be putting huge amounts of resources into it, but I do think that it would be the greatest failure of humanity if we let even one thing happen despite its awareness.
Blank slate in front of you.
Let's go back to rapid innovation.
What would you do?

(01:53:00):
I think we this is what I've been arguing.
So I've actually what do I think should I think we do?
We're doing it now.
Okay.
So what what what is that?
What is it?
What are the 5 steps?
10 steps that we have to be doing?
We've we've we've got organizations that are now making a bunch developing the instruments and deploying the instruments to discover the objects.
We have organizations like, the asteroid institute that are now cataloging these and and also doing the necessarily necessary groundwork to actually build a 4 dimensional map of these resources of these asteroids, which are not only threats, but potentially resources.

(01:53:37):
You wanna talk about going to space and the age of infinite.
Asteroids are the next step after the moon.
In fact, asteroids may be better than the moon for many things because we know that asteroids contain a lot of heavy materials which are locked in the Earth's core.
Mhmm.
We also, in terms of changing the environment, changing the solar system to make the Earth potentially safer.

(01:54:03):
We have a mission going up in November.
DART, the double asteroid redirect test.
It's gonna launch on a Falcon 9 out of Vandenberg, and it's gonna fly into an asteroid and change its orbit in a measurable way.
And we're gonna show that we do have the ability to adjust the solar system, you know, bend it to our will, so to speak.

(01:54:28):
And this is actually more this is almost more exciting to me than moon the moon.
The moon is great because it's there.
It's a really solid environment.
It has gravity.
It has a lot of easily accessible minerals in certain form you know, forms.
Asteroids come and go.
Not all of them are easily accessible, but they do have resources that you will never find on the moon.

(01:54:50):
And that's just because of the way they're the origin they are.
So so I I we you and I have not spoken a lot about project Moon Hunt and what we're doing, but the the orientation of what we're doing has nothing to do with being on the moon.
I'm not a moon person.
Yeah.
I'm not a I'm not a Mars person.
I'm not a space person.
What I saw is that we have these mega challenges we call them on Earth.

(01:55:12):
There's 6 of them.
They supersede the 17 SDGs, which are un unachievable targets, the sustainable development goals.
It's that we have some existential threats on this planet, climate change, mass extinction.
Yep.
Ecosystem collapses, displacement, social, physical, political, economic, unrest, social, political, economic, climate, whatever, then we also have this thing called explosive impact.

(01:55:40):
And it's not an impact like a fiery ball.
It is that we overfish our oceans.
Yeah.
And there are 800,000 Chinese shipping vessels alone.
Not that they're bad.
They're trying to feed their their society.
But we do things such as deforestation, and they're all interconnected.
And if we get 50 degrees Celsius in the Middle East or 60 in the next 30 to 40 years, It's not just the Middle East that goes across the top of Africa.

(01:56:07):
It goes through to Mexico and down into Central America, all the way up to Texas and Arizona.
It goes all the way around to Hong Kong and Indonesia and Bangladesh and India.
All of the the world will change.
And if we get too far down that pipeline, we're in trouble.
So the challenge in our case in project MoonHub is, how do you change the narrative?

(01:56:30):
How do you how do you explain to people that the solutions we're working on, by and large, are not working?
We are not improving climate change.
We are not extinction is happening.
United Nations says 200 to 250 species a day go extinct.
Based upon the numbers, we could have a trillion species on earth.
We don't know.
And some people say it's 8.7, so we use 50,000,000 as a number.

(01:56:55):
But if we're losing major species, if we are poisoning our oceans, plastic is a small fraction of it.
It's solid waste runoff, agricultural runoff, pesticide pesticides, radioactive materials going into the oceans.
How do you solve this?
And you have to get people to rethink their universe, their world.
And in our case, project Moon Hut is not about 50,000 people on the moon.

(01:57:20):
We will have 8 in our first phase.
We'll have 90 in our second.
We have 578 in our third, and we will have 1644 in our 4th phase.
And it will take up to 40 years.
And in that dynamic, we will change the perception of how people think, what they see as the world, what are options and opportunities.
And so, yes, asteroids are important.

(01:57:42):
The challenge is I can't I personally don't know.
Maybe you know.
How do you get someone excited about asteroids?
Because it's more or less an economic opportunity to most people.
It is not a a world changing opportunity.
We need more of that.
Yeah.
Sure.
Put the money into it.
We have these challenges on Earth.
And it's, it's too big of a mind jump for too many people.
But let me ask you.

(01:58:04):
If you woke up this morning and there were 90 people living on the moon, 90 people, would your world be slightly different knowing that they're there and they're working and there's resources going back and forth?
I mean, me, I would be talking about that all the time.
That's Like, we had 3 people in orbit, and I was telling everybody.

(01:58:29):
4 people in civilians in orbit.
I was telling everybody, this is cool.
So so now imagine just imagine for one moment.
Our phase 1, when I the first day, I we were in Silicon Valley, I was, there's a long story towards on videos.
I was with Bruce Pittman in a restaurant called Scratch, and I was frustrated with NASA.

(01:58:50):
And let's just use NASA as a whole.
I don't know all the people NASA.
It was just the experience I had.
And he was listening all the challenges they had, and I said to him, I can solve that these challenges right now.
And he looked at me like, what what are you talking about?
And I said I pulled him close because I gave a reaction that I won't say you on the air.
And he looked at me and he's shocked, and I said, you want me to tell you how to get to the moon?

(01:59:13):
And I'm not a space person, but let me tell you.
And he said, sure.
Because he knew my background.
I solved big challenges around the world from in all different industries.
And I said the first thing we knew, it was a box with a roof and a door on the moon.
A box with a roof on the moon.
And he looked at me and I said proof of concept, the Roger Bannister of space.
It would mean that people would say it is now possible Roger Bannister broke the 4 minute mile immediately after other people did.

(01:59:39):
So with 8 people, 4 to 8 people on the moon going around, people will now the innovation for, let's call spaces a, is not an industry.
It is a geography.
But the industry between the moon and Earth would change.
Money capital markets would open up.
Insurance would open up.
School children would be learning different things just because we're there.

(02:00:02):
It's not gonna happen with robots.
It's not gonna happen with all scientific exploration and research.
It has to be humankind living on the moon.
And so I then went over 4 phases, and his reaction was this brought us to to you and I talking today.
He said no one in the world is talking this way.
He was responsible for public private partnerships around the world, and I said, that's how I would do it.

(02:00:25):
And I was at literally done.
I outlined the whole thing.
It took an hour and a half, how it worked.
And so when I hear you and and I am very impressed.
I'm unbelievably impressed.
I think you have a a knack for being able to describe complex ideas in a in a simplified form as well as to be able to understand it at a very high level.
So that's why I'm asking this question of you is we want we are going to build this.

(02:00:51):
We are doing it.
We have teams of people around the world working with us.
And I'm asking you what are seriously, what do you think we're missing?
I mean, what are you talking about in private?
Asteroids will solve one small piece.
What else is missing?
It was a long drawn out there thing, but hopefully hopefully, you've got a little bit of it.

(02:01:12):
Yeah.
No.
I I What are you what are we missing?
What are we missing, Scott?
You're you're you're bright.
You're watching.
You're hearing.
What what
are we miss it's it's very hard because I'll I'll honestly say, I don't think I've I've read enough to know to say that you haven't aren't missing things that are important.
I I brought up the asteroids because that's my sort of I see those, again, as a place that's closer than Mars.

(02:01:35):
Right?
But I'd also have many advantages.
So let let's let's be clear.
That's why, you know, back when SLS was first being pushed, it was they wanted to do the asteroid redirect mission where they would bring an asteroid into orbit near the moon
Mhmm.
And astronauts would go to that because the rocket was cut down in size and wouldn't be able to send astronauts to the surface of the moon.

(02:01:57):
I I I mean, look.
All of all of these plans, they need ways for for to be supported
Mhmm.
Financially.
And if you if you have popular support in some way, that helps.
But, ultimately, you know, you're still dealing with pushing money around to the right places.
So so so we called up the big four.

(02:02:20):
I don't know if you know the big four, the big four accounting firms.
They're KPMG, Deloitte, p Price Waterhouse, Coopers, and, And they don't deal with startups.
They just don't.
They're too small.
They can't afford it.
It's not their bailiwick.
They will do innovation games and and, innovation events, but that's not their bailiwick.

(02:02:41):
And so we sat down with them.
We told them what we're working on, and, amazingly, they had 6 people on each call.
They didn't people were fighting to be on the call because they watched our videos.
They saw what we're about, and all of them are in.
Well, 3 of them are in.
The 4th one will be coming any day.
We have accounting people.
Only 1 person out of the 20 somewhat people is a space person.

(02:03:05):
Everybody else is an account they're they're accountants.
They they do businesses and nonprofits and moving money and capital structures.
We have 2 law firms that have come on board already, actually a third.
Zhongliang Law, they have 2,000 attorneys, and, it's mulch.
And they're patent attorneys, so they're helping us to be able to look at the engineering and what is necessary.

(02:03:31):
We have a fine we have a capital markets guy out in New York.
We have people who look at this from the broader 3 60 perspective, and they are doing it for the intentionality of solving for tomorrow.
That's that's what we're doing.
So we're not looking for engineers, and we're not looking for space people to come in and tell us.

(02:03:52):
We're really trying to be pragmatically building this.
So the the serious question with someone like you as I'm listening is getting you involved is 1 and having you think about tomorrow in a way that you hadn't thought of before.
And and we will do this.
We we will.
It's not even a question.
We don't need a lot of publicity.

(02:04:13):
We don't need 500,000 followers on social media.
We don't need we need people who think like you do.
So that's what I'm asking.
What do you what am I what should I know about you that I don't know?
You told me your space things.
You told me about rocketry.
What about you?
Something else.
So I'll tell you well, I'll well, how about this?
I'll I'll tell you, you know, my other so the thing that that drives me, funnily enough, is, long term, I like to think about where humanity goes and how we get over each hurdle to our existence.

(02:04:46):
Mhmm.
And, obviously, going to space is one big part of that, but, you know, that only gets you so many 1,000,000, whatever years depending upon how you look at other events.
And, you know, I I like to think big.
I like to think about humanity moving forward through the universe, but equally, I'm trying to think about how how we get from a to b right now.

(02:05:12):
And and, ultimately, I'm I'm very much aware that somewhere out there, there there may be challenges that ultimately we can't solve, but I wanna keep solving the challenges as they come to make sure that we we stay out there.
And that's why I guess why I always have gravitated towards the asteroid side of things.
Mhmm.
But, yeah, I mean, you know, space travel is just, like, integral to making to the science fiction future I wanna live in.

(02:05:40):
Right?
What do you want to live in?
The science fiction future.
Right?
The one where we have spaceship.
I grew I grew
up Space travel.
I grew up.
In my whole lifetime, I was told that by the year 2000, we will have flying cars.
We will have jets and like experiences.
Office will be so different.
And I'm gonna tell you, I'm sitting.
I have my window open.
The entire time we've been on this call, do you know there's not been one flying car driving flying by?

(02:06:04):
Not what?
Have you seen a helicopter?
I have not even seen a helicopter.
Wow.
And and the helicopter by the way, is it
all technology?
People that that never really thought through the engineering.
But it but it was the promise.
It was the promise when we were growing up.
I'm 58.
I think I'm 58.
We were promised this by the year 2000.

(02:06:26):
We've had a lot of promises, and I tell people when you people are promising robotics in space that will do x, y, and zed, and I say, okay.
Let's look at our home.
I have a washing machine, a dryer, a dishwasher, a microwave, a refrigerator, a sump pump, a garage door opener, and a few other things.

(02:06:47):
Do you have a Roomba?
No.
Don't have a Roomba.
I sorry.
I have a wife who does that.
Do you
have an iPhone?
Yeah.
We have these things.
But in
reality, my my home my home is the same as it was when I grew up with some improved electronics.
Yeah.
You know, general purpose robotics are are not a thing.

(02:07:08):
So so Because the the the bespoke the specific, you know, purpose robotics, like, your washing machines, are much more practical.
Yeah.
They're much more.
So when I'm when we're talking and you were saying the science fiction world, I'm asking you as pragmatically as you could be, as as down to earth if using a phrase, what is the science fiction future to you?

(02:07:35):
It is the people flying into space.
More people being in space than we have right now.
It is not even being in space myself, but having that be a sort of accepted thing so that we're we're learning to push those limits.
We're learning
By when?
As soon as possible.
Right?
I I think it's great.

(02:07:56):
I'm actually I'm actually braiding ASAP.
Yeah.
I mean, look.
Have you looked at the flights this this has been the year where space tourism exploded.
Yes.
Right?
And we're we obviously had a couple of suborbital flights.
We've had inspiration for where we've got 2 more tourist flights, to the space station this year.
Right?
We've got I mean, one of them is technically a Roscosmos movie production flight, but they're sending civilians up to to do these things, and we're sending, Yusaka Maizawa flying up in December.

(02:08:30):
Acxiom will be flying their team up in February.
This is suddenly this has actually been a transformational moment this year.
Like, things the the everyday people going to space, even if they still need a lot of money to do it, is suddenly it feels like an it feels like something has changed.
Right?
I and I'm not sure exactly what the long term consequences are, whether this will be sustained, but I'm hoping that this actually then means that we're gonna see more space stations because now, actually, a need for destinations.

(02:09:03):
Like, Axiom would have loved to have been the 1st flight to go to space, but they had to go to the International Space Station.
Yep.
And that meant that they were at the behest of NASA's, you know, schedule.
Right.
And there's a huge schedule ahead of
Right.
That's one of the reasons why Boeing's having a hard time with Starliner is because they had to wait for a certain launch, and they were, I mean, I guess they were it was actually lucky they found these valve problems before the thing flew, but they're now even if they fix them, they're gonna have to find another slot in the space station schedule.

(02:09:33):
So the space station is
And I think I think I don't know.
Voyager along with, what's his name, who did our podcast with us.
Trying to Jeffrey Mamber has talked.
They they're looking to put manufacturing facilities up in space.
You've
called us Nanoracks.
Right?
Nanoracks.
Yes.
He did a great, great, great interview if you wanna hear some of his thoughts.

(02:09:59):
It was it was very candid, and some people have said they can't believe he talked about some of these things in the way that he did.
And so we also have what's the, the the there's one that built that's trying to build the inflatable floating.
The
The Voyager station?
The Not Voyager.
It's the other one.
Sierra.
Sierra.
Nevada Corporation.
Sierra Nevada Corporation.

(02:10:21):
They're they're trying to build and these are micro steps in solving our major challenges on Earth.
So that's why I was just pushing a little bit.
Sorry.
I'm trying to push to say, what do you see?
What's missing in being forecasting out, we need more, and we are working on more.
So I thought maybe I'd hear something from you that would just kinda like, oh, wow.

(02:10:42):
That's great.
So
you know, sometimes I have to think about things for a long time before I really feel that I can speak on it.
Okay.
I I I do I've gotta believe you're having some private conversations about things that you have thought about, and that's why I was pushing.
Sometimes we get them, sometimes we don't.
Any other last things that you think are that I should hear about to learn about so that we can do what we're doing well?

(02:11:11):
There's things that you should learn about.
Well, that's what this is.
I Right.
But people don't understand.
You and I went over this that the interview is not because we need to have a podcast, so we wanna get followers.
So we the number one reason I choose or we choose, but I, in this case, choose a podcast guest is because I feel I can learn from them.

(02:11:33):
That's the number one reason.
Number 2 is there's values for others.
Number 3, that you're part of our ecosystem.
I think I read to you the ten reasons.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
The number one reason is I can learn from you.
So is there something that if you'll never be on again, I've never had anybody on my podcast twice.
What else if you were to advise, what tell me I should know about, think about, what might you say?

(02:11:57):
Boy, I mean, you really need to be thinking about how since you're talking about the futures and and you you need to be looking at how AI is changing things.
Okay.
And I'd like because that's actually it it's moving a lot.
It's moving in all sorts of ways that you don't realize, and and I I I can can't even start on it with the time I have.

(02:12:21):
No.
I and I we I had a company.
We did artificial intelligence machine learning, predictive analytics, and network analysis.
I've seen it in the factory floors where I've worked in from, China, Japan, you you name it, around the world.
There and we even have within Project Moon Hut.
There's a narrative, artificial intelligence, machine plus machine learning, plus robotics, 3 d printing, sensor tech, and there's one other I can't even think of, and the convergence of all of them.

(02:12:48):
And what does that mean for the future?
Right.
Convergence.
That's where it's at.
And and at and while I say that, at the same time, I woke up in a bed with sheets.
I didn't use ray beams to clean myself.
I used water.
Would be silly.
Right?
I I went down hearing side of things.
I went down
I went down and had, turned on the microwave and the stove and and did everything.

(02:13:10):
And almost everything I did was no different than 40 years ago or 30 years ago.
So we they are making progress.
We do have our mobile phones.
They're amazing in what they can deliver, and we still have political unrest rising at an unbelievable pace.
We're running that Because of what's, so easy to share on mobile phones.

(02:13:33):
Correct.
And if you look at China, just how to downgrade the energy challenges they're having, the UK lines that are happening, the displacement of people from different societies are happening, and we're still losing species around the world.
So we have to solve these things.
So, you and I will have more conversations, and somehow somehow, I'm hoping you wake up and say, I need to know more.

(02:13:56):
I wanna see more of what's going on with these teams of people who are trying to to do what you want.
That's what my hope is.
So, I'm I'm leaving I'll leave that on the table there for you.
How does that sound?
That sounds like a a fine place to start.
Okay.
I love that.
A fine place to start.

(02:14:17):
So I want to I wanna thank you, Scott.
I know this was a challenging thing.
How we were gonna do it?
Was it gonna work?
I hope this worked out for you the way you thought or better.
Well, I hope it worked for you because we've gone on for a long time.
No.
No.
This was fantastic.
I I'm saying fantastic.
I hope for you, it was also an enjoyable experience.
It was interesting for yes.

(02:14:38):
Yes.
It was.
Say yes.
You're supposed to say yes.
It was it was not entirely it was not entirely stress free because I had so many things I wanted to talk about that I clearly don't have time to talk about.
But that is the fact our podcast is very different than any other.
I I yes.
We you have
to admit.
There's nobody who does it this way, and that's important.
And because it's important because it allows you to be you.

(02:15:00):
You guided me.
I didn't guide you.
So I wanna thank all of you out there for your time today who've listened in.
I do hope that you've learned something today that will make a difference in your life and the lives of others.
Once again, the Project Moon Hut Foundation is where we're looking to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon, a moon hut, through the accelerated development of an earth and space based ecosystem, then to use those endeavors, the paradigm shifting thinking, and those innovations and turn them back on earth to improve how we live on earth for all species.

(02:15:34):
Now, Scott, what's the single best way to get a hold of you, to reach out to you, to connect to you?
The best way to connect to me is to look for my YouTube channel.
Just Google Scott Manley, and you will find my face grinning back at you on a YouTube channel.
And if you really need to contact me, there is an about link page there where you can email me.
But,
what's the latest first?

(02:15:55):
Let me spell this for it's s c o t t, obviously, m a n l e y.
That's right.
Okay.
That's my real name.
It's not some made up YouTube thing.
I wasn't that smart.
Well
so for everybody else, I'd love to connect with you.
You can reach me at david@moonhot.org.
You can connect with us on Twitter at at project moon hut or for me personally at goldsmith.

(02:16:19):
You can look on LinkedIn.
We are there.
We are on Facebook.
We don't do a lot of work because we're really just getting down and dirty every day.
Every day our teams are working, but we're on project.
You could look us up under Project Moon Hut.
We are on Instagram, and my personal Instagram is mister David Goldsmith.
And that said, I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for listening.
Hello, everybody.
This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to the age of infinite.
Throughout history, humans have made significant transformational changes, which in turn have led to the renaming of periods into what we've called ages.
You've personally just experienced the information age and what a ride it has been.
Now consider that you might now we might now be living into a transition period to the age of infinite, An age that is not defined by scarcity and abundance, but by a redefining lifestyle consisting of infinite possibilities and resources, which will be made possible through a new construct between the moon and the earth as we call it Mearth.
We will create a new ecosystem and economic system to take us into this infinite future.
The ingredients for an amazing sci fi story that will come to life in your lifetime.
The podcast is brought to you by the Project Moonhound Foundation, where we look to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon, a moon hut we were named by NASA, through the accelerated development of an earth and space based ecosystem, then to use the endeavors, the paradigm shifting thinking, and the innovations and turn them back on earth to improve how we live on earth for all species.
Today, we're going to be exploring It's Not Rocket Science.
Love the title.
And we have with us Scott Manley.
Hello, Scott.
Hello.
As always, we do very, very brief introductions, so here is Scott.
He's a YouTube personality.
He's a gamer, a programmer, an astrophysicist, and interestingly enough, he's also a DJ.
Now before I get into we get into this discussion, I do wanna share something, and it is this.
Constantly in discussion, individuals will comment or in in text or talk to me and say, well, how much research have you done?
So let me share with you how the program is put together.
I find a guest that I think is brilliant.
Scott is on that list.
Give him a call, connect.
We have a conversation, and then the guest watches some content to figure out who we are and what we're about.
And then we have this call where we determine only the title.
That's it.
Now for Scott and I, our first conversation was 1 hour and 44 minutes.
We've had creating a title go up to 2 and even 3 hours.
From that point forward, Scott and I have not spoken.
I do not know the outline.
I don't know the content in advance.
All we're doing or all together, you and I as a guest or as a listener, is we're learning together from Scott.
And from there, we will move on to the age of infinite.
That said, let's get started.
Scott, do you have an outline for us?
I do, sort of.
K.
So why don't you give them to me?
What's what's
So the title is it's not rocket science, and I wanna approach this from many angles.
Okay.
First of all, it's not rocket science.
It's it's one of these phrases in language and colloquial speech.
So so is the number 1 Yes.
Languages in our speech or what do you wanna call number 1?
I just the it is a phrase in colloquial speech.
Okay.
Rocket science
Yep.
Go ahead.
Rocket science is held up as this mystic art.
It
is.
Okay.
What's number 2?
Well, the number 2 is actually it's not that mystical.
It's just not It's not quantum mechanics or general relativity.
Mystical.
Okay.
Number 3.
Rocket engineering is where it's at.
Engineering
is where it's at.
Number 4.
Yeah.
I want to actually talk about how I'm not sure how to say this, but I wanna actually talk about rocket technology in detail.
Okay.
So we'll just call it rocket technology.
Yeah.
Okay.
5.
And I wanna cover SpaceX's, well, different model of rocket vehicle development and how that dovetails with what has gone on prior.
Okay.
Next.
I think that's that's a good thing to get started with.
Okay.
And we can go anywhere as our podcasts, always do.
We find new places to really explore.
So let's start with this first one.
The phrase in colloquial colloquial yeah.
Whatever speech.
Yes.
Dialect and and manners of speech.
It is fascinating how the you know, people learning to speak languages, you learn about the words and the grammar, and and what you also understand is to have a real living language is to have figures of speech.
Right?
Like, it's not rocket science.
So that individual is a loose cannon.
Right?
And these things I don't know.
I just find sort of find this linguistics thing on the side kinda fascinating as a science fiction fan, and I'm already going off topic.
No.
No.
No.
That that's okay because
I'm already asking myself.
Do you speak another language, Scott?
I I am terrible.
I barely speak, languages when I'm there.
I I do try.
So so you do speak Scottish because that to me is that is a a language in itself.
Okay.
I can read some Scottish poetry.
Here's a part of the address to the haggis I know off the top of my head.
It's the.
That's that's Scots, and I actually understand that.
That's Robert Brown.
I know you do.
I have a very Erin Gavin who's on our website.
If you look at our image of project moon hut, half of the face is Erin Gavin.
She's a Hollywood person, but she has a a a model agency in Scotland.
And I tease her all the time because I actually pull up the Gaelic, and I write, and I put it in as a translation.
And she laughs.
So, what was interesting the minute you said that is I never I'm not a grammar person.
I learned to speak Spanish, and I learned it from talking to people.
That's how I learned Spanish.
I don't learn it from a grammatical perspective.
And even these colloquial expressions, which is interesting that you brought it up, I don't even think about it.
I just think I they become a part of you when you learn a language.
Yeah.
I I I don't know.
I'm just I was kinda starting with this because, yeah, other languages, they have these constructs and and you'll find that a lot of, like, when people make up languages for TV shows and movies
Yep.
To make them realistic, they actually have to populate the language with these phrases if they're gonna be somewhat, they're not gonna sound like a collection of words and grammar, basically.
But, yeah, it's not rocket science.
Coming back to that, yeah, it has this sort of mystical connotations about it.
And and I get this all the time, because I work in tech, and I'm trying to solve a problem or we're discussing a problem in a meeting and we'll say, that's only gonna be a couple of hours.
It's not rocket science.
And and I'm immediately thinking if this would be so much easier if it was because I actually understand it, Patrick, and this machine learning, thing that's been thrown at me.
Yep.
Yeah.
I I get it.
And the the difference is that I have spent the last sort of 10 years randomly learning bits of this and teaching it.
And I think I I've sort of got one of the I'm known for teaching rocket science.
Even although it's not hard mathematical rocket science, although there is math involved, a lot of the a lot of this mysticism comes from just lack of exposure.
Well, I I share when I'm telling the story of Project Moon Hub.
I share of the first experience that I had, which was in Hawaii, where at the great giant leap, there were about 50 of us in the room.
I I went I was asked to go to this event, and yeah, Buzz Aldrin there, one of the guys who put the rover on the comet.
These are all this was a PhD level event, and I tell people that my laptop caught on fire.
Because in that meeting, I couldn't understand half the words that they were saying.
You take, you take an l 493 to l one, and then it's a b 475, and then there are dragons.
And I'm thinking, there are dragons?
I mean, I had no clue what was going on, and it is a language.
Well, you know and I think the funny thing is that the way you've repeated that back to me clearly shows that you didn't actually understand half the references because if you'd heard those terms enough, you might repeat them in a way that would make sense to me, but this is the game of of Telegram or telephone now.
And I Oh, yeah.
No.
No.
Yeah.
I I had I had no clue what they were saying.
I, Mike, I was typing so fast to get what is an l one?
What is an
l one?
Is probably a Lagrange point.
Right.
It was a Lagrange point.
But if you've never heard this before, if you didn't know anything about rocket science or space, I didn't know what that meant.
And then they started talking about dragons.
This was 2014.
And Game of Thrones is out.
And my first analogy was, what is a dragon?
Right.
Well, it could be here be dragons, and that's something you quite often think about when you're trying to plan or design something that is out pushing the limits where you're like, we don't know what's in this area.
And in old maps, here be dragons.
The mapmaker didn't wanna say they didn't know what's in there.
Yeah.
Just paint a dragon in.
Right?
Yeah.
That that you're absolutely right.
They put a, like, a they put a ship, and it'll be completely engulfed by something or monster.
Or something.
A Kraken.
Yeah.
And so it was actually if you think of 2014, 15, it was Elon Musk's was it was it there's a what's it?
The There's
a he has a spacecraft, the dragon, but
I'm not sure
that would have been involved in a comet mission.
So That was what was being referred to.
But Oh, it was.
Okay.
I felt like the 13th warrior after 2 days because I had to decipher.
And if for, the and I know you know the reference.
I'm just bringing it up.
It is the movie the 13th warrior where anti Antonio Banderas learns a language by hearing people speak.
So, yes, I felt like the 13th warrior.
I had to figure out this language of space and even what is rocket science is, I think it's an assumptive phrase for most people.
Yeah.
And and it's not something to be afraid of having been, you know, around it for a long time, but never having been educated in it, let me tell you.
So as your degree is with,
Physics and astronomy and, you know, the little bit of computational physics on the side.
But But not rocket science.
It's not rocket science because rocket science really isn't that much of a thing, but we can get to that.
Okay.
But, yeah, I what I did do was quantum mechanics and general relativity.
I mean, this is getting on to point 2.
And that stuff, that really did blow my mind.
You know?
You've probably done a bit to that.
Right?
Mhmm.
There's a lot of transformational ways about how you think about things, and that can make it incredibly hostile.
But rocket science is actually you know, I am I'm now saying putting finger quotes up when I'm saying rocket science.
Yeah.
Doesn't it?
Right?
You can't see it, but I sort of finger quote rocket science these days.
It's all classical physics and chemistry, and most importantly, it's it's engineering.
Right?
Yep.
So I I actually like that because I never thought about it that way.
Is it's honestly, I've never thought about it as physics, chemistry, and engineering even though I've taken I I haven't taken engineering per se, but I've done I worked on many projects where engineering was involved.
I never had broken it down into those three components.
Right.
You probably understand Hooke's law and tensile strength
Yes.
And compressive strength.
Right.
Yes.
And bit of
engineering.
Yeah.
No.
I I but I never brought it down to this simplicity even though it's complex.
But the simplicity is it's physics, it's chemistry, and it's engineering.
Yep.
And I never thought about that way.
So thank you.
That that right there is extremely it's a clarity that should have been described or someone should have said 6, 7 years ago, or I'm just not so smart.
Well, so, funnily enough, 6, 7, 8 years ago, I started really making my videos on YouTube.
And I had how I how I got into this position of, people telling other people to look at my videos about rocket science is I actually started playing a video game on the Internet called Kerbal Space Program.
And you may have heard of this.
You may not.
It's a video game where it is a physics simulation where you bolt together rocket parts like engines, propellant tanks, guidance systems, maybe some aerodynamic surfaces, and then you launch them.
And you can fly them according to the laws of physics.
And this started out as a very simple demonstration of the technology, and it's now grown over 10 years to be a very complete simulation, albeit with some compromises to make it easier for people to understand.
So I started playing that and explaining to people about it because the game had come out and a lot of people were starting to play with it and they would launch their rockets straight up, and they would stage them, and they would try to keep going higher.
And eventually, they would fall back to the planet, and so they sort of said, oh, this isn't a real simulation because you can't get into orbit.
And I, of course, was sitting off in the side with my degree in or in astronomy, and I said, no.
You're doing it wrong.
Yeah.
Let me explain.
Right.
Yeah.
It doesn't work because you built it wrong.
Well, no.
Because there it's not getting to space and staying in space isn't about going straight up.
It's about going straight up and then going sideways very fast.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Getting into orbit.
And so I started making these videos just explaining, you know, this is how it works.
This is how orbital mechanics works.
Let me show you how to transfer to the moon where you've gotta find your translunar injection point and swing around and then perform a breaking burn.
And, I had I don't know.
I guess I had a nice voice and people like that, but, I also had some background and could talk about other related pieces.
Speak Gaelic, which also probably helped.
No.
I didn't speak Gaelic.
Oh, so so let me I'm gonna ask you right now because this would be fascinating to hear from you in a, a more simplistic term.
Can you describe without having to go to a video and I I've got a lot of the background, can you describe the trajectory that you just described in 6 seconds, which was going up, turning, going as fast as you can, and then getting out of orbit, and then I think you went all the way to the moon.
Yeah.
So can you please give me your I'm not gonna say it's it's not 101, but, like, 201 or 2 you know, a second level, not a first level, description.
Well, do you wanna talk about the complete process of getting into orbit?
Because I'm there.
No.
I would like to get if you can give as the the reasoning is the reason I'm asking the question is that because I'm not a space person, and I use that term very, loosely.
I know a lot about space.
I've been working in this for 6 years, but I don't wake up in the 7 years.
I don't wake up in the morning and think, I just wanna go to space.
It would be amazing.
I don't do that.
And so I'm often talking to individuals who have no clue about what the and so I'd like I would like to learn from you so that I can do a better job of helping people to understand.
And many of our team members don't know space, so this would be fantastic.
So give me a a quick a primer of a 201 class.
Right.
So let's start with your basic rocket sitting on the launch pad with full propellant tanks.
So the first thing it's gonna do is light those engines, and it's gonna start ascending upwards.
And so there is more thrust coming out of those engines than there is gravity holding the vehicle down.
So because of that, you know, force equals mass times acceleration.
You know?
Yep.
You're gonna be have more force on it than the gravity.
You're gonna accelerate upwards.
So, you know, many rockets actually don't accelerate faster than there are cars that accelerate faster than rockets.
Think about that.
But rockets keep on accelerating.
A car will reach its top speed quickly.
A rocket just keeps going as long as it's burning those engines.
It goes faster and faster and faster and higher and higher.
Now it'll start to turn over because it wants usually wants to start going eastwards or southwards or wherever towards its target orbit.
So the the actual turn is because I've always wondered why it starts to turn, and I didn't realize it was turning to get into orbit.
I just thought there was some mechanical part when it got to that elevation, that altitude, that it would say, okay.
We have to start turning, but I didn't realize it was to push itself into a different trajectory.
Right.
It's aiming downrange along a launch azimuth.
A launch azimuth is a direction you want to go to that will ultimately turn into your orbit.
So the other reason you turn, by the way, is because if you've got a big rocket with propellant in it Yeah.
Don't want it to fall back on the launch pad if there's a a problem.
So you want it to start going sideways pretty quickly, but not go too fast sideways that you lose control.
So there's a balance there, and this is, you know, guidance people will tell you all about this.
So when so let me sorry.
Interrupting.
If, we're going up and we start to make that turn, we're still pushing towards a a higher altitude Yes.
But it but at, let's say, a, a 60 degree angle instead of a 90 degree, which was take off.
Does that sound reasonable?
Yes.
That's pretty much.
Some some rockets actually start off at an angle, but those are very rare.
There are small ones and, you know
So we go up at a sit we go up at a 90.
We go to a high enough altitude.
We start to then roll
or turn.
Technically, it's a yaw or a pitch.
Usually, it's a pitch you describe it.
Okay.
Roll is along the axis of the rocket.
Right.
That's okay.
So it's a pitch.
We and then what we're doing is we're we're aiming ourselves in a direction that will give us an orbital trajectory.
Yes.
Okay.
And so as you go on, you're getting it's getting faster and faster.
And by the time you're up around well past, you know, supersonic speeds, you're generally up at altitudes of maybe about 80 to over a 100 kilometers depending on the rocket design.
Your first stage is gonna burn out.
You're gonna drop that, and your second stage is gonna come online.
And it this will then mostly be concerned with picking up the speed needed for orbital velocity.
So what the first stage does is generally put it into a ballistic trajectory that would carry it maybe a few 100 kilometers down range.
Yeah.
But if the second stage didn't light, it would just fall back.
Right.
So the second stage uses this lift, this loft, and the time that it would take to reach its apex to get faster and faster.
And it's aiming for a speed of about, Mach 25 relative to the surface of the earth or 17,500 miles per hour.
Right?
25,000 kilometers per hour.
That's how fast you have to go.
7.8 kilometers per second.
There you go.
And at that, right, you know physics.
You are in these if you're moving in a circle, you experience, an imaginary force pulling you outwards.
Yes.
So if you're going fast enough around the earth in a circle, that imaginary force can cancel out the force of gravity, and then you are in an orbit.
You won't go up or down.
You will in be in the circular trajectory moving at 7.2 kilometers per second or 7.8 kilometers per second.
It depends on how you measure it.
Right?
Because the earth is rotating and
It it it's interesting because I haven't asked these questions.
It's interesting that the visual that we get on earth for someone who is not going to do the research, which I was not again, it wasn't interest to me.
You asked me other questions.
I'll go real deep.
Is that you see the image of the loss of the first booster burning out and the them falling down to earth, And it feels like you're already so high that you are in space, but what you I think you're kind of alluding is you're high enough to be at a point where the second engine kicking in can get enough orbital velocity.
It's still going at that 60 degree or whatever angle, but it's now accelerating it in a different atmosphere condition, in a different in, a different, and starting to turn into an orbital velocity of a circle around the moon.
Yes.
So we're Does that make sense?
About getting into orbit around the earth first.
Yes.
I mean, I'm sorry.
Around the earth.
That's what I meant.
Yes.
So So Go ahead.
That that first stage is to give you the altitude and the time you need for the 2nd stage to pick up the speed it needs because it takes time to accelerate.
Yep.
That's tip that's your typical rocket design, and there are many, many variations on this.
And you were talking about something going to space versus not going to space.
If we talk about an altitude of, like, a 100 kilometers of space, the boosters on SpaceX rockets, they go the first stage booster, those reach space, but the boosters on the Space Shuttle, those big solid rocket motors that were needed, those never got high enough to reach space, but they were would land and and recover.
So the whole alpha staging is just because this second stage needs to spend a lot of time picking up the velocity needed.
Yeah.
That may, makes sense.
Right.
It just doesn't look that way when you're looking at the camera.
It looks like it's already in orbit because it's so high up, but it's actually not.
It still needs that additional trajectory with a different burn and a different angle to get it to where it needs to be.
Yeah.
It's all about speed.
Getting to space, you can get to space going straight up and straight down by traveling at about Mach 3 and then letting velocity calculate drop track bring you up.
But if you wanna stay in space, you have to hit about Mach 25.
Okay.
Wild.
Yep.
So, so, anyway, that that would be you getting into a stable orbit around the Earth.
And one of the sort of well, I'm sort of moving forwards here in in terms of where I thought I'd be, but one of the sort of basic things in rocket science is the rocket equation.
So this is a bit of an aside.
You understand that a rocket is expelling propellant out a rocket nozzle, and that propellant is going off in one direction at a certain speed and that Newton's third law
Newton's third law.
Yes.
Equal and opposite reaction says the spacecraft has to accelerate in the other direction.
Right?
Mhmm.
Yep.
Now you can imagine that this can do this for a certain amount of time until it runs out of propellant.
Mhmm.
And then it's floating in space, and it just follows whatever trajectory because of Newton's first law and the law of gravity.
Yep.
So you can actually calculate how much time and how much acceleration you get to get a total change in velocity that a spacecraft is capable of.
And it's not totally trivial because if you think about it, when you've got a rocket full of propellant, you have more mass, and so that same engine gets less acceleration.
And as you burn propellant, you get more acceleration out.
Yes.
So there's a little bit of an integration you have to do, but ultimately, you can get some you do something called the rocket equation, which was an equation that's so simple it was derived, in the 19th century by a Russian school teacher called, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.
Mhmm.
And all it does is it tells you how much your rocket can change its speed based upon the dry mass of the vehicle, the velocity of the rocket exhaust, and the mass of the propellant.
But Okay.
What I want you to embrace here is the notion that there is a finite definable change in velocity that a rocket can manage.
We call this delta v, and you probably heard delta v if you've been in space circles.
I I I if you've even watched my writing, whenever I hit the word change, I always write delta.
So, yes, I'm I'm very delta v.
Okay.
Now we've got to space.
We've you we've done those delta v calculations, the first stage and the second stage.
Now to get to the moon, you might need a 3rd stage.
And you have to make sure that it has to be able to reach the moon.
And to do that, it's in a circular orbit.
It wants to go into an elliptical orbit where it starts at, you know, a few 100 kilometers above the earth, and then the ellipse carries its orbit out to where the moon is about 400,000 kilometers out.
Mhmm.
And
to do that, you accelerate.
Yep.
And you need a certain amount of delta v.
You need about 2.8 kilometers per second, I think, or maybe 3.
I I it depends on on a number of factors.
I and I I just understand the concept that you have to you're you're in a velocity and you need to escape that velocity, so you need another fuel source to be able to ignite it.
And it ends up turning it into elliptical shape because it's the it's the way in which the path of orbital or orbits work when you start to ignite.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, all orbits are are conic sections.
Okay.
We're generally talking about we're generally talking about circles or ellipses.
Yep.
And and a circle is a special kind of ellipse.
Yep.
Right?
And so, yeah, you you accelerate so that your orbit will come out and meet the moon at some future time, and you have to do the math on exactly when and where you apply this.
Yeah.
But it's actually not you can actually eyeball this and because I do this in video games.
Right?
Okay.
Oh, I I can fly spacecraft by the seat of my pants.
Let me
tell you.
By the way, do you know the people at curveball?
I do, actually.
Yes.
Okay.
I wanna meet them.
Oh, interesting.
Okay.
They they I mean, I'll tell you what.
The the people behind curveball have revolutionized understanding of rocket science, and it's fascinating that I I go to science events now, and so many of the people coming up have learned all about it.
And there's a fantastic diagram.
I don't know if you know xkcd.
It's the same cartoon.
So there's a a little graph he he drew as one of his cartoons.
This guy worked at JPL.
He is the graph is how much I understand rocket science on the vertical axis.
On the horizontal axis, it's time.
And it sort of goes up slowly, and he says, went to school.
She's got a little got a degree in astrophysics, being a slightly higher I can see
where this is going.
Played the game and learned it all.
Right.
Worked at JPL slightly higher, played Kerbal Space Program, and just shoots off
the top.
Yeah.
That's exact I drew a graph.
That's exactly what I had drawn.
Right.
And this is xkcd.
You should look it up.
And the thing about Kerbal is, as I said, it makes all this available to you and it makes it all available to regular people.
When you drive a car, you are you're you're dealing with forces on the road.
You're dealing with complex friction forces
Mhmm.
Engine power, you're breaking.
All this stuff is actually quite complicated physics.
You know, your body is rolling, you get suspension working
Mhmm.
But you don't care about any of that because you your understanding of driving is an experiential thing you've learned by doing.
Right?
You've built the context in your head and your model for how a car should behave.
Now people that have worked in with rocketry, a lot of the stuff is the mathematics.
Yes.
Right?
You haven't gone to space and tried to maneuver a spacecraft.
In fact, astronauts have gone to space and generally had spacecraft maneuver.
It's all been based on command sent up from the ground.
Right.
They're they're and it's a misnomer that because they're an astronaut that they are also a rocket scientist.
They are
a lot of crossover for
sure.
Right.
They learned some things, but they're in the back seat, And the the mathematics was done.
The rocket science was done.
The engineering was done.
The physics was done on the ground.
Mhmm.
They are now pushing the button at this, at this, at this to make it happen.
And it's their skills that people have.
Yes.
And and so, anyway, Kerbal Space Program allows people to be the astronauts and not bother about most of the math.
They can just guess and aim at the maneuvers and learn about how those change.
And so you get this understanding of the orbital mechanics by doing it by hand.
And, actually, talking about astronauts having, you know, knowing or not knowing this, There's a story I like to tell about Gemini 4.
Right?
So Gemini 4 was the 1st spacewalk.
I'm sure you 1st American spacewalk.
Right?
And but late in that, mission design, they added another mission goal, and that was they wanted to practice some orbital maneuvering.
And now they didn't have another Agena spacecraft up there to practice maneuvering relative to, but they did have the booster that had launched them.
So the booster had disconnected from the spacecraft and was floating away behind them.
And the crew they wanted the spacecraft to turn around and maneuver close to it from several miles out.
So the astronauts at the con controls, they flew the spacecraft like it was an airplane.
They pointed it directly at the booster, and they flew towards it.
Yeah.
And they what they found was as they flew towards the booster, the booster starts to go up relative to them, and they thought that's very strange.
I thought I was going straight towards it.
What was happening was orbital mechanics isn't like flying an airplane.
You're going backwards.
As you slow down, your orb you're slowing your orbit.
Remember how I said you had to accelerate your orbit to go up to the moon?
Well, if you slow down, your orbit will actually go down towards the Earth.
Yes.
And that meant that as they were going down, the does it looked like the booster was going up.
But not only was that, by going backwards towards it, they had actually shrunk their orbit a little, and that meant that their path around the earth was shorter.
Yeah.
So over time, that would mean they would actually go away from the booster.
There's this wacky thing in orbital mechanics.
If you want to go towards something that's ahead of you, then you actually have to slow down.
Right?
You have to fire your thrusters to go away from it so that you fall into a lower orbit and then catch up with it.
Yep.
It's backwards.
No.
It it's backwards, and and that's the part of, a lot of learning is that it's these are often things are counterintuitive.
And I I've only I've got 20 hours in a worrier, and I can tell you I've been in situations not like this, but where I thought I should do one thing, and the instructor would say, no.
No.
No.
No.
No.
You do the opposite.
Why?
Because the opposite gets you to where you need to be.
So that's interesting that that's why it was falling out of orbit or falling out away from
Well, that's why they couldn't rendezvous with it
because
the hadn't thought about the changes that were needed.
And, of course, maneuvering around the space station, this is all something that's understood now.
Right?
There's something called proximity operations where they have to understand that if you go in a certain direction, you're gonna have actually sort of motion in a different direction.
But
Mhmm.
But, anyway, Kerbal Space Program is fantastic because it gives these gives people this sort of hands on experiential, knowledge.
Yep.
And and it's intuitive.
And and you can then take that to the next level if you want and do the math.
You can crunch the numbers.
You can come up with perfect design.
You can even build simulations and models within the simulation and then pull off amazing missions that are analogs of the real thing.
It it so I know I meet so many people that this was the thing that turned them into rocket scientists or rocket engineers.
Mhmm.
Right?
Because I've said talked about this.
Some of them were were gonna do, you know, art or engineering or other worthy causes, but because they thought that rocket science was hard.
But in fact, they realized through a video game that actually, it's something that is quite understandable.
It's not esoteric or, mystic in any way.
Well, part of I I part of that that understanding has to come from the thinking or belief that a lot of the science has been done.
There was Newton created the 1st and third law.
There are laws that are already put into how we think and what we do think, how we live.
So, therefore, you're not starting from scratch.
If you were to do this and we went back 300 years ago, it would be a whole different story.
But we've built on the thoughts and ideas of others and being able to understand these laws enables us to be able to comprehend these changes.
So I think there's an interconnectivity to the ubiquitousness, the the the knowledge base that allows an individual to know, I'm in a car.
It will do this.
I'm in a rocket.
It doesn't act the same way.
Yeah.
And they and and there's there's that connectedness that I think makes it a little easier.
I don't know if that makes sense.
Yeah.
And and, you know, another thing I wanna you're talking about Newton and his very simple laws.
Let let's be clear.
You know?
From Newton's laws, you can get very, very complex results that are something you can easily model.
Right?
So there's a new science to be had even based on those laws.
And I guess, you know, if you look at Nivier Stokes equations are used for fluid dynamics, that's a that's always a place where you're like, here be dragons.
Here's things we still haven't figured out how to simulate.
We can do experiments, but we can't necessarily understand exactly why these basic, very simple laws of conservation of mass and momentum and energy produce some effect in the real world.
I it was why when, calc 3
transitions into theoretical math, I got to that point and I just couldn't keep on going.
I just learned to do, numerical integration, and that solved all my problems from that point onwards.
Well, I also had a a lack of desire to wanna go that far.
But, yes, these type of mathematical equations or these laws, they they go to a point.
And, yes, I know they could be extremely complex.
Yet when you when you can describe something to me, and, Scott, you're describing to me, an understanding of a principle, and then what you did is you have a reference point.
You said, in essence, David, if you're in a car, you understand you don't have to know there's friction.
But in the back of your mind, you know that the tires are causing friction against the ground, and there's an air friction.
And there's other friction, but let's use those as the basics.
You understand that there's an engine in your car that you can press a pedal and put in more of the combustible or use the energy if it's battery.
You know that.
So you're able to translate that to me so that I can grasp it.
And I I'm assuming this curveball also has that integrated understanding of just basic principles that humans have because they exist.
And that helps people to get to this next phase of rocket science.
Yes.
So we're we're, we are trying to go through these bullet points.
And I think, honestly, I'm realizing my bullet points are sort of changing order.
That's okay.
That's okay.
This this
I I do think we wanna get on to the point about rocket engineering.
Okay.
So let's go to
the point.
Mentioned it several times.
Yep.
So let's get into rocket engineering.
And so rocket yeah.
So I've we've talked about rocket science.
So there is such a thing as as rocket science, but it's really actually, you know, material science or trying to solve some particular problem in the lab.
Rocket engineering is where the rubber meets the road.
That's the real meat of what makes space work.
Wait.
Wait.
So rocket rocket science and rocket engineering, would rocket rugged engineering be a subset of rocket science?
No.
No.
I'd say it's the better term.
That's what I wanna say is I think that people shouldn't really be saying rocket science.
Okay.
Not that I've get any great opinion of it, but because rocket engineering is really where it's at.
No.
No.
It's done.
I I would call it rocket engineering from now on.
Is there any
You might you might find it I don't think you would ever be at a science event and see people talking about rocket science except for saying it's not rocket science.
So now we now I know the right word.
So, yeah, you've changed the
world.
Right.
So so the thing about rocket engineering can be exceptionally hard because you're dealing with situations where you are designing something that might have to deal with extreme temperatures or pressures or horribly reactive chemical environments.
You might have structural things where you are trying to get as much, strength as possible at the lowest mass possible.
Right?
It's not rocket engineering.
That makes sense to me.
So, like, built making a rocket engine pardon me.
Sorry.
Getting a little
No worries.
You can edit that out.
Right?
No.
I add we don't edit anything.
Oh, you no.
You can turn the volume down.
No.
No.
No.
We never edit anything.
Anything.
There is never there is never anything that we have ever I've done about 250 interviews, 260 interviews, and I've even have peep I had one individual I won't mention name.
Very, very, very, very famous in another industry.
And he was a jerk, and I won't go into all the details, but he screamed and yell and swore at me and all sorts of things because he had a misunderstanding.
And I just said to him, my my, it was almost like we were gonna lose the interview.
I'd worked on it for 2 years.
And I said, I was in Venice, and I said, we're going live in 3, 2, 1, and I just started.
And Hey.
And he said he just changed.
It was, oh, that's my favorite place in the world.
Amazing to be with you.
He just went on and on and 45 minutes into the interview because it was enjoyable to him, and I challenged him.
That's what I liked.
He apologized on the air, and I didn't know what to do.
So what I I kind of gave a summary, but that is in the interview.
It's never taken out.
So whatever you say, Scott, it is here.
So it's It's not what I'm saying.
It's what my my throat is bringing up that I'm
working for.
Perfectly fine with that.
I'm I'm I don't wanna do the Bob Fleming thing
No.
You're British reference.
It's it's a character from a British TV show who's always his shows are interrupted by him coughing up stuff.
Like Bob Fleming.
I get it.
So I will call you Scott Fleming Manning.
No.
No.
No.
No.
Yeah.
Okay.
My my my family lives in the same village that, Alexander Fleming grew up in where he, of course, came up with penicillin or is credited with penicillin amongst others.
Anyway, Fleming's a Scottish name.
Yes.
So, anyway, yeah.
So and the other thing about rocket engineering is that it's hard because there are huge consequences for failure.
A rocket has all these multitude of parts.
You know, we see a tank, we see engines, but there's many parts in those engines.
That tank, you know, is hiding the electronics.
It's hiding pressurization system, structural parts.
There's guidance.
There's sensors.
And almost everything has to work.
Right?
There's one thing, one failure can ruin your whole mission.
So there are huge consequences for cutting it the corners too much, right, for buying something that's too cheap or mis designing one thing.
And I have I have, like, huge numbers of stories of vehicles that were lost for all sorts of, you know, small, minor, sometimes hilarious ways.
Right?
And and I'll tell you that sometimes, like, rocket failures can have some very unscientific root causes.
Like
Well, I yes.
I'm completely, you know, understand that.
In, I wrote a small book.
People will say it's not small, but I wrote a small book.
And I the when e when SpaceX's rocket went up and it failed at 2 minutes and 19 seconds or would one of those, it was up at an altitude of 217 kilometers.
It failed because a single line of code did not allow for enough time for commanding main engine shutdown and state separation.
And Yes.
That was, that
was number 3.
Following 1, launch 3.
Oh, I didn't I don't know that.
But it was a single line of code.
It was a variable.
Yeah.
It wasn't even a line of code.
It's that they they set a number tighter than they wanted because, if you think about it, this is a perfect example of a trade off that you might make as an engineer.
Right?
That you are launching your spacecraft and you figured out the trajectory, and though those moments when you're separating the rocket and not under thrust, you're just losing energy.
Mhmm.
So you wanna minimize the amount of time that you're losing energy during this launch.
So they, they basically said that after the main engine shut down, they should wait this amount of time and then separate the rockets and then fire the engine.
And that amount of time they waited between the main engine shutting down and the second stage separating was too short because they wanted to minimize this, but they didn't realize just how much propellant would still be flowing through the engine.
Okay.
I I
mean, you you know, if you want, I can I could probably explain how rocket engines work because, actually, I really like explaining how No?
Go ahead.
I'm I'm I'm I'm here.
We're in rocket engine we're in rocket engineering.
It's it's perfect.
Yeah.
Please explain.
So, yeah, let's start with the let's actually start with the Merlin engine.
So rocket engines, as I've mentioned, they are what we call in in general terms reaction engines.
Right?
They're equal and opposite reactions.
They have to throw material out one side so that the rocket can move.
And that's why it's called a a reaction engine.
A reaction engine.
Really?
That's a yeah.
That's the reason.
Yeah.
I never tied that together.
So you don't need to have a chemical reaction to have a reaction engine.
Yep.
Understood.
About it.
Because you could because, an ion engine.
Right?
An electrical propulsion system could have could be a reaction engine.
So, anyway, the classic rocket engine design, how does it make the the fuel move very quickly?
Because you're wanting speed.
What you do is you burn your liquid oxygen and your liquid kerosene, that's what they use in the Merlin engine, and you burn it inside a combustion chamber.
So you mix these in very quickly.
Now what your goal in there is to get the pressures high enough that you that that they are trying to escape the this chamber.
Right?
So there's a rocky chamber you have to imagine.
It's a sort of, cylindrical shape with curved ends, and at the other end, it constrains down to a narrow throat.
Yep.
And you want this throat to be sufficiently narrow that when you're burning the propellant, it the as it tries to flow through this throat, it has to reach supersonic speeds.
And that's really critical because there's a a thing in Bernoulli's you know, Bernoulli's theorem talks about, liquids or fluids flowing through pipes of different sizes.
There's a bunch of things.
So if you can if you actually shrink it down to the size of a a very small size, it will be flowing supersonic.
And from that point onwards, it can't flow upstream again.
Now you then expand that out.
That's your rocket nozzle.
Think about it.
Right?
It expands out into this bell shaped nozzle.
And the way it expands is because it started supersonic, it'll actually get faster.
And there's a weird inversion of Bernoulli's theorem that I can't really explain with audio, So Okay.
That's right.
Try.
So I do wanna ask a question before you get to that.
In relative size, let's take a an engine.
You can pick 1 or a a rocket that you're thinking about.
How big how big is a typical engine?
I and I know that's a very bad word to use, a typical.
But I'm trying to get a size for how large this hole would be, this throat.
Yeah.
That's interesting.
Yeah.
I I know what you're asking.
And there is a whole range because rocket engines, some of them are the size of people.
Some of them are, you know, twice this the height of people.
The Merlin engine engine
engine engine itself getting us into orbit.
That type that you're
You're talking about engines that can be the size of cars or Yeah.
Or trucks.
Yes.
Or they can be very small things.
Like, I've seen rockets that use engines that are the size of lawnmowers, like the small aim they're very, very small.
So let's take something like the dragon size, I mean,
a large The dragon is the the second is the third stage.
So Okay.
You're talking about the Falcon 9 or the Falcon 1 that we started talking with, and it has a Merlin engine.
Yep.
And I'd actually have to look off numbers, but, you know, you can see there's pictures of people standing next to these, and it's not much taller than them.
Yep.
I've seen that.
So there's the, there's what's called the power head on the top, and then you see the bell shaped nozzle.
Right?
The nozzle, all that's doing is taking the hot gas from the combustion chamber and expanding it out to accelerate it.
So point I wanna make about this is that that process of expanding this hot gas through a nozzle turns the heat and the pressure into velocity.
Mhmm.
And
that's all you're wanting.
You don't care, but you'd you'd prefer it to be cold.
But, unfortunately, laws of physics says that hot gas moves faster.
So you're like, okay.
Make it as hot as possible.
Right?
Make it as high pressure as possible, expand it through this throat, and we get it going.
Okay.
So that's how the Merlin engine is is working.
But now how does that propellant get into that engine?
Right?
You've got these big fuel tanks.
Well, if you think about it, you're trying to put a lot of pressure into this engine.
So you need the pressure that's pushing the propellant into the engine, the combustion chamber, to be higher than what's inside the combustion chamber.
Otherwise, it'll flow backwards.
If you didn't if you didn't have if you just had, like, a regular propellant tank and you open a valve, as soon as it starts burning, the flame would run back up inside your combustion you know, into your fuel tanks.
It wouldn't go it wouldn't go very far.
No.
Yeah.
Right?
Mhmm.
So the Merlin engine there's different ways to do it.
Some in some rockets are very simple, and they just have tanks that are very strong and heavy, and they have very high pressure gas inside them that pushes the propellant in.
That's not efficient because you want your tanks to be super light.
So instead, use pumps.
And a huge part of the design of rocket engines is the pumps.
K.
Because these have to be able to move, you know, sometimes tons of fuel per second.
You you've seen, like, fire engines spraying water out.
Right?
That's nothing.
Like, look at these big trucks blowing, like, water, maybe, you know, hundreds of gallons per second.
The f one engines that are pushing the Saturn 5, those are putting, like, tons of propellant every second into that combustion chamber at incredibly high pressures.
How does that compare to, in relative terms, a military aircraft rock, engine in terms of propellant speed?
So military aircraft, are generally using jet engines.
Yes.
Right?
And so they are actually most of their reaction mass is coming from the atmosphere, from the air.
Okay.
Yeah.
So they they so almost all jet engines get most of their thrust from pushing the air along.
Yep.
And that's why they're sort of limited to, you know, Mach 3 or or, you know, generally not much higher.
If you look at your civilian aircraft, almost all the thrust comes from the big fan blades at the front.
Yeah.
Because there's a small jet engine in there that's driving the high bypass turbofan.
That's how they're what they talk about.
So they they the engines have been getting bigger and wider, and the actual core of the engine has been getting smaller to make them more efficient.
Yep.
So, you know, we're talking kilogram I don't know how many like, kilograms, pounds of fuel per second maybe in jet engines.
Maybe maybe more, probably a lot more, but rocket engines are absolutely in a league of their own.
So how do you build pumps that work that fast?
That's my next question.
Right.
You you use something called a turbo pump.
Oh, okay.
Right?
Oh, yeah.
Well, what is a turbo pump?
Right?
Turbopump is a combination of a turbine and an impeller, a pump.
So you have, like a little jet engine.
You have a series of spinning blades.
You blow hot gas through those blades.
It spins it up, and then that drives your pump, which, is pushing the propellant through.
Now what drives those turbines?
What makes the hot gas?
You have another rocket engine.
So the Merlin rocket engine, the f one rocket engine has what's called a gas generator.
And that's a smaller version of a rocket engine that drives the turbines, pumps the fuel for the main engine.
So you have an you you have an engine within a turbine within an, you have an engine within an engine?
Yes.
Okay.
Right.
And so the the one the the gas generator for the Saturn 5, it was something like a 100000 horsepower to drive just the pump on one of the 5 Saturn 5's engines.
It's wild.
And so that's actually very common to see turbo pumps in almost every rocket engine.
There's a few that use electric pumps.
You get ones which use, electric pumps as well.
Mhmm.
The gas what else?
Yeah.
You you you have a few different things, but turbo pumps are where it's at, where it's always been.
So, anyway, as you can imagine, this means quite a lot of complicated plumbing.
You have propellant lines, oxygen lines.
They have to go and feed the gas generator.
They have to feed the pump.
They have to feed these have to feed into the main engine.
Oh, and by the way, that main engine, remember how I talked about how the combustion chamber is incredibly hot because it makes the gas better?
Well, actually, it's hot enough to melt pretty much any structural material you want.
So you have to figure a way of keeping this cool, and how you do that generally is regenerative cooling.
That's where you flow the propellant that's coming into the engine through little channels in the walls.
Like, you the walls are basically made of pipes.
I I've seen this.
Yes.
You've seen this.
And this is how Yeah.
It goes on
the outside of the the I don't know.
The what do you call the chamber?
The nozzle and the combustion chamber.
Yeah.
I thought about it was arteries and veins Yes.
That are kind of interconnected out on the exterior, and that allows it to keep it cool.
Right.
And this is rocket engineering, extreme temperatures and pressures, and you're dealing with them by cooling it.
You know the space shuttle main engines?
The temperature inside the combustion chamber will boil iron, and yet when that engine is firing, you can have ice forming on the outside of it.
Like, just think of there's a few millimeters separating these environments Yes.
And that's rocket engineering that's doing this.
So I've sort of given you a rough idea of how this engine is working, and there's a lot of piping in it.
So coming back to this flight, the Falcon, 1 third flight, as they shut down that engine, the turbine spins down, the fuel stops flowing, but there's all this piping and there's all this propellant still sitting inside it.
And it sort of has a momentum.
The pump doesn't spin down immediately, so it kept on flowing.
And so that kept on burning, and they kept they kept on having thrust after they turned off the engine.
So it wasn't like full power, but it was decaying off, and that was enough to keep pushing it forwards.
And they had misjudged how long this extra thrust would keep pushing the rocket.
Okay.
And so when they separated, they pushed apart, and then the first stage kept pushing and it crashed into the second stage Oh.
And they lost the rocket.
Okay.
And if they'd waited longer, they would have got to space on their 3rd try.
So, yeah, it's more or less they they disconnected.
They decoupled, but they didn't account for the the momentum that was already there.
They might have propelled it still in all that plumbing.
And it still kept on going, and it just rear ended it.
Yeah.
That's a bad way to say it.
It just rear ended.
Rear ended, and we've seen video.
You can see the video of this.
The thing that you have car
You've seen these big cars.
Right?
You've seen trailers.
You've seen types of things where people didn't account for time, friction, whatever it may be, and it just rear ended it.
Okay.
And that and that's what I, I guess, comes back to there are huge consequences for making getting these things wrong.
Right?
Like, SpaceX almost didn't succeed because of launch 3.
They were very close to failing on launch 4.
Right?
Yes.
And and so I I'd written about this in, the the book that I had.
I've written about how a single decision, a single thought, a single process, a single strategy, a single whatever you wanna do could have huge consequences.
And the role of an individual who's in management, in this case, or leadership, is to make sure all these decisions actually add up.
And it's not always the big things that make things fail.
It could be as simple as a line of code decision.
Yeah.
And there's another, launch 2 for SpaceX has another sort of similar although it's a more engineering story.
So launch 2 failed to achieve orbit as well.
I think I'm I'm hoping I'm remembering this correctly.
This was, again, the Falcon 1.
Now remember what I said, you're trying to maximize the performance of your rocket, so you're minimizing the mass.
And so they were building out the second they were designing the second stage, and it has big fuel tanks in it.
Now one of the problems with fuel is that it's liquid.
Right?
And it flows around.
And, you know, if you imagine trying to balance a cup with liquid in it, it wants to wobble all over the place.
So you want the the fuel to sort of not wobble around in ways that you're not expecting.
So what you'll do is along the sides, you'll put what are called baffles.
These are designed to stop propellant sloshing around in ways that are are nonoptimal.
It's the same thing that they use when they have a a tanker on the road for milk or for, fuel.
They're using technology because that tanker would just slosh all over.
So they actually use walls and separations to Yep.
To make sure they're not sloshing.
So it's the same thing, I'm assuming?
Yep.
Pretty much the same thing.
Now the problem is, of course, adding these internal baffles adds mass to your rocket.
Yep.
But not having enough of them or not the proper design of them means the fuel can slosh around, and that can modify the center of mass of your rocket.
Yep.
And so what happened were on their 2nd launch was they separated cleanly, and they actually didn't have this separation issue.
The second stage started firing, and they were all very excited.
It was accelerating towards space.
But there was a combination of the baffles not being sufficient and the some of the guidance system coupling in a way to the the harmonics of the fuel.
So the fuel started essentially sloshing around in a spiral pattern.
Mhmm.
And the vehicle started wobbling.
And, eventually, it just started wobbling out of control, and they never made orbit.
And this came down to, you know, do we need these baffles?
You know, like, maybe we could cut them down.
And so they needed to then they they realized that by making that engineering trade off that they had lost the mission.
Mhmm.
And it's expensive, and it's time consuming, and everything
Expensive and time consuming.
Yeah.
So
when this how did they know it was in a spiral that the fluid dynamics internally were in a
I'm not sure if they had I'm not saying it was a spiral.
It was more like a slot a circular slot pattern, but I they probably had, cameras in the tanks.
Oh, okay.
Or a sensor some type of sensor.
It could be
Or or the fluid motion.
Vehicles spinning because they would have seen attitude control information.
They might have decided.
Right.
Now they have cameras in the tanks.
I know that in the current version of the Falcon nines.
I don't know if they had that on the Falcon 9.
I never would have thought that that individuals who put cameras in tanks, but it makes sense.
Oh, yeah.
They're amazing.
So I I just never would have thought of that.
That's, it just sounds it's amazing to do that because now you would know.
But that first time through, I wondered when the way you said it, I was asking, did they yes.
You could probably take the data, and you could see certain types of motion or movements that you could pull or you could yeah.
Very good.
Okay.
Cameras.
Yeah.
They actually had, so they had cameras in the tanks on the Saturn 5 as well, like, back in the sixties.
Yeah.
They had there's great footage showing this.
Again, remember, I'm talking about tons of propellant per second.
You just see this liquid level just drop over a couple of minutes, and this is like a cavernous propellant tank that you're looking inside.
You you know, another example, of fuel slosh, by the way, being interesting is you've seen Apollo 11th's landing.
Right?
Yes.
You've heard the stories about, you know, they got a bunch of guys about to turn blue here.
We're breathing again.
Right?
That's one of my favorite quotes because they have this low propellant light come on as they're descending towards the surface.
They they were way too high, and they were taking way too long, and they were very worried.
Well, turns out that was actually that light shouldn't have come on.
They had plenty of propellant.
And and the reason why it came on was because the the fuel the propellant baffles inside those tanks were insufficient.
Oh, yep.
So it wasn't it didn't it didn't hit the sensor.
Right.
So uncovered the sensor early, and they got this warning.
They actually had about an at least another minute's worth of margin beyond what they thought they had.
It wasn't great.
And, you know, Neil Armstrong, absolute legend.
Right?
But he he kept cool and he landed it perfectly and safely.
And, actually, he did made a better landing than many of the other, Apollos.
But they figured this out in time for Apollo 14.
And they want so, they wanted to fit better baffles to the tanks.
And the thing is they'd already made the propellant tanks for number 14, and they didn't wanna cut them open.
So they figured out a way of doing keyhole surgery, keyhole rocket surgery on propellant tanks.
And there's these great pictures of an engineer accessing these tanks from underneath to put in this very special, you know, slosh reduction system.
That that that's just one of my cool stories.
Rock because you get to say, rocket surgery.
So so is this is this your term or a real term?
Slosh?
Slosh is absolutely a real term.
Yes.
A reduction system.
So there's something called a slosh reduction system.
Well, maybe not slosh reduction, but slosh is a real thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
No.
I understood slosh is
is just Anti slosh measures, anti slosh baffles.
I I showed to you before we started that I take notes, right, on the last one.
So I I'm on page, going on 8 pages of notes already.
So I'm writing words, and I'm writing sloshed reduction system.
Yeah.
In space, that would be called an SRS.
Yeah.
Let's not go there.
Let's not go there.
So that's the the going back to our Gaelic and our colloquial speech.
So so the Yeah.
They're it's a it's an art to know how to be able to you to manage the fluid dynamics.
Yeah.
And so if you wanna change your notes, I'm gonna say anti slosh baffles is
the thing to look for.
Anti slosh baffles.
And and I the a part of this that now you can understand, I think, why we don't have the video on because you when we describe something on when you could see somebody, you can use your hands.
You can use pictures.
You could do but when you're not, you're describing it in words, you have to be more precise.
So, yes, anti slash baffle.
So I will that it's an ASB.
No.
I'm just joking.
Yeah.
Well, I'm trying gonna try and avoid using, dumb or awfully forced astronomical acronyms.
Yeah.
No.
This is great.
The you this is fantastic.
This is fantastic.
These are pieces that I had not explored.
And I just because wasn't timing wasn't right, and this is perfect.
So I'm I'm loving this.
So anything else with, that we could hit on in this rocket we went to rockets, but we actually started with turbo pumps.
We went
back to What do you what do you wanna know about?
Because there's there's some all sorts of interesting stories.
Have you ever seen, the Saturn 5 launches and looked at the rocket flames in detail?
I'm so what do you think my answer is?
I well, I'm I'm just saying I have not.
I I encourage people that don't know about this, to take a look at footage of the Saturn 5 launching.
Obviously, it is one of the most amazing things to see.
And if you've the Apollo 11 documentary a couple of years ago is just staggering.
I saw it on Imax.
Now the the the way the flames, the exhaust comes out of those rockets on the first stage gets a lot of questions, and I love to talk about this.
No.
I'm I'm in I'm interested to know why why is
this Why do people notice it?
Because when that flame comes out, it's actually black first.
Right?
There's no light.
It's solid black.
And then, like, 20 feet past the nozzle, that's when you start to see the actual intense flame from these rocket engines.
People wonder what is going on with that.
So what's going on there is another remember we've talked about, you know, regenerative cooling and trying to keep the engines from melting?
Yeah.
They use something called film cooling, and that's where you flow a thin layer of cooling material inside the rocket nozzle to protect the exterior.
So you don't need to run the cooling through it anymore.
You just have a a separating layer.
And that is cold it's basically fuel rich exhaust.
So it's black.
It's sooty and absorbs all the heat and protects it.
Now where does it get
So so let me get this right straight.
What's happening is you're getting your you're already getting the exhaust and the acceleration you need.
So what you've done is you've mixed it with a, another additive.
And that additive at this point, because you're already getting the velocity, of the propellant, So you what you're doing is you're cooling it immediately.
Well And it gives it a different color.
It's not quite the same thing, though.
If you
think about it, the shape of the rocket nozzle is what makes your rocket exhaust go faster.
So you want your rocket nozzle to be bigger and longer.
But as you make it bigger, do you wanna have coolant inside it?
Because that makes it more complex.
So you could have instead, what you're doing is you're flowing a thin layer of the cooler gas along the wall on the inside, and that protects
It's just on it's so it's not ins it's not in
the It's not mixing ideally.
Oh, it's so it's just a coating on the outside, kind of like a
And you're blowing it on the inside.
Like a lubricant that it is, and it's it's it's protecting it.
It's thin enough.
It's cold enough.
But when it comes out on the outside, you don't see the flame.
You see the blower.
Because it's so thick.
It's optically thick because you wanted it to do that to protect the material.
Now now where do you get that from?
Walmart.
Yeah.
So remember I told you about that, turbo pump and the gas generator where it's a miniature rocket engine?
Yep.
Well, one of the problems with that, if you think about it, is if you burn your propellant at the same super hot ratio that you've got inside the tank will melt anything, then you would actually melt your turbine.
Right?
Yes.
Yep.
So instead, you draw you burn that fuel rich.
You have about 10 times the amount of fuel compared to oxygen.
And that means the combustion temperature is lower because you've got less energy and more material to heat.
So that means your turbine can survive that environment.
Now that exhaust gas is very thick, black, sooty, and they take that, and that's how they cool the final section of the engine.
So this is done on the f one engine on the, Saturn 5.
It's also done on the 2nd stage engine on the Falcon 9, the Merlin engine, on this only on the 2nd stage where they blow this around it to help protect the very long extra nozzle.
So that's film cooling.
That's like another engineering decision that can help improve your rocket design.
And I don't know if you plan on going over this later on.
These are
how I could build plans.
No.
Yeah.
These are how this is how we're doing it today.
In your opinion, this and I know this is just opinion.
Did we could we have did we make decisions about engines that I'm gonna use these words.
It's not exactly, I will explain in a minute, come back to haunt us, that we missed opportunities.
And let me share with you your reason why I'm asking.
Is in 9 before 1900, the most ubiquitous, the most prevalent, most used car was an electric vehicle.
In the early 1900, the combustion engine came about, and the men and it was known so as, from from sociology, that the men really enjoyed the loud sound, the power, the and the influence of it, and they veered toward this more powerful device as a as a car.
And they gave their women the electric car.
And the combustion engine became the number one most prominent v vehicle partially because of the psychology of men.
So my question is when looking through the past, because we're looking to the future, is there something in your opinion that we missed or could have taken on and done it better?
Is that a good question, Harrison?
There's a
lot of questions.
There's a lot of things that in retrospect, have shaped the way that our our rocket launch systems have developed.
The the yeah.
They did sort of force us into certain, ways of thinking.
And Yep.
And I'm gonna say actually that one of the sort of more important, divides okay.
How how am I gonna put this?
In the US and the Soviet Union, both rocket designed the both groups went in different directions.
And after the cold war, we sort of came back together with different takes on how booster engines should be designed on rockets.
And what we see out of SpaceX and Vulcan, you know, there's ULA and the the, you know, forthcoming engines actually takes a lot more from Soviet designs than US designs in many ways.
So the the US was really interested in going to the moon Mhmm.
Because that's what, Kennedy said.
And so the US really focused on hydrogen technology.
Hydrogen is problematic for all sorts of reasons.
It's this very extremely cryogenic gas, liquid gas, that has to be cooled way below the temperature of liquid oxygen.
It is very low density.
In a gas form, it just the the atoms are so tiny they will fit between the spaces of your metal lattice and you will get metal and brittle.
It'll leak out through containers that shouldn't have leaks in them.
But US spent its time and it solved all those problems because it wanted to have the most efficient rocket engines.
Mhmm.
But that wasn't necessarily the best way to build a booster rocket engine.
In the Soviet Union, Korolyev was really interested in sticking with kerosene and liquid oxygen.
They didn't have the money to spend to to actually figure out hydrogen.
Instead, they looked at oxidizer rich staged combustion.
This is again, we're gonna have come back to a little bit of rocket science.
Mhmm.
But anyway, this is rocket Wait.
Wait.
Rocket engineering?
Rocket engineering.
Yes.
Okay.
I just so I got lost because we don't have rocket science.
We have rocket engineering.
So the so the so the Soviet developed engines ultimately were the ones that were came back to the US to power the Atlas 5 and the Antares rocket.
Now what what did the Soviets do that were different that made them really good for first stage engines?
So remember how I described this miniature rocket engine, the gas generator, and how we use it with film cooling on the f one?
But on a lot of other rockets, this thick exhaust from the gas generator is just dumped overboard and it doesn't provide any thrust.
In the Soviet Union, they were really interested in figuring out how to take the exhaust from the gas generator and feed that into the main combustion chamber so that they could then burn it and get more thrust.
Right?
So they would have more efficient engines.
Mhmm.
Yep.
Now the problem with that is remember how we used a fuel rich combustion to lower the temperature so that the turbine blades wouldn't be destroyed.
Yeah.
If you do that and then try to feed that into the combustion chamber, the pressures involved are so high that all that soot starts, polymerizing.
You start to form this gunk.
It's called this is a coking problem is what they say, and it gums up all your systems.
So you can't do fuel rich and feed that into your combustion chamber.
Mhmm.
Understood.
So instead, how do you reduce the temperature?
Well, they go the other way.
They made it oxidizer rich.
And if you have an oxidizer or oxygen rich flame, that is a really hostile chemical environment.
Have you ever seen an oxyacetylene torte cutting through steel?
Yeah.
I've actually used one.
Yeah.
I mean, you understand that it's it's not the heat.
It's the oxygen that is just burning that steel.
Mhmm.
So now Soviet Unions, they spent the time to develop the metallurgy, to come up with materials that could handle this hot, oxidizer rich environment.
The US didn't look at it.
And if you ask their engineers, they didn't think it was possible.
Right?
They didn't think there was a way to make this work.
But Soviet Union, they developed it, and instead, their, engines which are running kerosene and liquid oxygen got much more performance, much more thrust and efficiency.
So we talk about efficiency in terms of specific impulse.
I should have probably mentioned that before now.
No.
It's okay.
Specific impulse is, essentially the velocity of the exhaust.
Right?
That's one way of saying.
The other way to think about it is if you've got a rocket engine that, say, generates 1 ton of thrust, the specific impulse tells you how long it can generate 1 ton of thrust for 1 ton of propellant.
So specific impulse is a engineering term?
Yeah.
It's a measurement in seconds.
Always in seconds.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's very convenient if you work in metric and or imperial because you just multiply it by the acceleration of gravity, which can be either feet per second or meter per second.
And whether you're imperial or standard or metric, everybody agrees on specific impulse because it's measured in seconds.
Yep.
Most rocket engines have thrust of about 300 to maybe as high as 340 or whatever.
So these are the ones that are burning kerosene and liquid oxygen.
Hydrogen is much more efficient.
Remember how I said the US was really interested in hydrogen?
That's because those can be up around 400, 500 even seconds.
So these are significantly more efficient per unit mass of propellant.
So, anyway, the Soviet engine design that used this closed loop for the exhaust going into the main combustion chamber, we call this stage combustion or closed cycle, they got about 10% better specific impulse than the American designed open, open loop gas generators.
And that's why after the Cold War, when the US starts to look at technology sharing, this was one of the things that came back to the US.
And for the last, 20 years, the US Atlas 5 Rocket has an Atlas 4 3 were using these engines from the Soviet Union.
Originally, the Soviet Union from Russia.
And right now, we're we have an order for, like, 24, and then we're done?
Yeah.
I think there's 20 20.
Left.
Something like that.
And they're all spoken for.
So the Atlas 5, this icon that started out with the Atlas missile is has a limited lifespan on it.
Now we know how long it's gonna fly, and and we know that, like, 6 or 7 of those launches are assigned to Boeing for their Starliner.
We know that there's 11 of them assigned to Amazon for Kuiper.
You know, we can actually tick off what they're all gonna do now.
The
the the reason I I I'm asked the question is, and I I believe you'd see some of our work, we are trying to or our directive is we're going to establish this box with a roof and a door on the moon.
We've designed the phases.
We've got all sorts of things I'll share with you at another time, in terms of what we're building.
And one of the challenges is how do we make sure we create this Mearth ecosystem and the consistency of deployment of materials supplies to the moon and back.
And so I'm asking the question to say, what is tomorrow bringing that would be in terms of engines or rockets that you might be saying we could have, should have, might have done Yeah.
To get Well, I get I get
more points on that for sure.
Go ahead.
I'm I'm I'm all Excellent.
I'm all ears.
Okay.
You can keep me
on track or not.
No.
No.
No.
This is this is, this is amazing because in the almost 50 interviews we've done, we've never dealt into this area.
And the one reason that I, honestly, I wanted you on the program is I listened to you describe things in just maybe I saw 10 minutes of you of some clip, and I really like the simplicity of the narrative.
And it wasn't about the rocket science or the rocket engineering.
It was about unders the individual understanding what was happening so that they could rethink what they know about space and the work that's being done.
Well, I'm I'm hoping this is gonna be useful to you.
No.
It's already everything so far, so keep on going.
So, anyway, yeah, the so, anyway, this, this closed cycle stage combustion, this is what everyone's moving to.
Right?
The the new Vulcan rocket that ULA is building is gonna use, the BE 4 engine, which uses staged combustion.
It uses methane instead of, you know, kerosene.
And, you know, talking about this decision that had far reaching consequences was the decision early on for the US to switch to using r p 1, kerosene as a propellant.
Right?
That was largely chosen because they thought that it was too much trouble to have 2 cryogenic propellants on a single vehicle.
Turns out there's many advantages to using methane and liquid oxygen both being cryogenic, and methane is where everybody is evolving their rockets towards.
The SpaceX are building out Starship.
They're gonna use what's called a they're using lithium and liquid oxygen as well.
And their engine is the Raptor, which uses a full flow stage combustion cycle.
We we don't need to go into it, but it has twice as many pumps and turbines because it allows them to run them at lower temperatures and, therefore, perhaps have them last longer.
Mhmm.
So where was it?
Oh, yeah.
And so another another interesting decision that sort of so for reusability, there's this everybody talks about, oh, reusability in rockets.
It's such a new cool thing.
Right?
And and you know it is.
It's great that it's finally worked, but people have been trying to design reusable rockets going back to the fifties.
Right?
If you look at von Braun's early visions of space flight with the conical rockets and tons of engine, those were all supposed to be recovered.
Of
course, he was interested in building the engines.
He hadn't quite figured out the mechanics, the engineering required to land these huge stages.
The Redstone Rocket, which carried, Alan Shepard into space.
Right?
That was originally designed with a space for parachutes inside there.
There was nothing in there because by the time they flew, they realized the parachutes just wouldn't be able to land a rocket like this.
Yep.
SpaceX, they even built their early falcons with parachutes and were unable you know, the parachute just tore off and and, they ended up having to land them on the rockets.
Now when SpaceX had come onto the market, they their obviously, their Falcon 1 proved that they could do it, and then they came up with the Falcon 9, which NASA came along with where it was interested in supporting.
They had 9 engines.
And at the time, there were a lot of, you know, well meaning individuals in rocket industry who said that having 9 engines was just a huge gamble.
It shouldn't be done.
Why don't you build yourself a proper sized rocket engine?
So through a lot of rocket development for the last, 50, 60 years, the evolution has been towards fewer engines.
But because having one engine fail in the 19 sixties, typically, it was a very explosive failure that would take out neighboring engines.
So having multiple engines just increases your chance of failure.
But in the intervening years, the engines got much smarter.
They had more onboard technology.
They get they get better at nondestructive testing, and so that became less of a gamble.
So SpaceX didn't really necessarily think this way at the time.
It just had one engine and it could only afford to develop that one engine.
Right?
They couldn't afford to spend a lot of time building something bigger.
Mhmm.
So they put 9 of them on a rocket, and that proved to be an exceptionally good decision, although they may not have realized it when they first did it because it allowed them to land the rockets on just one engine.
Now one of the things I've talked about is how you're throwing this propellant into this combustion chamber to get high pressures, and it has to be high enough pressure that you create this choke flow condition so that the nozzle can amplify your rocket thrust.
Right?
Yep.
And this means there's a minimum amount of thrust that you can put into that engine before you lose that condition, and then it just starts it just starts, like, misfiring.
That's one way to put it.
Yep.
So if you have a really big engine, it's very hard to make it throttle down.
Most rocket engines when they were first, you know, going back, they they've ran at one performance.
They wouldn't throttle.
And, you know, the special engines could throttle down to, like, 70% or they are about it's actually they could throttle up to a 111% in some situations.
But
it's an it's an interesting concept if you think about it.
You can only go to a 100%.
So to have a 111% means that that is the 100%.
Yes.
So what?
They operated at 11% lower, not exactly 11 because it's not the the equation doesn't work out as 11, but they actually operated it lower.
But it's a 110 a 111 is the 100%.
Yes.
When they were designing the space shuttle, they had certain specifications and requirements that specified what a 100% should be.
Ah.
And in the end, the engine was able to push past that, and that helped because having more thrust early on helps you in all sorts of ways.
Yeah.
But you understand the concept.
I totally understand the concept.
When people say that, well, the person gave a 120%.
How?
Yeah.
But they were misspec their specification was incorrect.
Right.
How their specification.
But in anything in life, the person gave 200 percent.
How?
They increased themselves to the limit.
You can't, but that's still a 100%.
That is the end.
So you can't It's specifications versus reality.
Right.
So no one can ever give 200%.
No one can give a 1000%.
You can't give a 111 percent because that is the 100%.
So I'm laughing as you're saying.
So, yes, miss okay.
So So, anyway, point is
you throttling down is extraordinarily hard.
And so SpaceX, by sort of being forced to use 9 engines because that's what they had the money for,
They ended up with
a rocket that could throttle down to 1 eighth of its thrust.
Because you have now control over 4 9 different variables simultaneously, and you can turn them on at different levels, whatever that variable is within it.
But just by taking off an engine, you have got 1 you've got 8.
You don't have a 100 you don't have your 100% of 9.
So, yeah, they they ended up creating options.
This is probably the way I would say it.
Yeah.
They created options.
And by doing that, that meant that they actually had a rocket that could, throttle or produce reduce its thrust low enough that they could land it on the rocket flame.
Mhmm.
And that would that sort of it's it's their own impetus.
I don't think it was intentional, but it became it became a key part of what makes SpaceX, Falcon 9 a very special rocket.
So I would probably, if I was analyzing the situation, is that the individuals who are involved in rocket design had become so indoctrinated with a certain way of building.
Always the fear, always making it bigger, that they without even knowing it, that when someone gave an idea, they'd say, no.
No.
No.
We have to make sure we're safe, but they weren't incorporating the fact that the advancements in all of the engineering had enabled safer engines.
Therefore, you could create smaller, and they're still large, but smaller engines and multiples of them and not have the same damage that would have possibly occurred in 1960, 77 or 985.
So the variable was accidental, and it was the the analogy that I'll often use is if if we always proceeded in the same way and you looked at car design, in the 19 fifties, they put on fins.
Maybe it was not
It's marketing.
Yeah.
It was mark but it was also that these fins look at one point, if you consider that the trajectory was fins were getting bigger and bigger, then today they would be 7 meters high.
But in the reality, when someone looked at it one day and said, why do we have those fins?
And they said because fins sell.
No.
No.
No.
Let's take off the fin.
And they went into a different a different trajectory.
So what you're saying here is this was an ax possibly an accidental financial decision, a whatever forces caused that decision to be made, and it's ended up being hugely beneficial.
Yeah.
It's it's ended up being key to their design.
And nowadays, you know, you'll see Falcon 9 launches with 27 Merlin engines simultaneously firing flawlessly.
Yep.
So we we've reached I mean, there's it's very there's very rare to see an engine failure on the first stage on a Falcon.
And we've I think we've seen one during ascent, and we've seen a couple during descent, you know, as they've pushed the limits and figured out where where, you know, where their limits are on landing and reuse.
Okay.
So, and, of course, now, of course, they're looking at Starship.
They're building 1 engine design, the Raptor.
I mean, there's a few variants of the Raptor, but they're talking about 30 engines on the first stage of that thing.
And people are like, oh my god.
30 engines.
Well, SpaceX are flying with 27 engines on the Falcon Heavy, so it's not a big leap.
Right?
But the the 30 engines is about control.
It's not about 30 engines.
So I think when individuals hear it, they're like, that's massive.
Instead of saying, no.
It's a better control situation.
And we Yeah.
We we know that they don't fail.
We're pretty confident we're not gonna have an explosion with them.
So, therefore, the 30 engines gives us, variations of possibilities we couldn't have had otherwise.
Well, the other thing that having many small engines has that's worked for SpaceX is that it it's helped them become a production line.
You know, building 1, if anything, is much, much more expensive than building a 1,000.
Right?
Although you know what I mean?
It's like the unit cost goes down as you increase volume.
And so having to build 9 engines for every every rocket wasn't such a hit in the end.
Yep.
So how do you, how much does a Raptor engine or how much do you know is there a cost that they've put out?
There's there's wow.
Well, I mean, I think we're talking I think Elon talked about getting the cost down to 200,000, but that's not where they are now.
Well, I think that's what I heard.
If they can get the cost down to $200,000 per unit, that's their target.
I think they're more likely very it's a very expensive program right now.
They put a lot of effort into making the raptor the bestest of the best in all sorts of ways.
Like, they they made a point of running it at higher temperatures and pressures than or higher chamber pressure than the existing record holder.
Just more or less on a dare, I think.
But that sort of that's an interesting side of SpaceX is that they have been very willing to push the limits just even for, you know, swagger.
Mhmm.
Right?
For showing off.
But also just being interested to try new things, and that actually, I guess, leads into my almost my final point.
Although, I didn't get into any points about how some very unscientific changes can lead to failures that
Do you want to?
I don't know.
Can can I just stop for a second and Sure.
Talk about how, Russia is hasn't quite been as glorious as it has been as, in their past.
Obviously, they once had an amazing world beating space program.
In recent years, they've not really been living up to that, which is a shame for many, many reasons.
But for the this is just gonna be my one example of how really dumb stuff can ruin a perfectly high-tech piece of amazing hardware.
That is there was a Proton launch, which, Proton is a Russian rocket, and it was their heavy lift vehicle.
It took off, and it started to wobble back and forth and eventually flipped upside down and crashed into the the ground.
It's one of the most famous rocket failures.
If you look at it on YouTube, it's there.
And the proton is full of the most horribly toxic rocket propellant.
It uses hydrazine and oh, sorry.
It uses unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine and dinitrogen tetroxide, and both of those are horribly toxic carcinogenic explosive corrosive propellants.
But, anyway, why did this thing go out of control?
It's because, somebody assembling the rocket put in one of the, inertial motion sensors, the IMUs.
Mhmm.
Inertial measurement units upside down.
Right?
So it's basically it thought it was upside down.
And now you might think that, well, how did that happen?
Surely, they would design these things to put be put in only in one direction because the whole rocket relies on this.
Yeah.
They did.
They had special plates that had keyed bumps in it so that they would lock into place in only one orientation.
But, of course, if you try to make something idiot proof, then nature will create a better idiot.
And and they know that it was put in upside down.
They found it, and they found that it had been hammered into place to secure it.
Yeah.
There were marks on it.
So, like, this is the extent to which you're still dealing with everyday random luck.
And there's other examples where there was a an Arianon Did
you bring that up because you felt that that was a better technology, the, proton?
No.
I I I just I didn't necessarily bring it up.
I just wanted to provide some context for dumb failures.
Oh, okay.
Because they're also funny stories.
But my the reason I ask is when you think of what they had built, that proton launch, the broken was it did it have better design in it because of its failure?
No.
It's cause other cascading, cascading impact that people didn't do something because of it.
I mean, Proton has essentially ceased to be a commercially viable launch vehicle now.
Okay.
Because it was very it was expensive.
Russia used to be the place to go just to launch stuff because they were the cheapest, game in town.
Mhmm.
And now that they don't have Proton, it's it's less of, they've got less options.
They're trying to bring Angora online.
Not sure when that's gonna happen.
And Soyuz is a fine launch vehicle, but it has very limited mass limits and doesn't reach all the orbits it needs to.
That's why they they run Soyuz with the European Space Agent sorry, Arianne Space out of Kuru in Brazil.
It that's that was I was just trying to tell someone that's a really dumb failure.
No.
No.
It's it's great.
I I'm I'm loving hearing it.
And one of our team members who, Andreas Bergweiler, who's been working with us on designing the entire four phases of the moon hut.
He has run an organization you might it's called Space Affairs.
You might have seen the name.
And he has a, Facebook and a YouTube channel also, and he is absolutely an amazing person.
And he has done over 3,000, of the zero gravity flights.
Wow.
And he is he works and does a lot has done a lot with Russia.
So, my background, my grandfather was Russian Belarusian.
So they're humans on Earth trying to accomplish something, and we have our mega challenges we talk about.
So I'd like to hear whatever comes to mind that you think is valuable to know because it helps it helps to connect the world.
It helps helps us, me, to be able to have a dialogue with somebody if I know what worked and what didn't work.
And we can have civil conversations to move project Moon Hut forward.
So thank you.
I do appreciate every one of these stories.
So, yeah, I mean, I guess, and and you're going forward, trying to come back to, you know, so SpaceX, on the other hand, some of those failures that they've had have been really hard to figure out.
And and the classic one is there was a rocket with the AMOS 6 satellite, which exploded on the pad when they were doing a, like, a static fire.
They were fueling it up, and then it just exploded.
And there weren't any camera coverage on it.
It was one person that was a Rocket fan that just happened to have a camera.
He was expecting to see a static fire.
Instead, he saw one of the most, shared rocket explosions ever.
Really?
Yeah.
And so So he so
he had a camera.
He was taking a picture that ended up being the answer.
Well, it didn't it wasn't the answer, but it was one of the most shared pieces of footage I've ever seen of a rocket.
Right?
It is and the other one, I think, that's most shared explosion is the Antares, which is, another story about that.
But so the AMOS 6 failure is a fine example of how SpaceX pushes the limits and somehow sometimes does stuff that is a learning experience, let's say, because this was very much a learning experience.
SpaceX with the Falcon 9, they wanted to get more performance from the rocket.
And the very first Falcon 9 was slightly shorter.
And so the next iteration, they stretched the tanks to make it longer.
Right?
So you could put more fuel on board.
Yep.
And they've improved the engines over time.
The Falcon 9 has been a slow evolution.
Right?
Everyone, they've changed it slightly here and there to make it better.
NASA has tried to help them freeze the design into a state that is good for the human launch, but SpaceX still has this reputation for, you know, treating flights as potential experiments when possible so that they can advance their design.
And and that is, in my opinion, it is what's necessary to move the new innovations coming out of these experimentation.
Some of them are not massive, but they're enough to make a difference in the long term.
Yeah.
So one of the, you know, one of the things that SpaceX did was well, first of all, they have switched to using, composite overwrapped pressure vessels.
This so when you Say
it again.
It's composite or composite?
C o p v.
That's to look that up.
Yep.
Right?
Yeah.
I know what it is.
Okay.
So they, so when you've got a a rocket propellant tank, as the fuel and the drains out of it, then it leaves a space at the top, and you need to fill that space in with pressurized gas.
Otherwise, you'll get a vacuum and your fuel will stop slowing.
Right.
Yep.
So you fill that in with helium typically, and you store that helium in pressure tanks.
And to maximize the performance, they decided to put the pressure vessels into the liquid oxygen tank, like, surrounded by liquid oxygen.
So that would lower the temperature
Mhmm.
Of the helium because helium, when you squeeze it down, you know, you get better performance if you can keep it at a lower temperature.
You can put more helium in your tanks.
You can use less tanks.
Therefore, you can have, yeah, more payload.
Yes.
And and NASA, there were people that were not, were a little skeptical of this because you're putting they've never tried it before.
Right?
Another thing that SpaceX did later on was they switched to using densified propellants.
That means that they instead of having they basically cool the liquid oxygen to even lower temperatures.
And when you cool something, it shrinks down.
So by cooling it to near to its freezing point, you get more propellant in the same tank.
Therefore, you can get more performance out of your rocket.
SpaceX is the only company using densified propellants.
Everybody uses propellant that is close to its boiling point.
But it seems it seems like a smart idea.
It seems like a smart idea, but they it came back to bite them in the ass for AMOS 6.
Because what had happened was when they loaded this very cold liquid helium into these pressure vessels inside the oxygen tank, the propellant was actually colder than the freezing point, sorry.
The helium was colder than the freezing point of the oxygen.
Now composite overwrap pressure vessels, the way they're designed is you've got a very thin pressure vessel and then you wrap that in carbon fiber.
So you get the really good tensile strength of the carbon fiber, the really good strength to mass ratio, and you get this impervious liner that just has to stop the gas from leaking through.
That gets you a better, you know, lighter tank than you would otherwise have.
But that means that the liquid oxygen flow between the gaps in those fibers, the carbon fiber, and touch that inner tank.
So when they filled this tank with the very cold liquid helium, it caused the oxygen to freeze into a solid in amongst those carbon fibers.
And when the pressure increased inside that tank, suddenly the tank was pushing out against this these crystals or these pieces of of solid oxygen against carbon fibers, and that was creating points where there was more stress.
And that one of those points, a carbon fiber broke, and the energy of that carbon fiber breaking, it created a tiny spark in an environment where you've got carbon and solid oxygen ice, and it just exploded.
Right?
This is something they hadn't figured on.
They thought that they were gonna get a bit more efficient loading process by loading liquid helium into their helium tanks and then letting it expand.
No.
They they they shouldn't have done that.
Right?
That was the thing that they figured out was wrong.
But it caused an explosion in the tank, ruptured it, caused the whole rocket to explode.
And it's one of the coolest failures ever.
I've I've heard that, like, they, they tested this at, like, the McGregor test range.
They put a a pressure vessel inside liquid oxygen and then shot it with a gun to see what would happen, and the whole thing exploded.
Like, apparently, they had a very long line of volunteers to shoot that gun.
Yeah.
Of course they did.
They didn't think anything would happen initially.
But, yeah, they in the end, they solved this problem, and they still use dense pipe propellant.
They still have their, tanks inside the oxygen tank, but they solved that problem because of that.
And this Someone had decided to make it to to try something, and that that's what needs to progress any type of research into developing new forms of transportation.
And so SpaceX, of course, they've been doing this the whole time, and Starship is now the most visual example of SpaceX working the way SpaceX does.
Now SpaceX is run by Elon Musk who comes from Silicon Valley.
Right?
He that's where he really got his, you know, tech start in tech.
And I've I've I'm here as well.
Right?
We are a bunch of hackers.
We do have meetings where we come up with design docs and specifications, but frequently, we will just build something very quickly, test it, see how it breaks, improve it, and use that to make it work.
So much of the fabric of what has made Silicon Valley comes from people willing to build something very quickly in software and test it, right, and suffer the consequences.
And SpaceX has sort of taken that, and they're doing it with 100 meter tall pieces of stainless steel rocket hardware.
Yeah.
Because they've got the capital to be able to to They're they're they're building they're building shells.
And I think the way I've kind of imagined it is they are building a shell of what they plan on using to be able to experiment with it at rapid speed.
So it's rapid iteration.
They try it.
It doesn't destroy everything.
It's not as expensive.
They see what happens.
They take the data, and then they re reorient themselves to a new reality of, for example, densified propellants.
And they're they're able to say, oh, that's why it failed.
Now we can change it.
We can fix this.
We don't use this carbon fiber.
We use a double layer of carbon fiber, or we use another nanotechnology that will enable that coating to not be able to make that thing happen.
And that is that is rapid innovation, and it comes from a dis it comes from decision making, leadership saying, hey.
Go out there.
Try it.
Yeah.
We can handle the failure.
It requires, an organization that is comfortable with having failure.
And that wasn't necessarily the case in the early American space program.
For a start, they were seeing Russia doing all these launches.
And they were exploding on the pads, and you were getting headlines like Kaputnik.
Right?
Yep.
So aerospace is very risk averse.
And if you look at the the SLS is what, the US is sort of trying to build as its big rocket for NASA's deep space missions.
And they have been working from specifications.
They've been doing aerospace style design.
So SpaceX went and welded their big tank together out of stainless steel using a bunch of people that used to build water tanks.
Mhmm.
The SLS main tank was designed and spec by aerospace engineers.
They built test models.
They did simulations.
They eventually took all that and then passed it on to a group that then figured out how to actually build this tank, build a machine to build.
So they built this massive welding machine that's the size of a building that can take the tank sections and weld them together and make sure that it uses, like, perfect welds all the way up.
They they only started doing this, like, 10 years or whatever, 8 years into their design.
So they spent all this time designing it before they could even build the machine to build it.
Mhmm.
Yep.
And even then, they still discovered a problem with the welds afterwards.
I've had to go back and redesign the thing, whereas SpaceX is, of course, building it.
Now I'm gonna say if you don't want your rocket to explode the first time you fly it, doing all the the testing and whatever s that you're seeing with SLS, fantastic.
But if you're willing to burn things and make mistakes and accept those mistakes, then there's absolutely an argument that what they're doing is perhaps a better way to do it.
Well, I would argue it's not atypical of when you do experimentation in a lab on a small scale.
You are willing to try to do multiple experiments to see what happens.
And because of the cost variance as well as the, let's call it the, political clout or the the the societal view of spending money from a government agency, what you're doing is there's alternative pressures.
And those alternative pressures are, you must do it.
You must do it right instead of let's going back instead of going back to the 1900, the 19 twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, is instead of saying, let's figure this out.
Let's do this as fast as possible.
Let's try a series of, of activities to make them work and, come up with getting to the moon within, by 1969.
They were willing to do things that they wouldn't do today.
Yeah.
You know, the back then, they also didn't have as many options.
The f one engine, which I've talked about a lot in this already, to build those, one of the problems they had was they had combustion instability inside that combustion chamber.
Right?
Mhmm.
They would set up these oscillations, and they didn't know what caused them, but the oscillations would frequently destroy the engines.
And they didn't know what was causing them.
So what did they do was they redesigned their injector plate.
They built a new engine.
They would try it.
It would explode.
They put, like, an explosive charge in there to try and set up the oscillations in a way and see if their baffles would stop it.
It blew up the engine.
They they blew up tons of engines.
We don't see any of this because it was all in test ranges, but that was what you had to do back then.
Nowadays But you have to do model it.
You but in essence, whether it be modeling or not, you still have to do it.
And
that still had to move it out to do it ultimately to prove that it worked.
It's it's rapid innovation concepts.
There's many of them out there of moving yourselves forward.
And I think as I'm I think on a global scale, we have because of the political nature of and the fact that many of these are agencies involved, you agencies involved in decision making, there is a fear of the retribution of either a cost or an accident or something else that the humankind spirit in many regards does not have that same positioning that they did 50 years ago.
Yeah.
And and, you know, another thing that that helps is it's a lot easier to do things autonomously now than it used to be.
So Yeah.
Doing big experiments that could result in explosions, less less of a problem these days.
I mean, you know, the space shuttle when it first flew, they had to know that that would work because they it couldn't fly without people on board.
Right.
And it had a it had a challenge of human life in it.
Yeah.
So, let me ask you a different question.
I and I'm not looking at the list.
I'd you're you're a very bright guy, and you've you've been able to figure out on your own and through resources.
You've been able to figure out a lot.
If you were I I know I've gotta believe you're having conversations outside of the normal on air.
And in those conversations, you're saying we should be doing, we should not be doing, and and and not just the SpaceX, but I'm I'm asking you, Scott.
When you sit down and you say, I wanna get us to here, and why aren't we doing what are you saying, because in private?
I'm not that's not the word, but what are you saying when you're having that private dialogue with somebody?
What are you thinking about?
Boy, I mean, look.
That that's actually I I I've certainly a lot of criticism for how, the US has managed its space program in recent years, but that's, Yeah.
That that's that's sort of neither of you nor of the
Right.
That's a criticism, and we can all I'm asking I'm seriously asking because that's what project Moon has about is I'm seriously asking, what could we do?
What are you sitting saying?
Oh my god.
If people just understood this or if if this was done this way and I've gotta believe there are some nights you go to bed and say, oh my god.
This is so in front of me.
You might not have the platform.
You might not have the capital.
You might not have the time to do it, but I've gotta believe you put together 2 +2 to make 8 here, there, and everywhere.
You see the thing that I actually talk about and it isn't about going from here to there.
It's it's just about making sure that here is fine.
I'm the one thing I talk about a lot is natural hazards and the asteroid hazard and and and how we are so close to actually being able to solve these things, you know, because this is the the threat of an asteroid hitting the Earth is not 0.
Yep.
But, that's sort of been that's sort of my thing.
And that that came from me way before I was talking about rocket science on the Internet.
That, back, you know, 20 years ago, I I looked at the solar system and I realized that there was a non zero chance that a chunk of rock could come out of nowhere and seriously threaten civilization or at least threaten large numbers of people.
And we had come as humanity to this juncture where we actually understood this threat, and we also, with our 8 brains, had conceived ways to avert this threat.
So this was a unique moment in human history where we where we could understand a potentially existential threat and also can see how to change humanity's destiny on that front.
And I believe that we should be looking, you know, making sure that that just doesn't happen.
Now I don't think we should be putting huge amounts of resources into it, but I do think that it would be the greatest failure of humanity if we let even one thing happen despite its awareness.
Blank slate in front of you.
Let's go back to rapid innovation.
What would you do?
I think we this is what I've been arguing.
So I've actually what do I think should I think we do?
We're doing it now.
Okay.
So what what what is that?
What is it?
What are the 5 steps?
10 steps that we have to be doing?
We've we've we've got organizations that are now making a bunch developing the instruments and deploying the instruments to discover the objects.
We have organizations like, the asteroid institute that are now cataloging these and and also doing the necessarily necessary groundwork to actually build a 4 dimensional map of these resources of these asteroids, which are not only threats, but potentially resources.
You wanna talk about going to space and the age of infinite.
Asteroids are the next step after the moon.
In fact, asteroids may be better than the moon for many things because we know that asteroids contain a lot of heavy materials which are locked in the Earth's core.
Mhmm.
We also, in terms of changing the environment, changing the solar system to make the Earth potentially safer.
We have a mission going up in November.
DART, the double asteroid redirect test.
It's gonna launch on a Falcon 9 out of Vandenberg, and it's gonna fly into an asteroid and change its orbit in a measurable way.
And we're gonna show that we do have the ability to adjust the solar system, you know, bend it to our will, so to speak.
And this is actually more this is almost more exciting to me than moon the moon.
The moon is great because it's there.
It's a really solid environment.
It has gravity.
It has a lot of easily accessible minerals in certain form you know, forms.
Asteroids come and go.
Not all of them are easily accessible, but they do have resources that you will never find on the moon.
And that's just because of the way they're the origin they are.
So so I I we you and I have not spoken a lot about project Moon Hunt and what we're doing, but the the orientation of what we're doing has nothing to do with being on the moon.
I'm not a moon person.
Yeah.
I'm not a I'm not a Mars person.
I'm not a space person.
What I saw is that we have these mega challenges we call them on Earth.
There's 6 of them.
They supersede the 17 SDGs, which are un unachievable targets, the sustainable development goals.
It's that we have some existential threats on this planet, climate change, mass extinction.
Yep.
Ecosystem collapses, displacement, social, physical, political, economic, unrest, social, political, economic, climate, whatever, then we also have this thing called explosive impact.
And it's not an impact like a fiery ball.
It is that we overfish our oceans.
Yeah.
And there are 800,000 Chinese shipping vessels alone.
Not that they're bad.
They're trying to feed their their society.
But we do things such as deforestation, and they're all interconnected.
And if we get 50 degrees Celsius in the Middle East or 60 in the next 30 to 40 years, It's not just the Middle East that goes across the top of Africa.
It goes through to Mexico and down into Central America, all the way up to Texas and Arizona.
It goes all the way around to Hong Kong and Indonesia and Bangladesh and India.
All of the the world will change.
And if we get too far down that pipeline, we're in trouble.
So the challenge in our case in project MoonHub is, how do you change the narrative?
How do you how do you explain to people that the solutions we're working on, by and large, are not working?
We are not improving climate change.
We are not extinction is happening.
United Nations says 200 to 250 species a day go extinct.
Based upon the numbers, we could have a trillion species on earth.
We don't know.
And some people say it's 8.7, so we use 50,000,000 as a number.
But if we're losing major species, if we are poisoning our oceans, plastic is a small fraction of it.
It's solid waste runoff, agricultural runoff, pesticide pesticides, radioactive materials going into the oceans.
How do you solve this?
And you have to get people to rethink their universe, their world.
And in our case, project Moon Hut is not about 50,000 people on the moon.
We will have 8 in our first phase.
We'll have 90 in our second.
We have 578 in our third, and we will have 1644 in our 4th phase.
And it will take up to 40 years.
And in that dynamic, we will change the perception of how people think, what they see as the world, what are options and opportunities.
And so, yes, asteroids are important.
The challenge is I can't I personally don't know.
Maybe you know.
How do you get someone excited about asteroids?
Because it's more or less an economic opportunity to most people.
It is not a a world changing opportunity.
We need more of that.
Yeah.
Sure.
Put the money into it.
We have these challenges on Earth.
And it's, it's too big of a mind jump for too many people.
But let me ask you.
If you woke up this morning and there were 90 people living on the moon, 90 people, would your world be slightly different knowing that they're there and they're working and there's resources going back and forth?
I mean, me, I would be talking about that all the time.
That's Like, we had 3 people in orbit, and I was telling everybody.
4 people in civilians in orbit.
I was telling everybody, this is cool.
So so now imagine just imagine for one moment.
Our phase 1, when I the first day, I we were in Silicon Valley, I was, there's a long story towards on videos.
I was with Bruce Pittman in a restaurant called Scratch, and I was frustrated with NASA.
And let's just use NASA as a whole.
I don't know all the people NASA.
It was just the experience I had.
And he was listening all the challenges they had, and I said to him, I can solve that these challenges right now.
And he looked at me like, what what are you talking about?
And I said I pulled him close because I gave a reaction that I won't say you on the air.
And he looked at me and he's shocked, and I said, you want me to tell you how to get to the moon?
And I'm not a space person, but let me tell you.
And he said, sure.
Because he knew my background.
I solved big challenges around the world from in all different industries.
And I said the first thing we knew, it was a box with a roof and a door on the moon.
A box with a roof on the moon.
And he looked at me and I said proof of concept, the Roger Bannister of space.
It would mean that people would say it is now possible Roger Bannister broke the 4 minute mile immediately after other people did.
So with 8 people, 4 to 8 people on the moon going around, people will now the innovation for, let's call spaces a, is not an industry.
It is a geography.
But the industry between the moon and Earth would change.
Money capital markets would open up.
Insurance would open up.
School children would be learning different things just because we're there.
It's not gonna happen with robots.
It's not gonna happen with all scientific exploration and research.
It has to be humankind living on the moon.
And so I then went over 4 phases, and his reaction was this brought us to to you and I talking today.
He said no one in the world is talking this way.
He was responsible for public private partnerships around the world, and I said, that's how I would do it.
And I was at literally done.
I outlined the whole thing.
It took an hour and a half, how it worked.
And so when I hear you and and I am very impressed.
I'm unbelievably impressed.
I think you have a a knack for being able to describe complex ideas in a in a simplified form as well as to be able to understand it at a very high level.
So that's why I'm asking this question of you is we want we are going to build this.
We are doing it.
We have teams of people around the world working with us.
And I'm asking you what are seriously, what do you think we're missing?
I mean, what are you talking about in private?
Asteroids will solve one small piece.
What else is missing?
It was a long drawn out there thing, but hopefully hopefully, you've got a little bit of it.
Yeah.
No.
I I What are you what are we missing?
What are we missing, Scott?
You're you're you're bright.
You're watching.
You're hearing.
What what
are we miss it's it's very hard because I'll I'll honestly say, I don't think I've I've read enough to know to say that you haven't aren't missing things that are important.
I I brought up the asteroids because that's my sort of I see those, again, as a place that's closer than Mars.
Right?
But I'd also have many advantages.
So let let's let's be clear.
That's why, you know, back when SLS was first being pushed, it was they wanted to do the asteroid redirect mission where they would bring an asteroid into orbit near the moon
Mhmm.
And astronauts would go to that because the rocket was cut down in size and wouldn't be able to send astronauts to the surface of the moon.
I I I mean, look.
All of all of these plans, they need ways for for to be supported
Mhmm.
Financially.
And if you if you have popular support in some way, that helps.
But, ultimately, you know, you're still dealing with pushing money around to the right places.
So so so we called up the big four.
I don't know if you know the big four, the big four accounting firms.
They're KPMG, Deloitte, p Price Waterhouse, Coopers, and, And they don't deal with startups.
They just don't.
They're too small.
They can't afford it.
It's not their bailiwick.
They will do innovation games and and, innovation events, but that's not their bailiwick.
And so we sat down with them.
We told them what we're working on, and, amazingly, they had 6 people on each call.
They didn't people were fighting to be on the call because they watched our videos.
They saw what we're about, and all of them are in.
Well, 3 of them are in.
The 4th one will be coming any day.
We have accounting people.
Only 1 person out of the 20 somewhat people is a space person.
Everybody else is an account they're they're accountants.
They they do businesses and nonprofits and moving money and capital structures.
We have 2 law firms that have come on board already, actually a third.
Zhongliang Law, they have 2,000 attorneys, and, it's mulch.
And they're patent attorneys, so they're helping us to be able to look at the engineering and what is necessary.
We have a fine we have a capital markets guy out in New York.
We have people who look at this from the broader 3 60 perspective, and they are doing it for the intentionality of solving for tomorrow.
That's that's what we're doing.
So we're not looking for engineers, and we're not looking for space people to come in and tell us.
We're really trying to be pragmatically building this.
So the the serious question with someone like you as I'm listening is getting you involved is 1 and having you think about tomorrow in a way that you hadn't thought of before.
And and we will do this.
We we will.
It's not even a question.
We don't need a lot of publicity.
We don't need 500,000 followers on social media.
We don't need we need people who think like you do.
So that's what I'm asking.
What do you what am I what should I know about you that I don't know?
You told me your space things.
You told me about rocketry.
What about you?
Something else.
So I'll tell you well, I'll well, how about this?
I'll I'll tell you, you know, my other so the thing that that drives me, funnily enough, is, long term, I like to think about where humanity goes and how we get over each hurdle to our existence.
Mhmm.
And, obviously, going to space is one big part of that, but, you know, that only gets you so many 1,000,000, whatever years depending upon how you look at other events.
And, you know, I I like to think big.
I like to think about humanity moving forward through the universe, but equally, I'm trying to think about how how we get from a to b right now.
And and, ultimately, I'm I'm very much aware that somewhere out there, there there may be challenges that ultimately we can't solve, but I wanna keep solving the challenges as they come to make sure that we we stay out there.
And that's why I guess why I always have gravitated towards the asteroid side of things.
Mhmm.
But, yeah, I mean, you know, space travel is just, like, integral to making to the science fiction future I wanna live in.
Right?
What do you want to live in?
The science fiction future.
Right?
The one where we have spaceship.
I grew I grew
up Space travel.
I grew up.
In my whole lifetime, I was told that by the year 2000, we will have flying cars.
We will have jets and like experiences.
Office will be so different.
And I'm gonna tell you, I'm sitting.
I have my window open.
The entire time we've been on this call, do you know there's not been one flying car driving flying by?
Not what?
Have you seen a helicopter?
I have not even seen a helicopter.
Wow.
And and the helicopter by the way, is it
all technology?
People that that never really thought through the engineering.
But it but it was the promise.
It was the promise when we were growing up.
I'm 58.
I think I'm 58.
We were promised this by the year 2000.
We've had a lot of promises, and I tell people when you people are promising robotics in space that will do x, y, and zed, and I say, okay.
Let's look at our home.
I have a washing machine, a dryer, a dishwasher, a microwave, a refrigerator, a sump pump, a garage door opener, and a few other things.
Do you have a Roomba?
No.
Don't have a Roomba.
I sorry.
I have a wife who does that.
Do you
have an iPhone?
Yeah.
We have these things.
But in
reality, my my home my home is the same as it was when I grew up with some improved electronics.
Yeah.
You know, general purpose robotics are are not a thing.
So so Because the the the bespoke the specific, you know, purpose robotics, like, your washing machines, are much more practical.
Yeah.
They're much more.
So when I'm when we're talking and you were saying the science fiction world, I'm asking you as pragmatically as you could be, as as down to earth if using a phrase, what is the science fiction future to you?
It is the people flying into space.
More people being in space than we have right now.
It is not even being in space myself, but having that be a sort of accepted thing so that we're we're learning to push those limits.
We're learning
By when?
As soon as possible.
Right?
I I think it's great.
I'm actually I'm actually braiding ASAP.
Yeah.
I mean, look.
Have you looked at the flights this this has been the year where space tourism exploded.
Yes.
Right?
And we're we obviously had a couple of suborbital flights.
We've had inspiration for where we've got 2 more tourist flights, to the space station this year.
Right?
We've got I mean, one of them is technically a Roscosmos movie production flight, but they're sending civilians up to to do these things, and we're sending, Yusaka Maizawa flying up in December.
Acxiom will be flying their team up in February.
This is suddenly this has actually been a transformational moment this year.
Like, things the the everyday people going to space, even if they still need a lot of money to do it, is suddenly it feels like an it feels like something has changed.
Right?
I and I'm not sure exactly what the long term consequences are, whether this will be sustained, but I'm hoping that this actually then means that we're gonna see more space stations because now, actually, a need for destinations.
Like, Axiom would have loved to have been the 1st flight to go to space, but they had to go to the International Space Station.
Yep.
And that meant that they were at the behest of NASA's, you know, schedule.
Right.
And there's a huge schedule ahead of
Right.
That's one of the reasons why Boeing's having a hard time with Starliner is because they had to wait for a certain launch, and they were, I mean, I guess they were it was actually lucky they found these valve problems before the thing flew, but they're now even if they fix them, they're gonna have to find another slot in the space station schedule.
So the space station is
And I think I think I don't know.
Voyager along with, what's his name, who did our podcast with us.
Trying to Jeffrey Mamber has talked.
They they're looking to put manufacturing facilities up in space.
You've
called us Nanoracks.
Right?
Nanoracks.
Yes.
He did a great, great, great interview if you wanna hear some of his thoughts.
It was it was very candid, and some people have said they can't believe he talked about some of these things in the way that he did.
And so we also have what's the, the the there's one that built that's trying to build the inflatable floating.
The
The Voyager station?
The Not Voyager.
It's the other one.
Sierra.
Sierra.
Nevada Corporation.
Sierra Nevada Corporation.
They're they're trying to build and these are micro steps in solving our major challenges on Earth.
So that's why I was just pushing a little bit.
Sorry.
I'm trying to push to say, what do you see?
What's missing in being forecasting out, we need more, and we are working on more.
So I thought maybe I'd hear something from you that would just kinda like, oh, wow.
That's great.
So
you know, sometimes I have to think about things for a long time before I really feel that I can speak on it.
Okay.
I I I do I've gotta believe you're having some private conversations about things that you have thought about, and that's why I was pushing.
Sometimes we get them, sometimes we don't.
Any other last things that you think are that I should hear about to learn about so that we can do what we're doing well?
There's things that you should learn about.
Well, that's what this is.
I Right.
But people don't understand.
You and I went over this that the interview is not because we need to have a podcast, so we wanna get followers.
So we the number one reason I choose or we choose, but I, in this case, choose a podcast guest is because I feel I can learn from them.
That's the number one reason.
Number 2 is there's values for others.
Number 3, that you're part of our ecosystem.
I think I read to you the ten reasons.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
The number one reason is I can learn from you.
So is there something that if you'll never be on again, I've never had anybody on my podcast twice.
What else if you were to advise, what tell me I should know about, think about, what might you say?
Boy, I mean, you really need to be thinking about how since you're talking about the futures and and you you need to be looking at how AI is changing things.
Okay.
And I'd like because that's actually it it's moving a lot.
It's moving in all sorts of ways that you don't realize, and and I I I can can't even start on it with the time I have.
No.
I and I we I had a company.
We did artificial intelligence machine learning, predictive analytics, and network analysis.
I've seen it in the factory floors where I've worked in from, China, Japan, you you name it, around the world.
There and we even have within Project Moon Hut.
There's a narrative, artificial intelligence, machine plus machine learning, plus robotics, 3 d printing, sensor tech, and there's one other I can't even think of, and the convergence of all of them.
And what does that mean for the future?
Right.
Convergence.
That's where it's at.
And and at and while I say that, at the same time, I woke up in a bed with sheets.
I didn't use ray beams to clean myself.
I used water.
Would be silly.
Right?
I I went down hearing side of things.
I went down
I went down and had, turned on the microwave and the stove and and did everything.
And almost everything I did was no different than 40 years ago or 30 years ago.
So we they are making progress.
We do have our mobile phones.
They're amazing in what they can deliver, and we still have political unrest rising at an unbelievable pace.
We're running that Because of what's, so easy to share on mobile phones.
Correct.
And if you look at China, just how to downgrade the energy challenges they're having, the UK lines that are happening, the displacement of people from different societies are happening, and we're still losing species around the world.
So we have to solve these things.
So, you and I will have more conversations, and somehow somehow, I'm hoping you wake up and say, I need to know more.
I wanna see more of what's going on with these teams of people who are trying to to do what you want.
That's what my hope is.
So, I'm I'm leaving I'll leave that on the table there for you.
How does that sound?
That sounds like a a fine place to start.
Okay.
I love that.
A fine place to start.
So I want to I wanna thank you, Scott.
I know this was a challenging thing.
How we were gonna do it?
Was it gonna work?
I hope this worked out for you the way you thought or better.
Well, I hope it worked for you because we've gone on for a long time.
No.
No.
This was fantastic.
I I'm saying fantastic.
I hope for you, it was also an enjoyable experience.
It was interesting for yes.
Yes.
It was.
Say yes.
You're supposed to say yes.
It was it was not entirely it was not entirely stress free because I had so many things I wanted to talk about that I clearly don't have time to talk about.
But that is the fact our podcast is very different than any other.
I I yes.
We you have
to admit.
There's nobody who does it this way, and that's important.
And because it's important because it allows you to be you.
You guided me.
I didn't guide you.
So I wanna thank all of you out there for your time today who've listened in.
I do hope that you've learned something today that will make a difference in your life and the lives of others.
Once again, the Project Moon Hut Foundation is where we're looking to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon, a moon hut, through the accelerated development of an earth and space based ecosystem, then to use those endeavors, the paradigm shifting thinking, and those innovations and turn them back on earth to improve how we live on earth for all species.
Now, Scott, what's the single best way to get a hold of you, to reach out to you, to connect to you?
The best way to connect to me is to look for my YouTube channel.
Just Google Scott Manley, and you will find my face grinning back at you on a YouTube channel.
And if you really need to contact me, there is an about link page there where you can email me.
But,
what's the latest first?
Let me spell this for it's s c o t t, obviously, m a n l e y.
That's right.
Okay.
That's my real name.
It's not some made up YouTube thing.
I wasn't that smart.
Well
so for everybody else, I'd love to connect with you.
You can reach me at david@moonhot.org.
You can connect with us on Twitter at at project moon hut or for me personally at goldsmith.
You can look on LinkedIn.
We are there.
We are on Facebook.
We don't do a lot of work because we're really just getting down and dirty every day.
Every day our teams are working, but we're on project.
You could look us up under Project Moon Hut.
We are on Instagram, and my personal Instagram is mister David Goldsmith.
And that said, I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for listening.

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