1
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It is a very old idea

2
00:00:05,261 --> 00:00:10,000
that the holy grail of rocketry
is a 100% reusable rocket.

3
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And for whatever reason, people started
to think it wasn't possible

4
00:00:14,523 --> 00:00:16,500
and gave up on reusability.

5
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But it's reusability that unlocks
the solar system for us.

6
00:00:28,586 --> 00:00:32,547
If we can show
that full reusability is possible,

7
00:00:32,927 --> 00:00:36,187
anything is possible
in terms of space exploration.

8
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Wow.

9
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It's all plasma so far.

10
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Temperatures are coming up,
but we've got a long way to go.

11
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- Anything on the inside?

12
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- All clean.

13
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We've got nothing on the aft skirt
or attic areas.

14
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No glow in the tanks.

15
00:01:45,212 --> 00:01:46,652
No glow in the O-drive.

16
00:01:49,733 --> 00:01:52,400
All right, flaps are about to take over.

17
00:01:53,795 --> 00:01:56,530
Flaps have taken control of the vehicle.

18
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Starship is in the peak heating
phase of entry.

19
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Now we get serious.

20
00:02:08,038 --> 00:02:12,019
When the rocket is reentering the
atmosphere at 25 times the speed of sound,

21
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every air molecule is hitting it
like a bullet.

22
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That energy's gotta go somewhere,

23
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and where it goes is into
heating up the rocket.

24
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Starship is at maximum
entry dynamic pressure.

25
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We just got drone two livestream.

26
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[inaudible] are on. All cameras are go.

27
00:02:38,865 --> 00:02:41,905
Starship is executing
the swoosh maneuver.

28
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Dynamic pressure is coming down.

29
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Starship has landed.

30
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No way.

31
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It's done.

32
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- We got a whole rocket.
- We got the whole thing.

33
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It looks like the ship is gonna give us
some time.

34
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- Can we go get those things?

35
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- We had a plan to do that,
and we have de-scoped it

36
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for the last two flights for V3.

37
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- What's the closest, like,
ship or plane or whatever?

38
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- Well, we have a ship fairly close
that is very much... It's big enough to--

39
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- This is ridiculous.

40
00:03:45,454 --> 00:03:48,271
- Someone suggested that the flaps
paddle us home.

41
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Just start swimming.

42
00:03:50,256 --> 00:03:51,816
We're gonna start getting scrappy
and see what we got.

43
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I mean, we don't have the tow gear.
- Get it back.

44
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- We will try.

45
00:03:58,178 --> 00:04:01,836
This is the absolute gold of the data,
and for some reason we don't understand,

46
00:04:01,920 --> 00:04:04,520
the rocket is just there
floating and happy.

47
00:04:04,961 --> 00:04:06,397
We don't know how long
that's gonna last for,

48
00:04:06,481 --> 00:04:09,342
but we're getting as much data
out of it as we can see.

49
00:04:38,752 --> 00:04:42,689
The concept of reusable rockets
is like a core to SpaceX's development

50
00:04:42,773 --> 00:04:48,011
from the very start of the company.
And when we started developing Falcon 9,

51
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you know, we were going down
this path of this rocket

52
00:04:49,936 --> 00:04:51,112
that didn't have any reusability

53
00:04:51,196 --> 00:04:53,793
because we were just trying to figure out
how to get something off the ground.

54
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But not too far into the program,

55
00:04:55,898 --> 00:04:59,639
leadership said, "Hey, we need to figure
out how to get this thing back."

56
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Grasshopper was the experimental
test vehicle that we used

57
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to learn how to do
vertical takeoff and landing.

58
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The first Grasshopper flights
were these very, very short hops.

59
00:05:14,584 --> 00:05:15,941
We called them baby hop and bunny hop.

60
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It was just barely off the ground.

61
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T-minus liftoff. One,

62
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zero,

63
00:05:20,860 --> 00:05:22,000
launch.

64
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The Grasshopper team was really
the SpaceX within SpaceX.

65
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We were the folks doing the stuff
that was kind of out there

66
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with a very small team,

67
00:05:37,633 --> 00:05:40,814
doing stuff that we weren't
really trained to do.

68
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Returning a booster, it becomes
this question of, like,

69
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how do you get through
all the stages of aerodynamics?

70
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How do you get through
all the stages of flight?

71
00:05:53,099 --> 00:05:55,436
And the very last piece
is the landing phase,

72
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and that's really what
Grasshopper was about.

73
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At the time, landing something this size
after coming back from orbit

74
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seemed completely crazy.

75
00:06:12,966 --> 00:06:15,843
Convincing the people of SpaceX
that this was possible

76
00:06:15,927 --> 00:06:17,608
was, like, the first step.

77
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Because once we had the whole
engineering effort of the company

78
00:06:20,609 --> 00:06:21,826
behind us, then basically

79
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it's make a list of all the things
that have to get done

80
00:06:23,731 --> 00:06:26,592
and go knock that list down
until you have the rocket.

81
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After the Grasshopper program had shown

82
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that vertical takeoff and landing
was possible,

83
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we now had to prove that we could take
an orbital rocket all the way to space

84
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and land it, proving that reusability
for an operational rocket was possible.

85
00:06:54,444 --> 00:06:59,666
You want to go into a launch
with 90% of the stuff figured out,

86
00:07:00,086 --> 00:07:04,608
but there's a final 10% that you really
can't figure out unless you try.

87
00:07:15,532 --> 00:07:17,629
We had three landing attempts in a row

88
00:07:17,713 --> 00:07:21,093
where we had unexpected failures,
but we were getting closer.

89
00:07:22,414 --> 00:07:26,431
CRS-7 was a customer mission for NASA.
CRS is the crew resupply.

90
00:07:26,515 --> 00:07:28,411
We have liftoff for the Falcon 9.

91
00:07:28,495 --> 00:07:31,752
NASA had really taken a risk
on SpaceX at the time.

92
00:07:31,836 --> 00:07:33,736
The early days of SpaceX, really,

93
00:07:33,856 --> 00:07:38,517
NASA was a huge piece
of how we were able to survive.

94
00:07:43,098 --> 00:07:45,318
Acknowledging a lot of warnings here.

95
00:07:46,899 --> 00:07:48,400
We have non-nominal flight.

96
00:07:56,001 --> 00:08:00,902
Actually, ma'am, we have missile black.
Confirm destruct.

97
00:08:02,542 --> 00:08:06,899
It's hard to explain.
That was the first failure of Falcon 9.

98
00:08:06,983 --> 00:08:09,199
Falcon 9 had had a perfect track record,

99
00:08:09,283 --> 00:08:12,260
and everyone was just shocked,
like, "What happened?"

100
00:08:12,344 --> 00:08:13,720
It was a real wake-up call for us.

101
00:08:13,804 --> 00:08:16,761
A lot of us that had been working
reusability just went heads down

102
00:08:16,845 --> 00:08:18,061
because we had to fix this.

103
00:08:18,145 --> 00:08:20,842
Which meant that the whole company
had to shut down,

104
00:08:20,926 --> 00:08:22,526
figure out what went wrong,

105
00:08:23,006 --> 00:08:25,063
and that made the Orbcomm mission

106
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not only the return to flight
for the entire company,

107
00:08:28,447 --> 00:08:30,564
but we also decided to go for broke

108
00:08:30,648 --> 00:08:33,524
and bring the rocket all the way back
to Cape Canaveral

109
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and land on a landing pad.

110
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Three,

111
00:08:36,616 --> 00:08:37,612
two,

112
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one,

113
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zero.

114
00:08:39,470 --> 00:08:41,246
So I'm staying inside
and watching data.

115
00:08:41,330 --> 00:08:43,030
It was a very tense count.

116
00:08:43,811 --> 00:08:45,200
Pressure. Pump is on.

117
00:08:48,872 --> 00:08:50,780
Stage one's at entry startup.

118
00:08:50,872 --> 00:08:53,389
There was a couple of weird things
that happened in the second stage.

119
00:08:53,473 --> 00:08:55,229
Well, maybe it's a helium leak.

120
00:08:55,313 --> 00:08:56,449
Maybe it's a nitrogen leak.

121
00:08:56,533 --> 00:08:57,970
Maybe it's just water. We don't know.

122
00:08:58,054 --> 00:09:01,110
Let's go on the comm net and ask
if anyone's seen this before.

123
00:09:01,194 --> 00:09:04,270
Shannon just asked.
Did you... what'd they say?

124
00:09:04,355 --> 00:09:05,671
They're talking about it.

125
00:09:05,755 --> 00:09:09,280
We're standing there debating,
like, "Do we go? Do we not go?"

126
00:09:11,737 --> 00:09:13,694
Stage one boost back is starting.

127
00:09:13,778 --> 00:09:16,570
Telemetry, RF, and power
still look healthy.

128
00:09:16,659 --> 00:09:19,180
Finally, we're like,
"We're just gonna go."

129
00:09:23,922 --> 00:09:26,000
Stage one entry startup.

130
00:09:31,605 --> 00:09:34,140
We had a tracking camera
on the back of the rocket,

131
00:09:34,227 --> 00:09:36,864
and this video, when the engine lit,

132
00:09:36,948 --> 00:09:39,605
was one of the most amazing images
I have ever seen,

133
00:09:39,689 --> 00:09:42,050
and I was just completely speechless.

134
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Huge fire, landing legs deploy,

135
00:09:48,153 --> 00:09:51,200
and the next thing you see,
the rocket's, like, landing.

136
00:10:03,659 --> 00:10:05,130
Stage one has landed.

137
00:10:05,220 --> 00:10:06,596
LZ-1, the Falcon has landed.

138
00:10:06,680 --> 00:10:08,992
Landing operators,
move to procedure 11-9, 100.

139
00:10:09,076 --> 00:10:13,656
Station terminal, LZ-1, be advised,
we are now recovering. Repeat,

140
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the Falcon has landed.

141
00:10:18,943 --> 00:10:21,200
- That was awesome.
- Oh, yeah.

142
00:10:23,716 --> 00:10:25,171
- Awesome. No, absolutely not.

143
00:10:28,825 --> 00:10:31,005
Maybe, like, we're not sure.

144
00:10:31,246 --> 00:10:34,022
It's like all the octaweb bay doors
are flipping around,

145
00:10:34,106 --> 00:10:36,423
but I think it's just
condensation that froze.

146
00:10:36,507 --> 00:10:38,383
To this day, it was, like,
an amazing moment.

147
00:10:38,467 --> 00:10:39,763
That was basically the peak of everything.

148
00:10:39,847 --> 00:10:42,908
Like, everything we'd been working on
came to that day.

149
00:10:43,068 --> 00:10:46,145
Because we still, like, even though
we'd been landing rockets

150
00:10:46,229 --> 00:10:48,145
and trying to land them
on the drone ship,

151
00:10:48,229 --> 00:10:50,900
we hadn't successfully landed anything.

152
00:10:51,170 --> 00:10:54,526
There's no soot at all
where the landing legs were

153
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flush against the side
of the rocket, so...

154
00:10:57,151 --> 00:10:59,436
- Yeah.
- Why are you guys still at work?

155
00:11:00,996 --> 00:11:04,400
And that is the rocket right there.

156
00:11:15,536 --> 00:11:17,573
What we did over the next year or two

157
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is successively get more and more
performance out of the rocket.

158
00:11:22,798 --> 00:11:25,155
Basically, the shorter you can make
the landing burn,

159
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the less payload you take away
from the capacity of the rocket.

160
00:11:29,180 --> 00:11:32,000
So to do that, we had to keep
pushing the envelope.

161
00:11:40,363 --> 00:11:43,360
With Falcon, we achieved
partial reusability,

162
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but we showed that full reusability
might be possible,

163
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and Starship is what's gonna
achieve that.

164
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We're 500 to 600 nautical miles
off the coast of Western Australia.

165
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Pretty much as remote as you can get.

166
00:12:12,771 --> 00:12:15,628
So this is the first time
that we've ever hooked up

167
00:12:15,912 --> 00:12:18,729
to the Starship rocket.
It's right there off our stern side,

168
00:12:18,813 --> 00:12:22,000
and together we're gonna bring
this puppy home.

169
00:12:31,268 --> 00:12:34,028
Recommend Australis to move
20 meters port.

170
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We're all set.

171
00:12:37,717 --> 00:12:40,950
Starship is actually a bad boat,
but it's an amazing buoy.

172
00:12:41,038 --> 00:12:43,375
It has an enormous amount of buoyancy
for how large it is,

173
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so its draft is very, very small.

174
00:12:45,380 --> 00:12:48,757
You're talking like a foot and a half,
two feet of draft in the water,

175
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and it has a lot of sail area.

176
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So with just the slightest
amount of prodding

177
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or the slightest amount of wind,

178
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it just kind of wanted to go do
whatever it wanted to do.

179
00:13:05,048 --> 00:13:06,488
Yeah, we've lost it.

180
00:13:08,928 --> 00:13:12,764
Just slide it out a bit, mate.
Just slide it out a bit.

181
00:13:12,848 --> 00:13:14,800
Righto, just keep going out
nice and easy.

182
00:13:14,884 --> 00:13:16,004
Starting to get too far
off the front.

183
00:13:16,088 --> 00:13:18,200
Yeah, we're struggling a bit.

184
00:13:31,248 --> 00:13:33,000
Okay, that's quite good.

185
00:13:38,328 --> 00:13:40,460
It fought us the entire way.

186
00:13:40,560 --> 00:13:42,217
The rocket didn't want
to get recovered.

187
00:13:42,301 --> 00:13:46,140
It seemed like it just wanted
to float out in the ocean forever.

188
00:13:46,228 --> 00:13:49,000
Yeah, we've come to a roll stop now.

189
00:14:03,488 --> 00:14:05,200
Australis, Australis,
50 meters to starboard.

190
00:14:05,284 --> 00:14:07,128
50 meters to starboard.

191
00:14:10,608 --> 00:14:13,500
One knot, please.
Coming up to one knot.

192
00:14:13,584 --> 00:14:18,708
Mother Nature's doing her bit,
and we're doing our bit.

193
00:14:24,395 --> 00:14:26,910
It's been a pretty crazy couple weeks.

194
00:14:26,996 --> 00:14:30,500
Things have not gone to plan,
I think it's safe to say.

195
00:14:35,138 --> 00:14:37,034
The weather started kind of
turning against us.

196
00:14:37,118 --> 00:14:41,119
We got to be, like, at 16 to 18-foot seas
with about 40 to 45-knot winds,

197
00:14:41,559 --> 00:14:45,476
and it just started this vicious
cycle of fighting tooth and nail

198
00:14:45,560 --> 00:14:47,937
for the teensiest, tiniest,
smallest victories.

199
00:14:48,021 --> 00:14:49,297
We'd make the littlest hint of progress,

200
00:14:49,381 --> 00:14:51,321
and then bam, again.
Like, in the course of an hour,

201
00:14:51,405 --> 00:14:54,500
it would all kind of fall apart
at the end of the day.

202
00:14:56,662 --> 00:14:59,723
We were still, like, 850-plus miles
from Dampier,

203
00:14:59,983 --> 00:15:01,499
and basically said,
"Hey, this thing's never making it back

204
00:15:01,583 --> 00:15:02,740
to mainland Australia."

205
00:15:02,824 --> 00:15:04,340
At this point, it's sort of like
we have to pivot,

206
00:15:04,424 --> 00:15:06,800
or we're not getting this back at all.

207
00:15:07,145 --> 00:15:10,581
The real problem was that
we were making extremely slow tow,

208
00:15:10,665 --> 00:15:12,382
essentially just barely
fighting the drift,

209
00:15:12,466 --> 00:15:17,000
and even at that speed, we were starting
to damage the vehicle pretty hard.

210
00:15:29,771 --> 00:15:32,668
The thing that ended up working was just
this shoestring tied to the back of D1,

211
00:15:32,752 --> 00:15:35,069
and we were, like, jerking
this thing along, essentially,

212
00:15:35,153 --> 00:15:36,849
for 400 miles of the ocean

213
00:15:36,933 --> 00:15:38,590
with another, like, 200-mile assist

214
00:15:38,674 --> 00:15:41,311
of just the waves happening to be
in the right direction.

215
00:15:41,395 --> 00:15:42,291
We certainly learned a lot,

216
00:15:42,375 --> 00:15:45,316
which is hopefully knowledge
we'll never need again.

217
00:15:46,188 --> 00:15:48,004
Wow. You guys ever think
you'd see something like this?

218
00:15:48,088 --> 00:15:49,888
- No.
- I never did.

219
00:15:52,668 --> 00:15:54,500
We found a Starship.

220
00:15:57,828 --> 00:15:59,670
- That's some good-looking tiles.

221
00:15:59,762 --> 00:16:03,000
- You guys must have glued them
on there good and tight.

222
00:16:06,745 --> 00:16:11,082
So the fundamental challenge
with returning a Starship second stage

223
00:16:11,166 --> 00:16:15,943
is how do you make it survive
the extreme heating of entry?

224
00:16:16,027 --> 00:16:18,524
So we put a lot of work
into the heat shield

225
00:16:18,608 --> 00:16:21,065
to handle as much heat as possible,

226
00:16:21,149 --> 00:16:23,926
but also, the first job
of the heat shield tiles

227
00:16:24,010 --> 00:16:26,500
is to survive ascent.

228
00:16:33,752 --> 00:16:36,000
Right at liftoff,

229
00:16:37,533 --> 00:16:40,274
the vibration from the engines

230
00:16:41,354 --> 00:16:45,992
and the acoustics of the engine plume
bouncing back from the ground

231
00:16:46,076 --> 00:16:48,376
is extremely violent.

232
00:16:49,597 --> 00:16:53,678
Then as the rocket ascends,
it gets faster and faster,

233
00:16:53,958 --> 00:16:58,375
and before the air gets thin,
there's a period of maximum

234
00:16:58,459 --> 00:17:00,500
dynamic pressure.

235
00:17:09,623 --> 00:17:12,900
The Starship second stage looks
fundamentally different

236
00:17:12,984 --> 00:17:14,961
from any second stage you've seen,

237
00:17:15,045 --> 00:17:19,762
and that's because, unlike Falcon,
we started from a clean-sheet design.

238
00:17:19,846 --> 00:17:21,343
If we tried to land the rocket

239
00:17:21,427 --> 00:17:23,804
the same way that we land
the Falcon booster,

240
00:17:23,888 --> 00:17:26,789
we would just melt up the engines
on the way in.

241
00:17:26,969 --> 00:17:29,426
No amount of material science
could save us.

242
00:17:29,510 --> 00:17:33,500
We wouldn't have a rocket by the time
it got to the ground.

243
00:17:38,933 --> 00:17:42,594
Because the best way to test tiles
in particular is flight,

244
00:17:42,714 --> 00:17:45,211
oftentimes it is a try something,

245
00:17:45,295 --> 00:17:47,892
see if it works,
and then iterate from there.

246
00:17:47,976 --> 00:17:50,953
Starship is an exercise in iteration,

247
00:17:51,037 --> 00:17:55,198
and the tiles in particular
are just a symphony of iteration.

248
00:19:22,519 --> 00:19:24,500
Yeah, these are cool.

249
00:19:26,479 --> 00:19:30,000
It's kind of funny. This tile represents
almost half a decade, if not more,

250
00:19:30,100 --> 00:19:31,500
of development effort.

251
00:19:34,961 --> 00:19:37,058
They always tell you
not to reinvent the wheel,

252
00:19:37,142 --> 00:19:39,963
but basically, we had to
reinvent the wheel

253
00:19:40,024 --> 00:19:42,981
on the entire TPS program for Starship,

254
00:19:43,065 --> 00:19:47,087
because this is the largest
orbital vehicle ever built.

255
00:19:47,448 --> 00:19:50,525
You have to think of plasma
or the heat load during re-entry

256
00:19:50,609 --> 00:19:52,450
like a river.

257
00:19:56,253 --> 00:19:58,790
If the heat was coming in perpendicular,

258
00:19:58,874 --> 00:20:02,032
none of this would matter,
'cause all these tiles would melt away.

259
00:20:02,116 --> 00:20:05,457
But since this heat load is flowing down,

260
00:20:05,598 --> 00:20:09,940
it doesn't have enough time
to destroy the coating of the tile.

261
00:20:10,680 --> 00:20:14,717
We're trying to prevent the heat
from getting from the surface of the tile

262
00:20:14,801 --> 00:20:16,378
to the structure of the rocket.

263
00:20:16,462 --> 00:20:18,219
And so the trick you play is that

264
00:20:18,303 --> 00:20:21,220
the white material is
an incredibly good insulator.

265
00:20:21,304 --> 00:20:24,501
You could take the tile and just
blast a torch in the middle of it

266
00:20:24,585 --> 00:20:28,200
and hold it like this for 10 minutes
and not feel a thing.

267
00:20:44,153 --> 00:20:47,995
The heat shield tile is essentially
just really fancy glass.

268
00:20:48,555 --> 00:20:51,613
One of the key challenges
in general with the heat shield

269
00:20:51,697 --> 00:20:54,534
is there are about 20,000 tiles
on the ship,

270
00:20:54,618 --> 00:20:58,436
which means that you have
20,000 opportunities to get it wrong.

271
00:20:58,520 --> 00:21:02,198
And so the act of actually
attaching and installing the tile

272
00:21:02,282 --> 00:21:04,800
is one that has to be undertaken
quite carefully

273
00:21:04,884 --> 00:21:07,321
to make sure that every single time,

274
00:21:07,405 --> 00:21:09,946
every tile is fully installed
and attached.

275
00:21:13,388 --> 00:21:15,285
Our job, it's detailed, you know?

276
00:21:15,369 --> 00:21:18,420
We gotta pay attention
to the little things.

277
00:21:18,511 --> 00:21:20,092
We look at millimeters.

278
00:21:20,432 --> 00:21:23,269
I'm a local. I'm from the Valley.
I started here, you know?

279
00:21:23,353 --> 00:21:25,770
It makes me proud, you know,
like, saying that we're from here,

280
00:21:25,854 --> 00:21:27,314
home of the Starship.

281
00:21:27,514 --> 00:21:28,610
We came to work one day.

282
00:21:28,694 --> 00:21:30,531
All of a sudden, they asked,
"Hey, you got your passport?"

283
00:21:30,615 --> 00:21:31,811
I'm like, "Yeah, I do."

284
00:21:31,895 --> 00:21:35,070
They're like, "All right, prepare.
You're going to Australia."

285
00:21:35,158 --> 00:21:37,233
- You wanna drive it, bud?

286
00:21:37,317 --> 00:21:38,693
It felt like one day to another.

287
00:21:38,777 --> 00:21:40,254
One day I was here on Starbase,

288
00:21:40,338 --> 00:21:44,500
the other day I woke up
next to a Starship in the Indian Ocean.

289
00:21:48,178 --> 00:21:49,914
- Look.
- Oh, wow. Yeah, look at that.

290
00:21:49,998 --> 00:21:51,854
- Dang.
- There's your glowing right there.

291
00:21:51,938 --> 00:21:55,162
One step closer
to make it fully reusable.

292
00:21:58,563 --> 00:22:01,500
This is top five mornings at work ever.

293
00:22:04,145 --> 00:22:08,286
People in scuba, people pulling tiles.
We're at Christmas Island.

294
00:22:08,566 --> 00:22:10,500
It's very, very good.

295
00:22:26,311 --> 00:22:29,360
The current configuration of the vehicle

296
00:22:29,452 --> 00:22:33,500
does not allow us to do inspections
in all the places we want.

297
00:22:34,253 --> 00:22:37,954
So one of our main goals today
is to roll the vehicle.

298
00:22:41,495 --> 00:22:42,972
That rigging will be
underneath the rocket,

299
00:22:43,056 --> 00:22:45,713
and as we start to inflate
the lift bag on this side,

300
00:22:45,797 --> 00:22:48,757
it's gonna slightly roll
the vehicle up.

301
00:22:48,958 --> 00:22:52,255
Give me a hand signal when it looks
like it's starting to take shape.

302
00:22:52,339 --> 00:22:54,314
Yeah, she's rolling.

303
00:22:54,398 --> 00:22:56,410
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

304
00:22:56,500 --> 00:22:58,540
- TPS guys are gonna love this.
- Yeah.

305
00:23:00,501 --> 00:23:02,618
Ultimately, what we're doing
has never been done before,

306
00:23:02,702 --> 00:23:06,239
and so it's really critical
that we have a multitude of skills

307
00:23:06,323 --> 00:23:09,243
in order to meet the demands of the job.

308
00:23:09,500 --> 00:23:10,600
Ladder coming up.

309
00:23:12,358 --> 00:23:13,778
Heave.

310
00:23:14,698 --> 00:23:15,918
Heave.

311
00:23:17,438 --> 00:23:21,018
Heave. All right, all right.

312
00:23:21,968 --> 00:23:25,529
We've had almost 30 SpaceX employees
come to the Indian Ocean.

313
00:23:25,709 --> 00:23:29,006
Those 30 employees have been
from across the entire company,

314
00:23:29,090 --> 00:23:32,628
whether that is EHS,
whether that's recovery.

315
00:23:32,712 --> 00:23:34,528
We have a ship integration engineer
out here.

316
00:23:34,612 --> 00:23:36,509
We have a ship structures engineer.

317
00:23:36,593 --> 00:23:38,490
We have a naval architect.
We have a fluids engineer.

318
00:23:39,194 --> 00:23:41,500
Tile team, of course.

319
00:23:45,476 --> 00:23:49,974
My first reaction when I saw
the rocket tip over and survive

320
00:23:50,058 --> 00:23:51,534
was, like, of amazement

321
00:23:51,618 --> 00:23:53,515
because I was not expecting that,

322
00:23:53,559 --> 00:23:56,400
and I was, like, rejoicing.

323
00:23:56,780 --> 00:24:01,538
And the second thought was like,
"Oh, somewhere in the Indian Ocean,

324
00:24:01,622 --> 00:24:04,639
we are sitting on a mine of gold,
of data,

325
00:24:04,723 --> 00:24:09,741
that would allow us to improve the design
at least three months earlier

326
00:24:09,825 --> 00:24:12,866
than what I thought we were
gonna be able to do."

327
00:24:13,866 --> 00:24:16,500
I'm gonna bring you some more pieces.

328
00:24:17,148 --> 00:24:20,845
We have a chance to get the data
to fix the new one

329
00:24:20,929 --> 00:24:25,911
and figure out what the next layer
of the onion that we need to unwrap

330
00:24:26,271 --> 00:24:30,000
and to make the vehicle fully reusable.

331
00:24:36,595 --> 00:24:40,992
Tomorrow, we're gonna start very early
so that we have plenty of daylight,

332
00:24:41,076 --> 00:24:46,674
and we will basically
float Ship 40 onto the deck of the Forte,

333
00:24:46,758 --> 00:24:47,995
which is a heavy lift ship.

334
00:24:48,079 --> 00:24:51,420
We will secure it above a cradle,
which will support it,

335
00:24:51,740 --> 00:24:53,816
and we will de-ballast the Forte,

336
00:24:53,900 --> 00:24:56,277
and Ship 40 will set in the cradle

337
00:24:56,361 --> 00:25:00,177
where we can secure it down
and make sure that it's safe and secure

338
00:25:00,261 --> 00:25:03,182
for a trip eventually back to Starbase.

339
00:25:05,428 --> 00:25:09,364
When Ship 40 survived,
we quickly mobilized Forte,

340
00:25:09,448 --> 00:25:12,079
came up with a plan,
designed this cradle.

341
00:25:12,163 --> 00:25:16,459
Then we actually assembled the cradle
as we were sailing from Singapore

342
00:25:16,543 --> 00:25:18,460
over here to Christmas Island.

343
00:25:18,544 --> 00:25:21,500
She's scrappy, but she's really robust.

344
00:25:55,731 --> 00:25:57,408
Two meter. Okay.

345
00:25:58,088 --> 00:26:01,568
So we need to come closer
to the guidepost and then slide it up.

346
00:26:03,148 --> 00:26:05,800
Sasha, this is good.
If you can just keep the tension

347
00:26:05,884 --> 00:26:08,328
like this on the line, very good.

348
00:26:13,578 --> 00:26:16,000
How are we gonna start
raising this thing?

349
00:26:16,759 --> 00:26:20,316
At this time,
we are getting the vehicle, S40,

350
00:26:20,400 --> 00:26:21,917
directly above the cradle,

351
00:26:22,001 --> 00:26:25,758
and then once teams confirm
that the vehicle is stable and steady,

352
00:26:25,842 --> 00:26:30,200
we will decide to de-ballast the Forte.

353
00:26:42,229 --> 00:26:45,751
It's been just over a month
since this rocket flew,

354
00:26:46,052 --> 00:26:49,800
and it's been two days since
we got it on this barge dry.

355
00:26:51,015 --> 00:26:54,157
I think in terms of the data
we've been able to get back,

356
00:26:54,257 --> 00:26:57,339
this mission has been
an absolute success.

357
00:27:02,021 --> 00:27:05,402
Every single one of the discoveries
we made on Ship 40

358
00:27:05,982 --> 00:27:10,100
will get rolled into improvements
for the heat shield on Ship 41.

359
00:27:10,184 --> 00:27:14,721
And the reason that this is so critical
is that the next big goal for the program

360
00:27:14,805 --> 00:27:17,662
is to return the ship
to the launch site.

361
00:27:17,746 --> 00:27:19,500
And to do that,

362
00:27:19,827 --> 00:27:24,048
we need to rely on our heat shield
more than we ever have in the past.

363
00:27:26,709 --> 00:27:29,660
I think the core potential that we have

364
00:27:29,750 --> 00:27:33,951
is to redefine the way
that humans interact with space.

365
00:27:34,591 --> 00:27:37,968
Space is something for all of us,
for humans in general,

366
00:27:38,052 --> 00:27:40,969
and it is something that I think
we are on the precipice of

367
00:27:41,053 --> 00:27:45,111
unlocking with a redefinition
of how difficult it is

368
00:27:45,195 --> 00:27:48,195
to go from here on the ground
to low Earth orbit.

369
00:27:51,177 --> 00:27:55,118
The really big news from this flight
is that this was the first time

370
00:27:55,258 --> 00:27:58,335
on the end of the mission
in the middle of the ocean,

371
00:27:58,419 --> 00:28:01,436
we set it up as if it was
doing a tower catch.

372
00:28:01,520 --> 00:28:05,017
So we had all of the landing
guidance algorithms

373
00:28:05,101 --> 00:28:08,778
go through the maneuvers to get
the extreme precision that you would need

374
00:28:08,862 --> 00:28:12,920
to put the rocket over the top
of the tower and into the arms.

375
00:28:13,004 --> 00:28:14,440
And it did that. It achieved that.

376
00:28:14,524 --> 00:28:16,001
So this is the first time
that we can say

377
00:28:16,085 --> 00:28:18,800
that had there been a tower out there,

378
00:28:19,266 --> 00:28:21,046
the rocket would've been caught.