Elon Musk Weekly News Update: Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and More

Hey everybody, welcome back to the Elon Musk Podcast. This is a show where we discuss the critical crossroads that shape SpaceX, Tesla X, The Boring Company, and Neuralink. And I'm your host. Will Walden Elon Musk has openly discussed his prescriptions for ketamine, asserting its positive impact on his mental health and consequently its benefits for

his company's investors. And Musk emphasized the importance of consistent performance for his investors, suggesting that his medication plays a crucial role in maintaining his effectiveness. Now this all happened because of a conversation with Don Lemon, formerly of CNN.

Musk explained that his intermittent use of ketamine helps him manage what he terms chemical tides that can lead to depression like symptoms, and this admission came during a YouTube streamed interview highlighting Musk's transparency about his mental health management strategies recently Now, concerns about Musk's drug use were previously reported by the Wall Street Journal studying apprehensions among executives at Tesla and SpaceX, and Musk, however, counter these claims by

highlighting his clean drug test records and advocated for the continuation of his current regimen on X. Now, following this interview with Lemon, Musk's media company X, formerly Twitter, decided to terminate a planned collaboration with Lemon and this decision abruptly ended what was intended to be the launch of Lemon's new talk show on X. The interview, which lasted just over an hour, saw Musk had Lemon engaging discussions on a

variety of topics, including immigration, politics, content, moderation on social media, and Musk's personal experiences with depression and also ketamine use. Now, Musk went on to say that his social media platform is competitive in the environment, similar to player versus player video games, suggesting it's a space for robust engagement and

debates between people. He related this to his own use of the platform for various types of posts, from humor and memes to significant discussions about world politics. And during the interview, Musk revealed his routine of late night posting on X, stating he's almost always sober. During these sessions, touched upon his lifestyle choices, including abstaining from alcohol and his prescribed use of ketamine for managing his depressive states.

While he posts now. Most candid discussion about ketamine with Lemon raised some questions about privacy and medical ethics as he noted the personal nature of inquiries into one's medical prescriptions. And despite this, he provided insight into how ketamine helps him combat periods of negative mental health. And on a separate note, Musk mentioned an unplanned meeting with former President Donald Trump in Florida.

During the interview, describing it as a chance encounter, he recounted that the meeting was dominated by Trump's conversation without any significant topics discussed. Musk has remained neutral during political endorsements, specifically noting his current stance of not supporting Joe Biden while keeping open the possibility of endorsing a

candidate. Later in the electoral process and addressing the contentious issue of immigration and the Great Replacement Theory, Musk clarified his disapproval of the racist ideology. However, he speculated on the potential impact of undocumented immigrants on the US elections through their inclusion in the census count.

Despite the lack of evidence supporting this claim now, Lemon countered Musk's immigration argument by pointing out that undocumented immigrants are ineligible to vote, thereby minimizing their direct influence on election outcomes.

Musk's theory hinges on the increased congressional representation that could theoretically result from higher population counts in states with large immigration populations at The interview eliminated Musk's multifaceted personality, from his innovative leadership in technology and space exploration with SpaceX to his personal health management and political viewpoints. And Musk's openness about his Academy news shows that he's kind of into his own well-being

and taking care of himself now. Musk engagement with political and social issues, though, alongside his leadership roles, paints a picture of the CEO deeply involved in contemporary debates, extending his influence beyond the realms of business and technology. And the dialogue between Musk and Lemon, especially on topics like mental health and substance use, contributes to broader discussions about the responsibilities and the lifestyles of high.

Profile corporate leaders. Musk's perspectives offer kind of a glimpse into the challenges and considerations of leading major technological ventures, and the termination of the partnership between X and Don Lemon. Post interview signals the unpredictable nature of Musk's decisions for his businesses, and he sometimes makes swift decisions based on interactions, evolving circumstances, and

possibly even emotions. Now, Musk personal health disclosures and his interactions with meaty figures and political personalities encapsulates the complexities of managing a public persona while steering some of the most innovative companies in the world. And his own disclosure of his Academy news and his perceived benefits for his mental health and work performance has sparked discussions on his personal well-being and his professional obligations.

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either. No hidden fees. Current hates them too. I hate them. I've been a current user for five years now, I think, and transparency is key. So what you see is what you get from savings pods to help you stash away your cash for specific goals, to getting your paycheck a little bit early. That's a nice one. Current's got the features that matter the most to you now. If you got questions though, current support is just a tap away on your phone ready to help

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few years ago. It's from a company called Moonmark and the purpose of this company is to send remote control cars and have a competition, a race on the lunar surface. Enjoy. Because we're we're here to share the information. So Munmarg is a competition between high school teams across the country and we are already getting a lot of interest from across the world and students grades nine through 12 are going to compete to become the final two teams that create built to

space worthy racers. They're not Rovers, they're racers and they will go up on the intuitive machines known as Sealander, which is going up October 11th of 2021. Very, very cool. Yeah, like I'm said in chat, he said. Oh, high schools, yeah. Is it only open to high school people or can people outside of high school older than high school, like college teams or something like that? And or.

So about the the actual teams that are going to build these racers are going to be high school students. We are reaching out to those, like I say, in grades nine through 12. However, the purpose is for them, they're to, you know, if you get to, if you get to build something, it's going to land on the moon and race on the moon. There's a little bit of, you know, skin you got to put in the

game, right, or in the sport. And in this particular case, the tuition, so to speak, is that they have to reach out and they have to engage people across the globe and and what they're doing, how they're doing it and why they're doing it. And so there's a lot of opportunity for people of all ages to engage with the students as they go through this process.

Now Moon, what Moon Mark is going to do is to capture the content and the adventures of these young people and share it in across television, digital streaming. But you know our purpose is really to share what is about to help and if you might kind through the eyes of these students, meaning the accessibility of space, the commercialization of space. So we're really excited about this and we also right now I do want to mention we had a learner race car design challenge that's going on.

We're working with intuitive machines. We worked with them to develop the space specifications of what these racers will need so that when they land on the mode, they'll have the the, the right stuff, so to speak.

And then there those that are competing in the the design challenge in the next few weeks actually through the end of June, they will be able to put their own mark on those races and we'll have a panel of judges that will judge the design, the space worthiness and we'll also have an audience voting worldwide. So we're pretty excited about the the Lunar Race Bar Design Challenge. As well, is this open to anybody around the globe or is it just US based? No, it's open to anyone.

We we have had like a man mentioned a lot of really great international interest so students really want to participate and and we actually started the the design challenge a little sooner than we anticipated and we did that because so many young people and all all of us but mostly or house them So and and we're looking to provide young people and people that are interested in engaging with these young people with something that has a really positive and exciting

focus at a time when we really need it. Oh, very cool. So we have a. Couple, and I do want to mention because I get this question very often, is there a registration fee or a participation fee? And the answer is no. You know what you have to have is you have to have access to a computer and you have to have access to the answer now and then. You have to have some really cool and smart friends to get together and and and you know, put the good stuff on the moon.

Oh cool. So we have a couple questions in chat. What? What is the race? What is the actual race? Will they be racing for a target or an obstacle or what? So is there a finish line of a great? Question. So we we just this past week heard from an intuitive machines as to where the the Lander is going to touchdown and that's going to be in the the the oceans or the store, the oceans of storms.

And so now what's going to happen is that when the Lander is about 30 meters off the circles of the mill, it will eject a sphere of 360° cameras. And that we don't know exactly where that's going to land. But those cameras are #1 point to capture the app to landing itself, which I believe will be the first of its kind. And then that sphere of cameras will serve as the rallying point where the the point at which we

will direct the races. So they will drive from the Lander probably we will have some Geo about geometric requirements along the way, but they're going to head to that camera and they're going to turn around and they're going to come back. Oh, wow. OK. Yeah. That's cool. So the actual, the actual race track itself is still yet to be determined and there's a lot

that we won't know. I I say there's a lot of bulk moments in this well, and there's certainly will be, no doubt about it. It sounds challenging. Is going to. Be where that sphere lands and how we can line up. Yeah, sounds like a challenging problem to solve for the racers, especially when you don't know where that sphere is. Like, how are you going to find the sphere? You know, you have to design a vehicle that's going to be able to not alone, you know, go

across the lunar surface. Like, that's hard enough. But you have to find this sphere of cameras and then you have to then turn around and come back to the Lander. What? That sounds incredibly difficult. Well, it certainly does have its challenges The the, the advantage that we have is that the the experts that we're working with that intuitive machines not only do they know how to build spacecraft and launch it along with human flight.

They have years and years of experience both the NASA and and and in commercial space. But they actually are working with us to make sure that those erasures are space worthy.

And what we've discovered in in this process is that there are some significant challenges and there are some things that we we've determined that are a little bit easier than we thought they would be. One of the things that I'm really excited about is that we're going to be able to perhaps accelerate some application of technology with this project that would not we're going to be able to accelerate, for example, communications.

Currently, the data streams or communication from the Moon and elsewhere have a very, very specific scientific purpose.

Our purpose is to capture that race, which is going to require much higher bandwidth or both on the Moon, on the lunar surface and then back to Earth's. And so the companies that we are are working with in the various communications aspects of this, it's been clear that we are able to you know what what we one of the outcomes of this is that we will be able to test and prove communications on the runner's surface that will serve others when they get there. OK, so this is a forward

thinking mission. It's not just just get the racers of the moon race around, but it's actually to serve a purpose for the future landing and other Rover missions in the future, or racers even. And could we possibly see a racing circuit like NASCAR on the moon in the future? How cool would that be? That would be awesome. You're you're, you're, you're talking to someone who truly, truly enjoys motorsport and I also very much enjoy high

performance driving. And so that is a reason, because of the of my involvement in the sport, it became clear to me that there was really, you know, a really wonderful, you know, analogy or analogous kind of set of disciplines that was necessary both in in aerospace and in auto sports.

So you've got the, the teamwork that's necessary you, you've got the physics, you've got the engineering, you've got the timing, you've got the, the discipline and all of that and and that belongs in, in in both of these areas and both of these industries. And we thought that it would be very interesting to apply those particular skills, science, technology, engineering and arts as well as mathematics in this

competition. So not only are we, we are forward thinking in terms of how along the way we can accelerate technology and use of this for those that come behind us on on the lunar surface. But also the journey along the way, which is really, really exciting of an adventure for these young people and and many people that they touch.

Well, that's very cool. I'm I'm glad you guys are doing this because this is so. When I was a kid, I always thought about, you know, having a moon colony and having something like this, like sports on the moon. You know, we, I had these books when I was a kid and they're all illustrated and they're really cool.

And I would open them up and I would imagine something like this happening, you know, and just that somebody's actually doing this in my lifetime is insane in the in the best kind of way, like in the happiest way that you could imagine that there's going to be race vehicles on the moon. Like that doesn't to me as a normal person that has nothing to do with the engineering part of this. And I'm I'm kind of like heading the clouds kind of person.

This is awesome and I really want to thank you for coming out today. Now we have one last question though. What is the winner win from this race? Oh, that's a that's a great question. The winner, the the two racers that get there, OK are are both winners. They will have gone through a a more really, really rigorous set of qualifying rounds in order to get to the mouth.

And you know the what what they're going with the the team that takes the checkered flag is going to get the checkered flag and it's also going to have the the the honor of being the first race winner on the MO. So we don't have a a cash prize or something like that. This is much actually more of them. He's deeper than that. It's. Just. They're not going to be motivated by cash. That's that's if someone wants to. Come and give them cash, then you know we'll we'll make it a

good scholarship. Yeah, and I'm sure somebody might be interested in that something, you know, some sort of sports drink or something like that might be interested, or some sort of energy drink. May I share one more thing will sure of what you you just shared about your your dream when you were a kid. So when we when we looked at at at women marketing we looked at the and and what we wanted to

achieve. Things have not occurred in like what you experienced for many, many years and there's there's lots of reasons for that. It's not that we haven't had space heroes. It's not that we haven't had incredible stories. There hasn't been a a an Apollo moment since 19691972. OK. Since then we we kind of let them run behind and and all of that sort of thing. We want to create because we can. Now we want to create an Apollo

effect for kids. We want kids to look at other kids and say, wait a minute, if they can do that, I can do that. And that is something that hasn't occurred for many, many years. We can do that because yes, we have accessibility through space technology that that civilians haven't had before and we also have the ability through our communications and technology to engage for worldwide. So that's what we're going oh. That's great.

Yeah. You know, the the, the reality of the situation is that, you know, these kind of things are going to be happening more so in the future, you know, than what I ever expected. Because we had, like you said, we had the Arpella moment when we were, you know, in the 70s, sixties and 70s and then we had the space shuttle. We have people on the International Space Station. We don't have anything that's like a big, big idea anymore.

And I think this is one of those big ideas where people can get really inspired and get behind. And young people, especially the way that you're marketing this and pushing this for young kids to get involved with all of those amazing, amazing techniques that they'll be using to get a racer to the freaking moon and then race it and then race it and then maybe wind. Who knows? I mean, if if they get one, if they get the racer to the moon, that is huge. That's a huge, huge deal for humanity.

Like it's not just a a huge deal for for your company or intuitive machines or anything. Like it's a it's a huge deal for people, and for young people in particular, to move these little machines, you know, on the moon, like just getting in there and having them land, That's kind. Of amazing. That is absolutely our, our intent and we have all, since we've been born, we have had every human on Earth has had an experience with the moon and by and large it's been a positive

experience. And So what what we're doing here is an intent is to, you know, a unifying experience that's positive. And because we can, as I mentioned, you know, communicate globally, we have the ability to touch people in the way that that's meaningful to them and that's that's something that we really aspire to. That's really great. Well, I want to wrap this up for you, Mary. Thank you so much for showing up to the show today. And oh. Thank you. Yeah, you're more than welcome.

And if anybody wants to check out the race, you can go to Moon, Mark, dot, Space and get more information. Is there any other place they can find you on the Internet, social media, etcetera? We're we're on all all the usual suspect places. We're on Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn and Instagram and check out Tiktok. Coming up. Oh, cool. OK. Oh, yeah. All right. Well, thanks so much, Mary. Appreciate it. And hopefully we will speak to you soon. Thank you very much.

You'll appreciate being here. Have a great. Day. Yeah, you too. Bye, bye. If you're anything like me, you appreciate when things are made super easy, especially when it comes to managing your money. That's where current.com steps in. It's not just any banking service. It's designed for you, the modern person. They blend technology and finance in a way that just makes sense for our digital lives.

Here's the best part, When you sign up for current.com using the special code that I'll drop in the show notes, you'll get a free $50. Yep, 50 bucks for free. Easy. Sign up. Remember, there's terms and conditions, but we'll get to that. Now it's quick to sign up. You forget all the paperwork and you'd never go to a bank with current. You're up and running in minutes and it's all from your phone. And the sign up bonus? 50 bucks. That's right.

Use the code from our show notes and boom, $50 is yours. It's that simple. Every penny you put into current is FDIC, insured through their partners. Peace to mind. Now there's no nasty surprises either. No hidden fees. Current hates them too. I hate them. I've been a current user for five years now, I think, and transparency is key. So what you see is what you get from savings pods to help you stash away your cash for specific goals, to getting your paycheck a little bit early.

That's a nice one. Current's got the features that matter the most to you now. If you got questions though, current support is just a tap away on your phone ready to help you. I've used them a few times and I'll tell you what the best customer support I've ever seen in a bank. So if you're looking to step up your banking game and get a sweet $50 bonus in the process, head to the show notes, use my special code, and join

thecurrent.com revolution. It's banking, but not as you know it. It's better. Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. I'm feeling a little bit under the weather for the last few days, so I'm going to post this really cool podcast I did a while ago with my friend Neil Thorne, and we discuss the Starship as a space station. It's absolutely riveting to think about a Starship you can launch to orbit and it's immediately a space station. It's a huge, huge rocket.

So please enjoy this conversation I had with Neil Thorne about Spacex's Starship as a space station. SpaceX is collaborating with NASA on an integrated low Earth orbit architecture to provide a growing portfolio of technology with near term Dragon evolution and concurrent Starship development. Now this architecture includes Starship as a transportation and in space low Earth orbit destination element supported by Super heavy.

That's the Starship Dragon and Starlink and constituent capabilities including crew and cargo transportation, communications and operational and ground support. So joining me today is Neil Thorne. And we're going to be talking about what this means from NASA and what SpaceX is capable of, and how this is going to change space travel and space exploration forever, and how this can eventually turn into a thing that SpaceX could use for their Mars transportation, be a Starship.

But before we get into this conversation, let's take a moment and listen to a word from our sponsors. How you doing today, Neil? I'm doing just great. How are you? I am doing fantastic, thank you for asking. So the Starship going into low Earth orbit and it seems like base X and NASA are working together to use this as some sort of transportation hub or some sort of space station in the near term. And do you think that's what they're looking at here?

I don't know. It's a very vague sort of approach that NASA's taking. They're they're not saying build us a space station, they're just saying help us out in low Earth orbit. Hard to say exactly what it is they're expecting out of this. I haven't thought for ever since the Starship became a thing that putting this huge object into

space. This the Starship. Which One Starship has more interior volume than the space station does right now, but you link three or four of those together, and suddenly you've got quite a bit of space up there to your activities. Yeah, it'll be an interesting next few years for the Starship and for NASA, because eventually NASA will be the orbiting the International Space Station. What is it, 20-30? I believe 20302032 or something somewhere around there? It always seems to be a flexible

number. Yeah, that's it always seems like. I think they wanted to do it in 2026 at some point. Yeah. And then they. I think it's as long as it's useful though. They're going to keep it going, but. Yeah, I think so too. I think as long as the taxpayers can pay for it and as long as the they're seeing some returns. From it. It's such an expensive thing to run every day to keep six people up there. It's just such an expense and everything in there is so outdated at this point.

The technology is advancing so fast here on Earth that even something they've they started building 6 years ago that got sent up there two years ago is so far beyond the technology right now that it almost becomes irrelevant. Yeah, and SpaceX is working currently on their Starship

program. And in the next, hopefully we can see this in the next, as Elon said, 6 to 8 weeks, another launch of Starship. And when that happens, we'll see if it's actually going to be a possibility or feasibility that this will make it to orbit. And once it does make it to orbit, these studies that SpaceX and NASA will be working together on could become a thing.

And they have to work together to get Space XS Starship onto the moon as well for Artemis 3. So maybe this could be part of that because they need to dock with the SpaceX Starship in order to get to the Moon, so. As you say, everything that they need to do to help NASA here, they have to do for the moon as well. So it's going to be being built in sequence, I think. In parallel I should say.

Yeah, they're going to be using Super Heavy, which is the Starship program, a Dragon and Starlink. So the Dragon will more than likely be docking with it and I think the Polaris program will be using a Dragon to dock with the Starship. I think what the what's going to happen is they're going to send a Starship to orbit. They're going to get it up there.

Then they're going to send the crew of Polaris program in a capsule Dragon capsule on a Falcon Nine and then dock with the Starship kind of mimicking what they're going to be doing with the Starship in the Orion capsule.

And then they're going to, they're going to go inside the Starship and do some testing and do some science and some experimenting, some engineering and see if it's actually feasible to live in one for a little bit and then do some more, some more testing inside and maybe outside of the Starship. So I think that's what they're thinking here. I'm not 100% sure. But yeah, it's very vague. It really is very vague this whole wording. I think they kept it that way, so. I think so.

So they can't be like Starship is going to replace the International Space Station. Exactly. And I think that would make a lot of companies very angry. The blue origins, the Axiom space, all these people would be very upset at that. So I think you keep it vague. They're going to help us out. We're going to use their capabilities to to further our goals. That's it. Yeah. And maybe if goal happens to be a new space station, then it has

to be a new space station. Yeah, maybe eventually they will. Maybe eventually they will turn a International Space Station, turn it away, get rid of it, and then they'll put couple starships together.

Or even 1. Starship is a there's 1000 cubic meters estimated in interior volume of a Starship, which if built right can hold for Earth to Earth transport 100 people according to Elon Musk. More than likely for these kind of missions it'll be something similar to the International Space Station where it's about 6 people. Maybe the Starship can hold a little bit more because the space station has 915 cubic meters of internal space and it's not that much different. It's 85 cubic meters of

difference. So you could put some more supplies in the Starship, but. Yeah, it's not much, though. The space in the space station is more compartmentalized, so it's more usable space. Yeah, than the Starship, which would be a more open plan, but obviously much probably much better for people's psyches as well. Yeah, I think so. Most of the renderings we've seen have has been a tube it through the middle with a ladder or some sort of transport in the middle where you can go from

section to section. But it's pretty wide open through the whole Starship. And I think just people spend a year plus on the International Space Station and they're segmented off doing their experiments. Don't see anybody maybe all day, maybe throughout the day they might see one or two people, but if they maybe there's 7-8 people in a Starship. Maybe you can see all the way through the Starship while people are working.

I think that'll be really neat. I don't know if that's how it's going to. Actually have to. I think it would be a much more enjoyable atmosphere to, even if you're not working with somebody that they happen to be across the 9m gap between you working on something else and you can see them, I think that camaraderie gets built and then again, people can also get on your nerves much faster.

That's true. So obviously when they select an astronaut, they do a lot of psychological studies to make sure they're going to live and play well with others. So that will have to continue, yeah. And sending 100 people in Starship to any long distances is really difficult to conceive of. What are we talking? 17/16/17 people per sort of Starship if you all? I can't imagine traveling a very long distance stuck in the same room my my sort of bedroom if

you will, the entire time. That would be very difficult because it wouldn't be much room for anything else. Yeah, that's true there. So there there's been talks of how many people could go on of Mars ship to from any anywhere from six people to some people were saying 30 people and there were some people that were saying up words of 100 people to Mars. I don't think it's going to be 100 people. I think that's ridiculous.

I think that's way too many. But I think if you have something like this where SpaceX and NASA are working together low Earth orbit, they can try different configurations for the long term Mars transport because you could have two starships docked together. What they're going to be doing with the refuelling of the tankers for the Artemis missions, instead of a tanker, you have just another Starship where people can float between the starships.

There's a port, and there could be a section where it's like a living section, where it's just you work out, you sleep, there's maybe some entertainment, there's big windows. And also there could be a variant where it's just cargo, where there's just a like, so much food and you're gonna have to bring a lot of water to Mars or even to low Earth orbit. So sure, there's a possibility that's what they're gonna be

working on as well. And it's going to take, I wish it were to happen really fast, but space transport, space technology, engineering and science all take a long time. So what they're building now, maybe 50 years from now, we'll see the ultimate gain of we're going to be taking normal trips to Mars. There's going to be just numerous trips per year to get to Mars.

And I believe the next, the closest that Mars is going to be to Earth is going to be 2024. So maybe if Starship gets to orbit this year and then maybe next year, who knows, maybe they're going to start trying to get to Mars. Just shoot a Starship. Yeah, shoot a Starship without any intention of landing it. Yeah, and. Just. Try try to get into Mars orbit, or at least use the orbit to slow you down so you could land if you wanted to. Yep.

Obviously that's the hardest part about any trip to Mars, it's making sure you hit the right spot so you don't burn up in the atmosphere or get slingshotted out into space, bounce off the atmosphere. So it's very difficult to do. And that's where the majority of sort of things being shot at Mars fail. So it's they're going to have to practice that for sure. Yeah, right now they're practicing getting things to orbit around Earth, which is

comparatively way easier. So it's gonna take some time and some, yeah, who knows, Who knows? We'll see what happens with the next Starship launch to see whether they actually get to orbit and there's no complications, and destroy the pad. And if that all goes to plan, then yeah, I could potentially see them trying to stretch themselves. Obviously SpaceX is an iterative design company, and they're not afraid to say, OK, we did it, let's move on. Ship 15 was the first one to land.

They didn't bother trying to land another one. They said good, let's move on. Yeah. I could see them getting to orbit and saying good, let's move on. I can see that too. Yeah, and saying, OK, we made the orbit, now we need a tanker up there. Let's do that. OK, now that's done. We don't need to do it 100 times before they put people in the Starship. They'll have to do it 100 times. But if they're just doing tests, they're gonna be happy with what they got and move on to the next

challenge. Yeah. And even between the first launch and this next launch that's coming up, they switched. I think it, I think Elon said hundreds of things, maybe 1000 things, something like that between the Last Starship and a Super Heavy and the next one that's going up. One of the most important things is that they're going to be doing hot staging between the booster and the ship, which is. I'm not sold on that just yet, but we'll see how it goes, yeah. That seems like an incredible

feat. I don't see the the a lot of Russian spacecraft have done that in the past, and it seems to be pretty pretty well documented, but I think SpaceX could pull it off. I don't know if it's going to work this time. It's the first trial and error. Exactly right. This is all trial. This is all to be done, to be determined. They'll have to. They'll figure it out. It's not impossible to do, just a matter of figuring out how to make their current build sustain that sort of blast as as they

separate. Yeah, obviously they'll need some way to exhaust the flame as it comes out, but also the top the Dome of the the booster's gonna be have to withstand the all those engines lighting as well. Yeah, I don't understand how they're gonna do it. I don't really understand that technology that much, but it seems like they have to reinforce like it's a stainless steel Dome on this thing, so they have to reinforce like something, yes. Yeah, it's not a thick stainless

steel either. Plus they want to reuse these 100 times. Yeah, So there really can't be any damage from this separation. For this to be successful, there can't be any damage. It has to be 100% perfect. If it starts to wear away from the heat or there's any damage whatsoever, then it's unsuccessful. It's not going to be a long term solution.

Then fix it. So do you think this could be something like a, for lack of a better term, a puck that they put on top of the booster and they could replace it if needed? So it's not going to be, it might not be 100% reusable right away, but they could just use it just for that one time and then the next booster is going to have a different puck on it and. They could do something like the heat tiles that they've got on

the outside of the ship. They could plaster those over the top of the booster and use those as an abrading, replaceable part. Yeah, that. But it would take some time to inspect those every time that it lands. Yeah, that's true. It's similar to the space shuttle. So yeah, I think the, I think we're going to see some wild stuff in this next lodge. But yeah, the NASA and SpaceX collaboration here with this space station is going to be a huge thing. And The funny thing is, NASA is

a government agency and for. Forever they've been using taxpayers money to do things like this, experiments like this. And Phil McAllister, the director of commercial Space Flight at NASA, said it is great to see companies invest their own capital toward innovative commercial space capabilities. We've seen how these types of partnerships benefit both the private sector and NASA.

So basically they're saying, hey, all of you companies out here, Blue Origin, Northrop Grumman, Sierra Space, SpaceX, Special Aerospace Services, Think Orbital and Fast space.

You spend your money, you figure this out and then we're going to partner with you to use your technology in the future and we're going to pay for it. But you have to figure it out like you're going to have to have a minimum viable product, the MVP, so we can use it for our own services for the future, whether that's a space station with SpaceX or if they're going to be using it, of course for HLS and further missions. But it's different than what it used to be for the longest time.

It's very different, absolutely. And it's really is a great solution. NASA put so much money and effort into developing things like the SLS and everything that came before it, space shuttle and whatnot. To have commercial companies do all that research, development and testing, and then to just pay them a bunch of money at the end or during it as a sort of seed money, it's just so much easier for everybody as far as the government is concerned and a lot less risk as well. Yeah.

And then you hand off that risk to private companies. Absolutely. It leaves so much more, so much more room for NASA to play around with different ideas, too. They don't have to stick with one thing like the SLS. They're stuck with the SLS. They can't really diverge from that and say we're going to stop doing that because Starship works now they have a contract. They're going to be building these SLS rockets for the

foreseeable future. And what Starship surpasses the SLS and technology and weight to orbit ratio, weight ratio to orbit, but they don't care because they have these contracts in place with Boeing and other companies, Northrop, Brahman, etcetera, to build these SLS rockets and they can't

change it, you know? What I really like about the con this commercial partnerships is that some someone who likes SpaceX is going to pay for their materials what they should be paying as opposed to what NASA pays for materials.

A screw, NASA's paying for a screw might cost them $100 a screw because the companies that are selling them that screw know that they can get away with it. Whereas SpaceX is saying we're not paying, that we'll build a machine and make these for a dime a piece, if that's what you're going to bother charging us. It's a much more efficient from an economic standpoint to have the commercial partners take care of all the stuff because they're not going to get

overcharged the way NASA has traditionally been overcharged. Yeah, I think that's an important step forward for NASA and an important step forward for these companies because not only do they get money for these initial projects, but they can add things on to it eventually. So SpaceX could say, OK, we have the Starship, we have a crew Starship, but we can also make a space station Starship. Would you be interested in the space station? NASA could be like, yeah, we

like that idea. That's a great idea. We're going to give you the money for it, even if it's just a concept right now. But since SpaceX brought it to them in a capability in like in the capacity of a like a commercial project, then they're going to pay like SpaceX is going to pay for it and then NASA will pay them whatever SpaceX wants to charge them. So for sure, I think it's going to be a huge boost to the low Earth orbit economy, but also the economy of deep space exploration as well.

Yeah. And keep in mind as well that SpaceX has never had any interest in space stations orbit beyond Starling. So this that would be a change of tune and it would have to come with a obviously a big check behind it for them to do something like that or they see some benefit in having a station in orbit and they're willing to

work with NASA to get one. Does Is it a good starting off point for a mission to Mars or something like that to have all the tankers take all their fuel there and then you dock a ship there and launch it from there? They'd have to determine whether that makes sense or not. Yeah, I guess the tankers in space will eventually assemble or serve the same purpose as that space station, right? Just having a ship in space that's gets refueled to refuel another space ship that's a

space station right there. Yeah, very basic one. Yeah, minus the people. Yeah. But yeah, I also think that if SpaceX does make some sort of space station out of the Starship, they can charge rent to NASA and that could be recurring income for SpaceX. If they can see the ROI on a Starship that's in orbit and they can make X amount of dollars per year from it to continue development of better starships, Mars starships, ground systems, infrastructure, whatever.

If it's going to pay for part of the development of these new systems or even Starlink, then that might be something that you would be interested in. Because it seems I wouldn't say free money because they still have to have people manning the systems and fixing up the ships and stuff as time goes by. But once the once the ships are decommissioned they could in theory outfit the ships with. I don't know like I wouldn't.

I don't want to say plug and play, but it could be a very compartmentalized systems that they could take out of 1 Starship and put into a newer Starship. And it could be really easy to transfer those things because the docking mechanisms for the HLS Starship, it's pretty big. If you think of not the docking the the elevator systems, it's pretty big. So maybe that could be as part

of the docking system. It could be big enough that they could transfer A people and B supplies from 1 Starship to another. So decommission one, take it back down to earth, refurb it, do whatever you got to do, and then upgrade your Starship to a new one. And it seems like you could have a. You could have a space station forever in that case. For sure, the beauty of Starship has, from day one has been its

cost effectiveness. It's extremely relatively extremely cheap to make and to they could put up another one on a moment's notice at some point, right. Replace a part that of a ship that is malfunctioning can bring it back down. What not as you say before, there's a lot of others companies that are involved in this partnership with NASA. So it's SpaceX is just one part of that. There's all kinds of ship of companies that would be doing similar things with them and for

them. Yeah, Blue Origin. The project the Blue Origin is going to be used for with his NASA liberation is integrated commercial space transportation capability that ensures safe, affordable and high frequency US access to orbit for crew and other missions. That just does that mean that they're going to be using a rocket to get to lower theraband the commercial space transportation? Origin is the taxi. That sounds like it. Or at least one of the taxis.

Yeah, sure, and nothing. It really says nothing else. It says other missions, whatever that means, but it doesn't really give them anything else. There's no other harder piece of this future NASA, the space that they get out of this, you're ferrying people back and forth. Yeah, Sierra Space looks similarly too. Sierra's got Sierra gets the in

space superstructure as well. They're actually primed for that next generation space station, so they'll get the space transportation in space infrastructure and tailored space facilities to provide a human a presence in orbit. They are really the space station, provided that they can meet all of their deadlines and whatnot. To be honest, at that point SpaceX seems like they're in the wings in case Sierra can't provide what they need.

And they could work together. This is is collaborative efforts with NASA. So anyway. Everything that goes up into space needs to work with together. Yeah, universal locks and universal lists and universal that you can't have anything that is proprietary when you're when you talk about NASA and space, it's all got to work together, yeah. So one that's very interesting is VAST, and this is some cool

wording. Collaborating with NASA on technologies and operations required for its microgravity and artificial gravity stations includes the Haven One, which will provide a microgravity environment for crew research and in space manufacturing. The first crude mission, called Vast One to the platform development activities for larger space station modules will also take place out of the Space Act agreement. So artificial gravity stations. Pretty sci-fi if you ask me. That's very sci-fi.

That's your rotating stations for sure. Yeah, and that'll take. That'll pretty cool. Yeah, it'll be cool. They're gonna have to. I think what they'll do is they'll set up a smaller version of they're gonna have to incrementally set up smaller, medium, large, etcetera. Anti gravity. Artificial not anti but artificial gravity stations. Anti gravity would be wild. Proof of concept is was one of

the first things right. You gotta get up there and prove that it's gonna work and it's gonna be able to be stable and and what do people how do people react in that situation. We don't actually know why. We can guess based on experience that we've done on Earth with spinning people around in a circle, but how long term effects of somebody being spun and just observing around them, right?

This part of the station is spinning slower than that part of the station and it's all curved and how does that affect somebody? Yeah, Curious to see. Yeah. And they're gonna be, oh, go ahead. Go, no, go please. Oh, I believe they're gonna be using Starship as a transportation system for the Vast one as well, or the Haven one, so to. Get it up there. Yeah, Nice. And they're gonna be using, I believe, this Falcon Nine. Yeah.

So they're gonna be doing the Haven One on the Falcon Nine, and then they're gonna be using the Starship eventually too. So that's pretty cool. They're all going to be collaborating with each other and also NASA. So it's going to be, it's that's going to happen in 2025. S Yeah. August 2025. Apparently. That's going to be pretty soon, Yeah. Couple years from now, yeah. And the other ones we haven't talked about are the ones that

kind of interest me quite a bit. Northrop Grumman and Space, Aerospace Services, special aerospace Aerospace services and think Orbital are all on the robotic side of things. That's getting things up there to build stations and to manufacture things and not put people in danger of getting lost in space or being subject to being out in space with the radiation what not. So it's I'd like that side of it as well. Curious to see how that helps.

So the the north of Grumman, the persistent platform to provide autonomous and robotic capabilities for commercial science research and manufacturing capabilities in lower orbit. The manufacturing capabilities part of that is pretty cool. I'm interested to see what they do if they're going to 3D print things or if they're going to be doing just take parts from Earth, like just say beams and trusses and pieces and then put them together robotically.

I don't know what the actual mission is. They don't have any more information about it, but it seems like that would be something that they could do up there, as many manufacture parts of a station or parts of something with robots. Yeah, that's the dream we always

see, right? We always see in the future the sci-fi things are being built right in space, that you've got your sort of space dock where the ship is being built in place up in space around in Earth's orbit, and that would be cool to see something I was when I was a kid, I was really fascinated by space welding, where you put two pieces of steel together that are perfectly flat and as soon as they go together, there's nothing stopping them from joining.

So it's a Weld that just happens because they're the molecules just pass from one piece of metal to the other. Oh wow, 'cause there's nothing stopping them. There's no, there's no oxygen, there's nothing in the way these molecules just passing from one piece of the next and the joins pretty cool. I might have that wrong. It's been a long time since I looked into that, but that was one thing when I was a kid. It was really cool.

That would be wild. That would open up so many, so many doors to stations and architecture and space. And that's cool. That's really cool and everything. I didn't even know about that space welding. I'll have to look into that. That's cool. I can look it up again too. I could be totally wrong being completely ridiculed. But that's OK. Leave it. Leave it in the comments, people. Yeah, I think we've touched on everything here. Is there any, are there any other companies you'd like to

talk about? I know we talked about Sierra Space, but you didn't get to talk about special aerospace services much, but they. All do the same kind of thing. Special Aerospace Services is is looking at autonomous maneuvering units, astronaut assistance units. So it's all servicing the station outside, helping astronauts as well as perhaps doing autonomous work as well to keep things running. Keep it serviced.

If somebody drops a hammer, if this thing can go and get it, rather than astronaut having to risk something or it being one more piece of space junk, maybe they're out there collecting that stuff as well. That would be really cool to see. That would be yeah. And then think orbital, similar to just another piece of a space station, but they do the orbital platforms and research manufacturing astronaut missions, that sort of thing.

So it's building stuff in space, building more things on there. So there's the the autonomous builders, if you will. This is really cool to see, and it'll be interesting to see how these all work together as well. Can they? Can Blue Origin and SpaceX sit down in the same room and figure out the best way to move humanity forward? Wouldn't that be nice? That would be really cool.

I think all of these companies working together, building platforms and building stations and sending things, they're going to be working together in buying trips to space from different companies, Blue Origin or through SpaceX or through Sierra Space, If they need to send something up there, they're going to be working together to send part of their send, part of their space station or part of part of their platforms up

there. So it'll be an interesting time for all of these companies to work together and also to work with NASA. And they're going to be using NASA's technology. They're going to be using NASA's capabilities to innovate in space. And all of the stuff that NASA has learned throughout their time with the International Space Station and through their time with the Apollo programs and the Space shuttle, all of that, all of these companies can use that to better their

platforms too. So it's going to be really cool. Very exciting, yeah. I hope that's the next 20 or 30 years are going to be very interesting space field and hopefully humanity's still around to take advantage of it. Yeah, I think we will be. I think there's we're not going to stop. I think this is going to be a really cool, interesting time. This is the stuff that I dreamed of when I was a kid like like this.

It's finally coming true that we're going to people are going to start building their own space stations like companies are going to start building their own private space stations. Who knows? Eventually we'll be to the point where there's going to be a private mission to another star system like Prometheus or something like that Show the movie Prometheus, except maybe they won't be bringing DNA down to Earth and dumping it into a

river be a little bit different. But it's going to, it's going to be wild in the next 20-30 years what happens up there, because not only is it SpaceX, it's all these other companies that want to make money and they get, they make billions of dollars per year from NASA and also from each other. So it's going to be cool. Can't wait to see it. Happen. Yeah, same here. Thanks, Neil. Thank you very much for having me on here. Will, yeah, of course.

Anytime. We're going to take a trip back all the way to December 13th, 2022 when Elon Musk said he was going to remove 1.5 billion Twitter accounts. It's from the archives. Take a listen. It's interesting. So, Elon? Musk bought Twitter a little bit ago for about $45 billion, and ever since the purchase it's been kind of a roller coaster of

emotions. He fired half of the staff, so half of the people that were on the moderation team and also engineers and also business people behind the scenes, they're all gone. So it's a slim line team and they're working forward in a way that is going to bring Elon's vision to life. And this vision is going to be something that's never really been done before, which is an all in one platform, which is going to be chatting, text, crypto king, video, audio, everything under one platform.

So that really hasn't been done. It's been done in WhatsApp, but it's also something that's never been done sort of in America at this point. So Elon is building that platform and this gets back to SpaceX eventually. So I wanted to let you know that that is not just about Twitter today, but we have to set it up so we know what's going on with Twitter and how it's going to affect SpaceX.

So Elon can have the staff trying to cut money, you know, trying to trying to get the money situated because he spent $45 billion on this and he has to move forward with his plan to build this thing and to make it profitable. But since he has joined up, there's been other things that have been happening at Twitter as well. So Elon kind of opened up the floodgates for all the people that have been banned before to come back out of the platform.

You know, all the people with hate speech etcetera have been let back on the platform. And he's a, you know, he's a absolutist when it comes to free speech. So he wants everybody to speak their mind. He wants everybody to talk about the things that they want to talk about and he wants to give everybody no matter what your leaning is. And he wants to give you a platform to talk about what you want to talk about.

And I understand that. You know, it's it's a noble thing to do. Everybody should be free to say whatever they want to say. Then the consequences of those things should be with the other people that are on the platform. And you should be able to talk it out. You know, like that's how that's how he feels. You know, just talk it out, figure it out. Now, some of this stuff, some of this speech is, you know, protected under the Constitution.

Of course you can't incite violence, things like that. You're not supposed to do that stuff. There's laws about that. You're not supposed to do that. And he said he's going to follow the law of the land as much as possible on his platform. Right. But this is where it gets kind of dicey. When those people came back in, there was a flood of trolls as

well that came back through. And apparently those trolls started off on 4 Chan, which is a place where if you're not familiar with it, it's full of trolls. And if if you've never been there, don't. It's like if you don't want to see it, don't go there. It's it's not a not a pleasant place but it is an interesting place to visit on the Internet and if you, if you're really inclined, go check it out. But I would, I would suggest highly against it. But it's it's interesting.

So they all hung out there and they thought of an idea, hey, let's troll the Internet and let's make a fake Eli Lilly account, right. And this account is a pharmaceutical manufacturer. So they said, hey, we're going to make insulin free. This was a fake account, a verified fake account. You know, you can pay the $8 to get a verified account. They paid the $8, got a verified account and duped everybody into thinking that that's the real Eli Lilly. And the real Eli Lilly was like,

no, we didn't say that. What are you talking about? So the $8 check mark thing on Twitter kind of got canned, right? Immediately it got cut off. Eli Lilly lost a bunch of money. Investors pulled out of the company because they thought that this was real. So the stock price tanked a little bit and people pulled out and they were like, we can't really trust this. So Elon in his wisdom said, OK, $8 check mark not good enough. So we're going to put more check marks.

We're going to check mark the people that are paying the $8 just to verify that you're a human, you're going to have to pay more if you are. You know, if you work at a company, say if you're an executive at a company, you're going to pay X amount of dollars, you're going to get an executive check mark and the name of the company will be in a little icon underneath your profile.

And also a government person, you know, somebody that works in the government, you can have that attached to your Twitter profile. So you're going to have to pay for that check mark as well. So different check marks for different people. Understandable. You know, hey, if you could take a second and hit the subscribe button and the like button, it would really help out the

channel. But it's going to help you out even more because you're going to start seeing more SpaceX NASA Space Flight content in your feed, not just for myself, but from other creators as well. And it's going to help you out actually a lot more than it's going to help me out. So please just take a second hit, subscribe, hit like and let's get back into the Elon Musk content. So you can discern between a real account and not a real

account. And you have to have those certain sort of e-mail addresses or some sort of way to identify yourself in order to get that check mark. So if you're Eli Lilly, you know, for, for instance, you'd have to have an Eli Lilly e-mail address verify your Twitter account so you can verify that you work there. OK. So no more of the trolls getting a hold of the other people's accounts because they're not secure anymore. OK. So that's the thing that Elon's working on right now.

OK, so this all comes back to SpaceX, I promise. So those are the things that advertisers on the platform on Twitter looked at and they said, hey, this doesn't look like it's very stable anymore. And we don't really want to spend our money on a place that is going to give everybody, including the trolls, ways to say racist things and bigoted things and horrible things to other people. We don't want to be associated with that. So we're going to pull all of our money out.

Half of the advertisers, the big advertisers that were spending millions of dollars per month pulled out of Twitter and said we don't want this anymore, we're going to pause our ad spend on Twitter, right. So there goes millions of dollars down the drain for Twitter immediately since Elon took over. Now when Elon saw this, he got, he got mad. You know, he was just like, how can't, like, why can't you understand what I'm doing here?

And also, look, we've had these working relationships for a long time. There's always been trolls. So he confronted the people and he berated them, according to some news article that I read. I can't remember where I read it. I'm sorry, could be the Financial Times. I apologize. I don't have that up right now. But I read it this morning and it was a reputable source. So take my word for it.

Sorry, I don't have it up. The fact is that apparently he went in there and he kind of yelled at people and, you know, kind of said, hey, you should be spending your millions of dollars here and not postponing it because I got this under control. So take that with a grain of salt as well because you never know where the Internet information is coming from, right?

Could be just somebody, also a troll, could also be somebody that works there but also has a, you know, has a vendetta against Elon or one of his companies or something like this, right.

So millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars are going away from Twitter. So I think you know where I'm going with this moving forward, the Internet has kind of turned on Eli Eli Elon and has turned him from this person who's going to rise up and pull people out of horrible places such as, you know, with Tesla, you know, you're trying to remove carbon emissions from the, from the auto industry, right, by using electric vehicles. That's cool.

Like EVs are great for that, you know, and they're like they're great technology. So moving that forward was a huge deal. And also, you know, solar panel roofs, great idea, use the energy from the sun, renewable sun comes out every day. You know, there's there's unlimited source of power from the sun. Use that power from the sun to generate battery power and your house, and you continue to have continuous operation of your home and the energy and that you need for your appliances and the

other things in your house. OK, that sounds like an awesome idea, right? And then you have SpaceX, which is this gigantic rocket company that's sending rockets to the International Space Station. People on board those rockets, they're going to be sending people to the moon in a lunar

Starship variant. And also people that are investing in SpaceX think, you know where I'm going here, the people that are investing in SpaceX are investing billions of dollars every year to keep the company moving forward. So some of those people, and I'm not saying this is actually happening yet, I'm just saying this could happen in the future.

Some of the people that may have wanted to invest in Tesla and there could be, you know, since let's just put a a random number on here, let's just say 1 billion dollars, 1 billion with AB dollars and that's a a certain amount of people. That said, I don't know what Elon's up to now I'm kind of sketched out. I don't know what's happening.

So I'm gonna pull back my 300 million or yeah, my $300 million for now and I'm not going to put it in the next round of funding for SpaceX. Now, can Elon bring in other investors to help him out and get that funding anyway, or could he sell off some of his stock in Tesla to fund SpaceX

going forward? There's a possibility of that, but the sentiment about Elon, Elon has changed tremendously from this person that was going to help revolutionize everything and change humanity as a whole to somebody who's cutting jobs and also now he's a horrible person. And the sentiment online is that it it's completely changed.

If you look at the rhetoric on even on Reddit from the last three to four years, even a couple months ago, everyone was 100% for Eli. You know, there was a a couple of detractors here and there, but most people were like, hey, that's a there's a guy doing some cool stuff, you know, he's making those rockets. That's cool, including myself. I'm like, hey, he's doing some cool stuff.

He's making those rockets. He's making those rockets go to the International Space Station and also Starship, etcetera. But now people are kind of changing their tune. You know, they're they're saying things like he's not fit to run so many companies because he's so, he's so stretched between all of these companies doing all these things that he can't do all of it. You know, they've they've been saying that for a long time, but now it's kind of showing through

a little bit. People are seeing it through the cracks, but it's out public. And Elon even puts it out in the public and talks about it in the public on Twitter all the time. Like he's he's kind of a guy that was like, hey, I love Twitter, I love to talk on here. I love to make memes, I love to make funny things go on on Twitter. But now he owns it so he can kind of do whatever he wants with him. So it's a private company now.

He owns, you know, Twitter, so he can make it whatever he wants to make it. And he doesn't need to rely on outside investment other than advertisers or the investment that was already put into Twitter in the 1st place. And the reason why he bought Twitter, The user base is huge one and if it was the technology that they had, you can build that. Like I could build Twitter.

If I really want to do it, I can sit down and I can read a or watch a a React build, build Twitter with React JS tutorial on YouTube. So it's not the technology. I can get that done in an afternoon, you know, that's no big deal. Elon could do that himself if you wanted to. But it was for the user base, the millions and millions of people of active users that he bought Twitter so he can build his x.com platform moving

forward. Now is this going to hamper some people from investing in SpaceX in the future? I think the diehards will always be there. I think people that are interested in Space Flight and interested in Starship will always be there. And possibly this could shift the focus from private investment of SpaceX into SpaceX going to a more public route if the sentiment dies down from the private investors. And I'm not an an investment guy, you know, so this is not

financial advice. I wanted to let you know that now, not financial advice, but I want to let you know that there's a possibility that within the next X amount of years, SpaceX could be thinking about going public where you could buy shares of test or sorry, SpaceX, and you could buy shares of SpaceX because of this fallout from something like Twitter is if Twitter goes bust, if Elon just goes like, I can't save it and we're going to lose a bunch of money.

Sorry everybody, you know, what are you going to do? But you know, Elon's, you know, he's not perfect and nobody is. So moving forward, if that happens, maybe the vision of Elon, maybe the outlook of of Elon is going to be a little bit

changed. And maybe they're going to have to move SpaceX from, say, a privately owned company and privately funded company to something that's more public like Tesla, where you can have thousands of investors and, you know, you could, you could build a gigantic successful company sort of like Boeing. So maybe SpaceX is going to be

the next Boeing, who knows. But I'm, I'm excited and I'm eager to see what happens in the near future because it could be really interesting or it could just be nothing. You know, there's there's a whole part of it that's just like, maybe this is just Internet drama, you know, maybe it's just Internet drama for now. And people will wake up and they'll say, hey, you know, this is going to be a a, like, no big deal.

And we're still gonna invest in SpaceX because we understand the value of SpaceX, which is bringing humanity to space and bringing like sending humanity to Mars and sending people back to the moon and sending people to the International Space Station and also launching satellites, launching Starlink satellites, bringing connectivity to everybody in the

rural areas of of the world. There's a possibility people are just gonna be like, yeah, we understand, like that's cool, and we're going to spend our money there because we know that that's a successful business. They keep making money, and it's a whole other thing than Twitter. Like, Twitter's kind of a it's a technology company. SpaceX is a technology company, too, but they're a very successful technology company. And Twitter is his new kind of hobby thing. You know, like that.

You think? A lot of people think like that too. Good morning, and welcome back to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston for a second in a series of three briefings today, all talking about NASA's Boeing Crew Flight Test. This mission is a flight test of the Boeing Starliner spacecraft scheduled to launch in early May with our two NASA astronauts, Sonny Williams and Butch Wilmore. Our briefing today will focus on the details of that mission. Our guests here with us today.

We'll discuss the timeline and all phases of flight that they'll be keeping an eye on here with us today we have Mike Lammers, Starliner Ascent Flight Director, Ed Vance ICE, Starliner Rendezvous Flight Director, and Vincent Lacourt, International Space Station Flight Director. We'll be taking some questions here in the room, on the phone and on social media. If you're joining us from the phone bridge, please press * one to enter our question queue.

And on social media, if you have a question, please use hashtag. Ask NASA. When you're asking your question, please state your name and media affiliation as well as who you would like to address your question to. But first, we're going to start off with some opening remarks. I'll kick it off with Mike Lammers. OK. Thank you, Chelsea. Again, I'm, I'm Mike Lammers. I've, I've been a flight director in Houston for about 15 years and a number of programs.

But today I'm kind of excited to come talk to you as the Starliner Flight Director. I'm the lead Flight director and I also do the ascent phase of the flight and in that role I I lead the Boeing and ULA United Launch Alliance operations team that gets the the crew both into the vehicle pre launch as well

as gets them into space. And it's it's been a culmination of a number of years of developing how this flight system works with Boeing and United Launch Alliance as well as developing procedures operation techniques and training especially here at the end where we go through a lot of the details of the mission and it's it's it's really just outstanding to to talk to you about and I know we're all we're all really excited to get into the details of the mission.

Just up top again we're we're targeting launch of the early May and we will have a rendezvous 24 hours later and we're going to do a minimum of an 8 day mission and test flight. And I stress it's it's a test flight right. The the mission is to shake down the vehicle with the crew on board.

We've flown it twice before, but this will be the first time with the crew when we want to learn about it and and make it available as a tool to transport crew up and down to the International Space Station. Again, it's targeting a minimum of an 8 day mission, but the total length is going to be defined by orbital mechanics and the weather at our landing locations which are in the Southwest United States. I'll talk about that in a little bit. Again, I'm here with with Ed and Vincent.

What we're going to do is we'll talk about each phase of flight. I'll start with ascent. Ed will go into the rendezvous. Vincent will talk about what what we're doing docked, then I'll hand back over to me, I'll go through kind of the landing phase and then we'll get into questions. Again, real happy to go into all sorts of detail. We we, we live and breathe this stuff.

So if you have any questions or things that you want more amplification on, we're we're more than happy to go into that. So what I'll do is I'll talk verbally a little bit before we go into the video, but I'm going to start with the day before launch. The way this system works is the the vehicle's going to be stacked on the Atlas Five at the at what we called the VIF, the vertical integration facility. I believe that stands for out at pad 41.

And the day before launch, in the morning, the stack will be rolled out to the launchpad, brought down hard on the launchpad and they'll do some checkouts. And then we have a Boeing team in Florida at the Boeing mission BMCC, Boeing Mission Control Center. They actually handle. They're the team of engineers and technicians that do all the integration and test of the spacecraft. They power up the spacecraft, powered up and down all the time.

In fact, just over these last few days, they've been doing that to fuel the spacecraft. They will power up the spacecraft. My team in Houston will come on and watch with that as well as the Boeing engineering team that's that's based in Houston will be right down the hall from me and we'll bring the vehicle up.

We'll do some checkouts. We'll make sure it can communicate through T Driss and the communications network and do some file up links to the vehicle and just generally make sure it's ready for launch the next day. We'll also do a briefing for the crew just to give them any last minute things that may have come up and kind of a look at the

what the weather. What we're going to do on launch day is Butch and Sunny will will wake up on launch day, go through some of their preliminary activities. They're turned over to Boeing at about 4 1/2 hours before flight, right? Then Boeing manages all the crew activities both to get them ready and out to the pad. At that time we'll do a, we'll do a basically a weather check

with the crew. I'll run out a weather briefing with them and then they'll go ahead and go into the suit room and get suited up with the the Boeing and that David Clark technicians that do that. As the crew is getting ready, the Boeing team in Florida will do the final activation of the spacecraft and that involves bringing the propulsion system up to pressure and activated and then they're ready to turn it over to the team in Houston who will manage the spacecraft.

Keep in mind that the way that this system works is we've got the spacecraft managed from Houston in flight and then of course the launch vehicle is is activated and run in Florida until we hit the point of launch. At 4 hours before launch, again, we're going to hand over to Houston, a little bit different than Shuttle and Artemis.

We manage a lot of the last activities as far as commanding to the spacecraft actually from Houston, the there's also besides that Boeing team in Houston and Florida, we also have a small team in Denver that works for United Launch Alliance that handles what gives me some information on what the rocket is going to be doing during flights. So we're all coordinating. The crew arrives at the pad two hours and 50 minutes before launch.

They'll go up to the white room. You'll see the padtechs help them strap in. That process takes a little bit over an hour. They'll start closing the Hatch at one hour and 20 minutes before flight. I should note too, that the the rocket is actually fully fueled before the crew gets out there. So that's one of the last things we do is we load the rocket with the cryogenic propulsion while we suit up the crew. Again, we're at an hour and 20 before launch. We'll get the crew in and then

the get the Hatch closed. We'll do a leak check on the spacecraft and the pad team will clear the pad about 50 minutes before launch. OK. The real meat of the countdown where you'll hear a lot of things on the on the audio that they provide, that's. At l -, 18 minutes, we'll begin the transfer to internal power. That's where we go from the external power to the onboard batteries. That's commanded from Houston.

You'll hear some calm checks between the crew and the ULA launch conductor Doug Libo. A number of poles going through the count and then in the final four minutes you'll hear the launch conductor give the crew an instruction to do a switch throw. It's called last arm to auto. That'll that's last is the launch abort system. The crew will alarm the abort system at 75 seconds and then they'll go ahead and launch. OK, so it's already been a a busy day but now we have liftoff.

So that's where my real work starts. This is going to be the first crude ascent that's been flown out of Mission Control in Houston since the STS 135 in 2011. Can we go ahead and roll the first video? I'll just talk for about a minute and 1/2 through the ascent activities on the Atlas 5, the animation ascent. OK, again, we've got the Atlas 5 on the pad. Crew access arms retracted at 11 minutes, by the way, so there's a liftoff from pad 41.

OK, On the Atlas 5, most of your energy to make orbit actually comes from the first stage with those two SRBS and the RD180 engine. Actually, one of the first things you'll hear from the crew here is roll program while we're going through Ascent. Looking forward to hearing Butch talk to us right off the pad again. RD180's got 2 engine bells. That's actually a single engine there in the first stage. First stage will burn. The Sr. BS will burn for about a minute

and a half. You'll see them burn out. We actually carry the empty casings for another minute. Goes a little faster on the video, but we got to get above the atmosphere to jettison them. We'll get through first stage at 4 1/2 minutes. There's about a 15 second pause as first stage separates. That's the ascent cover that covers the docking system. It'll be jettisoned and the Arrow skirt will jettison as well. And then the two RL 10s on the Centaur will take us on a nice

easy cruise to space. That'll take us up to about 12 minutes into the mission. Miko is 12 minutes. We'll stay on the booster for about 3 minutes, and then we'll have a separation at 15 minutes into the mission. Again, we're sub orbital still here. We got to do another burn. Starliners actually got a pretty spectacular orbital maneuvering system. You'll see the four engines kick in there.

We'll do that at 31 minutes into the mission, and that'll push the crew into orbit and get a get them heading on to rendezvous. OK, so with that, as in the real world, we do one more burn at an hour and 15 minutes. But then I had it handed over to Ed and his rendezvous team. All right. Thanks, Mike. My name is Ed Van Sis and I've been a flight director since class of 2009, certified in 2010. So like Mike, about 14 or 15 years as a flight director.

Experience International Space Station, Artemis 1A, little bit gateway flight director for for about a year. Lots of projects inside the space station and now I've been working Starliner since 2016. So really all three of us up here have maybe different exact projects that we've worked on, but we all have significant experience across multiple programs for the agency and also been working Starliner for for

quite some time. It's been really an honor and actually humbling to be able to work on Starliner from the days of when it was a PowerPoint presentation all the way up now to having two flights behind us to get ready to go put crew into

orbit on on this third flight. The the teams that we get to work with are are truly amazing and highly capable and everything that they do and getting to be at the forefront of leading the teams, not just the flight controllers but and and the real time engineering teams as well.

But all the all the folks that are working in the factory and with ULA and and all the other organizations we work with and of course with NASA as well and the commercial crew program and and the ISS program, just having that capability and and experiences is just quite a pleasure. Like Mike said, we're we're getting ready to put this vehicle and this crew through a test flight and various phases

of of a test. So that's what you're going to hear a lot about as we are working through the missions. Obviously the primary goal is to get the crew up to the space station and to get them back home to the Southwest US safely. But in that process we are doing a lot of purposely, doing a lot of tests of the vehicle as you would with the test flight of an

aircraft or anything else. So you'll you'll hear a lot about from Vincent, you'll hear a lot about different test things that we're going to do while we're docked. But we also want to put the vehicle through some some experiences that we don't anticipate being needed on a on a normal 6 month mission to the space station. But we know the vehicle should be capable of handling them if

the crew were to to need them. And so we want to check them out on this test flight as well just to be able to say that yes, not only then the normal mission will go fine, but then all of the capabilities the vehicle has on maybe not a good day, all of those work as well. So that's going to be the focus of the bulk of the cruise afternoon after launch. So they they got up early, they went through everything that Mike just described. Now they're in space.

They just completed the the first Co elliptic burn and you'd think that now it's just a a great relaxing ride to the space station and it will be for that six month increment mission. But like I said, we're putting the crew right to work getting them out of their seats, out of their suits and then right into

some demonstrations. And we will be doing a bunch of things with the spacecraft to make sure that it can help the crew and the crew can also maneuver the spacecraft as they need to. So we'll be doing things like purposefully pointing it in a in an orientation that's say, not exactly the the nominal the normal orientation for the mission, and then having the crew manually fly the spacecraft back into the the direction it should be pointing.

We also want to make sure that if for some reason the vehicle doesn't know where the communication satellites are located, that the crew can manually fly the spacecraft to point the antennas at the satellite. Another another thing that we'll be doing this day is tricking, if you will, the spacecraft into thinking that it doesn't know

where it is in space. So we're going to deallocate a couple of its Inertial measurement systems to they're still running, but the vehicle computers are not actually looking at them. So effectively the the computers don't necessarily know where they are. And then the crew will manually fly the spacecraft to look at stars and use our star tracker to then rebuild its inertial

navigation base. And we'll see how their manual, manual way of doing it compares with what the still running computers are are seeing and see how well that compares. And they should all compare very equally and we should be able to run off of that solution that the crew comes up with.

But again, it's a test flight, So we want to see how well the vehicle does and all these scenarios that we've thoroughly tested out on the ground with all our avionics systems down here, but want to see how the spacecraft is really performing. And one other final thing that what we're doing is we're putting all all of our thrusters through a a human manual flying checkout. So we want to make sure that not only can we point in space, but also can we do translations as

well. So if we're close to the space station and the computers have a hard time controlling Starliner, we want to make sure the astronauts can manually fly away. And to ensure we have that capability, we're going to give the crew full manual control on this first day and just test everything out. So we'll do some demonstrations of that and that last part is really important for the safety of the space stations.

We have that manual capability and we talked about the, the engineering teams that are here in Houston, the ones that are in Florida as well and the other NASA programs involved. We're going to take a look at all this data while the crew's sleeping and have the the Boeing teams that that we are embedded

with. We'll take a look at all that data, bring recommendations to our mission management team and ultimately take that to NASA to certify that this manual flying capability is also something we're ready to use in proximity to the space station if we were to need it. So all that's happening while the crew's asleep and then they'll wake up the next morning and we can go ahead and show the video here for the free flight and the orbit. So this is kind of the end of the cruise day.

There is the kind of representation of what they're doing at the in those tests that I was talking about. So we're pointing the nose towards the Earth trying to see where we are with respect to the communication satellites. We also fly in this tail to the sun attitude. So our our solar arrays are at the the back of the Starliners. We want to make sure we keep those pointed at the sun.

But the crews inside there and they're getting ready for bed, and we'll do some more checkouts overnight while they're sleeping. They'll wake up in the morning. We'll be pretty close, you know, a couple couple 1000 kilometers away from ISS and do a rendezvous. That was exactly the same automated rendezvous we did for the last flight. We'll fly up underneath the space station and then around out in front.

And we'll we'll actually pause a little bit out in front of the space station, do some more manual flying just to make sure that's exactly the way the crew expects it. Then we'll press in, and at 10 meters we'll do our final approach and dock. And then Sunny and Butch will get to get everything situated inside the cabin and get ready to come into their new home for the next few days.

And Vincent's the expert on the space station side, so I'll hand it over to him to explain all that to you. Thanks, Ed. So good afternoon, everybody. My name is Vincent Lacorde. I'm the lead International Space Station Flight Director for CFT. I was selected into the office in 2015. I'm going to walk through our dock time frame with International Space Station. Our main goals of the dock mission are a few. There's the practice and validate the planned operations

for long duration missions. We're also going to perform some contingency operations just in case we were ever to need those in contingencies. And then we'll do some cargo operations. Our lead planners who are Richie Chantlos and Izzy Lasky did a great job of trying to fit all the puzzle pieces together and have figured out that we can do our mission in a minimum of eight dock days. So we have a few graphics I'm going to show you to kind of show you how the mission will look day by day.

So the first of all, just as Mike said, we usually dock about 24 hours after launch. Once you arrive and dock to the space station, you're going to get the crew is going to egress, get out of their asset and entry suits. Then they're going to repress the vestibules and be able to open the hatches. And then they'll go on to the space station and we'll have our welcome ceremony that you'll get to watch on NASA TV. Then the ISIS crew members

conduct a safety briefing. Will they'll be able to take Butch and Sunny and remind them of where all the emergency hardware lives on the International Space Station, in case we have any contingencies when they're on board. Now let's go ahead and go to flight day three, which is dock day #2. On this day, we're unloading all of the cargo and we're also configuring the vehicle for

quiescent operations. If you can imagine when you're when the Starliner is there for six months, you don't want to use all the power and leave all of your equipment running the whole time. So what the quiescent OPS does is it basically powers off all the redundant equipment that you don't really need. The crew will still be able to

go inside the capsule. They have good lights, good displays, good ventilation, things like that, but all of the extra computers and stuff like that will be powered off. We'll also get to do some emergency hardware transfer. I'm getting ready again for some of the contingency operations that we're going to practice later in the mission. Let's go again to dock day #3. On dock day #3, we're going to do some of our operational checkouts.

The first main one we're going to do is called our Safe Haven Checkout. If you can imagine if you have an emergency on ISS, you want to be able to get in your Earth return vehicle, isolate yourself and make sure you're in a safe environment. So that's what we'll practice. Butch and Sonny will go into Starliner, they'll close the Hatch. They'll basically completely power up the vehicle on their own to practice if they were getting ready for an emergency undock and return.

So basically, make sure all that all that stuff works in a kind of a steady environment. On entry, we have a system called a supplementer that provides cooling for the vehicle that uses water. If for some reason there's any kind of leak or any kind of where we need additional water, we have the capability to refill that on board even though you normally would not need to do that.

So we'll get to practice that again, just to make sure all the hardware connects correctly, make sure all the procedures are accurate. So that way if we need that in a contingency, we're ready for that. On a long duration mission, we'll have 4 crew members. And So what we'll do is we'll borrow a few ISIS crew members, have them float into Starliner with Butch and Sunny, and we'll practice that that day of free flight to see how would we Orient ourselves with four crew members.

So we'll get to practice that before the the long duration mission. And then we'll get to do a Boeing event where we'll have all of the engineers and employees who worked really hard to get Starliner on board. They'll get to interact with the crew and spend some time with them and see all that great hardware they built in space. We'll go to the next day, dock day #4, so usually seven day in

the six month mission. Seven days before the mission ends, you'll take that quiescent config and do a complete power up and basically check out all the missions systems to make sure all the computers come on, make sure all the the equipment is working. We're basically going to test that out on dock day #4. Butch and Sonny will basically sit in the capsule and watch all of displays and watch all the units come up so that way they can understand how all the

systems are working. Now let's go to flight day number 6, which is dock day #5. We put this sample day in there. As Mike said, Orbital Dynamics will really drive what day we're able to undock. So if it's longer than eight day mission, this is one of the days we'll put in. So we'll give the crew 1/2 day off. Again, they're very busy on all these days, so they'll get a

little bit of rest. We've also trained Butch and Sonny to be able to do basically all of the key International Space Station tasks that could exist for them. So they're ready for any preventive maintenance, corrective maintenance tasks as well as a lot of science tasks.

So we'll we'll ask the space station program what extra activities are available and Butch and Sonny will go back to their International Space Station lives on their previous missions and get to do some of those tasks that they remember doing. Let's say, let's go to dock day number six. At this point, we're really now focused on the end of the mission. So we're going to load all the cargo that's going to come home on the Starliner and start some of that undock preparations.

That emergency equipment that was in Starliner, when I'll take that out and put it back on the the ISS where it lives. One of the other training simulations we fly on Starliner is on entry. It's all automated, but there is the capability that if needed the crew can take manual control and fly an entry for Butch. He's just going to practice that

right before a launch. So he doesn't need a lot of practice, but on six month mission you want the crew to be able to to get in that simulator and really practice those entries to make sure they're ready in case they need it. We'll get to practice that on dock day number six. Let's go to the next day. Now we'll really do a full undocked power up, make sure the vehicle is completely ready.

We're going to have a conference with the crew to walk through all of their flight test objectives, make sure they give us feedback. So that way if we need to adjust any procedures or just any hardware, we can do that before Starliner 1 and then we'll have our standard departure news conference. Then we go to our next day. What we did is we went ahead and put in a sleep shift day because again because of order dynamics, you don't always get to undock

at the same time of day. So this give us a chance to sleep shift the crew for any anytime we need. And then we go to dock Day #9, which will be our last day on the International Space Station. We'll get to do our farewell TV events. The crew will get in there as an entry suit. We'll close the Hatch, and then we'll get ready to leave. And at this point, we'll hand back over to Mike who will kind of walk you through the operations of how you undock and how you entry and land.

OK. Thank you, Vincent. So again, we mentioned where we are now. It's we're on, we're on undocking day and the crew is in the vehicle. I'll show a short video here in a second. But undocking happens about 6 1/2 hours prior to landing. That's a little bit longer on this test flight than it would be for a direct descent mission at the end of a six month increment. We added some time for the crew to do a couple more flight tests and these are really important ones.

Starliner is really unique in that it has a backup system. We called it a backup system where the crew, you know, they have a rotational and a translational hand controller and they normally go through three flight computers that fly the vehicle automated. But as it turns out, we can have the crew engage backup control where they're actually firing. The the commander can fire The Jets directly, bypassing the

computers. And that's just designed so if you had a really unlikely computer failure, the crew can actually manually control the vehicle in this backup mode by what I like to call stick and rudder flying. In fact, they can even de orbit and and land in that mode. So what we're going to do is we're going to spend about an orbit with the Butch, engaging the various.

There's a couple of different jet manifolds that they can they can engage to get some experience flying and back up And just to make sure that get some feedback on how the vehicle flies with respect to all the experience that he has, both, you know, and our training Sims on the ground. And then, of course, the other spacecraft and even aircraft that he's flown before. So again, we'll go ahead and do that. Over a couple of Revs, we do a deorbit burn, and you'll see this in the video.

But we do a deorbit burn over the Pacific and we target a landing in the Southwest United States. We've got 3 landing areas, White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. There's actually two spots that we can land there. It's a it's a really quite a big place and the the other and that's where the previous two Starliners have landed. There's also a landing area at Wilcox Playa that's an area east of Tucson, AZ.

It's actually just off of I-10 or a Dugway proving Ground which is West of Salt Lake City and that gives us kind of a spread, geographical spread that allows us to to get. Opportunities every day depending on where orbital mechanics puts us. So we'll go ahead, we'll roll the video here. This is only about a minute and then we'll be finished. OK, so there's undocking. I think you'll see. Right after we undock, we back down the corridor. There's a cover that this is a

little early in the video. There's a cover that closes over the docking system. We fly 1/4 lap, we get go up over the zenith of ISS and then we do a departure burn. I don't believe we show the deorbit burn here, but this is some of the tests that we're doing with the the backup control that I mentioned. When we do the deorbit burn, it's pretty quick. It's less than a minute and the

deorbit burn will happen. The service module is separated, it does a disposal burn and it burns up over the Pacific. The capsule will go ahead and do a guided the orbit using its own propulsion system, which was activated shortly before this landing sequence begins at 30,000 feet. There goes the forward heat shield and then we put out a couple of drogues. You'll see those jettison here in a second. Hopefully we'll have video from the NASA WB 57 for this when it happens.

Mains go out reefed at 8000 feet and then they'll dis reef 3 mains and takes about. That's the bucket handle that gets us in the correct attitude for landing. Running the mains for about 3 minutes. You should see here in a second the forward heat shield is dropped and then the airbags deploy and the crew touches down and the crew will jettison the chutes manually. They do a switch throw. That'll cause a lot of the

vehicle systems to power down. Well, as they power down, we'll bring the crew up. Actually on a satellite phone. The landing team is 4 kilometer on a on an offset on on a on the edge of something we call the four kilometer circle just to make sure that they're safe from the falling parts that are coming off the vehicle. There are things like mortar lids and those droves that you saw before.

Once the vehicle's on the ground, that team will approach and they're actually on the SAT phone call with me and the and the crew. And they'll we'll go ahead and turn the vehicle over once they're at the location. And then they'll go ahead and make sure that do the usual safety checks that you do around the capsule. And they'll take the crew out, they'll do the medical checks and then the crew will be helicoptered to a landing field and then they'll be flown back to Houston.

So that's that is the mission summary. Great. Thank you so much. That was a huge wealth of information. Thank you to all of our briefers for that in depth. Going over of the timeline, we're going to switch over to some questions now. We're going to be taking questions here in the room. So if you have one, go ahead and raise your hand. We'll also be taking questions on our phone bridge. So if you are on the phone, go

ahead and press * one. If you've got a question for one of our briefers, again please state your name, affiliation and who you'd like to address your question to. We can go ahead and start right here in the room. Hey Mike, I made Rick Wall Street Journal, not sure who this would go to. Steve and Mark talked a little bit earlier about how Boeing is using NASA flight OPS for for this mission. First of all, just to be crystal clear, that's you guys, that's your team's and then second.

Could you talk a little bit about decision making during the mission if there is an anomaly given that given NASA flight OPS role in the Boeing's like ultimate responsibility and authority and management over CFD, how does decision making work and something goes wrong? Thanks. So I'll take a little bit of that, but I'll also let like

Vincent to weigh in too. So what you really have up here, you have three members of the Johnson Space Center Flight Operations Directorate that are NASA civil servants. But we also have APR 2 Starliner mission operations flight directors that are operating out of the white flight control room embedded with Boeing for design, development, test flight mission execution of Starliner. And you have one space station flight directors. He's running his flight.

Vincent's running his team down on flight control Room 1 just like space station 24/7. 365 is being run from there and his focus and his responsibilities are for the safety and protection of the space station and execution of the entire NASA

mission. So I'll let and I'll let him go into details on that versus our side of things is focused on the crew safety vehicle safety mission success of the Starliner mission for and with Boeing. But also of course since we are providing a service to NASA and the commercial crew program primary focus for us too is of course safety and and mission success for the space station. So it is a partnership with Vincent and his team and NASA and ISS team but there are some

pretty clear distinctions. So we have for those of you familiar with our operational products, we have flight rules, we have launched commit criteria that are Boeing products that tell us the limitations going on goes things like that for Starliner that are part of Boeing process. We we work in developing those with our mission operations, flight control teams, the mission engineer, the Boeing engineers and then the Boeing management.

So Mark and Leroy that you talked with earlier and we get all those approved so that we know how to go operate in the Starliner spacecraft at the nitty gritty level. But we also then work with commercial crew program and ISS to ensure that what we're doing is within the requirements and and safety paradigm of of what NASA needs for really taking care of their astronauts. Even though they're our friends, they're the NASA astronauts, we need to take good care of them

so that it is a collaboration. But there's still a distinction on the the extent to which were embedded within Boeing and and their design and development test versus Vincent's role. Yeah. So I think from the International Space Station flight director role, it's very similar to how we do SpaceX, right. Once we get inside integrated operations, the International Space Station Flight Director has operational authority and they're making the ultimate calls on, again, go being go to

dock, go to undock. Those kind of decisions. The same way we would work with a SpaceX mission director because they are the experts in the SpaceX capsule. The same way I'd work with Ed and Mike that they're the expert in the Starliner capsule. So if there's any anomalies on the Starliner vehicle, again, my team is not the expert. We will listen to them and get their to get their advice.

And then we have space station flight rules where we document if they have failure of X computer or we still go or we not go based on what we're done and see what risk we will take.

So again in a lot of ways for us we've practiced this for years but it's very similar how we do other vehicles where again my job is to make sure the ISS is in the right configuration for docking, make sure all of our systems are at the right redundancies and then to communicate with Ed, Mike, Chloe and Rick and on their side to make sure that I understand the situation and what what their vehicle is doing.

And again the the good news for us is we we sit right down the hall from each other right so off console it's very easy to work together and and get good situation where it's on any anything they're working. So that's the benefit right of working at Johnson Space Center where Boeing has has contracted NASA to fly their vehicle. It's easier to be sometimes easier to be on the same page because we do work at the same place and and see each other all the time. Great. Thank you.

We'll take a question on the phone real quick. Marsha Dunn with The Associated Press. Hi, I'm wondering how long could the Starliner and it's crew stay at the space station if something goes amiss during AS then in the initial part of the flight? Are you taking up extra rations just in case? And is Boeing, NASA working with SpaceX to be on emergency standby just in case? I'm just wondering the backup plans. Thanks.

I can go to answer first like the cargo so we have, we basically bring a lot of supplies for the crew for for kind of that initial mission. We have some extended supplies and caves they stay, but obviously ISS has has plenty of food and water for example. So really we're prepared for them to stay as long as they need to. Obviously there's certain weather requirements that we need to meet on on CFT and so we have no issues if we need to

stay stay any longer. Yep. As far as duration goes, this this is there's really no hard constraint on the vehicle. This is the spacecraft that's designed to stay at space station for six months, and there's nothing essentially limiting that if you needed to. As far as being on standby, you know those are. I'm not aware of of any of that. OK. We're going to go to a question in the room. Go ahead. Hi Elizabeth Howell from space.com. This is probably for Ed.

So can you talk about during the close proximity operations to the ISS aside from obviously the flight activities of flight activities Sunny and Butcher doing, are there any key difference with how a SpaceX direct and close proximity operations those? So I'm first going to admit that I've been focused on Starliner for a long time and have not been a flight a NASA flight director for a Crew Dragon

mission. So I don't have tremendous depth of detail to really give you a point by point comparison. But I have worked a couple of Dragon cargo missions in in previous years. So at a high level, the trajectories are basically the same because largely because of what Benson described with the way that ISS wants to have vehicles approaching and the way they want to manage the traffic

plans. So at a very high level, all the spacecraft that come up to the ISS are going to come up from below and behind and then do some sort of rendezvous. If you're docking to the forward part of ISS, obviously you'll go below, behind, in front and then and then kind of come up.

The way that we do that with Starliner is a little bit different than with the Dragon. So the profiles will look a little bit different just because the sensors that we use, the sensor suites for rendezvous are all, you know, different technologies, different way of doing things, different mission rules, different waypoints if you will to to to get on that trajectory. The way that the space station is monitoring the approaching vehicle is very similar.

It's obviously not exactly the same, but it's very similar and then largely from that level I can say that it's pretty close to the same. I can't really do a good comparison for you on you know timeline of events or the the manual capabilities of the manual actions that crews might be doing. But from that perspective it's it's pretty pretty similar. We'll take another question in the room. Thanks. Hi, Irene Klotz with Aviation Week from Mike.

Two questions. The first one is considering that redundancy in Starliner, do all systems need to be operational to meet the launch commit criteria or are you able to fly? If something is operational, you can provide any detail on that? And then the second, just to clarify again the relationship between Boeing and NASA for the Starliner missions, for all intents and purposes, are you all sort of on leave from NASA on your official jobs and working as subcontractors to Boeing?

So Boeing is your customer during these missions? You're no longer sort of representing NASA as you would if it wasn't a Starliner mission going on? Thanks. Yeah, I'll good questions. I'll I'll take your second question first because maybe here's here's another way of of of of thinking about it and I realized that that it it can be it's challenging to describe sometimes the relationship but I'll give it to you another way.

When when I'm working Starliner right Ed and I, we actually have a charge code right and that that that is you know funded by Boeing. I mean ultimately it's part of a NASA contract but but but it's it's being managed by Boeing and we're providing them service right. And then that goes into even how the mission is run. When I report to the mission management team, the mission management team is chaired by Leroy Cain who's a Boeing

employee. Boeing runs the mission until we get into the joint OPS with with with Vincent as he as he described then you know NASA's got an oversight role like they do for all of the of the vehicles. But, but once, if we're outside of this area around ISS, it's it's a Boeing run mission that is done in partnership with their customer who is NASA. As far as the launch commit criteria, you know there's kind of two sets.

There's the ones that ULA has United Launch Alliance on the Atlas Five. I'm not as familiar with those except to say that they do their own set of checks that's identical to all the commercial and government missions that that they do for the rocket for the spacecraft In general, all the systems have to be up and running. I think I could probably get into some details where there's there's some small things that we can fly without.

I was just you know talking yesterday about about 1 criteria is how many. You know the crew uses tablets for their procedures, right. And we fly with four of them. Well if something happened to one of them we can fly with three. So there's there's there's a few places where there's sufficient redundant systems that can go ahead and launch. But, but in general all the flight computers, all the Imus have to be running to to to launch and we, I mean we're evaluating those right down to

liftoff. Thank you, Mike. We're going to switch to a question on our phone bridge, Jeff Faust with Space News. Right. One, is there anything like the dry dress rehearsal that SpaceX does for true Dragon missions for Starliner? And then you mentioned the timeline for undocking the landing is a little bit longer on CFT versus an operational mission. What would be the the time from undocking to landing for an operational mission?

Thanks. Let's see for the the dry dress, the answer is yes, there is an activity and I forget the exact date right now, but it's about 8:00. It's it's eight days before launch, seven or eight days before launch and it's called the crew training activity. It's really a full up run where the crew we we have the whole team there. The crew suits up in the suit room. They get get in the suits we take them down to the spacecraft.

The one difference is is the the spacecraft and the rocket aren't at the pad, they're in the VIF, the the integration building. But we we have them practice out in the pad in the white room on some other activities. But the crew will get into the spacecraft. The spacecraft is going to be powered. In fact, we're commanding it from Houston just as we would on launch day and we go through the entire launch count, including things like having the crew do suit checks, working with the pad team.

We'll do all of that and get a chance to to practice it. So that is being done and is similar. It is a dry dress. Let's see, the second question was the amount of time for a post certification mission as we call it, when when Starliners coming down it would be the shortest possible time to get from undocked to landing would be about four hours. There's a little bit of a dependency on whether or not there's a fly around done.

So Starliners got the capability to do a full fly around of the entire space station to to do photography of space station. We're not doing that on this mission. Potential to do it on the next mission if NASA requested, and if they do, it'd be, I think, closer to the six hours. Thank you. Got a question right here in the front ABC News for Matt. What are the weather and lighting constraints for landing? Was that so the question was weather and lighting

constraints. The the weather constraints for landing are we essentially want the lowest wind that we can to to undock and then that's just to give it a gentle, the gentler, not not have a a large lateral component. When we hit the ground also we do things like we account for if a parachute fails or an airbag fails. And so you tend to be a little bit more conservative right now. I think we, we want limits that are less than 10 knots for that.

And that kind of ties into the second part of your question which was lighting. There are no requirements for lighting. In fact we tend to like to land at night and that's because two reasons, one is the wind is lower at night in the places that we're landing. Also you got to think about the safety of the of the people that go out and meet the spacecraft after it lands.

Some of them are in things called scape suits which are to protect them if there's a leak of of fuel or oxidizer from the vehicle. They're actually pretty hot and you know we land in the desert and so we it's a lot easier on the landing team to land at night. And it turns out we found in previous missions it's actually I when I started working this program years ago.

We're a little bit worried about operating at night, but they've actually come up with a really nice setup with the lights and of course if you see the the video we've got the infrared tracking both from the ground and the and the aircraft it's it's it's it's kind of funny. We've got to the point where we almost prefer the night so. OK, got another question right here. Or with CVS. Well, we prefer the daytime, but that's OK. It is prettier. I I will give you that.

Two quick ones from me and I know this isn't about, this isn't a dragon briefing, obviously, it's it's, it's star liner. But are there any things in your minds that are clear advantages that Starliner brings to the table, things that you particularly appreciate in terms of how it flies and how you control the spacecraft, how the crew does that? And secondly, can do any of you have any idea what what sort of TV we can expect from the mission between launch and docking?

I know what we get on once it's at station, but is there any live down links during the mission that you're aware of or do they have the capability to do that? Thanks. I haven't talked lately the the the for the second question there is with the the current Starlight for CFT, there is not the capability to do live video downlink. We do have the camera system that you saw on the last flight that'll provide streaming video when we're docked to the space station.

And that camera system is running during the free flight phases as well. And the crew will actually be conducting some public affair affair events during the free flight on both the 1st and 2nd day of the mission. But they'll be recorded on the video system and then played back after we've docked. So there might be some some audio of that that comes down live, but there's for this flight, there's no live TV capability in the free flight

phase. Comparing capabilities between Dragon and Starliner, again I have to plead a little bit of of Dragon lack of knowledge just because I haven't really worked in depth on those vehicles to really give a good comparison. But I can tell you that they are different and some obvious differences are the fact that Starliner lands on the land

versus in the ocean. Starliner has tactile hand controllers for manual flying, whereas Dragon doesn't, and those are those are kind of some of the more obvious aspects and they're just differences. They're not. One's not really better than the other, one's not necessarily more capable than the other, but they are different capabilities. The rendezvous sensor suite is different between the two

vehicles. Just the way that the two companies have approached how they want to approach and depart from space station are also differences. And that that then factors into how you train the crews, what you focus on with the crew training and that really rolls into exactly what NASA of course wanted with the commercial crew program is you didn't you didn't want just one spacecraft or one provider that you know all your eggs are in that basket.

You provide a couple of different capability from access to space perspective but you also provide a couple of different venues for industry to design solutions in their own way using their own ideas that are different from each other. And you you start to have this low earth, low Earth orbit economy that NASA has been talking a lot about where now you have different options if you want to get a ride into

space. So we we are definitely going to be exercising those that Starliner has as much as we can. And then maybe the best way to answer your question is going to be after the mission when the the services they're looking to provide access to the Earth orbit can then compare between the two and and see which of the two menu options, if you will, for accessing space are are to their liking and meet their

mission needs. Thank you, Ed. We do look forward to seeing those live down links once they get to the space station. We have a question here in the room in the back. Thank you. Stephen Clark, Ars Technica. Just a follow up on Bill's question, what is the vehicle lacking on this particular flight that doesn't allow you to do the live video downlink and will that come online like with Starliner wine? And secondly, my main question, Mike, can you talk about the

abort modes during ascent? Can you walk me through different abort phases, different types of aborts you would conduct if you have to, hopefully not at different stages? Thanks. I can answer the first part and then I'll let Mike do your part. Really the only thing that the system is lacking is just connection from the the data, the video recorder to a transmission system. So the transmission antennas and the ground stations to receive those transmission transmissions

are just not online yet. So the the capability within the capsule, the infrastructure for it is all there. They just we just haven't progressed enough into getting the the operational post certification piece to where we have that capability yet to. Answer the second part of the question, the aborts. So we spent a lot of time working on aborts. Boeing and United Launch Alliance have spent a great deal of effort making a safe system.

The the way aborts work is it's kind of joint between the spacecraft and the launch vehicle. The launch vehicle is monitoring itself and if it needs to abort, it will tell the Starliner to abort. Additionally, we've got, you know, I've got a team of United Launch Alliance flight controllers are actually in Denver and they're reporting to me in real time and they will tell me if they see an abort approaching.

We can do some things like perhaps abort early if we need to, just to put the crew in better weather over the ocean. It's a very large swath of the world we're flying over. But what you'll hear is that lift off, as I mentioned earlier, the abort system goes active 75 seconds before launch. And then as we lift off and you gain more energy, you land at

different places, right? So the one of the you'll hear them call the abort boundaries one of them is CM forward and that's just has to do with how how the the service modules jettisoned after an abort but that's still in the in the pad area around Florida as you get more energy right when the first stage goes at 4 1/2 minutes you'll hear Ecal that's East

Coast abort landing. The it's a heritage term you actually end up in the ocean generally east of Cape Cod and then as you gain more energy you will hear a call for St. John's and that is in the area of the ocean near St. John's NL. You'll do a guided landing there and then once you have enough energy to get up over the North Atlantic, which is by design vehicles designed to avoid that, you'll hear Shannon and that's your Shannon, Ireland.

And then once you obtain enough energy to make orbit, we've actually got a mode called Ato or abort to orbit and that'll get the the Starliner. If if there's a low performance case, the Starliner can burn its own engines and get into into a low orbit that's 200 kilometers high. And actually in a lot of cases we can give it a little bit of time. We can actually figure out how to get a rendezvous out of that if we need to. But those those are the kind of the top level how abort modes

work. So I want to go to our phone bridge because I know we don't have all that much time left. We'll go to Robert Pearlman with Collect Space. Great. Thank you. Two questions. Given the flight rate, is there just one NASA team assigned to Boeing for all of the Starliner flights in terms of Mission Control? Or are there different assignments of different people assigned as you progress from CFT to Starliner One?

And second quick second question in terms of referring to the vehicle on orbit, since there is a name of this spacecraft Calypso once you see me referring to it as Calypso or as Starliner as you call back and forth from space to ground, I'll get the first one. So I'll get a book.

Hey, the first question as far as the NASA team we that that supports Starliner. This is a really good question actually because you talk about the flight rate and Starliner is kind of interesting in that you know Boeing flies this crude mission and the the team that we use, we have a very small core group of people that work this full time. But actually most of the team that flies this vehicle does

other things right. Both Ed and I do space station shifts and we do, we've done Artemis shifts and it actually really helps with this flight rate because as I'm a guy that does operations, one of the things that's really important for people that does the kind of work that we do is you got to fly things right and it and it's all about how often you get to fly things that really builds a team that knows how to manage a spacecraft and space and do it safely.

And the way this works out is that we can almost ebb and flow on this program as we're needed, right? So right now we're coming up to a flight and we surge.

When you get into some of the time in between these, in between these year long missions, we can allocate people to do other things And that ultimately, you know, saves resources as far as having a team that otherwise you'd need that have completely stood up to cover you know 24/7 OPS of a spacecraft that that is free flying only a very short short period of time. As far as the naming, what we've been using in all of our simulations is, is Starliner.

That's kind of what we're used to and what we've been training. So I'm sure the the, the name that Sunny used will come up. But in general, in our training we've been using Starliner and I think I expect that's generally what you'll hear. Great. So we only have a couple of minutes left, but I do want to get one more question in the room if it could be a quick one. Yeah, hopefully this will be

brief. Will Robinson Smith for Space Flight. Now for Mike, assuming that the airbags deploy as nominally, can you describe what the the impact the Butch and Sonny will feel like, what that sensation will be? And if one of them only partially inflates or doesn't fully inflate, what the difference for that might be? Thanks.

That'd be an excellent question for Butch and Sonny this afternoon because they have both landed in well Butch has landed in a Soyuz which has got an interesting way of landing as as as we've we've seen you know they land on land too and but they're using rockets instead of airbags but I believe the descent rate is about 25 feet per second.

I would say that it's likely a firm landing but but you know the requirements for these vehicles that both the NASA crude vehicles as far as the conditions that the crew see it impact is fairly gentle. It's it's not going to be I think something that is puts the crew at risk in any way and that includes with an airbag out, right.

All those requirements there, we call them the Health and Human performance requirements, but they were all there and the vehicle is certified to do all these things even with an airbag out and that was part of the requirements to to build it. So I I suspect it's going to be pretty gentle. Great. Thank you so much. That is all of the time that we have today. Thank you to our awesome briefers for talking about an overview of NASA's Boeing crew flight test mission.

Hey, thank you so much for listening today. I really do appreciate your support. If you could take a second and hit the subscribe or the follow button on whatever podcast platform that you're listening on right now, I greatly appreciate it. It helps out the show tremendously and you'll never miss an episode and each episode is about 10 minutes or less to

get you caught up quickly. And please, if you want to support the show even more, go to patreon.com/stage Zero and please take care of yourselves and each other and I'll see you tomorrow. A lawsuit filed by X, owned by Elon Musk against the group studying online hate speech was dismissed by a federal judge, with the ruling emphasizing the protection afforded by the 1st Amendment to the research group's reports on the platform, previously known as Twitter.

Now the judge's decision articulated that the suit aimed to penalize the researchers for their findings on the increase in hate speech on X. The judge, Charles Breyer, in his Monday ruling stated unequivocally that the lawsuit's objective was to reprimand the Center for Countering Digital Hate, or CCDH, for their expressive activities. He highlighted that the case centered around retribution against the defendants for their critical speech.

Now the CCDH faced legal action from Musk following their publication of research indicating a rise in racist, homophobic, Neo Nazi, anti-Semitic or conspiracy content on X, particularly from paid accounts which allegedly remain unmoderated now. This action came during a period when advertisers were withdrawing their support from X Musk's legal team, during a court hearing in February hinted at the possibility of refiling the lawsuit against CCDH.

However, Judge Breyer dismissed the suggestion, finding the argument that the group's data collection methods threatened the platform's security unconvincing. The judge expressed doubt regarding the lawsuit's basis, suggesting that X's concerns lay more with CCDH's express viewpoints than with the actual methods of data collection employed by the group. The skepticism was apparent during the February hearing and was reiterated in Breyer's final

ruling. Now, despite Musk's public commitment to absolute freedom of speech on X, the lawsuit against CCDH reveals a less tolerant stance towards criticism, particularly when directed at Musk himself. This is further exemplified by Musk's legal action against Media Matters for America, another group that reported on the platform's failure to filter out anti sabetic content on the

CCDH. Victorious under California anti slap statutes, which aim to prevent baseless lawsuits that suppress free speech, is set to receive coverage for the legal expenses from Musk. The exact amount is yet to be determined through court proceedings, though, and Musk's purchase of Twitter in 2022 led to several controversial decisions, including the reinstatement of accounts previously banned for harmful contact and changes to the

platform verification system. These decisions have sparked discussions about Musk's management and the platform's direction under his leadership. Now, Musk's inconsistent commentary on X's financial health further complicates this. While he occasionally claims the business is thriving, he's also acknowledged a significant drop in advertising revenue and speculated about potential bankruptcy.

The CCDH's work which led to the lawsuit involved using third party tools to analyze publicly available data on X, and Musk contended that this constituted unauthorized data scraping, thereby infringing on the platform's terms of service and contributing to financial losses. The legal dispute between X and CCDH shows that there are big concerns here regarding the accountability of social media platforms for the content that they host now.

This case in particular focuses on the tension between corporate interests and public research on digital platforms and their societal impact. Now, the court's dismissal of the lawsuits, It kind of. It reinforces the importance of protecting research and discourse on the rule of social media. In propagating hate speech, it emphasizes the legal protections afforded to such work, especially when it challenges powerful entities.

Now, Musk's aggressive legal strategy against organizations like CCDH and Media Matters is a broader attempt to control the narrative surrounding X and its handling of contentious content. This approach has raised questions about the balance between free speech and the responsibility of the social media platforms themselves, and the CCDH's victory in this case is seen as a significant affirmation to the right to

conduct public interest. Research on social media's influence highlights the legal safeguards in place for entities investigating and critiquing the operations of platforms like Musk. I have to ask you, is this freedom of speech? Is using the data that you find on a platform and creating speech out of it? Is that freedom of speech? Are they allowed to talk about this? And it seems like in some ways Musk is trying to stifle their freedom of speech.

I'm not sure if that's the case, but it seems like he may be trying to silence them with his court case now. The ongoing legal battles here involving Musk and X, including disputes over former executive severance and accusations against a law firm for excessive billing, show a picture of a platform embroiled in controversy and litigation. The outcome of this lawsuit may set a precedent for how research organizations can study and report on social media platforms

without fear of retribution. Now, the judiciary's role in upholding free speech and research in the face of corporate opposition is paramount. Here, we have to make sure that free speech, including research

organizations, are protected. This ruling also draws attention to the broader implications for social media governance, particularly regarding how platforms manage and respond to hate speech calls into question the effectiveness of self regulation and the potential need for more stringent

oversight. Now, the dismissal of Musk's lawsuit against the CCDH by a federal judge affirms the essential role of free speech and research in scrutinizing and holding social media platforms accountable. This case highlights the legal protections available to those who critically examine the impacts of digital platforms on society, reinforcing the importance of transparency and accountability and our digital age. Hey, thank you so much for listening today.

I really do appreciate your support. If you could take a second and hit the subscribe or the follow button on whatever podcast platform that you're listening on right now, I greatly appreciate it. It helps out the show tremendously and you'll never miss an episode and each episode is about 10 minutes or less to

get you caught up quickly. And please, if you want to support the show even more, go to patreon.com/stage Zero and please take care of yourselves and each other and I'll see you tomorrow.