YouSaid · the spoken record

Tim Dodd

lines on the record: 382
first: 2023-02-02
most recent: 2023-02-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And you're doing those things. My friends joke that I'm going to be the first person to go to the moon against their will.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then from like probably six until early college, I wanted to be a prosthetic engineer. And never once did I think about anything rockets, really. You know, I had like a space shuttle poster. I had some space shuttle Legos. You know, I liked space and, you know, I knew of the space shuttle, but it was a far down the list as far as things that I thought were cool. Ninja Tur Lamborghini Contash B17G Flying Fortress.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh no. Well, do you want to know what I wanted to be when I was a kid Well, first, when I was young, I wanted to be a tractor. I'm not quite sure I understood. That works. Then I wanted to be a scorpion trainer.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But for people that are stuck feeling like they're not sure of what's next and how to bring light into their world, you really just got to listen to what does make you happy. You know, people feel guilty about, oh, I play video games for eight hours. Then start learning how to make a video game. Learn how to do reviews of video games or make, there's so many, you can work in the video game industry. You don't have to isolate your love from your work, you know, and it's just funny that we, you know, maybe you feel guilty that you drink too much. Okay, I don't know if there's a good advice. Go learn how to make alcohol, you know, be a start a liquor company. Yeah, start a liquor company.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be honest, like, I feel like it's so painfully obvious to follow your heart and follow what makes you happy that I'm just shocked that people allow themselves to sit on like mediocrity, you know, like to just sit there and be like, well, this is just what I do. You know, and for a lot of people, that's perfectly fine. Like I have, you know, some of my best friends are clocking in and out and they're perfectly happy. They have a wonderful life, absolutely no judgment there, of course.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think I'm feeling more and more, especially this last year, I did a lot of live streaming and traveling back and forth between Florida and California and here and just handling major like big live streams really stressed myself out. And at the end of the day, I was like, all of this is taking away from my ability to make videos. And that's ideally, honestly, if I had my choice of things, I would just ignore everything else and just sit and lock myself in a house for a year and just sit there and make videos and go and travel every other month for fun, like not for space stuff. Just go and do some light traveling, you know, some.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm trying to do less live streams if I can. But then again, like Starship, I got to stream that. There's no way I'm not going to do that. But I'm really just trying to get back to like making the deep dive videos where I have no limit on how long and how deep and just really go for it because that's actually what I love to do about.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I find that it's just the problem with for me with podcasts, and I guess the podcasts that I've done have tried to be relatively topical about the current spaceflight affairs. And three or four years ago, that was actually manageable for me to keep up with. These days, man, I can't keep, I just can't keep up with it. I gave up on trying to be super topical and I realized that maybe my biggest talent and the things that resonate most with people is just trying to explain the basics and the root. So I'm really just trying to like.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To navigate, but there's still like there's a planet called Eve that's kind of like Venus, so it has a really thick atmosphere, really thick, really soupy. And a lot more gravity. So it's just really, really hard to get off of. It's easy, relatively easy to land on Eve, but like that's kind of like the ultimate boss in the game. It's like getting off of Eve. So that's one of my favorite things to do is build these crafts to get to Eve and try to return home.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah. The physics are all like real world physics. And I mean, there's aero simulations. There's all of it's like one-to-one, you know, for Earth physics. That's awesome. It's just on an easier scale, solar system. So it's easier.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so it's technically a different solar system. It's the Kerbal system, and you're on the planet Kerbin. So there's the Mun M-U-N. There's a second moon in the system on this planet. It's called Minmus.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was awesome. I've done it a handful of times. I think we probably did like 20 or 30 episodes or something. And it's definitely something I would like to get back to doing.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Knows nothing about space. Hilarious, like in the sweetest, most fun way. As an adult asked me which is bigger, the Earth or the Moon. And I love that for him. That's fantastic. He's just a delightful human. He would sit next to me. We would recreate a historical spaceflight mission in Kerbal Space Program. And he would just sit there and play guitar and sing about what I'm like doing and asking questions. And it's still one of my favorite things I've ever done”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so it's me playing curb. I used to do this kind of like a podcast style thing. I should get back into this because it's one of my favorite things I ever did. It's called, we called it Todayish in Space Flight History, but these days I'd probably just play Kurbal. But I had my friend come sit next to me. His name's Jacob. He is a former professional pole vaulter, just this really knows nothing about rockets.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. There's some of my. Actually, the first videos I ever uploaded to YouTube were recaptured streams from Twitch that I just physically uploaded to YouTube.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's okay. So I started playing it in like 2014, I think, around as I'm like falling in love with space. And I became obsessed with this game. Like literally you, you know, you take you get a little command module, click you, click on a fuel tank, boop, you choose your engine, boop, you choose a stage connector, boop, you connect more tanks and build these space planes and fantastical things. And it's all like physics based. This sounds like a commercial. It's available on PC and console. It's available everywhere.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you want to learn about rockets, how to fly, how to build, how to get into orbit, how to get to other planets, there's no better way to learn about rockets than flying space.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So frustrating. We know when it launches, people, you know, amateurs track and know they even will be like, oh, it changed orbit. You know, it raised and lowered its orbit, blah, blah, blah. We generally have just almost no idea what it's doing up there. And it just...”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Looking to some U.S. propulsion and stages. So they actually are partnering with Firefly. And their new Antares rocket will be a first stage built entirely by Firefly. So I'm excited that Firefly already has the propulsion technology. And they actually developed, ironically, their tap-off cycle engine was developed in partnership with Ukraine, with Ukrainian engineers who developed the whole turbopump system. So it's like, it's this cool. Meddling of these worlds. Their former CEO, Tom Rusk, was, like, I have an interview with him and he's anyone that can just spout nuances and facts. I just love. I just soaked that guy's information up as best I could because he is brilliant. Literally a doctor, a rocket doctor. So”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I like about Firefly, they've already got kind of a traditional aerospace back in there. They're starting to buddy up a lot with Northrop Grumman. They're going to be building the booster stage for Antares, which is currently flying only out of Wallops, Virginia, and is one of the only other commercial providers for the International Space Station. And north of Grumman is a very traditional aerospace company, you know, like lots of solid rocket boosters, and they've purchased ironically their current Antares is reliant on Russian engines and Ukrainian boosters. two things that I don't think you're going to be able to get your hands on too much anymore so”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stoke develops the upper stage and maybe even the engines. They are the two guys, the CEO, the co-founders of that company. They are engine, like propulsion engineer magnificence. They both worked at Blue. They developed engines in a hurry there and then left blue when it felt like it was getting too slow for them. And now they are, I mean, these guys fired a 15-chambered rocket engine instead of four from the Soviet. We're talking 15 chambers, single turbopump 70 times in the month of October. Wow. That's impressive. And that's like that was on average, you know, if you think about days off, time off, you know, parts changing. Over twice a day on average of a hydrolox engine, that's insane. So I love them and I hope the best for them, but they're also topical right now. They're at the top of my head.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. That'll be hopefully coming out the next, depending on what the schedule like is down there. I'm actively editing that as we speak. And it is so cool. I mean, it is like it's genius. And if they can actually get it to work, I can see them merging. I can for sure see someone potentially like I perfectly in a perfect world they merge with Rocket Lab.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's kind of a neut No, no, but they are using, they're also using liquid methane and liquid oxygen. I just think it's a really, it seems like a great rocket. And assuming they can actually get it flying in two or three years, I think they're going to be here to stay. I'd be remiss right now I'm editing a video from an interview with Stoke Aerospace out in Kent Washington. It was just one of these companies that they have a long ways to go. They're still in the very, they're behind the curve, frankly, in terms of launch vehicles right now because, like I said, there's so many coming out of the woodwork. But the idea they're working on Their solution to a fully reusable rocket is amazing. One of the coolest concepts I've ever seen.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think iterating with 3D printing on a rocket is brilliant because you can literally change software and have very little upload a file and have a new rocket. Like that's amazing. So in terms of long-term iterative process, if we're really talking about like hitting the ground running and just seeing where the evolution takes you, I think that's about as good as you can get. I think what SpaceX is doing at Starbase, just physically bending cheap steel is probably also a very valid solution. So I really think, and they have the engineering chops, I think they've got some amazing people there. Again, Rocket Lab. I adore what they work on. And, you know, like everyone, there's a caveat here that everything takes longer. Anything, any company tells you it's two or three times longer, just period. Rocket Lab's no different. But I really, they're working on a neutron rocket that's going to be like, I think 8,000 to 15,000 kilograms to lower Earth orbit.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For now, we'll ignore SpaceX and we'll just kind of talk about I think who's kind of coming around the corner here. So let me just do a quick overview. I'm going to shoot myself in the foot for getting some cool people here and some exciting companies. But relativity is one that if you should definitely get Tim LS on the show, who is the CEO of Relativity? They're doing 3D printed rockets. The ones that have the world's largest 3D printer are getting really close to their first orbital launch. The cool thing about them, the reason that I think they're exciting, the reason that they have the potential is just how quickly they can iterate. I think 3D printing a rocket is really dumb.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's modern day. But it's sad because people don't see what they are also working on, which is New Glenn. You know, I see comments almost every day still of like, it doesn't matter because, you know, they're working on tiny. It's like, no, New Glenn is more powerful and more capable than Falcon Heavy. New Glenn is almost more of a competitor to not quite to Starship, but it's almost in that class. It's a heavy-lift launch vehicle. It's huge. crazy. It'll be nuts. They're very actively working on it. You know, I still think we're three years away from it launching, but that's a very strong competitor in the class of rockets that SpaceX is currently making.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Origins, man, Blue Origin has done with New Shepard is amazing, and people just laud it because it's suborbital and it looks very phallic.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me say this ULA has all of the potential, but just operationally, they're Lockheed Martin and Boeing's like Lovechild. They're kind of set up in a far too traditional manner where they just really aren't given the opportunity to innovate like a lot of these startups are.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it'll be the similar thing for spaceflight. I think we'll see realistically in the terms of Jubbo jets and passengers, there's basically two. There's Airbus and there's Boeing. So I think in the long run, there'll be two or three major players. I think there'll be 10. Like as far as launch providers, as far as the ones actually leaving Earth and getting into orbit, I just don't think there's a ton of room for individuality, really.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ones that I personally really believe in, you know, Rocket Lab is awesome. I really think that they are one of the few that I believe can actually build a Falcon 9 class rocket today with their technology, with their knowledge, with their investments, with their funding. And they've proven themselves. There's very few, they have actually made it look easy. I think there's a lot of startups and a lot of new rocket. There's too many launch providers popping out of the woodwork right now. They won't all survive, of course. I think realistically, if you look at like airplanes, how many airplane man, you know, there's a handful of airplane manufacturers, there's not hundreds and thousands of airplane manufacturers.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just in general, I think if you aren't working on a reusable, some form of a reusable vehicle, like physically working on it, pen to paper, not beyond pen to paper, like bending metal for a reusable vehicle, you're gone. You're toast. Think we're well into that being the only provable way forward, the only way you're going to compete and survive is a reusable rocket. Fully reusable would be great, but that's obviously massively aspirational still. It will come. But to me, the list you pretty much had it right on the head's Astra was another orbital rocket company.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I would like to think in a perfect world if we're thinking futurism that in 30 to 50 years, I definitely think we could have a full-time permanent major civilizations Like what Blue Origin wants to develop where they have a huge sphere, you know, and you're doing a lot of, especially heavy industry off of Earth, so you're not polluting Earth. That makes so much sense to me. Yeah, I think we Could live a lifetime where we thought this since the 50s and 60s that people are going to be living and working in space like crazy and at any given point we're lucky to have 12 people in space today But I really think in our lifetime we're finally getting to that point of. Yeah, that's a reality.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And radiation is the other thing. We know We have a really good data set on what radiation and doses do to humans. We know we can measure radiation. We know we can approximate and kind of give edge cases for the Mars transient and getting to Mars and being on Mars. And the simple answer to that is at the end of the day, if we have to dig into Mars or find a tunnel to live in so you get some extra mass in between you and cosmic radiation, so be it. Like that's the answer then. Again, none of these are like insolvable problems. They're just things, hurdles you would have to overcome based on the risk exposure and the posture there.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The right compromise of vehicle complexity and human biology and all of these other effects. This is absolutely a solvable thing.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“1G without your feet and your head being at two different. So you get really sick. You always feel like you're falling. Your brain will tell you that you're falling constantly. But then again, okay, so this is a whole thing is, you know, and I don't know if there's, we don't really have the data yet on like going from 0G, we know the effects of that. We know the effects of 1G really well. That's our majority of our data set. But we don't really have much data on the long-term effects of 16th gravity, like on the moon or 38% gravity. Is one six gravity actually enough to counteract 95% of the effects of low gravity? Or is it 15%, you know, is it one sixth? Is it like a linear thing? Is 38% gravity totally 38% as bad as one or whatever? You know, is it a slight, like, where is it out on the scale? So there's a chance that we don't need anywhere near 1G of gravity to counteract the bulk majority of these problems. We could have 0.1g or whatever is.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There, then you're hanging out on Mars. You have 38% of gravity, and then six months ish back. People live on the International Space Station at six months dense. We've had people for basically a year up on the International Space Station. It's not like it's not life-altering. Yeah, you have a couple days of not being able to walk very well and you do have some bone density loss and some other concerns. But again, it's solvable. And I think the first missions to Mars, I think it might we might, we'll probably do the trade. Is it worth it to like land on Mars and have a crippled crew that can't even physically stand yet for a day or two before they get their feet from underneath them? Or is it, do we need to spin up two spacecraft or, you know, a tether and have, like you can't do it like Starship, you know, even though it's 30 feet wide or nine meters wide, if you spin it on that one axis, that's not enough space to get.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If we say that that's a big enough hurdle that we absolutely have to overcome this, okay, cool. We'll just spin up two vehicles that are going to Mars and people will have, but you know, that's the thing is Mars is only about, we'll say six months.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think realistically, we have a really good handle on what the effects are. And we actually have the solution to like everything. It's just whether or not we can. For instance, one of the, you know, low Earth orbit, one of the biggest challenges eventually after your long-term space travel is bone density loss and not having gravity. You know, you actually have issues with a handful of things. Artificial gravity is easy in terms of relatively easy in terms of spaceflight. You know, you can have two vehicles just tethered together and just spinning to give it enough distance and a decent enough spin velocity. And you can get one gene relatively easy. We're talking, again, relatively easy, especially after talking about theoretical physics. That's easy stuff. We haven't done that yet, but there's no reason why we can't produce artificial gravity.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I swear there's probably 40, or like not 40, but there's like eight minutes of we tried PMZ 15 13, BM412, RMNL, mitral hydrogen. I swear it's multiple minutes of explaining one trial on something because there's just so many different chemicals they try. I don't know. It's almost a joke. I literally audibly laughed out loud listening to it because I'm like, This is so ridiculous. I'm sure it makes sense reading it, but like listening to it is just hilarious. But it's great though.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, like we just like we see with this visual light Someone could see in X ray, et cetera. And just the way we even come to the same perspective in looking and observing is just so different fundamentally that we could, I mean, it's not quite like that. It's not like it's like, oh, they were actually on the moon and we're, you know, it's nothing like that. But it's such a unique and incredible story. I think Andy Weir is one of the best science fiction writers. I can't say that with much authority because I don't listen to much science fiction. So zero authority. I really like Andy Weir's books and that book is no different.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're going to love it, like it is. Basically, almost answering that how could they not see us type of thing almost where he creates this incredible, I don't want to spoil anything, but the... Could have totally different perspectives with an alien race and not even consider that, you know, the two of us are coexisting. I don't want to spoil anything. It's really, really, really worth the read or the read.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In human life, like in all of human existence that we're not alone in this universe, cellular at least, and a good percentage of people, I'm thinking 20, 30 in today's world, 40 plus percent of people wouldn't even believe it existed.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“peasants in physics land but i i really just think like it's very humbling that we're still using chemical propulsion and and variance of like ejecting mass to to propel ourselves and i i no matter how you get at it and i think someday i i would expect that our species has figured out a way to get beyond that”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Time and time again. Yes. No, and this is well outside of any of my knowledge base. So I want to make sure that if I say anything stupid, it's because I just a peasant here in physics land.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I could say a lot of crazy things, but like basically, but the point is it'd be stupid for us to even guess about things we don't even know about yet. You know what I mean? So therefore I'm not going to say that the best option for interstellar travel is nuclear drives like that could be like someone saying in 1600 the only way to fly is by strapping a thousand birds to your head, you know, like”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I do. I think we're still at the very infancy of our understanding of everything and how things work. And, you know, 100 years ago, it would be stupid to try to predict the things we know today. And who knows? Like even, you know, I think about things like James Webb looking deeper into our solar system than ever before and physically being able to see objects that we just have not even been able to physically see before.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just all around I don't think nuclear thermal, we're not quite getting there, but then you get into like nuclear pulse drives and things where you're literally like basically ejecting a bomb out the back of your rocket and exploding and having like a shock absorber and pogo sticking your way out of the solar system. That's, I mean, by all physics, sure. You know, there's not nothing wrong with that. It's not breaking any laws of physics. And, you know, but I just don't see us getting to that need anytime soon. I don't think we're going to be. Yeah, I mean, I think we're going to want a better understanding of physics and.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another reason why we kind of stopped using them. The one that the United States developed, Nerva, was so heavy only a Saturn V could actually lift the stage of it, like the upper stage. So it replaced the S4B. With a nuclear thermal, with a Nerva engine, the Soviet Union developed one about one tenth the size and thrust that was small enough to fly on a proton rocket. But neither of them ever flew. Both of them had been tested and thumbs up ready to go, which is just a huge shame to me because they could unlock a lot of interplanetary potential.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For getting off Earth, you'll always want to use chemical propulsion because the gas will become irradiated. You don't want to, and actually the thrust-away ratio of these engines are relatively poor. They're very heavy. They have a nuclear reactor. The reason we kind of gave up on them is they're really most useful for like interplanetary. If you're trying to get a big, like if you're trying to send a huge payload off to Mars, nuclear thermal is amazing. still could be beneficial even going to the moon, you know, like in an Earth-Moon system, you could use nuclear thermal very effectively. And it could be a great choice, but it also starts to get into that trait of like, we can just kind of use a little bit bigger rocket and fly a normal, you know, it's that whole trade thing.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Double that of chemical propulsion. Most of that comes just because hydrogen is so light, you're only emitting, you're only ejecting hydrogen out of the nozzle. So the lighter molecule is, the faster, you know, just like if you had a Know a golf ball versus a bowling ball, you can only physically throw one so fast and the other one as a human you're not going to do very well with. So you can just, you get, you have the more potential for a higher exit velocity. So nuclear thermal, amazing. You can just shoot these little hydrogen molecules out crazy fast, crazy efficiently. We already have it. We can do it. Yes, yes, yes. And actually, we're already reinvesting in that again as the United States is looking at basically ramping back up our nuclear propulsion.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source