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Elon Musk Explains Updates To Starship And Starbase

We’re going inside Star Base with Elon Musk, the ultimate tour guide. He will take us through High Bay to see where the starships are assembled. We’ll also see the new mega bay under construction and talk about SpaceX’s plans to fly this rocket.

Now, I must warn you. Some of the things we talk about are quite technical, but I have a few posts to help you understand what we are talking about. Those posts have links in their descriptions and stay tuned because in the next post, we’re going to go over the launch tower.

Then we’ll take a closer and personal look at the new Raptor 2, and talk more about the Falcon 9’s Merlin engine in detail. And if you find this post valuable, consider leaving Super Thanks as a tip or become a channel member or a Patreon supporter for early access and to help show your support.

OK, let’s get started. So we’re making good progress there with Mega Bay. So it should be done in a month or two. Scale because in terms of perspective right here, it looks almost the same, you know, just from our point of view, but it is.

It is about 30, 40 feet tall. So it’s more about you, this matter. So circumference is more important than length because we just need, we need to be able to build more ships and boosters. And you can see.

Like High Bay, that’s fine. If you’ve got like two or three, that’s a work in progress, but maybe two or three workstations in the high bay, in the mega bay, we actually have, about a dozen, maybe at least 10 workstations can be.

So the type of width and length is more important there. Especially when we try to actually roll out the production line, we need more workstations. Here the high bay is fine for low production rates, but as you move to higher production rates.

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You need, you just need more workstations. Yes. And so that’s the B Booster, isn’t it? Yes. Or half booster, half half ship, it looks like. Yeah exactly. It sounds like you have your vents in there, cold, or cold gas.

ullage gas vent. Well we are using ullage gas, for attitude control. So instead of having separate Attitude Control Thrusters, we are using Ulage Gas itself for Attitude or Reaction Control. So basically for attitude control when you’re in class or basically when you’re in a vacuum.

So the need for impulse is very less. In earlier design iterations, we had a separate cold gas attitude control system with nitrogen bottles. But it doesn’t really matter much because we have a lot of resentment that we’re about to get out anyway.

So can also use eulage gas for attitude control and small delta V changes in orbit. I have to admit, you taught us to question our odds. So, it makes sense to me, to have a booster, you know.

Because the booster doesn’t need to do this natively, the second time you turn off the engine, it’s going to want to vent a lot of stuff anyway. And it also coincides with its first flip, but how does, for a starship with docking maneuvers and stuff.

For me, in my head, the Venn diagram of the need to pressurize a tank and the Venn diagram required to do an orbital maneuver is, not always, you know, a huge amount of overlap. So is it, or is it not a concern? Are you, are they, is it always going to be on tap.

When the ship reaches orbit you’re still high enough pressure in the oxygen and fuel tanks that are auto pressurized. So you’ve got like hot gaseous oxygen and hot methane.

But you have a lot more than the useage pressure. You really don’t need any more pressure. So, like you are under excessive pressure. Deorbit and landing are done with the burn header tank. So you really want to vent the main.

Tank bottom just above atmospheric pressure, you want the main tanks to have enough pressure for structural stability. So this pressure is constant, but the pressure for atmospheric entry is not a pressure higher than that required for stabilization.

When it goes into orbit, it will actually have a much higher pressure than it needs for atmospheric penetration. So we’ll expel the main tanks at the pressure needed for re-entry in any case. So we’ll throw that gas away. That is, if it is free, then you can also use it.

We’re gonna dump the gas anyway. So why then have separate tanks and everything, you can use that gas for, you know, attitude control and little maneuvers and still we’ll dump the rest of the gas that isn’t needed for entry. Ok. That, so because of that last statement, you’d leave it out anyway.

Certainly, yes. Actually when you look at the whole design, in fact, it’s exactly the same, obviously it was very dumb to have a separate cold gas reaction control system, because, well, we have extra gas. If we only have main tank vents that vent in that direction.

So no need for separate Ulage thrusters. You can literally just use the vent. So at some point, maybe they’ll have a four, like four, set of nozzles or the like, like the Apollo style.

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