Flight 13 Launch Week: Starbase Update

[00:04] And that must mean that it's time for another Starbase summary. We got a bunch of stuff coming up in this video here, folks. Kicking it off with a couple of Massey's. Also, here's the countdown clock counting down out to a new launch

[00:17] date, Thursday. We got to drive through a drive through? Drive around Starbase in this video as well. They were out doing some testing with some cameras. And also over at Massey's, there is booster 21. That's not for flight 13.

[00:32] That's for another flight. So, let's get into the Starbase summary with some clips at the beginning to let you know what was going to be happening. But, what was going to be happening. But, here is one of the engines that was off

[00:46] of booster 20. And of these engines that we're going to looks like two of them were the one or two of them were ones that did not What's the precise way of saying this? Uh were not illustrated as igniting

[01:01] on the on-screen telemetry on the SpaceX official feed. And then one of these actually did light. Lit up, you know, the little circle turns white, I guess, the little circle turns white, I guess, uh whenever the engines are on. Now,

[01:14] what you see in that little diagram on the SpaceX live stream, it's it's it's binary. It's on or off. It's yes or no. And that's not really how the engines work. It's like doesn't really mean flames or not, right? It can be uh in

[01:27] different phases of the startup. And that sort of talks about whether or not they get shut down violently, like the water hammer sort of thing I was talking about last time, or if they're shut down gracefully. So, so just because the

[01:39] that we know were they like fully ramped up? Were they in the startup sequence? Like exactly the state of those. But, uh in any event, we did see three of the engines. Remember, Elon tweeted about

[01:51] two of them. But, apparently we saw three out there. Now, to go to Massey's. or sorry, they're going to go to to a McGregor and get possible that they had other standby engines that they've already put into

[02:05] booster 20. These went out to Massey's for more testing or whatever. So, in any event, there we've got the ship back in Megabay 2. Got a long shot of the Star Factory here with it. It's almost like one of those

[02:18] optical illusions. Does it look to you like it's it's leaning a little bit, but Eh. You know how it is. You know how it is. Some nose cones inside of Star Factory.

[02:31] We're just going to pan down the row. We've got a big fan in the back. Back there. Various states of tiling happening. Can see a label on this one that told us

[02:44] know, honestly, I and I will be honest, it's hard to keep up with which nose uh applying So, we'll say a guestimate and it's just like, "Oh, the next nose cone that appeared, we're going to call this

[02:59] number." We don't always see an official label. So, those take with a grain of this, that and the other." Uh it's not an official statement. Now, here's the fancy-schmancy countdown clock and some speakers, I guess, next to them. That's

[03:13] out front of the office building there as you're This is It's going to be on the left in this drive-through. Um but I don't know if we'll see it here. Hey, big props to the team. We've got a couple more people out there and uh the

[03:27] team was out doing some in motion practice here on this I can I I can say this. It's sort of like behind the scenes, right? Uh but we have other places where we are in motion and what we just passed the countdown clock, by

[03:40] Where we're in motion and we want to be able to get steady video that we're able to time-lapse, we're able to zoom in on, get details, get wide shots for context. Uh so, the team was actually out uh driving the vehicle around. You can see

[03:54] here. Cuz it looks like Jerry and uh I think D was out practicing with some equipment, some new techniques, some new settings on the cameras to make sure that we can get smooth video when we are moving

[04:09] like time-lapsing this together for you, right? But over on the right-hand side, we've driven all the way up highway 4 over to pad one. Nice little pan and a little jump there, but that's why we're practicing.

[04:22] There's a little bit of a track. Hey, this is D actually. Looks like they they both took turns in the passenger seat. But here we have of it. Are we going to go to the finished wall in a second?

[04:37] finished wall in a second? That's going to be pad one over there. Got a bunch of the pumps, condensers, and stuff like that.

[04:50] up to the the fill station and the turning circle here. ASU's going to be on the left-hand side, but we're sort of looking at the tower. Here's trucks in line for the fill station. There's going to be the fill stations over there. Pad

[05:02] the tank farm stuff there in between the two. know what all we're going to see. We're going to find out. This is the turning circle. That's the end of highway 4 out towards the beach. There's the ASU. So,

[05:16] turnaround. Looks like a crane they're taking apart or putting taking apart or putting back together. Got some deliveries for What was that? Is it Jerry in the wind? It was the the videographer selfie there

[05:30] real quick. Um [snorts] driving along. We're going to come up to hopper again here. This is definitely a It looked like a gimbal sort of setup. Jerry was holding the the holding something in a in a

[05:43] gimbal sort of setup. So, maybe that's why we get this smooth horizon. Actually not a bad pan there. We're going to go by Hopper here. Of course, right in front of Hopper is where we deployed the danger trailer that this is danger lot

[05:58] Hopper lot cuz it's so close. And it's 700 ft away from the pad two launch Trailer got some full solar panels full in half like tacos last time. They really weren't that bad there. Sort of the little the track as we went

[06:12] by Hopper lot. Getting zoomies now. This is not how fast they were driving. Clearly time lapsed here. There is the NASA highway side we just went past.

[06:25] Some SpaceX trailers there on the corner. Hey, if anybody has any experience combining a wind turbine system with a PV system photovoltaic solar panel system, I'm all ears. The requirement is

[06:42] telemetry from the two. Some of these things that I've seen you can have telemetry from one, telemetry from the other, but something that seamlessly combines the telemetry from the two different sources,

[06:54] we are looking into something like that for some projects. I don't I don't think that those SpaceX trailers the countdown clock, do we see it? Uh no, it was over on the left hand side right there but you couldn't quite see it. Um

[07:08] I don't think that those SpaceX trailers have any telemetry or anything like tells us what our charge levels are, what our draws are. We have remote like things on and off. We can go to low power mode savings mode, that sort of

[07:23] I am super curious. I also would not mount a wind turbine on the same structure that had a camera on it cuz it would shake like crazy. But you know, I'm curious if anybody has any ideas on how you can do that. Use a bunch of

[07:37] Victron equipment if anybody out there is uh, familiar with that. So, all the way over past the Gigabay, a lot of cladding going up there, not as much as out at the Cape, if you've been following along on the socials with

[07:50] following along on the socials with Julia Bergeron's shots of the Cape. At the, uh, storage yard, there's your old rocket garden back there. Looking a little sparse these days. What's not sparse is the

[08:03] big Elon's new Cybertruck factory here, uh, parking lot, whatever you want to But, all of these, you see them all over the place. Uh, I think they're largely they're there so that employees use them. I'm not exactly sure what the

[08:17] arrangement is on how you might rate a Cybertruck. Like, is it just employees? Do you check them out? Do you do random or lease them or something like that? drive around with it. They've taken to moving them, moving a lot of things with

[08:30] the Cybertrucks. There's a Pad 1 OLM section arriving. Very cool. I was saying, uh, they've taken to Cybertrucks, especially over at McGregor. Shout out to the Cybertruck

[08:45] team, which actually took one of our clips from McGregor Live and put it, I think they reposted it today. Uh, today, yesterday, whichever day you're watching this, whatever. They reposted it and they put a Cybertruck carrying a Raptor

[08:58] like that. No problem. Hey, y'all need some more footage like that, hit us up anytime. We have plenty. And we've got some Pad 1 flame trench walls arriving. Nice. Security camera frame rate there.

[09:14] Nice. Security camera frame rate there. I feel like it's a flipbook. camera's only doing 30 FPS. So, here is another interesting bit of

[09:26] So, here is another interesting bit of goings-on. Booster 21, not 20, 21, over some cryo test. Yeah, well, it says right there on the tin. Cryo test over at Massey's. You can tell because of the the ice that's forming on the side

[09:41] there. Whole crew was out and about getting that. There we got some ice going kind of up and then melting down. Let's see how many of these we get. I actually don't know how many we get. I know that there were multiple cryo tests

[09:53] Starbase live. But uh I also saw them on social. I saw them all over the place. Saw them on our Discord. Here's the third one. Is that sort of holding or is it climbing up? It's climbing up.

[10:07] Slowly. Now see, if you look into the hot staging you see where the dome sort racing. I don't know if we'll get a like banged in shot on that. But you can Caesar. See how it turns the corner there and the top of the dome is even

[10:23] frosty? Like you can see that thing is filled to the brim and it doesn't even have a brim cuz it's a dome on the top. It's closed on the top. But you see that all the way up there turning the corner where those struts are attached. If you

[10:36] that sort of hot staging you can really see how much that ship sorry how much at all is not pointy enough. Um how much it is filled up. Now

[10:48] that it's completely filled up but it's a pretty good proxy especially if the a pretty good proxy especially if the ice stays. Like if it lasts a long time it can get pretty cold in there but if that ice is like super white and it

[11:01] stays white for a good amount of time it's pretty uh pretty good indication that there's fluids on the other side but for now that was the Starbase thought about the little sort of speed run intro at the beginning.

[11:14] I'll be at Starbase Thursday 5:45 p.m. window opens for flight 13 but for now we will see you nerds later. Thanks for watching.