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 So Boeing is kind of going through some stuff right now. They've initiated a legal action against Virgin Galactic, and they've alleged the unauthorized retention of proprietary information exchanged during their collaboration on a new mothership project. And this is for Virgin
Galactic's space program. The aerospace Titan of Boeing seeks the judicial directive to prevent future further misuse of this data. In a legal filing to a federal court in Alexandria, VA, Boeing claims that Virgin Galactic continues to hold on to confidential Boeing data originally shared under a 2022 partnership agreement. This situation has escalated to a formal lawsuit highlighting a breach of trust between the two entities. Now, at the heart of this dispute is the mothership's
development. This is part of the system that launches space planes to significant altitudes. Now, Boeing and Aurora Flight Sciences had a partnership, and it was aimed at producing an advanced mothership for Virgin Galactic's future space tourism endeavors. Now, Virgin Galactic's ambitions include the rollout of its Delta space plane, designed to offer more frequent suborbital tours.
The company is simultaneously enhancing its current mothership EVE to boost production efficiency and maintenance simplicity. Now, despite the initial collaboration, the partnership between Virgin Galactic and Aurora Flight Sciences dissolved, leading to the current legal standoff. Virgin Galactic's failure to destroy certain trade secrets as per their agreement is central to Boeing's lawsuit. The trade secrets in question encompass decades of Boeing's expertise in aircraft
development and operation. Boeing argues that Virgin Galactic's actions not only infringe on proprietary rights, but also pose a risk of exposing these secrets to competitors. Virgin Galactic has responded to the lawsuit, denying the allegations and asserting its intention to contest the claims vigorously. Boeing, on the other hand, has refrained from further comments on the matter.
This lawsuit surfaces as Virgin Galactic progresses in its space tourism ventures, having successfully conducted its first commercial spaceflight and several subsequent missions bringing private astronauts to suborbital space. Virgin Galactic's financial strategy hinges on the success of its Delta space plane, though, projecting substantial
profits from its operation. Despite the potential of the existing EVE Mothership to launch Delta, a new mothership could enhance operational capabilities. Now, the legal complaint also addresses Virgin Galactic cessation of payments to Boeing and Aurora linked to the Mothership Development Project with outstanding invoices
mounting to about $27 million. You know, the breakdown of the partnership reportedly stemmed from budgetary and timeline constraints leading to the premature cessation of Mothership's development efforts. Boeing and Aurora's lawsuits delineates the alleged misappropriation of specific technical equations and test data, which are considered proprietary and offer a competitive edge in aircraft design and performance modeling.
The dispute extends to Virgin Galactic's refusal to eliminate documents containing these trade secrets, The Virgin claiming rights to this information under the terms of their agreement. The aerospace conglomerate is seeking financial redress for the unpaid work and additional compensation for the unauthorized use of the trade secrets.
Aiming to safeguard its technological advancements, Virgin Galactic's focus has recently shifted towards the Delta class space plane with less emphasis on developing a new mothership. This pivot reflects the company's adjustment to more demand for space tourism in this market. Now it's complex thing going on here. Intellectual property partnership dynamics. If a company dissolves, who gets the ownership of the data and who controls the ship?
There's challenges here, and the collaboration between Boeing and Virgin is going to continue, but more so in the courtroom. The outcome of this lawsuit could have ramifications for both Boeing and Virgin Galactic, potentially influencing future partnerships between the two and the sharing of proprietary information between them. Now let's shift focus a little bit. Let's go over to SpaceX. Let's go to their Starship program. Just recently, Ship 29 was on the pad.
Now this means that they're testing for the next flight of the Starship, which is IFT 4. Now IFT 4 is an important flight because IFT 3 went really well and IFT 4 which means integrated flight test 4. This is the number, the 4th one that they're doing. They're gonna be doing something that we didn't really know, but Elon Musk tweeted about it and I'll let you know what happens there in a second.
But on the 25th they did a static fire A6 Raptor engine, static fire of the Starship ship 29, and then they did a single static fire of a single Raptor engine using the header tanks for flight 4 yesterday on 3/27/2024. Now the ship is currently being lifted off the pad as I record this, which means it seems like testing is done. They're gonna probably move it back to the Bay and do some fine tuning of the ship, fine tuning of the engines and get it ready
for the flight. Now when this happens, Booster is going to come out towards the flight deck, go down towards the pad. Booster 11 is the booster that they're gonna be using and there will be testing on Booster 11 in the upcoming week or so. So they have to do some cryogenic testing, which means they fill it full of really cold liquid, subzero liquid. And also they're gonna be doing some static fire testing of their engines.
Fair enough. Fire is they basically just test the engines on the pad so it doesn't actually fly. They clamp it down, they shoot off the engines real quick. Sometimes it's a full duration, which could be anywhere between a few seconds and a few minutes depending on the rocket and the
engines. But we're expecting a full duration static fire test of the booster and some spin Prime tests in the coming week or so. So it will be moved down to the pad within the next few days, before the weekend probably. So once that's done, Elon and company said that they want to get this done by mid-april and I think that's possible with this
testing schedule here. But the most important thing that Elon has said is that after this single engine, Raptor engine static fire for the Starship 29, Elon tweeted goal of this mission is for Starship to get through Max re entry heating with all systems functioning.
So the goal of the next mission, we thought everybody in the aerospace industry, we're leaning on Starlink, Starlink, Starlink. They have to get something done with Starlink. They have to launch a Starlink into orbit, or you know, something like that, or at least get the mechanism working properly. They did a a Bay door test last flight on IFT 3 seemed to go
pretty well. There's a little hitch in the giddy up when they were closing the door, it seemed like, but they'll fine tune that and get it ready for this next flight in subsequent flights. So what they're really focusing on, according to Elon, is to get to maximum re entry heating with all systems functioning and if they do a maximum or if they do a re entry with maximum heating, they know that they can go to orbit and come down wherever they're going to come down in
the future. Right now for IFT 4, they're going to be coming down the Indian Ocean for subsequent flights as well. So we're not exactly sure where they're going to go for flights when they go to full orbit, but for the foreseeable future, it's going to be be in the Indian Ocean. So it's gonna be exciting. We should have onboard cameras for the whole flight, so take
notice of that. You can check out the flight on our YouTube channel, Space News Pod on YouTube, and you can also check out more analysis on that Channel as well. So please take a second, check that out and I'll see you over there. Hey, thank you so much for listening today. I really do appreciate your
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