Hey everybody, welcome back to the Elon Musk podcast this. Is a. Show. Where we discuss the critical crossroads, the shape SpaceX. Tesla X, The Boring Company and Neuralink and I'm your host Will Walden if you want uninterrupted episodes of the Elon Musk podcast. Please go to. Clubelon.supercast.com to find out how there's a link in the show notes. And today's episode is about the Starship IFT 4 flight and also subsequent flights after that.
We saw the success of IFT 1, IFT 2 and the most successful flight so far, IFT 3. They did some interesting things in IFT 3. One of them is the Hatch which
is used for Starlink satellites. That's they open up the Hatch like a Pez dispenser, shoot out Starlink satellites into orbit, and then while they cash in on those satellites because it's a service that SpaceX provides to rural areas where people can't get high speed Internet. And this hat store was it kind of went OK. I talked about in the last video, it was OK. It had a little little hiccup while it was closing, but altogether it was a success.
Now that's important because we have to talk about something in the Gwyn, Shotwell talked about who is the COO of SpaceX works hand in hand with Elon Musk, knows exactly what's going on with Starship at all times, and she just recently was on a paddle on the satellite conference and something really interesting, she said. So there's a timeline for AFT Four. She said SpaceX will be ready to launch in about six weeks. That's a month and a half.
That's really fast. Most of these launches take half a year, four to five months. If they can be ready in six weeks, this is going to be incredible because Elon Musk has talked about having nine launches of Starship this year, and if they can turn these around in a month and a half, I can see that actually happening. This is a huge deal because before they only had clearance to do 5 launches per year, and now they're trying to up the ante to 9.
Next year they'll probably going to go up to 30. Knowing SpaceX and building on the success of 12345, they're going to keep building on all of the successes of these Starship launches going forward. So she says right now that the teams are still reviewing the data from IFT 4 and that also remember the Bay door, the Hatch door, They're not gonna have satellites on board. I FT four. I thought they were gonna do maybe a dummy satellite, an I FT
four. I knew they were gonna do another hatch test, but I wasn't sure about the about some dummy satellites. That's where I was kind of conflicted because they have so many other things that they have to take care of. So many other things that they have to work on, including possibly another propellant transfer. I'm not 100% sure about that because we don't have the data from the propellant transfer. They said it's successful, but was it 100% successful or was it
99%? We're not 100% sure. So are they gonna be doing other transfer prep, pellet transfer for IFT 4? Possibly, possibly, just to make sure that they can use that for the Artemis program. And if you're not familiar, the Artemis program is NASA's next program to send people to the surface of the moon.
Very important thing. And SpaceX will be landing those people using the HLS Starship. So this propellant transfer is super important because they have to transfer propellant in orbit from a tanker Starship to a flying moon Starship, a lunar Starship, the HLS Starship, which they will land on the surface of the moon with astronauts on it. Then they'll do science all over the place on the moon. So it's gotta be it's up in the air about the propellant
transfer. But it's possible now, since Gwen said six weeks, we know that we could possibly get a bunch of Starlink and Starship flights this year. I don't know when they're going to start launching Starlinks, but more than likely at the end of the year. But Gwen said that the goal of the Starship this year is to reach orbit, deploy satellites, and recover both stages. So that means they're building the second tower at Starbase right now. I believe that's gonna be the
catch tower. Right now. They cannot. There's no way, there's no reason for them to use the current tower as a catch tower. Anything that happens to their launch tower right now, it's gonna put set them back a year, six months to a year. So there's no reason for them to do that. What they have to do is build on the success of the tower. One for the tower 2. Build it out so there's just
catch capabilities. Make sure that the catching is perfect, and then from there, launch from tower one, catch on tower two. Transfer the booster back to the production facility, scrub it off, get it ready for the next launch. Fix up whatever needs to be fixed. Same with the ship. Full orbit. Come back down to Starbase, Texas. It's gonna be impressive when they catch 1. A 250 foot tall booster. Huge. Bigger, like wider than your house. Think about your house right
now. How long does it take you to do a lap around that? That's that's as big as a Starship. It's 30 feet in diameter, 9 meters. It's a gigantic thing, also 250 feet tall. It's massive. The thing is a skyscraper. And they're going to be landing this at Starbase Tower #2. Now, according to Gwen, they're going to recover both stages. Now, if they're gonna be doing a tower catch, they're gonna have to really speed up Tower Two's production. They could possibly get it done
in six months. Possibly, but it might be later this year. So what they're going to do in that meantime is they're going to land the booster precisely in the Gulf of Mexico. They're gonna orbit the Starship and possibly land the Starship precisely. Maybe in the Gulf of Mexico, but more than likely not.
They have a bunch of. And the the FAA did an environmental review for the subsequent launches of Starship FT 45678, and all of them were going to be landing in the Indian Ocean. So we have a little bit of information about that. And right now we know that it's not expected for the ship to survive the landing in the Indian Ocean. It's probably gonna break up in
orbit. It's probably gonna burn up or something is gonna happen and it's gonna blow up in the Indian Ocean. The FAA had to take care of that. They had to work with SpaceX and they had to work, you know, together to figure out if it's going to cause any damage the Indian Ocean. And what they find out is that it's not going to do any damage.
Not not much damage, actually. Most of the ship will sink to the bottom of the ocean and the the wildlife, the sea creatures, the fish, etcetera will not be harmed. So from what we know right now, SpaceX is going to do a bunch of launches this year, possibly a catch land in the Indian Ocean with the ship, land in the Gulf of Mexico with a booster and I believe IFT four or five, they're probably going to do a successful booster landing. They looked really great last
time. They're really close, so I'm assuming what they can do with hardware and software. They probably upgraded the hardware and the booster and software upgrades as well. So they could more than likely land the booster in the Gulf of Mexico, soft landing in IFT 4 or IFT 5 and then the ship. It's going to take him a little bit longer, so I'm assuming IFT 6-7, maybe 8. But getting RE entry nailed is very important as well, very,
very important. So Starship has to get the RE entry and the orbit down pat before they can do a soft landing. And once they get the RE entry and the D orbit figured out, then the RE entry and the the D orbit will lead them into the Gulf of Mexico and the Gulf into the Indian Ocean. Softly. Right now it's going to blow up. Like that's where we're at right now. This thing's going to blow up and we know it's going to be a Rudd. It's going to be a rapid unscheduled, actually.
It might be a scheduled disassembly, but the rapid, unscheduled disassembly. But they may schedule it by blowing it up on purpose because they may run out of fuel or, you know, whatever it is at this point, but they need to get it into orbit. That's what they plan on doing. That's what Shotwell said. So we're looking forward to the IFT 4 flight and we're looking forward to. I want to see, I don't know what you think about it. What you think about Gwen talking about this six weeks.
Do you think it's possible this isn't Elon time that we're talking about? Elon time is like when he says six weeks, we're like, OK, dude, six weeks. All right, bro. We're thinking more like he says six weeks. We're like four months. Elon, bro, does he, does he own a watch? I don't know. I don't know. Let me know what you think of the comments down below. But Gwen says six weeks the teams are working on the data from IFT 3 and they're working now.
SpaceX is also working with the FAA because there was a, you know, after the FT3 flight, things blew up and there's an incident report SpaceX, SpaceX has to work with the FAA in order to fix the things that went wrong. And then the FAA has to tell them, OK, cool, good job, good job fixing the things that blew up or something wasn't working properly. So good job. Do that. And then I FT four will be cleared for flight once the FAA gives them a flight license.
So lots of things happening at Starbase, lots of testing happening in the next two weeks, 2-3 weeks. And if Gwen is going to be right about the six weeks thing, they're going to rush this thing through. There's going to be some cryo tests, there's going to be some pressure tests, there's going to be some static fires of the booster and the ship. Everything is going to be bonkers for the next month and there's going to there's going to be a lot of activity down there.
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