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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 andjointhecurrent.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 SpaceX 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 there. They're not saying build as 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 too for 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 at 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 Spacex's 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 a 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 of 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 happens 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 or 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 could 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 too. 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 the 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 can 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 going to 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 going to 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 gonna be taking normal trips to Mars. There's gonna be just numerous trips per year to get to Mars.
And I believe the next, the closest that Mars is gonna 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 gonna 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 is 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 veil. So it's they're gonna have to practice that for sure. Yeah. Right now they're practicing getting the thing 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 this Starship. They'll have to do it 100 times. But if they're just doing tests, they're going to 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 you'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 gonna 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 don't need some way to exhaust the flame as it comes out but also the top, the Dome of the the booster is going to have to withstand the all those engine lighting as well. Yeah, I don't understand how they're going to 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 something.
Yes, it's not a. Thing Stainless steel either. Plus they want to reuse these 100 times. Yeah, so there really can't be any damage from the separation. For this to be successful, it 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 to 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 puts 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 Qantas 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 a 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 the 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 with 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? To 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 this NASA collaboration 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 thoroughbred the commercial space? Transportation. It 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 hard or piece of this future NASA. The space that they get out of this, you're ferrying people back and forth. Yeah, Sierra Spaces looks similarly too. Development 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 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 career 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 would be 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 we're going to have to incrementally set up smaller, medium, large, etcetera, anti gravity. Artificial, not anti, but artificial gravity stations. Anti gravity would be wild, but artificial gravity. Stations proof of concept is was one of the first things right.
You got to get up there and prove that it's going to work and it's going to 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 about 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? Be 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. 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 gonna be collaborating with each other and also NASA. So it's gonna be it's gonna. That's gonna 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. That's the dream we always see, right? We always see in the future of the sci-fi, things are being built right in space. 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, 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 service. 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 and 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. Hey, thank you so much for
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