YouSaid · the spoken record

Tim Ellis

lines on the record: 75
first: 2023-09-22
most recent: 2023-09-22
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

“Between flights one and two, but from flights 20 to 22 or 100 to 101 and whatever, right? And over the course of that lifespan, things are going to happen. You're going to take bird strikes. You're going to take ice strikes. You're going to have mechanics drop wrenches on it. You're going to have the manlift that's 10 stories tall sway in the breeze and bump the hull. And the question is, what do you do then? Is it good to go? Do you have to inspect it? I don't know. But that's the level of comfort you have to get to. And so, yeah, our solution is metallic, actively cooled system. And I think checks those boxes.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to focus on reintegrating things, getting the payload on, refueling, and then flying. There's no time for inspections. There's certainly no time for refurbishments. And so you've got to design a system that's so robust where you don't need to inspect and you can still have 100% confidence in mission success, right? And so that's what it all comes down to. And that was kind of like the founding thesis and question mark we had when we started. Can we come up with a solution that checks those boxes? In our opinion, the ceramic tile solution will never check those boxes. They're just too brittle. I think Starship has 20,000 tiles or so on its hull. And I think they will be eventually successful, but it's a fantastic engineering challenge to get right at all. And then the question is, how does that look not only?”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In either one of these cases, like the shuttle, I believe the number is 30,000 personnel are spent on every single shuttle mission, inspecting and refurbishing the heat shield tiles. Oh, wow. Yeah, just shocking number, right? And so that's what you have to solve in order to reuse in a day, you have to focus on like the minimum number of things that you need to do to get this thing up in the air again.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the second stage goes all the way to space, and then in order to get it back, it has to come back through the atmosphere. And you're probably familiar with shuttle coming back in or capsules coming back in. They kind of glow red hot. They need to survive the heat of reentry. And that is an engineering challenge, which to date has been solved by basically high temperature materials, brittle ceramic tiles in the case of the shuttle and now Starship, or a material that actually burns away. So you can coat the whole thing with cork. Burn away on its way down, and it'll protect the vehicle and allow you to do the mission. But that's obviously not reasonable. So you'd have to replace that component.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think rocketry is another level of challenge over aircraft. And I think a daily reuse is an achievable goal. So if you fly and land the component tree and fly it again the next day, that's a very worthy and achievable goal. Not an easy goal, but it's an achievable goal.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so the question is how do you scale that number up? If you are not reusing the second stage, the only way you can scale that number is by scaling your manufacturing facilities, scaling your test facilities, scaling the touch labor it takes to certify these components, all of those things for every flight. And still you're left with a vehicle where every single mission is a maiden voyage. So that again has cost and reliability and availability issues with it, right? Okay, so the reusability of the second stage not only lets you amortize that remaining 30 to 40 percent of the cost of the vehicle. But it also totally changes the way you think about how to scale the flight frequency and how reliability manifests itself because now you have flight proven hardware on every mission instead of a maiden voyage”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that's the obvious place to start in this quest for reusability is figure out how to take the biggest cost component and reuse that. So that's what SpaceX has done. And then to finish that and take it to its logical conclusion, you also want to reuse the second stage. But here's what's very important. When we talk about scaling the space economy, you've mentioned the record number of launches. SpaceX set the record last year with, I think it is 61 launches in a year, and I think they're on pace for mid-70s, mid to upper 70s this year. Again, that's huge. That's a record for the industry, but it's still paltry in the grand scheme of transportation and logistics.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so I think the first part of reusability is obvious. If you go to an aircraft analogy, you know, you'd never throw away a 737 after every single flight, right? That's pretty obvious. And so the same thing is true with rocketry. There's no reason you would want to throw away the vehicle if you didn't have to. You want to amortize the cost of that vehicle over many flights. Rockets are typically two-stage vehicles, and that means the first stage is used to basically punch yourself out of the atmosphere, give yourself a little bit of downrange, but then the second stage is the thing that actually gets you the rest of the way into space. But the first stage is the biggest thing on the rocket. It usually is...”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's a quarter of them use some sort of reusability, but they're only using partial. Reusability only in that first stage. Yeah. So could you break down the different stages, what that even represents, and why it's important perhaps not to just have a reasonable first stage, but also something it sounds like Stoke is working on is the reusable second stage.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I guess so. Ten years ago, we'd never reused any rocket. There was one demonstration of reusable rocket, which was the DCX, and did relatively low altitude flight and landing. And in fact, the 30-year anniversary of that is coming up. But other than that, it was a huge unknown if we can do something, go to a space or high altitude and come back and land these things. And so, you know, SpaceX has obviously changed the way we think about that. And to some extent, Blue Origin as well. Okay, so let's see. I think SpaceX flew 61 times. They're the only company doing any level of reusability. Most rockets use two stages, the first stage and the second stage. SpaceX reuses only the first stage. I think they did that something like 52 times last year.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually love that you brought up trade because most people, like if you think about commercial flights, they think about them being transported. And the same analogies often used for space where people are like, oh, well, do I really need to go to Mars? And that's the frame they take. But they often don't take the frame of, you know, someone. Hundred years ago would never have been asking, like, do I need an iPhone chip made in Taiwan? They wouldn't think about that because they would never have dreamt of the iPhone, let alone where the chip within the iPhone is being made. And so if we move towards reusable rockets, can you ground us in where we're at in that trajectory? We talked about almost 200 successful rocket launches last year. How many of those even used any reusable components? And then also, where do you see us going?”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Manufacturing things in space. It's very hard to imagine gaining resources, going on vacation, those types of things. Except for a very small slice of applications or people. And so to me, that's the same opportunity we have, right? It's like transcontinental trade, except now we can do it in space, provided we solve the mobility challenge.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, like shockingly recently, 200 years ago, we were sailing around on wooden tall ships. That's how we got across oceans. And in those days, transportation was slow, expensive, and unreliable, and in many ways, those are exactly the three words that describe space transportation. And in not a very long amount of time, you know, we invented steamships, we invented steel hauls, eventually we invented aircraft, and now we moved transcontinental transportation super readily. But if you go back to those tall ships days, you know, can you imagine a world where this is the way we get from one continent to the other? Can you imagine saying, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to outsource manufacturing overseas because that's more cost efficient. There's absolutely no way you would ever do that, right? And I think space is very similar. It's slow, expensive, and unreliable to get to space. And in that world, it's very hard to imagine.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so that number 200, I think it was like 190 or something. That number is a world record for us, right? But if you look at any other mode of transportation, that number is just paltry. It's pathetically small. And if you want to grow a thriving economy in space, that's absolutely just not going to get it done. I think a very appropriate analogy is if you think about our ability to move across continents through ocean, right?”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. In addition to having a better understanding of what we're doing on Earth, why do we need in what seems like a sense of this capability turning exponential as well where we're able to, as Stoke is working on, build reusable rockets and really increase the amount of satellites that we're putting up there or the capability for us to go up at a frequency that we've just never seen before? Why is that necessary given that we have been putting satellites up for decades? And last year, I think in particular, we saw almost 200 successful rocket launches. So give me a sense of why we need to increase this capability to the point where we haven't seen before.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, right. We took it season by season, right? You know, people can go and look and measure ice packs. So in a lot of geologies, the water supply, the freshwater supply is from melting ice packs. So you measure ice packs season to season. But you go back not very far in history and people said some divine intervention that's dictating these droughts or not, right? And so”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, we can now experiment and understand agricultural efficiencies better. We can understand water flows and water patterns. We can predict drought. We can predict and know where our freshwater supplies are season to season and across borders. And so there's a lot of efficiencies that we can gain.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So you're basically saying we're pursuing two paths. The first is a better understanding of what we are actually doing on Earth. So as you said, like monitoring rainforests, understanding how different parts of the atmosphere are changing over time and what's in them, migration patterns, you can all see that better from space.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's number one. And number two, in the long run, we know we've got to scale beyond Earth if we are going to continue scaling, right? So there's maybe three different trajectories of human scalability. One is we continue to grow. One is we stagnate and level off. And the other is that we decline. And I think the most exciting one for us to pursue is the one where we continue scaling. So we've got to think about how we do that, but also not make that lead to a decline.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'm a little bit dated on the statistic, but one thing that will never leave my retina is if you look at the way that our civilization is scaled over the last 200 years, we've gone from something like half a billion people to 8 billion people. And when you plot that over the course of history, it took, you know, it's unknown, tens of thousands of years to get to that original half billion people. And then just three, four, or five generations to go from half a billion to eight billion. It's unbelievable. And I think that there's a lot of questions over what impact that has on our earth, our civilization, and our ability to continue scaling. Nobody really knows the answer to that question. And so I think space is a very, very, very important pillar to be able to figure out and learn what that impact is and how to”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's that ingredient. And then there's renewed geopolitics that are starting to factor very heavily in the way that we secure our sovereignty for ourselves and for our allies. That for 30 years was relatively uncontested in space. And today that's no longer true. So all of these ingredients kind of come together and they've only been kind of coexistent in the last, let's say, three to four years. It's all very new, but now is the time to do it. And I think also maybe this final thing, there's urgency around it, right? I think our civilization is fantastically intertwined and delicate. And that time-bound window is bounded. It's a relatively narrow window. We've got to get it right now within the next 20, 30 years. Or else that window can very viably close. So now is the time to do it.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Number two, I think we're at a very, very unique point in history. We finally have the ability, we know we can get to space. We even know we can get back from space. So there's a technical know-how. There's incredible engineering tools that have just kind of become prolific in the last 10 to 15 years. So engineering tools, analysis tools. So we can now do things with teams of 100 people that took tens of thousands of people in the 60s. That's incredibly powerful. So there's that ingredient. There's kind of the micro scaling of electronics and capabilities for compute, for image processing, for telecom, right? All of these things are now miniaturized. And so you can do with very small form factors what used to take RV-sized buses, right? So now all of a sudden the mass and cost economics make sense for kind of prolific space assets.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I would say is it's kind of an eventual aha that led me to do it. So there are a couple different very important ingredients that I realize are all coming together right now and are going to lead to something very big. I actually kind of grew into thinking that it's kind of a moral imperative for us as humans to develop space and do it in a way that actually benefits the earth. And I think a lot of people who are in the space industry think the same way. So maybe that's number one.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think, first of all, I love it and loved it as a child and continue to love it today. Jeff Bezos obviously worked for him for quite a while, but he used to say your passions choose you, you don't choose your passions. And I really love that. I think it's true. And so, yeah, this is a lifelong passion for me. I went through grad school, did Mechanica Aerospace did like fluids and combustion type experiments in grad school, went to Blue Origin. It was a super small company at the time, and I loved the small team and kind of scrappy environment at that time and just continued on today.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“200 years ago, we were sailing around on wooden tall ships. That's how we got across oceans. And in those days, transportation was slow, expensive and unreliable. And in many ways, those are exactly the three words that describe space transportation. You know, you never throw away a 737 after every single flight, right? That's pretty obvious. And so the same thing is true with rocketry. There's no reason you would want to throw away the vehicle if you didn't have to. Start asking yourself questions. What are the important problems that need to be solved and how can I go and do this in a way that's a sustainable business? We're in like the 1930s and 40s for space. We have a lot of different ideas that are being tested and in my opinion mastering the first stage we use and the second stage reuse are the two ingredients that are going to lead to mega consolidation and then also a healthy and thriving economy.”
2023-09-22 · a16z Podcast · Engineering Rapidly Reusable Rockets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source