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

“I have to admit I kind of have a hard time extrapolating out that far. There's a lot of people that are like big futurists and really do think about interplanetary stuff and think about colonizing Mars and stuff. I have a hard time predicting when starship's going to fly, the orbital launch. imminent-ish, like month or two scale time frame. And yet I'm still like, I can't tell you when that's going to, I can't tell you anything about when we're going to land on Mars or what's economy and what the scale of launch operations is going to look like in order to do that because it's just so hard. I wouldn't have predicted where we're at today five years ago, you know, it's insane. It's so hard to predict. And yeah, but it's funny because there's so many new companies starting up trying to predict that. And it's a really exciting, you know, startup culture.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll stream some of the really big ones, but back in the day, like I said, would wake up in the middle of the night to catch these streams or, you know, catch these launches and watch them because they were such a big deal and there's maybe only five of them a year. And so it's a really big deal. Nowadays, it's like, oh, yeah, there's literally like two a week on average now. It's insane. From SpaceX alone, let alone, you know, United Launch Alliance, Rocket Lab, any of the Chinese missions, you know, I mean, all of there's countless. It's insane. It's hard to really, really hard to keep up with.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Able to do, yeah. I can't really believe it. I mean, obviously, even just in the I think I'm a fairly fair weather fan, really didn't start paying attention to like 2014. And just seeing what it was like back then to what it's like, I don't watch every launch at all anymore. Like I'll catch the big ones.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every bit of fuel they're using and proponent they're using to land is proponent they weren't using to put something into space. So they want that to be as efficient as possible. So they're really watching them hone that in and just continue to evolve and edit that and just get it to be the workhorse that we're coming up on a hundred consecutive landings, perfect landings. 100. I think they've done like 150-something landings altogether, 160 altogether. But we're talking like in a row without blowing up, which five years ago was completely experimental and insane. And now we're coming up to the point where we're 100 in a row. It's like, this is becoming more reliable in the landing, which is not the primary mission. This is purely for SpaceX's like gain, is to recover the booster. It has nothing to do with the effect of getting the payload on orbit, you know, most of the time. And the landing is really only for their benefit and their gain.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So they have to actually literally be riding the throttle. So, what you do is you kind of start ideally, you know, you kind of start in the middle of your window of throttle range. So let's pretend your engine can throttle down to 40% of its maximum rated thrust. You might start at like 70% of thrust in the middle of that window of where it could burn. So if all of a sudden it's kind of coming in too hot, you have room to throttle up. If we're coming into, you're actually, you know, a little too early, you throttle it down. You have a little bit of wiggle room. Just amazing how smoothly and how perfectly they're able to still control that thing, even though they're down to one engine out of the nine and they're still riding like the finest margin of what's possible. And they're continually playing with 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, well, one of the fun things to remember, too, specifically with the Falcon 9 and the Falcon Heavy boosters, I mean, it's the same thing, basically. They shut down all but one of the nine engines. And even with that one engine at its minimum throttle setting Still, too much thrust to hover. So as this rocket's coming down, if they start a little bit too early, if they light that engine too early, it will actually stop above the ground and will not be able to lower itself. It will literally stop like say it stopped 200 feet above the ground. Their only option is to kill the engine and then it's just going to fall those 200 feet. It's what we call a suicide burner, a hover slam, kind of interchangeable terms, because your thrust to weight ratio is never below one.”
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'm pretty sure it is. And that was one of the things that was weird is that Elon, when he started SpaceX, was like, we're just going to code in the most common language so that we don't have to have people learn this archaic, you know, weird thing. And we can just literally pull people off the streets and be like, here, write it, 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 couldn't tell you a single thing about the code and the avionics behind it, but I can tell you all the hardware that makes it happen if that helps.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ironically, I didn't end up getting to see that one fly Went home, my camera saw it. I left my camera out there, like a remote triggered camera. My first images as a launch photographer at the time was CRS-3, but I went home and scrubbed too many times. This is back in the day they were scrubbing often. And they'd be like a three-day, five-day, seven-day. You just never knew. So I go home and I watch the live stream of it. So I didn't even get an experience. My first launch, and anyone that's ever tried to go to a launch can probably empathize because, yeah, scrubs are very common in the spaceflight world. So that one I didn't get to see, but since then, obviously, I've been able to attend very many launches.”
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 huge, and people just don't understand that. And so when I saw it with my own eyes, I remember just being like, this is so much cooler than 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
“I think I'd almost impitched that too. I think the people that I was working for at the time, I think they kind of were downplaying it as like, well, it's not a big rockets here. It's not going to be that exciting. But we get out there to the pad and I'm like, this thing's huge. This is not a small rocket. Like this is, it's, you know, it's 70 meters tall, 220 feet tall. It's huge. And I think people forget the scale of that, you know? It might look skinny and tall and all this stuff, but it's still a very, very large piece of machinery. It's physically about as large as you can ship the boosters about as big as you can ship across the country, period, without like completely shutting down highways. It is made within those exact specifications of having, you know, lane privileges and bridges and everything. It's 12 feet wide, 3.7 meters wide, and it's 45 meters long. So it's exactly what you can fit with a pretty standard, you know, like before you start getting into crazy amounts of problem shipping the rocket. And it's huge.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was surprised at how much bigger the rocket was than I imagined. I originally, when I was going down to Kennedy Space Center, I was disappointed that I wasn't seeing like a, you know, I didn't know a ton about rockets. I knew enough to know what a space shuttle was, what the Saturn V was, you know, but that was probably about the end of my knowledge. And I just remember being disappointed that I wasn't seeing a big quote-unquote NASA rocket flying. I was thinking in my head, like, oh, I'm going to see this launch. It's probably going to be like three stories tall or something, you know, just some little skinny little stick and some little firecracker. And yay, you know, and”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In an uncontrolled manner. And so then they came back with vengeance. When they came back, the first mission back is the first time that they landed a rocket, which was awesome. So they returned to flight after the anomaly was landing a rocket.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yep, early 2014. So that, and for me, that was so fun watching, that was like the peak of me just becoming obsessed with this idea. I'm watching back in the day, it was like months between launches. So a launch was like a big idea. I'd wake up at 3 a.m. to watch this landing attempt or whatever, you know, and every, you know, there's CRS 4 almost landed, CRS-5 almost landed CRS-6, CRS-7 blew up. I was watching that on, I think it was like a Saturday morning or maybe a Sunday morning. And I remember watching that and watched it blow up. And I was like, oh my God, now what? You know, and it blew up on a scent. It was their first failure. So it was their 18th flight, I believe, Sierra 7, the upper stage, had one of the bottlers bottles inside the tanks that are filled with helium. And one of those bottles broke off on ascent and actually just completely overpressured the upper stage. The upper stage blew up and the whole rocket went kaboom.”
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, like, well, what if we just stuck landing legs on it and just landed the thing vertically? And next thing you know is December 21st, 2015, they did exactly that for the first time.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it also decreases the velocity by almost half, or around half. And then that, therefore, decreases the amount of the biggest thing with the atmosphere is that as it gets compressed against the front of anything flying through the atmosphere, the compressed atoms just get hot and they can get so hot they turn into a plasma and they get so hot they can just absolutely destroy anything. So they slow down enough that the air molecules don't end up, you know, destroying the vehicle on re-entry. And then they realized, I think at some point it was probably a similar crossover. They're like, well, if we're lighting the engine's already to slow down in the atmosphere, we can just use that same engine to land.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And with SpaceX, they weren't even getting to the point of the booster surviving reentry long enough to be able to pull the parachutes. They're mass fractions. And that varies every single rocket's different, for instance, Rocket Lab uses carbon composite fuselage and tanks or, you know, same thing. And that's very, very lightweight, has really good mass fractions, and therefore their drag coefficients and things like that. were able to survive re-entry of the first stage, which is something that SpaceX wasn't able to do at the time. What kind of the big, I think, breakthrough for SpaceX with reusing the booster is they realized we have to basically slow down before we hit the atmosphere. So they actually do what they used to call a reentry burn, which I still think is the correct term because it is re-entering the atmosphere. But now they call it the entry burn. And they light up three of the nine Merlin engines, not only to slow it down, but actually even while those engines are firing, it creates like a literal force field as it's falling through the atmosphere.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can't speak for Elon and SpaceX, but it was pretty immediately they wanted to try to recover. And as a matter of fact, I think the very first two Falcon 9 rockets and Falcon 1, I think they even wanted to try to recover using parachutes to recover the first stage. And now fast forward, you know, almost 20 years later, and Rocket Lab is actually doing a concept like that where they're pulling a parachute after the first stage is re-entering and they actually are trying to recover it with a helicopter is going to try to snatch it out of the air. They've actually done it. They've actually done it successfully once.”
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 reusability definitely is a necessary part of making any kind of interplanetary mission in order to actually do that just financially. You have to start reusing these.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The next big feature that you saw in 2014 would have been they added landing legs to a Falcon 9 rocket, which is, I was at, that was the first launch I ever went to, was actually to see, it was CRS-3, so commercial resupply mission 3, and it was probably their, God, I don't remember what that was like their 14th or 15th launch or something, like pretty early on. And people were literally laughing at the idea of them putting landing legs on it. They just thought it was stupid. They're like, why are they wasting? Why is this billionaire Elon Musk guy wasting his time trying to land a rocket? It's not going to work.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The very first Falcon 9s had a square array of engines. It had like a three by three by three grid of their Merlin 1 engines, the 1Ds. And I think it only lasted, I don't remember if it was two or four flights before they went into this Octawag configuration where there's a ring of eight engines with a center engine in the middle. Still in the same diameter that the rocket was the fuselage was more or less the same 3.7 meter wide diameter, but the actual thrust structure changed. And one of the big efficiency gains was you no longer have a corner engine and then like an edge engine and then another corner engine. You can just make eight of the same kind of part of the Octaweb it's called the same shape and then your interchangeability and your manufacturer ability becomes a lot simpler. So that was kind of one of the bigger upgrades at first and they kept stretching it every time they like touch this thing it got longer and like or taller and taller technically and then”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, but right now their biggest customers actually themselves with Starlink. One of the biggest reasons they've launched so much massed orbit is because Starlink is designed around the payload fairing and the payload capabilities of the Falcon 9 rocket. So, you know, because they're vertically integrated, because they build their own satellites, because they're building their own rocket, they can literally design a system that's, you know, another manufacturer might have made a more square satellite that was heavier or something. But SpaceX looked at it from a blank slate and said, here's our constraints, our payload mass constraints, our volume constraints. And they made a funky looking satellite at things like the size of a table folded up, which isn't anything I've really ever seen before. But it's purpose-built to fit as efficiently as possible inside their fairing and inside the capabilities of that rocket. So therefore, because they're launching those like an insane amount, you know, dozens, you know, 40, 50 times a year or whatever, they're just putting up insane amounts of mass like we've never seen before.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. Yep, the Falcon 9's the semi truck, the Dragon capsules, the payload. You know, it's the thing being dropped off basically at assassination. In this case, the destination is the International Space Station. And yeah, so they develop those relatively quickly and became a commercial success before you know it. They're now the number one launch provider in the world launching more mass to orbit than anybody else, launching more frequently countries like the entire country of China who's going crazy right now with launches. Granted, China beat them by two launches this last in 2022, but prior year, SpaceX beat the entire country of China. I mean, it's nuts.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Followed by an upper stage engine called the Kestrel engine. Pretty small compared to the things they're working on today, but that Merlin engine continued to evolve into being the power plant for the Falcon 9. They went from a small lift launch vehicle up into the medium class launch vehicle so they could provide services for NASA. That's one of the big things they first kind of hung their hat up was they got the opportunity to fly cargo to the International Space Station under originally it was called the COTS program, the commercial orbital transportation services for NASA, which evolved into the commercial resupply contracts. And that's when SpaceX developed both their Dragon capsule, which is a uncrewed at first spacecraft that conducted the ISS and the Falcon 9 rocket that can take it to the International Space Station.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is Alex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Tim Dodd. Can you give a brief history of SpaceX rockets? So we've got Falcon 1, Falcon 9, there's different versions of those, Falcon Heavy, Starship, and also the Dragon Castles and so on. Well, yeah, Falcon 1 is where it all started. The original intent and the original idea of SpaceX was Elon wanted to try to get something to Mars. He saw that NASA didn't have a current Mars plan and he wanted to go to Mars. So he decided how do I best do this? He literally wanted to at first purchase a rocket from Russia. Then on the after a foiled attempt at doing that, he decided he was going to try to develop his own rocket. And the Falcon 1 is what came out of that process. And he developed a pretty incredible team. I don't know how exactly he stumbled upon the team that he stumbled upon that quickly. But the people that he assembled were amazing. And they built the Falcon 1, which was a single Merlin.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
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2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
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2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, maybe second to Jimi Hendrix, but maybe my favorite living guitarist, would that be fair to say? I don't know. He's just a genius, the soul of every note he pulls out of the guitar. It's crying, it's singing, it's celebrating whatever he does with the guitar is just so truly unique. And I think that's one of the elements of art that stand out at the highest level in the world you're able to create something truly unique. And there's many, many, many, many other masterclasses I highly recommend with Martin Scorsese. I mean genius. Get unlimited access to every masterclass and get fifteen percent off of an annual membership at masterclass dot com slash lex.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Psychotherapist or psychiatrist and so on. And I think one of the big things is the first step for that kind of process. And so it should be as easy as possible. And that's what BetterHelp does. It's easy. It's private. It's affordable and available anywhere. Check them out at betterhelp.com slash lex and save on your first month. This show is also brought to you by Master Class one hundred eighty dollars a year get you in all access pass to watch courses from the best people in the world in their respective disciplines. That's what you want to learn from the people who have been there, who have done it, and have returned to tell the tale both right somebody I hope to talk to one day this incredible game designer Carl Santana, probably one of my favorite guitarists.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whatever happens to us when we are young in our childhood, the difficult stuff, the good stuff, everything. The whole shebang, and some of that is trauma, and I think the shadow that trauma leaves in the human psyche. is significant and deserves to be lit up and ought to be explored, I think, and talk therapy, sort of talking through it, bringing it to the surface I think is one of the best or definitely one of the really effective ways to begin the healing process and to take it to completion. That's something we talk about with Paul. It was something that we talk about with Carl Dyseroth and just in a lot of incredible conversations with”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got better help for mental health, masterclass for online learning, Shopify for e commerce, and ExpressVPN for privacy and security. She was wisely my friends. Also, if you want to work with our team, we're always hiring, go to lexfriedman dot com slash hiring. And now on to the Full Ad Reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Better Help, spelled HELP Help. Quite a few conversations coming up, including with Paul Conti, that really delve into the human mind, the complexities of the human mind formed through”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The following is a conversation with Tim Dodd, host of the Everyday Astronaut YouTube channel, where he educates and inspires all of us with detailed but accessible explanations of rocket engines and all things space travel.”
2023-02-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #356 – Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source