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

“We already have thermal nuclear reactors, there are nuclear engines that have been tested both by the United States and Soviet Union that were 100% valid, like totally ready to go, efficient, super awesome. Yes, yes, yes. Hardcore, yes. And what they're using is basically a fusion reactor. You're flowing hydrogen through it and heating up that hydrogen, taking it from liquid to a gas. by heating it up, you're adding energy to the propellant. And then you're literally just using that now steam hot hydrogen and flowing it through a DLVL nozzle. And you also have to use that energy to spin the pumps to still pump the thing. So you're still kind of using like a lot of the tricks that you're using. But instead of a chemical reaction, you're literally just using nuclear fission to heat up propellant and do the same thing. And at the end of the day, you end up with like 800 900 seconds of specific impulse, which is.”
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 specifically for myself that I get most excited about something when I learn a lot about it, like when I learn the ins and the outs and I learn all the little problem solving and the cool like, oh my God, they had to do what to make it work? Wow, that's amazing. And I try to just always go back to that root thing of like, what can I teach myself? Like if I'm every video, I expect that I learn something, making it no matter what, like no matter how much I think I know about something at the end of the day, if I'm not learning something, it's not a good video, you know. And I always think that people get excited when they learn and when they have some questions answered for them.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100%. And that's a perspective thing that I think about all the time. You know, when I'll do a lot of thinking about like, what is the thing that's reacting to people? Is it the sound? Is it the perspective? Is it like seeing a little tiny human next to a landing leg that makes people go? Oh my god, this thing is huge. Just reading and digesting that and trying to help to convey that as best as possible because the stuff that we are and have worked on is so cool. It's so exciting and it's so important. And like actually, you know, so much bigger than any one of us physically and metaphorically. It's just so, it's just, I wish everyone had that experience and had that light bulb go off.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Insane, but at the same time, like, I don't know if we want to talk about conspiracy theories or anything, but like it is all of, we have the proof and the pudding of like the 400,000 people on payroll, like all of the paperwork, all of the...”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no. I still, when I need inspiration, I rewatch this documentary called When We Left Earth, I think it was Discovery Channel did it six-part episode. It was narrated by Gary Senise phenomenal overview of the space race. And that will get my juices flowing every time. Every time. It's so well done. And it really just summarizes that program so well. And beyond, it goes all the way to the space shuttle. Yeah, when I watch footage of humans walking on the moon, it's just, I... Can't believe we're dumb enough to do it with the technology we had and the risks they took to do it. And the insane engineering that it took to do that is just absolutely astonishing. The amount of, the sheer logistics of what it took to do it with the technology we had back then is like, how did we have so much money and effort?”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As soon as they can land on the moon, they can land on Mars, basically. I mean, those two things are very, and in some ways, Mars is almost easier. If you can, because you can use the atmosphere to slow down. It actually doesn't take that much more delta V to actually land on Mars than it does. Because on the moon, you don't have any, you have to first get out to the moon, then orbit the moon. You have to slow down. Every one of those is a maneuver change. Then you have to lower your orbit until it coincides the moon. And then you have to slow down enough to not explode when you hit the moon. So there's a lot of delta V there, a lot of change in velocity. Mars is actually, by the time we kind of crunch the numbers, it's relatively similar. It's just a lot more difficult. Like timeline-wise and, you know, accuracy and all of these other communication, you know, there's a lot of other things, obviously, involved. I'm glossing over making it sound easy. It's not. But, you know, I think there's a real decent chance we could see a starship vehicle land on March.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, and if Starship works out as planned and as NASA has invested in human landing system, they're relying on SpaceX to land on the moon. SpaceX can land on the Moon, they can land on Mars. Now, whether or not the life support and the human considerations of long term spaceflight missions and high radiation and blah, blah, blah, blah, refueling on Mars is a huge, huge, huge deal. They definitely could send a starship to Mars and land, ideally land in one piece on Mars.”
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 be clear that I don't want to go to Mars, but I do think if you're making me guess a timeline for when humans will walk on Mars. Even a year ago, I still would have said by the end of 2020, like the 2020s decade, you know, so by December 31st, 2029, I thought humans would have walked on Mars. I'm starting to think. That's still too optimistic. But I definitely think by 2040, I for sure think that. And I really think it's just hard to predict that curve, you know, that project out that curve. We're going to go from feeling like it's impossible to like it's feeling like it's enough.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a lot of margin, but of course, you can't excuse that all the way, like you have to still have plans and be considering that and considering collisions and considering all of the above”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're dealing with this, all the space assets know, hey, I'm at this orbital plane and this blah blah blah and they know their altitudes and know their safe distances and have these margins built in. And it's space. So there's like an insane amount of room, you know.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The one thing to keep in mind is perspective. Like, I know 10,000 satellites and 20,000 and 100,000 satellites sounds insane and it sounds really scary. But I mean, just even look at how many planes are in the air at any given time. And the planes are bigger. They're flying slower, which actually means there's a greater chance of collision. If you think about, you know, two objects occupying space, if one's moving really fast, like imagine trying to throw two basketballs at each other relatively easy. Now try shooting two bullets at each other and having like, you know, at 90 degrees from each other. You have to have your timeing down like really perfect to do that. Now, take that times 10, you know, and these objects are taking up a physical space very small amount of time. They're relatively small. Like most satellites are not very big, and they have limitless altitudes to deal with. So even though you can have what look like convergences, you know, they can be 10, 20, 50, 100 kilometers difference often.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And astronomy, where currently it's not cheap enough to really do a ton of incredible science or space-based telescopes. We have web, we have Hubble, we have all these other awesome space-based telescopes. Chandra, et cetera, et cetera, whatever. But it's still so expensive to launch them. We're still so reliant on our ground telescopes, but in the future, you can see a world where, oh, this is so cheap. We'll just launch, like, we can launch 50 James Webb Space Telescope this year for half the price of doing it on Earth, you know, and get way better data. So, in the future, I think in 20, 30 years, we'll look at it and be like, oh man, that was an awkward time where. Space assets were interfering with astronomy. But I think in the future, it's like, can you imagine doing space astronomy from the ground? That's insane.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when you have tens of thousands of these things flying, you're going to be turning off the laser more than it's on, you know, and just being this insanely inconvenient thing because you're going to have these junctions happen often. And I think one of the things that SpaceX is like, okay, no, no, no. You guys keep the laser on. We'll deal with your laser. Good. Good step, you know, things like that, mitigating the brightness of them so they're not visible under most conditions, of course, like there's still always going to be visible in some. But then ultimately for me, it's like this, you have this weird, like almost like a puberty of space flight.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Currently, if a Starlink is flying over a ground-based asset, a lot of ground telescopes actually have a laser that goes up and it measures the atmospheric distortion. And the telescopes literally sit there and like by the millisecond fixes, like changes the focus and fixes those atmospheric distortions. And that laser can interfere with satellites. So previously, I'm pretty sure that SpaceX actually had to request that as they're flying over these satellites, these telescopes, they turn off the laser.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No matter where you are, you give them the resources to learn. They're going to solve problems. They're going to problem solve. They're going to engineer. They're going to. But if you don't give them access to that information, they're going to be stuck in their cycles, you know. And so I think the potential for Starlink is incredible. I think it's already impactful. It's already affecting people in rural and indigenous areas. And it's already affecting businesses and all that stuff. I think it's great. I think it is You know, there's some downsides with astronomy with ground-based astronomy that it can hinder observations from the ground. There's already a lot of communications between SpaceX and astronomical societies and things like that because it is a real concern. It can ruin observations. It can ruin data. But like one of the big ones, for instance, recently I think a new thing they're going to be working into is that”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a genuine thing. That's like humanitarian 101 is give people access to information. And I think we have this potential to try to step in and fix other people's problems. But the reality is people were smart.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“City planning and fitness and health. All of the modern conveniences that we I'm a self taught rocket nerd. I would not be who I am if it wasn't for the internet in the last seven years, you know, six, seven years.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And not for the space assets, but just the potential for humanity. Like, I really think even as a consumer of the internet, personally, our studio space down in Texas, we're stuck with MediaCom, which has like the least reliable internet service, period. That's the only option. Either that or they're trying to charge me like $20,000 to run a fiberop cable, like a thousand meters or something. It's insane. I'm not going to do that. I bought Starlink. It helps, but it's still not amazing, but it has, you can see where this is going in a year, two, three, five years. Like, oh, I can totally screw this other internet provider. And this is now by far the best option. And it's available literally anywhere. You don't have to be limited to your internet local internet service provider. And on the global scale, of course, you have people being able to learn and learn about rockets, learn about water management and architecture.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Generally, I think Starlink is phenomenal. And I would be saying this if it was any company I want to make that clear that people think I'm just some SpaceX fanboy or something and anything they do is perfect.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And these days, like there's more and more requirements and legislation and especially trying to get international collaboration on having end-of-life plans for satellites so that satellites, especially those in low Earth orbit, have like drag devices to increase them once they're done. They literally pull even just a ribbon, like a silly little, like, you know, 40-foot-long ribbon will sit there and it'll slowly, or it can speed up its re-entry process by months or years or whatever. So we're starting to see that this is now an important company called Stoke Aerospace out in Washington as one of these launch providers that's really looking not into just trying to be the next SpaceX launch company. They're really seeing satellite bringing stuff down from space as actually being, especially right now, we have all of these hundreds and thousands of satellites being launched every year. Someone at some point is probably going to have to do some cleanup.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the way, this is really, but again, the caveat is, for the most part, the low Earth orbit stuff would clear up within years. So we could get back to doing some lower orthod, like Starlink stuff would probably be able to be re and we could kind of redo it and build up from the ground up again. GPS wouldn't be wiped out and our geostationary satellites wouldn't be wiped out. But the scary thing is we wouldn't be able to relaunch and replace new things because we're stuck. We're not going to fly through that debris field, you know”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Spacecraft in low Earth orbit, depending on its altitude, will take anywhere from five years to five months to deorbit or two months or one month. Depending on its orbit or its altitude, we'll have some parasitic drag still and slowly throughout time slowdown, which lowers its orbit, which drags it down more, lowers its orbit, and et cetera, et cetera until it re-enters. So if we end up with some kind of catastrophic event where the entire low Earth orbit has been inundated and blown up, it'll take months for the first band to clear up. It'll take years for something like there's charts, people have all this stuff available. You shouldn't look it up.”
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, especially satellites. Well, I mean, the good and the bad thing is. The good thing is a lot of satellites don't operate in low Earth orbit. Like a lot of the ones that we use day to day, a lot of them are in medium Earth orbit, like if they're GPS or they're geostationary, which are way, way, way out there. And because of that, they won't really ever deorbit like it'll take, you know, millennia to deorbit because just because something's in space doesn't mean it's there forever, especially like in low Earth orbit. The atmosphere doesn't just suddenly stop. It's not like you hit the Karman line 100 kilometers and all of a sudden there's zero atmosphere. The atmosphere just slowly tapers. You can experience that yourself as you climb a mountain, you slowly realize there's less and less air. You just keep going. And just because you're in space 200, 300 kilometers up, there's still trace molecules. You know, there's the occasional oxygen molecule. There's the occasional nitrogen molecule. And so that is actually dragged. So as”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sharp scary bullets that can destroy another spacecraft. And so all of a sudden, especially now, Starlink, we're talking about thousands and thousands and thousands of satellites in space. If all of a sudden one, you know, a couple of them crash and, you know, blow up and all of a sudden you have all the shrapnel going everywhere and then that hits another satellite. That creates shrapnel. You can literally blanket our entire lower Earth orbit in 17,500 mile an hour bullets. We're talking the kinetic energy in this is so hard for people to fathom because that's over 10 times faster than most rifle bullets and even like a big 50 cal is not going to be we're still talking about about 10 that so when you think about the kinetic energy it's insane so a fleck of paint can go through panes of glass”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Millions of bullets in a halo around the earth in a very specific halo. So some things get blown up faster according to its orbit, faster. So they'll go a little bit higher elliptically. Something will get slowed down in that explosion and actually re-enter. Some things will go sideways and change its inclination of that orbit. So you have this debris field, but it more or less becomes a band of like no, no, you know, like a big, scary.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, for instance, there's only a couple years ago, Russia did an anti-satellite test on an orbital. We've done this through the US has done this. I'm not pinning it on them, but we kind of know nowadays, like don't do anti-satellite tests on orbital things because those things stay in orbit. You know, when you blow something up in space, it's not like, you know, people think, you know, when... I mean, that's in the sense that it's not going to be slowed down due to air resistance. It's going to continue to do that, but it's staying in orbit around the Earth. You just slightly change the orbit of it around Earth when you throw a ball or something. So the scary thing is when you blow up a satellite, all those pieces of that satellite are now.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we could really, and the good thing is I think everyone, mostly everyone, seems to understand this for the most part, that like we really can't be risking blowing up stuff in space in low Earth orbit because it could easily, like we could strain ourselves from space assets for 50 years.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I worry most about space wars as leading to the Kessler syndrome of having a cascading effect of like a spacecraft blowing up and then affecting another spacecraft and that blows up and then all of a sudden you're trapped and have this debris cloud that we can't go into space anymore. Because frankly at this point we could annihilate ourselves with terrestrial stuff anyway. You know what I mean? We don't need space to end society as we know it. You know what I mean? Yeah.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, I see no reason for them to be slowing down. So it's definitely something to watch and be interested in. And who knows? I mean, they're really genuinely might be a race to the moon again, and there really genuinely might be a race to Mars.”
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 still am hopeful that similar to back in the Cold War that we might have something like that someday where we actually are collaborating. And it feels like sometimes we're really close to that. And then other times it feels like we're really far from that. And it just sucks because I know, and you know, I try really hard on my channel to always separate and celebrate the work being done. Because at the end of the day, there's someone that's just going home to their family, clocking an hour is working really hard on pushing their program and doing engineering work. We don't get to choose where we're born and what we're born into. So I really like to avoid the political aspects of things and the geopolitical aspects and just appreciate the science and the science we're seeing and the progress that China's doing in the last 10 years is very akin to the early spaceflight programs and with the runway of like just going keep on going.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Held a dumb hope that China would actually be allowed to sign on to the Artemis Accord to be able to take part in this next step towards the moon. I'm just imagine if they provided a propulsion module or a lander or something and we actually came together to land on the moon instead of having another space race. It's like, it would have been so cool.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And by the way, it was a failure. We had a lot of startups, like a lot of the launches were from brand new companies. So to have two failures out of 64, I mean, that's still, if you look at operational launches, it was flawless.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think ultimately, you know, as we continue to expand our horizons and expand our exploration, that it has the potential to unite us more than it has the potential to divide us.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100%, and even just the astronauts and the cosmonauts involved, like think about what probably went through their heads during this process of like going from, oh my God, I'm going to have to work with them to getting to know them and then sharing meals in space. Like that's a crazy transformation of timelines. And I would love to, I do think that spaceflight has the ability to bond us and unite us because it is ultimately, you know, this little tiny little planet we're floating around on, you know, it's the only, it is the boundary that we all share. You only can, it only takes you getting off this planet to realize, oh my God, we're all neighbors. We're all living in the same house together.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Amidst the Cold War, yet we have this collaboration that I don't know what else could have done that. You have to come up with a docking module that is the two different air environments and the two different docking systems and talk to the engineers and mission planners and figure out, you know, train together, the cosmonauts and the astronauts train together and got to know each other. They were crossing boundaries and borders and coming together for this mission. And even if it was totally a fluff piece, like even if it was totally this like, you know, cynical, you know, just trying to make a pretty face for everybody, for the cameras or something, obviously it still had an impact.”
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 historically spaceflight has been one of the most bonding things. We look at, we have countless examples of Cold War enemies coming together and working together, lending a hand. Apollo 13, for example, of course, there is the potential that who knew where it was going to re-enter since it was not in the plane trajectory at all for reentry. And the Soviet Union said, hey, wherever, you know, wherever they landed, we'll help you guys out, basically. That was a pretty big thing at the time, obviously. We also in 1975 saw the Apollo-Soyuz mission, which was an Apollo spacecraft docking with the Soyuz spacecraft. First time there was international collaboration. And again, 1975, still very...”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In it and it's leaking coolant and will not be returning humans on it. So they're actually having to fly up an uncrewed Soyuz. And that one likely wasn't a manufacturing error. It probably was like a micrometeorite puncture rendering the spacecraft unusable. We don't know for sure yet. But it's just really been like this fall from grace where they have all the potential. They have some of the best engines, some of the best rockets. And especially like right before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Bron Shuttle and the Inergia rocket were incredible. Had they been able to evolve that into Braun II and the reusable Inergia, they had a fully reusable inergia on the drawing board. And I honestly fully think they could have done it.”
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 they got very comfortable at the top, you know, from 2011 until 2022 or until 2020. They were the only ride of the International Space Station since then. I feel like in 2018, honestly, I think that's kind of when things, that's the first time I specifically remember a pretty nasty thing happened in 2018. I think it was a Soyuz mission to the International Space Station had one of the boosters not detached and had to have an abort. You know, that happened then all of a sudden next thing you know there is a progress being docked to the ISS a couple years ago that spun the ISS, cartwheeled the ISS out of control, followed a few months later the peers module docks to the International Space Station spirals the International Space Station out of control again with like a thruster getting fixed on there's a hole in Russian segment there's well I think the most recent one right now there's a Soyuz dock to the ISS that has a pumpkin”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, utmost respect for the engineers involved and everything that's happened. I think Nurgomash is like still some of the greatest engine manufacturers when they have the funding to do so. But man, it seems like they're falling from grace as far as space prowess.”
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 just the technology in Soyuz. I mean, more or less that same rocket is what's still flying humans. That our cosmonauts from Univers and going to the International Space Station are flying on a variant of that Soyuz rocket still today. It's still like that big of a workhorse.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hopefully, a lot less risk than what Yuri went through. So, Yuri's, the crazy thing, remember those matchsticks we talked about, you know, there's 20 main combustion chambers on Soyuz, and there's 12 more Vernier engines that all need to be lit. So you're sitting on top of this booster, and they light all of those 32 combustion chambers on the ground, and then it has this insane separation process between what the Soviet Union would call the first stage and the second stages, but we would call it like the core stage and the boosters, they all, for these boosters have to peel away perfectly from the core stage simultaneously. If one of them sticks on, mission failed. If one of them doesn't inject properly and frags into the other tank, you know, it's a goner. So the staging process of the Soyuz is insane to me that that ended up working out.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, april twelfth, 1961. Yuri's night, baby. Yeah, it's insane. What's insane to me is the first... Person in space didn't just go to space. He went into orbit. You know, Yurigarn flew around the Earth in orbit and re-entered. That's a monumental task compared to suborbital. So the United States did two suborbital flights in that same year, I believe in that same year, at least. I'm pretty sure in 1961 they flew for the first time orbitally in 1962s. They weren't terribly far behind to get a human into orbit. Like in the grand scheme of things, you know, 10 months difference. But at the same time, like the fact that Soviet Union just went straight to flying someone into orbit is monumental.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Spacecraft. For example, the first orbital spaceflights from the Soviet Union, the cosmonaut had to eject out of the capsule and parachute to a landing. That's not very well known, and it wasn't, they hid that even from History as best they could at first because they were slightly ashamed that they couldn't have a full recovery system with their spacecraft. They could physically recover it, but they wouldn't have been able to recover the cosmonaut in One Piece. So instead they had them just eject out of the thing and parachute to safety. That's insane. And so there definitely was some extra risks, but also a freedom to just push things to the limits and try everything. They threw all the spaghetti on the wall.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We took a handful of German scientists, and the Soviets took a handful of German scientists, and they both got their own a little bit, some blueprints here and there, and the others got some blueprints. So we literally have the same, it's a weird thing where we're starting from the same like thing and letting two divergent, you know, divergent paths go crazy on their own development. So it's really fun to see the cultural differences. One of the things the United States did is they really would kind of take an engine and just perfect it more or less and then not really evolve that much like they they I don't know and I don't know why I actually need to do a history lesson on all of the US engines but it's literally like as far as orbital class engines before now it's like a dozen or two you know it's it's it's a tenth the amount of the Soviets and the Soviets just literally made up a new engine every time they had a new like they went and it was like a completely different”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's definitely huge, huge cultural changes. And the fun thing is that they kind of spawned from the same, they have the same starting place. Both the Soviet rocket engines and Americans all came from the Nazi V-2 rocket and the A-4 engine, literally physically spawned from that because at the fall of, you know, at the end of World War II,”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I will never say it that perfectly, but I know it's not just Korev. I mean, again, the English. Translation of it likely. I should have just said Core 11 said I'm saying it the dumb America way, but”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People told you about, yeah, I a few things. Yep. First off, we had a graphic error where we actually, you know, we copied and pasted a lot of our After Effects projects. So, our nuclear engines, one of them on screen says that it runs on RP1. It does not. It has basically all the wrong stats. We just didn't catch it in the edit, you know, that we literally copy and paste it. And I say it right on screen, but in the voiceover, but on screen, it's wrong. The other thing that I'm excited to ask you about this. I watched, and I spoke with a lot of Russian speaking individuals. We had a lot of research assistants that were reading and blah, blah, blah. I tried really hard to learn how to pronounce Sergei Karelio's name. And I'm still going to say it wrong no matter what. But my understanding”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the easier thing to do normally is you would keep those nozzles fixed and then affixed like, say, the Soyuz engine, the RD-107 and 108, they have a fixed main combustion chambers and they use these little vernier, or some people got mad at me for saying Vernier and Werner engines that swivel themselves and those provide your control authority. So the main chambers stay fixed and then you get your role and your pitch and your yacht of auxiliary thrusters.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Above the turbopump, like the mount where the engine swivels so that you have low pressure coming from the tanks into the pumps. And then you just have a straight, you know, fixed pipe flowing into the engine. So you don't have to bend that pipe and have it be dynamic. If they had the four chambers moving independently from each other, that means those four chambers all had to have a flexible high pressure pipe going, which I don't even know if that's, why am I just now realizing this?”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Engineering. Yeah, and then the cool thing too is specifically the RD 171, its engine, all four of those nozzles can actually pivot and rotate. I just... Now, as I'm explaining this, realized that has to mean that they have Like flexible joints in the high pressure pump lines in order to, like, I never, this is the realization I'm having right now because normally you put the gimbal”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source