The SpaceX Starship Test Flight 2 Update Is Here!

None

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
On the morning of Saturday, Novembereighteenth, we witnessed the future of human
spaceflight, and it was spectacular.This is the Starship Flight Test number two.
As the sun rose over the Gulfof Mexico, so too did humanity's
best hope for a future among thestars. The most powerful flying machine ever

(00:21):
created took flight for the second timeand delivered everything we had anticipated, plus
a little more. It's important toremember that the main goal of this second
flight was to get the vehicle throughto stage separation and test the new hot
staging system. Everything past that wouldbe a nice bonus. After scrubbing a

(00:42):
Friday launch due to a faulty gridfinactuator, SpaceX crews worked through the night
to de stack the Starship and replacethree of the electric motors that control the
rotation of the super heavy boosters gridfins. One was confirmed broken, but two
more were swapped out due to anabundance of caution. The vehicle was then
re stacked and prepped for launch.At the crack of dawn. Ground systems

(01:04):
at the starbas launch pad were infull motion to prepare for propellant loading of
the booster. This began at Tminus one hour and thirty seven minutes from
the expected seven am launch time.Everything was going smoothly and according to plan,
and that trend continued straight through thepre flight checklist up to T minus
forty seconds. This is a plannedhold for the Starship. Launch crews can

(01:26):
pause the countdown at this point togive them extra time for final checks.
The ship can be held at fortyseconds for up to half an hour.
At the time of the hold,starship is fully fueled, operating on its
own internal power, and has beenreleased from the hold down clamps on the
launch mount. After final pressurization wasconfirmed on the upper stage, the countdown

(01:49):
resumed and we are a go forlaunch. At T minus five seconds,
we can see water spraying out fromthe new flame diverter system. Then,
just before the clock hits zero,we we can see the first plume of
fire from the raptor engines as theyquickly build up thrust. All thirty three
engines are running for about five secondsbefore we see the first movement of the

(02:10):
ship. From here, it startsmoving very quickly. By T plus ten
seconds, the tail of the boosterhas cleared the top of the launch tower
and the rocket is already traveling atone hundred and forty kilometers per hour.
From the moment of liftoff, wecan see the improvements that SpaceX has made
to both the vehicle and the launchpad since the first Starship flight test back

(02:32):
in April, the most obvious differencebeing that we can actually see the rocket
as it leaves the pad. Thefirst launch was covered by a gigantic cloud
of rock, dust, smoke,and debris. This was not repeated on
flight two. I've checked a fewdifferent camera angles, and I can't see
any significant debris coming out from thelaunch pad this time around. The shockwave

(02:54):
definitely sent a bunch of loose materialflying. Everything at the launch site that
wasn't bolted down probably went airborne,but I can't see any pieces of the
ground being ejected like what happened before, so preliminary results indicate the shower head
worked as intended. Looking back tothe Starship, now, this is what
a methane burning rocket is supposed tolook like. Perfectly clean, smooth and

(03:19):
consistent plume of fire coming straight downfrom the super heavy booster. We see
none of the smoking, sputtering offlames that happened on flight number one.
All thirty three engines are performing beautifully, and for the record, this is
the first time that has happened.Even during ground testing, SpaceX never gets
all thirty three booster engines to performthrough the entire test duration. As the

(03:43):
starship ascends, it's traveling straight andsmooth right up until max Q that's the
point of greatest mechanical stress on thebody of the rocket, and this happens
right around T plus one minute andfive seconds at a speed of thirteen hundred
kilometers per hour and an altitude often kilometers above sea level. Then ninety
seconds later we get to the mainevent stage separation, the furthest that any

(04:10):
starship has ever reached. Because weare doing hot staging, there is no
main engine shut down or MECO aswe typically know it. Instead, most
engines shut down, leaving the centerthree raptors on the booster continuing to fight
against gravity as the ship prepares foraction. At this point, the starship
is going fifty six hundred kilometers perhour and is sixty nine kilometers above the

(04:32):
ground. Now a lot of stuffis going to happen very fast. The
clamps holding the two stages of therocket are released, the six engines on
the ship ignite, and the hotstaging process is underway. As the ship
pulls away, the remaining three boosterengines will use their gimbal mechanisms to begin
flipping the booster around one hundred andeighty degrees so that the top is now

(04:56):
pointed straight back down towards the ground. During the hot stage, we can
see all of the flame and exhaustfrom the ship engines being diverted out through
the side fents of that hot stagering on the booster. The three center
engines on the ship are using theirgimbals to angle as far towards the outside
as possible so that they are notblasting directly into the top dome of the

(05:16):
booster, and here is where thefirst problems start to arise. When the
booster starts to flip, we cansee the first engine restart is already underway.
Most of the thirteen interaptors have relt, but some are still visibly dark.
As the booster comes around, telemetryshows four engines out. Only two

(05:38):
of the center group are still running, plus three of the outer ring engines
are down. They're all clustered togetheron one side, so we're starting to
get asymmetrical thrust. By the timethe flip is completed, the booster airspeed
is down to around forty seven hundredkilometers per hour, so it sheds around
one thousand kilometers per hour of velocity. Through the flip maneuver, we can

(06:00):
see that another booster engine is outnow its opposite of the three failed engines,
so this could be intentional to tryand balance out the thrust, or
it could be more error. AtT plus three minutes fifteen seconds, there
is some kind of an event andmultiple engines go down at once, bringing
the failure count to seven raptors.We've now only got four of the mid

(06:21):
ring engines still running, and they'reall clustered together so highly asymmetrical thrust.
Two of the center group are stillrunning. By T plus three minutes eighteen
seconds, all booster engines are out. At plus three minutes and twenty seconds,
the booster itself explodes. This happensfast. It basically pops like a
balloon at ninety kilometers in altitude andtraveling at thirty eight hundred kilometers per hour.

(06:46):
This is the flight termination system takingthe booster out of the air because
it's gone way off course due tothe engine malfunctions. This is exactly what
it is supposed to do in thissituation, so another massive improvement from flight
number one. The self destruct worked. So what happened to the booster?
It really does not seem to havebeen damaged by the hot staging event.

(07:08):
I'd say it's more likely that duringthe flip there was an issue with tank
pressure and fuel sloshing around. Obviously, no one's ever tried to flip such
a gigantic fuel tank around in midair, so the fluid dynamics are totally
unknown, but now SpaceX has significantlymore data about it than they did before.
This whole time, though, theship stage has been well underway and

(07:30):
is gaining velocity and altitude on itsway to slightly less than orbit. The
point of this flight test is toget the ship very close to orbital velocity,
but keep it at a speed whereit will naturally fall back down without
the need for a deorbit burn.At this speed, the ship is still
going to hit the atmosphere hard enoughto stress test the heat shield tiles if

(07:50):
it makes it that far. Asthe ship continues to burn all six engines,
we're hearing callouts from the ground crewthat all systems are nominal. Ti
p plus four minutes, we cansee some interesting white specs appear on camera,
either UFOs or debris from the boostercatching the sunlight. At T plus
five minutes, we hear the callout for ship trajectory nominal. At six

(08:11):
minutes we hear ship pressure nominal.So everything appears to be going very smoothly
up there until we get to Tplus seven minutes seven seconds. The ship
is traveling at seventeen thousand kilometers perhour, it's one hundred and forty nine
kilometers above sea level, and wesee a plume of smoke visible on camera.
At T plus seven minutes forty seconds, we see a second plume from

(08:35):
the ship. It's now at twentyone thousand kilometers per hour, and telemetry
shows all six engines are still firing. Altitude remains about the same one hundred
and forty eight kilometers. By sevenminutes and fifty seconds, the plume is
cleared, but we can only seea very faint light from the ship's engines.
At eight minutes three seconds, telemetryshows all engines cut off on the

(08:58):
starship. The vehicle is at justover twenty four thousand kilometers per hour.
Then two seconds later we see asmall puff followed quickly by a larger puff,
and this marks the end of Shiptwenty five. Flight. Termination kicked
in very late into the second stageburn. We were only a few seconds
away from second engine cut off andthe coasting phase that would have taken the
ship most of the way around theworld to the Pacific Ocean. So what

(09:22):
we saw here was probably about eightypercent successful. We only really missed out
on three main events. Won thereturn of the boosters, so we didn't
get a re entry burn or alanding burn over the water. Two,
we did not get a second enginecut off on the ship, which is
not a big deal. Third,we did not see the re entry of
the upper stage, which is abummer because this is a massive unknown.

(09:46):
No one has ever tried to bringanything that big back down from space before,
and we still have no idea howStarship's heat shield tiles will perform under
stress. Can already see from somestill photos that a lot of the tiles
fell off during launch, mostly alongthe weld lines, so the ship probably
would have broken up anyway, butthere's no way to know until we can

(10:07):
actually get to that point in theflight. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson seemed pretty
stoked about the results. He postedon X shortly after the launch. Congrats
to the teams who made progress ontoday's flight test. Spaceflight is a bold
adventure, demanding a can do spiritand daring innovation. Today's test is an
opportunity to learn then fly again.Together, NASA and SpaceX will return humanity

(10:31):
to the Moon, Mars and beyond, and that's probably the most important thing
to remember. We are taking thefirst, very small steps right now towards
the most gigantic leap that humanity willmake in our lifetime, sending people to
live on the Moon and eventually toMars. This is not going to be
easy, and there will be plentyof failures along the way. In terms

(10:54):
of what comes next for SpaceX,well likely we're going to be looking at
another FAA mishap investigation for the superheavy booster. It accomplished more than we
would have expected, but it stilldid malfunction and fly off course, so
that needs to be looked into.But this will be more of a routine
job and much less involved than thefour to twenty launch investigation. Technically,

(11:15):
SpaceX is still approved for up tofive launches from Starbase in twenty twenty three,
so will they try and take advantageof a December launch window depends on
the condition of the ground systems.We know that the launchpad was not destroyed,
but it could still be damaged,or at the very least SpaceX probably
discovered something that could be improved.We know that SpaceX has plans to upgrade

(11:35):
the orbital tank farm at the launchsite to enable faster propellant loading, so
they'll probably want to do that beforeanother launch attempt is made. We are
also starting to see a lot ofindications that SpaceX is getting ready to construct
a second launch tower at Starbase,so maybe their energy gets diverted into that
project for a little while. Eitherway, likely no more Starship launches for

(11:58):
a few months. Late winter orspring twenty twenty four would be a good
guess. As for what the nextflight of Starship might look like, well,
they already have Booster ten and Shiptwenty eight pretty much ready to go,
so the hardware is definitely not inquestion. As for the flight profile,
do they try for a full orbit? Do they attempt a payload deployment?

(12:18):
I'd say it's most likely that SpaceXwill try the exact same flight profile
next time around as they did onNovember eighteenth, because we still need to
get that data about the upper stageand that should probably be known before it
goes all the way to orbital velocityor tries to carry anything into space.
So stay tuned for our next videoout on Wednesday, when we go even

(12:39):
deeper into the details and aftermath ofthe Starship test flight number two.