The 2024 SpaceX Update Is Here!

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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Twenty twenty three is closing out asa milestone year for SpaceX. Two launches
of Starship, five launches of FalconHeavy, one hundred launches of Falcon nine,
three of them with crew on board, and over five thousand Starlink satellites
currently in operation. But all ofthis is just a small sign of even

(00:21):
bigger things to come for SpaceX.Twenty twenty four is where things really start
to get crazy. Obviously, thebiggest story of the year in the world
of spaceflight news is going to bethe Starship, the biggest, most powerful,
most technologically advanced rocket ever created,was launched not once but twice in
twenty twenty three, and two timeswe watched Starship explode in mid air before

(00:44):
it was able to complete a fullmission profile, which was awesome but also
confusing for a lot of people outthere, because, in spite of the
fact that their rockets all blew up, SpaceX has labeled these flights as successful.
For a casual observer, it mightbe hard to reconcile the term rapid
unscheduled disassembly with a success of anykind, and that is totally fair.

(01:07):
I don't blame people for being confused, so it's important to get some perspective
on just what SpaceX was actually tryingto accomplish with these test flights. April
twentieth, twenty twenty three, theHoly Day for twenty, SpaceX attempts the
first launch of Starship. The primarygoal is to get the thing into the
air without blowing it up on thelaunch pad, because no one has ever
released anywhere near this much energy fromone rocket before. Take the Saturn five,

(01:33):
also a really big rocket. Thisis the vehicle that sent the Apollo
program to the Moon, but thatwasn't even half as much power as Starship.
No one knew what was going tohappen when SpaceX went full send on
launch day, but there was onlyone way to find out, and we
found out a lot on that firsttest. So, yeah, Starship did
blow a giant hole in the groundat liftoff, and yes, it was

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actively on fire and falling apart theentire time it was ascending, and it
took totally did end up going wildlyout of control and spun around in the
air for about a minute before mercifullyexploding. But these are all learning experiences,
and we can see the proof ofthat learning in the results of Starship
test number two on November eighteenth,when none of those same problems repeated themselves.

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Instead, we found a whole newcrop of failures. The primary goal
of this test was to reach stageseparation, that means the upper stage ship
is released from the booster and senton its way to outer space, and
this goal was achieved quite spectacularly.Hot staging is not a new technique for
orbital rockets. It was used byNASA and the Soviet Union back in the

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nineteen sixties, but it's not commonand it's never been done on a rocket
of this scale before, not successfullyat least. And Starship performed the maneuver
beautifully, sending the upper stage ona smooth flight well above the carbon line
and achieving spaceflight back to the learningexperiences. Immediately following the stage separation,
Starship's booster attempted a flipman and aboost backburn to send the rocket on a

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return trajectory for the Gulf of Mexico. This is the exact same procedure that
the Falcon nine booster uses for aground landing, so SpaceX has some experience
in the field, but the immensesize difference between a super heavy starship,
booster and a Falcon nine makes thisa whole new ballpark. It's like going
from an e bike to a HarleyDavidson. There's going to be a learning

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curve. So the booster exploded inmid air, but it lasted long enough
for SpaceX to gather a lot ofdata that they will inevitably use to learn
and improve. And then, ofcourse our ship may have successfully reached outer
space, but it didn't stay upthere for very long. Which should have
been a ninety minute coast around theworld ended up being five minutes of acceleration

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followed by a big boom and anend of mission. So what happened to
the ship, Well, we don'texactly know. No one has ever tried
to fly anything anywhere near that largethrough space before. The Shuttle was a
large orbiter. But you could fitmost of the Space Shuttle inside the cargo
bay of a starship. So againSpaceX now has data that they can use

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to learn and improve for next time. The thing is that when you attempt
something that's never been attempted before,the best you can do is make an
uneducated guess about the outcome. Theonly way to know anything with certainty is
to try. Some things will workthe way you intended and other things will
not. So what does this meanfor the future of Starship in twenty twenty

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four. Well, more testing andmore learning, which will inevitably lead to
more success. But there will alwaysbe failure along the way. It's just
a game now of minimizing the badand maximizing the good. Starship will launch
again in the first quarter of twentytwenty four. That's a safe bet.
The flight hardware is already constructed,it just needs finishing touches. Likely there

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will be improvements and iterations to bemade based on the experience from November eighteenth.
The resounding good news is that thesecond Starship launch did not destroy the
launch pad. In fact, thenew flame diverter system that was implemented following
the four to twenty cratering incident performedexactly as it was intended. No major
refurbishment of the ground systems will berequired this time around, and that means

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SpaceX can start cutting down on thetime in between Starship launches. It took
seven months between flight one and flighttwo, and it could be as little
as two months before flight three.It could be as little as two weeks
after that when we see flight numberfour. Twenty twenty four is going to
be a year of a rapid developmentfor the Starship program. SpaceX is going

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to be pushing as hard as theycan to get this rocket into a position
of being a viable launch platform fortheir next generation of Starlink satellite, and
at the same time, they're goingto start figuring out how to make Starship
a fully reusable super heavy rocket,and that is where things are going to
get interesting all over again. Thespectacle of the Starship is nowhere near over.

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If you thought the launches were exciting, just wait until we get to
the landings. Starship may dominate theheadlines, but we also need to shout
out Falcon Heavy for an epic yearin twenty twenty three, with even more
to come in twenty twenty four.It's been so cool to see Falcon Heavy
finally doing the work that it wasbuilt to do. Prior to twenty twenty

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three, there had been only fourlaunches of this rocket since its debut in
February twenty eighteen, and in justthe last year alone, the flight count
has doubled. We've seen the triplecore Falcon rocket in action, four times
so far in twenty twenty three,with a fifth launch set for December eighth.
This has quickly become an invaluable toolfor both NASA and US Space Force.

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On October thirteenth, we saw FalconHeavy prove itself as a deep space
launch platform, sending a two pointsix ton exploration spacecraft to the near Earth
asteroid sixteen Psyche. In December,Falcon Heavy will cap off the year with
its first launch of the X thirtyseven B spaceplane. This is a somewhat
mysterious orbital vehicle. It's owned bythe Space Force and it's a fully autonomous

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platform that spends very long durations inEarth orbit. Last time it was up
there for over nine hundred days,and with the power of the Falcon Heavy,
the military space plane will be goinghigher into Earth's orbit than ever before.
But it's really twenty twenty four whereFalcon Heavy will shine. We have
three historic missions to look forward to. In October twenty twenty four, Falcon

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Heavy is scheduled to launch the longawaited Europa Clipper spacecraft. This will go
onto the Jupiter System, where advancedscientific instruments will conduct a thorough investigation of
the icy Moon Europa. This isthe best candidate for discovering the first life
outside of the Earth. Then,in November twenty twenty four, Falcon Heavy

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will send NASA's Viper rover to theMoon. This is the first mission of
the Artemis program to make contact withthe lunar surface and explore the South Pole
region. It's also NASA's first roboticasset on the Moon in decades. Then
the big one. In December twentytwenty four, Falcon Heavy is scheduled to

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deploy the first two modules of theLunar Gateway space station. This might actually
be the most exciting of the three, because the construction of the Lunar Gateway
is almost like a point of noreturn for NASA's Ardmis program. People are
going to the Moon and we're goingthere to stay. The Falcon nine may
not be anywhere near as exciting asits two larger siblings, but this rocket

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has made a gigantic impact on thespaceflight industry. Falcon nine will close out
twenty twenty three with one hundred orbitallaunches. That's about one third of all
Falcon nine launches ever, and theyhappened in just one year. This rocket
has been in service since twenty ten, and it's worth noting that Falcon nine
has passed two hundred and fifty consecutivesuccessful missions since the last failure in twenty

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sixteen, so in many ways,Falcon nine is only just beginning to ramp
up its capability. This is thanksto the incredible reliability and durability of the
reusable booster stage of this rocket.Initially, SpaceX had hoped that a Falcon
booster could be reflown ten times,then it was approved for fifteen times.

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Now SpaceX is going for twenty launchesand landings from one single booster. On
November fourth, the most experienced boosterin the SpaceX lineup, B one zero
five to eight, launched and landedfor the eighteenth time. This booster began
its career with the first crude flightof the Dragon capsule in May twenty twenty,
so eighteen missions in just three anda half years. No space Shuttle

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was ever used that frequently, andthe seventeenth launch of B one zero five
to eight was only forty five daysPrior to the eighteenth launch in twenty twenty
four, SpaceX is intending to leveragethis rapid and frequent reusability to push Falcon
nine even further, targeting one hundredand forty four launches in one year,

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which is an average of one Falconnine going to orbit every two and a
half days. Eventually, this workhorserocket will be replaced by Starship, but
that's not happening anytime soon, anduntil then, Falcon nine will continue to
be the world's most important rocket.SpaceX will close out twenty twenty three by

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reaching a new milestone with Starlink deploymentsover five thousand satellites in operation. We've
seen the capabilities of Starlink grow exponentiallyover the past couple of years. It
went from an incredibly limited use betaprogram in twenty twenty one to a global
high speed network in twenty twenty twothat was being proven as a vital communications
system in an active war zone.We've also seen the capabilities of Starlink illustrated

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by SpaceX themselves. Remember when Falconnine booster landing videos were just a glitchy,
pixelated meta US. Well, nowwe get a crystal clear streaming video
the whole way down. That isthe Starlink V two MANI with its optical
laser communication system in action to correspondwith the increase in satellite capabilities, SpaceX

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has been rolling out upgrade receiver unitsto consumers. That latest version of the
Starlink dish was just released in latetwenty twenty three, and we can see
the advantages of those five thousand satellites. First generation receiver systems needed to be
mounted on the top of a polein the middle of a field with an
active tracking motor to rotate the disharound just to maintain signal. The Generation

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three dish simply comes with a kickstand. As long as it's pointed towards the
sky, Starlink will function anywhere inthe world. In twenty twenty four,
this capability will only get better.The majority of those one hundred and forty
four Falcon nine launches are going tobe dedicated to deploying more Starlink V too

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mini satellites. Only problem is thateven though these are referred to as mini,
the upgraded units are actually bigger andheavier than previous Starlink orbiters, and
that means Falcon nine can't deploy asmany satellites in one launch. The original
Starlink was deployed in batches of fiftyto sixty all at once. Currently the
V two Mini is going up ataround two dozen per mission. This is

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why SpaceX is going to be movingquickly to get Starship into a place where
it is viable for orbital payload.In order to effectively deploy a new constellation
of full sized Starlink V two satellites, SpaceX needs the capabilities of Starship.
No other rocket can do this job. So we are expecting the first Starship

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payload to be deployed in the firsthalf of twenty twenty four, and we
are almost certain that the latest iterationof the Starlink satellites will be on board
for that mission. I think youcan see how this all ties together.
Falcon nine, Falcon Heavy and CrewDragon will be the core of the SpaceX
business model for some yas time tocome, But in many ways these amazing

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vehicles are just placeholders for the future, and the future inevitably will be the Starship