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

“Pockets and oscillations and frequencies, and they just couldn't make big combustion chambers. They never figured it out. They never quite, well, they did actually kind of figure it out, but they didn't like it. So they ended up just shrinking down and having small combustion chambers and just sending, splitting the pipes, basically instead of one fuel pump going into or one pipe going into one combustion chamber and one oxidizer pipe going into one combustion chamber, they'd split it off into two or four combustion chambers and kind of spread that work around so they didn't experience this combustion instability. So the RD-171 is like still to date the most powerful rocket engine ever built. The turbopump is insane. I don't even remember how many 200,000 horsepower something comes out of that turbopump. In order to flow the amount of propellant necessary at those rates and at those pressures into the combustion chamber. So it has four chambers and it's just an absolute marvel.”
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 one of the fun things about the Soviet engines is it'll look like a lot of their engines look like multiple engines because you see multiple nozzles. You see multiple combustion chambers and you would think, well, obviously, you know, the nozzle is the engine, right? But what they actually would do, the real heart and the real power of the rocket engine actually comes from the turbopumps, comes from the pumps themselves. And as we talked about earlier, that includes the turbine and the actual pumps that flow the propellant into the chambers. And so the Soviet Union was incredible at developing these closed cycle high-powered turbopumps. But if you try to scale the combustion chamber too big, you end up with what's called combustion instability. You have such a large surface area of crazy flames and combustion happening. They can get these weird positions.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To the same people as the other people. So he hid 80 of his engines in a hangar. And then we still literally used them in the United States. We used altogether, I think it was like eight or ten of them, repurposed them as they're called AJ26s in the United States. But like we still were flying Soviet rocket engines in the 2000s because they were better than engines we are building today. Like that's to me that's my favorite fact about the N1 rocket is that they're still that good that they were the best choice for at the time.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's interesting because the N1 was the Kudsnetsov design bureau. And he was actually an aircraft manufacturer. So he was one of the first people outside of kind of the missile and rocket program. He had all these other big wigs kind of in the other OKBs that were developing missiles and rockets. And then all of a sudden here comes Nikolai Kutznetzov, who had never developed a rocket engine. And so his first attempt at a rocket engines was the NK series, NK-15, NK33, and they were amazing. They were brilliant. These wonderful closed cycle oxygen rich engines that were awesome. There were awesome engines and that were, you know, because I love that because his direct boss, since he wasn't necessarily in the aerospace, you know, or in the, I guess, the rocket missile defense world, he didn't have to at the fall of the Soviet Union. He didn't have to give away all of his things.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Still unrivaled today almost. Like finally now we're beating it, the NK33s that they developed for that rocket. Like finally today we're to the point of like having better engines than they built in the 60s.”
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 like all of it together. Yes, that's exactly like that's exactly the way to put it. And they did things that are insane. They developed a full flow stage combustion cycle engine. This engine, had it been used, I mean, it would have put the F, it was same relative size as the F1 engine on the Saturn V in that same category way up there of like, you know, 6.7 like mega Newton of thrust or something around and the F1 is like seven or something. It's huge yet way more complicated, way more efficient, way just better engine in that sense as far as performance goes, yet it never flew. It never left the stand. They never built the rocket around it. The N1, which was the most powerful rocket to have flown so far to date, like it never made it through its first stage burn. All four attempts failed spectacularly. And yet it had so much technology on it that was.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That ignites the actual propellants in the combustion chamber. It's not the most elegant solution in the world. Still using that. So they went from like the whole spectrum of it's a mixture of like make it better, faster, harder, stronger, gooder all the way around to also if it ain't broke, don't fix it. It's like it employs 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
“The coolest thing to me is how it's this weird blend for the Soviet Union went through an insane iteration process and made so many engines. Like I didn't even touch any maneuvering thrusters or missile engines. Like I only really dealt with main propulsion engines on orbital rockets and there's still way too many to talk about. I mean, it still dozens and dozens of engines. I could have gone deeper into this, which is hilarious. They iterated so much, made a new engine for just at the drop of a hat. Yet they still also did super primitive things. They physically are still today lighting the main combustion chambers of the Soyuz engines of the RD-107 and RD-108 with essentially matchsticks. Like they literally stick a T-shaped thing up into the chamber and have a pyrotechnic in it.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that becomes more Realize that more and more like every day, you know, the more the channel matures, the more I realize the importance of it as an overall mission as opposed to like, you know, in the first year or two, it's a rat race of growth and popularity and all that kind of stuff, you know, and you feel that. You feel that it's a driving force these days, not so much, just because that will wear you out very quickly.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quality and at this level, if it's losing money. You know what I mean? So there is a trade off. And I am kind of having to navigate that.”
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, how do you physically get them running? There's all these valves, if the turbine, the turbine, you know, that we were talking about earlier, like that has to run on the pumps, but it itself is powering the pumps. So how do you get that like chicken and egg? How do you get that thing started? There's tons of, it's so cool. There's so many ways. And so for me, that required reading a lot and talking to people that know a lot more than me and just really trying to make sure I understand enough of it to explain it and try to weave a narrative, you know. And so that video is three months in the making, we're still probably another two or three weeks out. And I don't expect, I mean, I think this one will do relatively well, you know, but in the grand scheme of YouTube, like still child's play, you know. But I'm okay and I'm okay with that. I'm at that point, actually, where I am okay with that. It still stings, and I'm more worried about just like, can I continue to do it at this?”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, but as you know, as a creator, like that is what keeps the lights on it and makes it so I can go this deep. Like if I didn't have that, if I had to rely solely on like YouTube ad revenue, I mean, I would just, there'd be super different videos. I wouldn't spend as much time researching because I just, you know, they'd just be more glossed over. It's like a hurry to churn them out so I can keep the machine going. And I have this incredible freedom to really dive into a topic like a video that I've been working on now for almost three months is how to start a rocket engine. And let me tell you, it's not as easy as one might think, or I guess as it is as difficult as you might think. I mean, it's an insane topic.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And frankly, at the end of the day. I realized I have lately, especially the last year or two, kind of disconnected from that aspect of it. I'm super fortunate I have very generous Patreon support and people that can help me sustain to produce”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Riding a fighter jet. I thought that was going to be easy one or two million. I don't know if I've paid the flights off to go there. You know what I mean? Like in that video.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Change everything. I have videos, ironically, the last, I don't know, five videos I've produced are horribly floppy. Like some of my worst videos I've ever made statistically.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is insane to me. Like, I just really thought this was more something just to put on the shelf as a resource almost for myself, you know, like just to kind of have that knowledge bank and something I've always wanted to straighten out in my own head and kind of know the history a little bit better, but come to find out like it took a while as a slow turn.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's the struggle for sure, honestly, especially as we grow, I try to make better and better videos, which means hiring more and more people to do higher end animations and spend more time editing and shooting and scripting. But at the end of the day, it still can't be just losing money. And I have videos that definitely lose a lot of money because I hire 3D artists and stuff. And I was so certain the Soviet rocket engine video I thought was just purely going to be a passion project. I honestly was like, if it ever crosses a million, it's a home run. I think it's a little over two.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And slowly, I just kept playing and getting longer and actually more and more in depth into the topics. And instead of getting pushback, you know, and being like, this is so boring, I realized as long as I was walking people through the whole step, you know, giving them all the context they need, they're happy to get as deep into the weeds as I can get them. And so that just kind of fed the snowball just kept rolling. And I'm like, all right. And, you know, before you know what I'm making hour-long videos, like an hour long is more or less a normal length on my channel for a produced video. And they're really, really in-depth. But I love that process of trying to preemptively kind of guess what the questions might be. And, you know, part of that is like we do script read-throughs with like our supporters and do like cuts of videos and people, a decent amount of people see it before it goes public. And we get those questions out of the way. You know, we get those people asking the questions. And then I love nothing more than trying to.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely at first, you're not going to find your own voice. And I know, like, even Jimmy talked to you about that, like how your first video is going to suck. You're not going to be yourself. You're going to be nervous. You're going to be not going to know the tone, the pace, the things that are interesting. And actually, originally, I had constraints. It was really worried about making a short video because I thought there's no way anyone's going to watch a three-minute video and then a seven-minute video. And pretty quickly, I realized like YouTube as a whole was kind of changing, but also there's always that historic backbone of like 22 minutes of programming for a 30 minute spot on TV. Like no one goes over 22 or 44 minutes if you have the full hour special or whatever. Like that is the absolute limit of what a human being can watch, you know, basically was what I thought.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Check the analytics on YouTube, and all of a sudden that video kind of took off, and I got like 40 or 50 or 60,000 views or something. I was like, no way. And it just kept, you know, that just honed it in more. Like, okay, YouTube will bring a bigger, like bring an audience to me as opposed to like Instagram. I had to find and, you know, try to get the audience to come to me. And this was like they were going to do the legwork. So if I make decent videos, and I realized like really the fun thing for me was explaining a topic that was scary and intimidating and try to make it fun and engaging.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very quickly. So I made another video. This one I spent more time on. And I had before photography, actually, I used to do like wedding videography too. So I had done my woes with videography and weddings and stuff. I hated video. Like I thought video was the worst. It took so long to edit. You know, and I love Darvy's. It's like, boom, you snap me, boom, boom, post, you're done in an hour, you know, and video. It's like this whole cumbersome thing. So I thought I'll never do video. And here I was making this long time seemed like a long, seven minute long YouTube video about how the Falcon 9 lands. And again, like that one I posted and actually it did really bad. And I was really upset. I'm like, I spent two weeks on the stupid video, you know, worked really hard scripting and blah, blah, blah. And then it, you know, had like a thousand views or something. It did much worse in the first video. And I was so upset. And I kind of like was ready to keep throwing more spaghetti at the wall to see what's going to stick for everyday astronaut. And I think it was like a month or two later, I happened to like, 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
“So cringy. And as it should be, you know, your first video should be terrible if it's not terrible, then you spent too long trying to make it. So the thing that clicked for me is I had very little audience and all of a sudden that video kind of took off, you know, relatively, I think it got like 10,000 or 12,000 views. And I was like, holy crap, that's way more engagement than I'm having. I'm famous now. 10,000 people, that's almost my whole town.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I got to tell people about this and stood there and made my first produced YouTube video. And I didn't want it to be over three minutes because I was afraid that'd be way too long for YouTube. And I got it down to like, I don't know, two minutes and 40 seconds or something. And that video. And very horrible audio. It looks like it was color graded by a seven year old with a tan marker or something. It just looks terrible. Sounds horrible. I'm yelling. No one's happy. But the video did relatively well. Like I had no followers on YouTube. Like I had, you know, maybe 102 or something.”
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 basically I gave myself a runway of one year of 2017 of like I'm going to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. So I was doing like Twitch streams. I was playing Kerbal Space program, which is like a video game, like a physics-based rocket building simulation game, but it's also like, it's fun and silly because you're not playing with humans. You're playing with these little Kerbalien guys and it's fun and silly streaming that on Twitch and doing things and posting some of those things onto YouTube, but finally, like I said, it actually happened to be February 27th, 2017 when SpaceX had that announcement that their flying someone around the moon that I'm...”
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 so many opportunities to have a light bulb go off for someone and be like, This is awesome And so, yeah, I think I started. So by the end of 2016, like throughout 2016, I realized I want to be done doing photography as a profession and I want to pursue everyday astronaut. But I didn't know what it meant yet. I just knew like I had this thing. And at that time I'd been doing it for roughly two years and had seen, I don't know, like 50,000 Instagram followers or something. I thought like I could just be a full-time influencer now like just go around taking pictures of myself in a spacesuit and doing public appearances and writing children's book or something. I don't know. I don't know what this thing is. I'll figure it out, 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
“And was trying to portray that through images on Instagram. And it took me a little while, but eventually I realized on Instagram, your retention rate, you're lucky if you get like two seconds of someone looking at an image, you know, or maybe nowadays 60 seconds of a quick little Instagram short or something.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then that kind of just continued. I was like thinking of more and more funny situations where I could have this astronaut on Earth doing mundane everyday things and came up with the name everyday astronaut. And originally it was just literally a photo project, like this whole art series of an astronaut doing these things, these funny, whimsical, you know, silly mundane things. But I was researching a lot about like, you know, I was trying to hide Easter eggs. Like I was going to hide in the echocardiogram of Alan Shepherd, you know, like his first flight into space and photoshopping that into pictures and like, you know, doing all these little like facts about spaceflight, but there's just hidden little elements in these photos. And man, doing that, I just fell in love with it. I just was going over every little detail that I could learning. I was just couldn't stop learning. And I was getting excited because I was like, I could be teaching people about all this exciting stuff and all the cool things people figured out, you know, 40 years ago, 50 years ago.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so I ended up like the space du kind of like more or less haunted me because it kind of just sat in like my living room for a long time and I didn't know what to do with it. And I actually had a friend who is also photographer wanted to do like a photo. He was just kind of taking pictures randomly. He's like, hey, bring your spacesuit over. We'll do a picture. He's like, all right, you know, I walk across the street. We literally lived across the street, Taylor. And I put the spacesuit on. I took this funny picture and me like, this is awesome. And I got a lot of fun out of creating a character of everyday astronaut. Or at the time, I guess I didn't know an astronaut.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Already reading like my premature obituary, like idiot dies alone in a spacesuit in his living room, you know, like just imagine. That would be like Darwin Award for sure, for sure. So I get the spacesuit and it kind of.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'm literally, and so as soon as I seal it up, I'm realizing I can't breathe. I'm going to run out of air. So luckily, like there's a hose, you know, kind of that long hose thing that would normally plug into an air supply had a little plug on the end of it. So I just unplugged it and was able to temporarily breathe through the hose until I figured out the locking mechanism. So there was my almost, that was my mortality rate thing right there. So that was probably above a 98 or below a 90. So you're there standing.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very just seeing all the stuff, it's so cool. Look at all this old history stuff. And ended up seeing there's an article for a VMSTK 44 flight suit, high altitude flight suit that came from the Soviet Union and looks, you know, it's like a MiG fighter jet, very similar to like the SR-71 kind of pumpkin suit, semi-pressure suit with a full helmet. I mean, it looks like a spacesuit, you know, for all intents and purposes. It's kind of like a spacesuit. And I just bid on it. I bid like I think 325. And next thing you know, like it arrives at my door. Yeah. And from that point on, like literally, I got it out. I immediately try to put it on. And the first thing that I do is almost die in it because I close the helmet down on myself and locked it and didn't know how to unlock it.”
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 knew enough to know what that meant, but that's really about the end of my space knowledge. And so I clicked on it. The clickbait got me. Like I'm like, oh yeah, I'm going to see if, you know, and I see that the minimum bit was like $250,000. I'm like, okay, no, I can't own the apologystick, you know. But it got me on this website called RRAuction. And so I started scrolling through that, looking for things that hadn't been bid on. And they had, you know, at the time they're doing a huge space auction. And so I'm looking for things just out of curiosity fun. These are cool, like starting to really, you know, like I said, I liked space, but I wasn't like.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rockets. So, yeah, so the story kind of keeps going for we saw I was doing. Can't tie photography, man. We'll go on a deep rabbit hole there. So it ended, you know, through all this doing a lot of weddings, I was already getting saturated and feeling like I'm not being as creative. You know, you can only shoot them so many weddings before you're like, well, now we do this pose, this pose, this pose. You know, even if they're amazing places in front of a castle in Germany or something, I'm still like, well, at the end of the day, I'm not being very creative, you know. I remember craving like some projects. And so I was sitting at my friend's coffee shop in my hometown in Cedar Falls, sidecar coffee. And I'm sitting on this red couch. And I see this article from, I think, Gizmoto, and it said, you could own the flight stick of an Apollo command module.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what's fun with me with photography and rockets, they're both like the ultimate story of compromise because when you start learning about photography, learn about how the aperture affects both your exposure but also your depth of field, higher shutter speed affects both your exposure, your depth of field, how the medium format camera versus a crop camera affects everything is a compromise in price versus performance. There's always a compromise. You're always literally doing like a trade study of what can I afford, what's my outcome, like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. How fast is the autofocus or whatever? Same with rockets. Like there's a million choices and every single one of them affects every single thing. So there's always all these trades. It's so cool that you can see the same totally different outcomes based on the same like requirements. Do X and here's how we're going to do it. And two teams of people will come up with wildly different things.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And yeah, I just fell in love with it. It became like I got a job at a camera store and, you know, basically all my extra money went into buying everything that I could at the time. And I only worked there for about exactly a year before I went into pursuing photography full-time. And I basically was shooting weddings so that I could travel and pay like, you know, afford to be able to do some big trips every year and develop some kind of portfolio of traveling. Not necessarily like not for I guess Instagram wasn't much of a thing at the time it's really just I liked making big prints and having them displayed and that kind of stuff and pretty”
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 was always obsessed with realism and recreating and visualizing things. And so when I got my hands on the camera, it was actually my dad's old pen tax that I first shot on a film camera and developing the film, I didn't personally develop it, like, you know, getting the film back back in those days. I just was like so excited about the idea that I had this visual thing that I saw with my own eyes. And now I can stop time and capture it and show it to other people. Just kind of like to me that was like the ultimate form of realism was like. Literally showing you the photons basically that affected this film. And so I was 19 when I got my first digital SLR at Canon 20D and started shooting.”
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 actually remember. So I drew up drawing constantly. I was the weird kid that I would bring a sketchpad to the restaurants. Like every restaurant when I was growing up until I was like 18, 19, I literally would just sit there and draw while we're waiting for food. And my parents like fostered that. And I'd be the weird.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lot of portrait work and then just randomly commercial things like you know food and beverages for businesses or like you know wheelchair ramp company I shot their product you know random whatever a professional photographer does in Cedar Falls Iowa 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
“I used to be a professional photographer, so from 2008 until the end of 2016, that was my income, was photography full-time”
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 not a smart guy always, okay Formation flying in the fighter jets was likely a more dangerous thing Then what I'll be doing in spaceflight.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And realistically, I'm not. I'm going to be convinced and statistically convinced that this is relatively safe. You know, like, again, in the 99s percent safe. Again, there's things that people do every day that are less safe than this.”
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 most people, for me, the idea of dying isn't so much about myself, it's about those affected by it, you know, my loved ones, my family, my girlfriend, my friends. You know, obviously I don't want to have this be a traumatic experience for anybody, you know. It's already going to be hard. It's already, I know my mom gets, my parents and family and friends are very supportive. And, you know, my parents are all about it, of course, but my mom is also very emotional too. So, you know, she's, so my speaking of athletes, my brother-in-law has actually been on American Ninja Warrior two seasons, phenomenal athlete. And even just when he competes, my mom gets so emotional. Like, she can't even hold it together seeing that. So what's it going to be like when she sees her son get on top of a skyscraper and ascend on a column of flames into the heavens? Like that's going to be very difficult, 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
“I have for most of my adult life had dreams of Falling and hitting the ground, and it just all you get a ring in your ears, it all goes black, and in my head I go, Oh shit, that was 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 mean, yeah, I mean, Like I said, I've had dumb moments on motorcycles where I kind of saw I'm going to smash into this thing at 120 mile an hour and”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I would love to see that. You know, there's certain things that I would love to see milestones that I would love to see tested out and proven before I get on board. But at the end of the day, I really do believe that just like Falcon 9 and the success of that, that they're going to push it and get all the kinks out well before anyone's on top of it. Nowadays, Falcon 9 and Dragon is arguably the one of the safest, most reliable and best rides you could take to 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, doing at that point, you're pretty much. I would like them to test the heat shield of that entry velocity, though, because it takes another, it's about 30% faster to get, like, to go 30% faster than lower Earth orbit to get out to a translunar injection. And although that only sounds like, oh, 30% faster, the reentry heating experienced by a vehicle goes up by velocity cubed, not squared. So not even not linear. So it's not like you go twice as fast, you get you see twice as much, you know, 30% faster, 30% more heat. And it's not squared. It's not go twice as fast to get four times as much heat. Let's go twice as fast, get eight times as much heat on reentry. So 30% faster on reentry is actually a really, really big deal.”
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 not sure. I'm not sure if they'll do that exact flight profile, but by then they will have already flown most likely the Artemis 3 program will have a Starship variant to the moon that lands on the moon.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's a, you know, yes, it's risky. It's scary. And I think about it a lot, a lot. It definitely is one of those things that I, you know, I will have to see. And I'm in no hurry for this to happen either. You know, personally, I'm in no hurry because it's like I would rather see this thing be developed and iterated and see 10 or I was going to say 10 dozen, but I'd be happy with a dozen fully successful like, oh, we've got the thing totally nailed down, you know, before I get on it. And that likely is the reality. There'll likely be a dozen or two or three launches because just even to get to the moon on Starship, they have to refuel it in orbit. So it will get to Earth orbit basically empty and out of fuel. So I'll have to dock with a fuel depot, fill up, and then go to the moon. So just to even get that full, you know, we're already talking about a hand.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is certain engineering principles that prove that that could be a completely valid thing, the space shuttle through 133 times fully successfully, it did have two failures, resulting in the loss of 14 lives. 98.5% success rate. Pretty, I mean, yeah, there's other, I've probably done things that are a lot riskier. I have race motorcycles, drag race motorcycles, and ridden like an absolute jerk on the streets on a motorcycle. I'm sure I've had a higher than a 98.5% survival rate or lower than that. I mean, at some point.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know of too many people that are dumb enough to do that this day and age. It's obviously I will have to see a lot of successful launches and have to have a lot of confidence in the engineering, the data that they have developed a safe system because currently the current iteration of Starship has no abort system, has no escape tower. So, you know, Dragon capsule, which is currently flying people, has a launch abort system. It has super Draco engines that either by the push of a button or by the automatic triggering of the flight computer can shoot the capsule off of the rocket in milliseconds and pull it safely away, get it far enough away that it can pull the parachutes and safely splash down. Starship, by all iterations I've ever seen, does not have that. The space shuttle also did not have that. So it's not absurd to not have an abort system. Like it is there.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source