Starship Escapes The Indian Ocean - Where Will It Go Next? Transcript, AI Summary & Key Points

Hello, it's Scott Manley here. After what can only be described as an epic voyage, Starship number 40 has finally made it. Not quite home, but it has made it to some safe shores. It has escaped the Indian Ocean after 3 weeks of traveling and staying still and traveling and dodging storms and getting tied up and released. And eventually instead of going all the way to Australia, it has made its way to Christmas Island.

Now, when we started talking about the recovery of this uh starship, we originally thought Australia would be the place they would go because, well, Australia was where the ships sailed out of, but in the end with the various currents and stuff. Turns out that Christmas Island appears to have been a better choice, but technically Christmas Island is sort of still part of Australia.

It's technically an external territory. And interestingly, Christmas Island is named because it was discovered on Christmas Day, uh, 1643 by William Miners. Uh, but yeah, it's a very small island with a population of less than 2,000. So, you can imagine rolling up with a massive space booster and sitting in one of the bays to shelter it from the weather has caused a bit of the stir on the island.

And I've heard there's like a SpaceX cocktail, which involves rocket fuel, which, you know, is basically alcohol, right? Alan Shepard, eat your heart out. Um, and so anyway, the locals, including you, a number of cool photographers and stuff, have uh started sharing stuff on social media, and that's what we've been seeing. Most of the imagery that we've been really interested in has come out from imagery from the locals, although some of that imagery has been really uh revealing in ways that SpaceX perhaps doesn't like.

Interestingly, uh we've seen a number of people on X have their accounts temporarily suspended and content removed for posting stuff. And this is kind of interesting because you see the thing is Twitter is now owned by SpaceX and is therefore an aerospace company that has to respect ITAR. And like ITAR really only affects US citizens in the US and stuff.

And so technically Australians posting pictures of secret space stuff on sites in Australia, not a problem. But people from Australia posting images on sites that are owned by a company that is legally required to enforce ITAR compliance is definitely getting the lawyers knickers in a twist and we are seeing accounts taken down. Regardless, some of these images that we've seen have been pretty revealing and really fascinating.

This the spacecraft itself has uh suffered a fair amount of damage along the way, partly because of being on the ocean, which has of course constantly been moving around and causing small amounts of bending. We can see wrinkling in the skin where the structure has been folded very slightly over the last few weeks. We have seen the forward flaps take a real beating.

One of them is gone completely and the other one is largely missing. And the the working theory behind this is that at the catch points where the spa the starship was supposed to be caught or ideally would be caught like the booster uh all the tiles near that have been stripped off. So a lot of the speculation says maybe they tried towing it with uh like cables wrapped around those and then when they became unhooked they would sort of just slide forward and hit the fins.

Or maybe those flaps, maybe that's what they attached, you know, cables to and those just got torn off by the action of the waves and the forces of pulling it forwards. And if you look carefully, you can see that there is this chain wrapped around the circumference of the spacecraft. Now, you might do that and then hope that as you put tension on it, it rides forwards into those catch pins.

So, that would kind of make sense and support that. Obviously, wrapping a chain around the top of the vehicle is not going to do great things to the heat shield in that particular area. And we can visibly see that that's damaged in other photos. Welcome to my furnace room where I have all sorts of stuff stored down here like my old video game consoles and stuff like that.

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They have to translate 200 tons of force through their mountings. Now granted that will be compression forces but I I guess there's enough force in there that they can actually get pulled. It's also convenient that they're strong enough to handle the various pressures and they provide you know loops and stuff that they can tie uh you know secure cables to.

So that's how they ended up ultimately towing it in and uh yeah I think a lot of the damage on there has been from just trying to get it secured. There was also the case where they looped all the fenders around it in a big lasso and those bashed up against the ship for a while and they gave up on that idea. In the end though, there are a fair number of tiles that have survived and I'm sure they will be interested in what they look like.

But as nerds, we are looking at the various images showing like for example internal structure of the flaps. Now I am sure that a lot of this is aerospace engineering 101. But as a casual observer, I was fascinated to see the decisions they had made. I mean, there is only so many ways you could build a structure like this that would handle the loads and not flex too much so the tiles stay attached.

And obviously, we've seen cases where these flaps have been damaged during re-entry and we've seen the gases entering and we've wondered where is that gas going? H what is it damaging? How is that structure going to fail? Well, you know, now we've seen failed flaps. we can see a lot more and we can imagine a lot more about what was going on during those previous entries and landings.

Uh and then yes, we had one person who flew a drone right around the back and was getting shots that we could basically look up inside the engines and see those injector plates and that is most definitely up there in terms of like Aritar compliance scariness. Um that video h was taken down. the person that shot that actually shut has taken their Facebook account temporarily private or maybe permanently private, whatever.

They were sharing a lot until a few days ago. Those are the shots that have been removed from Twitter. I'm not going to share them here. I did realize um I don't know if you're someone that's been experienced with internet lore as of 20 years ago, you might remember a website which was hosted on a CX Christmas Island domain. Um and also uh got people into trouble when they shared it because it showed pictures uh looking up the back of someone.

Um yeah, I I if you don't know what that is, don't look it up. If I've reminded you what that is and you want to forget, sorry. Anyway, yeah, look, at this point, this is something that SpaceX has worked hard to bring home. It was clearly not easy. They have got their engineers, no doubt, already on site looking at this. And to be clear, soon after it landed, they were very carefully examining everything and taking photographs to document it.

So I'm presuming that by now the you know he the thermal protection team have taken a lot of you deep you know detailed looks and cataloged all the damage that happened immediately afterwards. Now I think the value in this now is bringing it home and looking at the structural changes because not only did it do the flight right it's now had you know a few weeks of sitting on the ocean of having continuous variable stresses applied to that and that is actually going to be fascinating from a structures point of view

because you know sure this thing is designed to handle forces in a different direction but just by having have being able to look at this being able to see where the stresses are applied and how they're affected that can absolutely inform decisions going forward. Also, I just think it would be cool to have this brought home. So, yeah, uh we've had seen the engineers look at this.

SpaceX are absolutely planning to bring this back to the US. Now, we're not sure where they're bringing it back to, but we do know how they're going to bring this back. They're not going to tow this across the ocean any further. It has had enough of that in its life. They have they have basically hired T or chartered a semi-submersible vessel called the 40.

And this is a salvage vessel, transport vessel. It's very similar to the kind of ship that moved uh of course I still love you, you know, the barge through the Panama Canal. It's a semi-submersible thing. It basically will you more or less uh have a deck which can be descended or sunk below the surface while keeping most of the ship above the surface.

And then they will move the uh the starship on top of this thing and then it will sort of rise out of the water. And ideally before it's done this they will have installed like supports a cradle to support this thing so that they can lash it to the deck. And these things these ships are designed for moving much larger items. Like they can actually move entire ships, not just starships.

Starship is going to look absolutely minuscule on the deck of the 40 when this happens, but uh you know it's probably still Yeah, it's definitely still worth it. I think SpaceX I've heard some estimate from, you know, the guy that does like what's going on in shipping. Great channel. Watch it. Um I've heard estimates that this is probably costing SpaceX $100,000 a day just for this one ship.

And based on his estimates, it's going to be 50 days to 2 months to get it back to the US. And there's many options. They could go through the Sewish Canal, which is probably not going to happen because that will take them close to, you know, Iran straight of Hormuz and all that. They could go through the Panama Canal if they want to go to Brownsville.

Um, Panama Canal has had to actually cut the amount of capacity available because of lack of rain. Uh, you know, El Nino causing some trouble there. Or they could just actually sail across the Pacific and go to uh you know LA because you know we have uh SpaceX down in Hawthorne and maybe they have some maybe they can bring people there uh and or maybe they could just park it there temporarily until they offload it to a cheaper ship.

Regardless, you know, this is something that's going to be 2 months out before we actually see it coming to US shores. That would be a really interesting thing. I I'm sure by then they will have covered up a little more. In fact, I believe somebody has pointed out that they have already plugged the nozzles so that we can't see those injector plates.

And I totally understand that this is a SpaceX object and SpaceX are very much responsible for like secrecy of secret stuff related to ITAR. They're probably going to cover stuff up as they bring it to shore. But I really hope that once SpaceX has done their analysis, once they've had their engineers crawl over it and ring every single piece of science and engineering data that they can use out of this magnificent monolithic structure that they brought back.

I hope that it can be put on display in some way so that we can all see it. So we can stare at this and admire it for this thing that completed this flight and then completed this ocean crossing. And I'm going to point out that technically this is the first pointto-point Starship, you know, journey. I'm not going to say flight because it landed and then had to get towed.

And you know, you might think, well, that's a bit silly, Scott. I had to, you know, spend all these days on the ocean. That doesn't count. You know, for a few years, the US Navy claimed that it had completed the first flight to Hawaii in an aircraft which had to taxi across the ocean for 6 days under sail because they ran out of fuel. But that didn't stop the Navy claiming some sort of victory for a few years.

So, I think SpaceX can claim some sort of merit for this. But hopefully, uh, you know, they will be actually flying these things to orbit and landing them again soon. And when I say soon, we know now that we're expecting the next flight, flight 14, midepptember. We don't know exactly the date anytime soon, but given that that is my wedding anniversary month, I'm pretty sure I know when it will happen.

And I will be with my wife instead, who I love, and you know, I'm going to say great things because at this point, uh, I was really hoping to be out to see Flight 14 so that we could see a catch of Starship, but actually that's not going to happen. Seems that Elon has got ahead of himself and it sounds like flight 14 they are not going to be performing a tower catch return of Starship at this point.

However, it's not clear whether they are still going to orbit or not. So they could go to orbit fly around for you know a few orbits and then land back in the Indian Ocean or they could just fly in the suborbital trajectory and then at some future flight they will be in a position where they can actually catch Starship. Um but I'm not going to see the next flight one way or another.

Uh, and that's fine. That's fine. There will be many, many more Starships. In fact, it sounds like at some point there will be more Starships than Falcon 9. Anyway, uh, I want to just end by sending my congratulations to everyone that was involved in this epic quest. When I saw this land in the ocean and fall over intact, I was sort of filled with this, you know, energy.

I was like, we have to bring this home. And clearly that was not something that a decision that I would have to make, right? This was up to Elon and the engineers at SpaceX on how to make it possible. And they worked hard. They spent over three weeks, you know, braving storms and trying ideas which may not have worked. And obviously learning how to do this thing, this oneoff task that would hopefully never need to be done again.

And you know, they succeeded even after Elon at one point had said, "Look, Starship recovery is looking highly unlikely or not so good or whatever, right? the teams on the ground or on the ocean, so to speak. They braved the storms. They made it happen. And they are probably not all SpaceX employees. Many of them work for the ships who are just chartered.

Uh but they they made this happen. They manifested it. They brought this piece of iconic now iconic hardware out of the Pacific to Christmas Island. And hopefully it will come back here to the US and hopefully be put on display so that we can gaze on it and feel some sense of awe at this you minor achievement which you know will be the first. Um yeah, it it's uh I'm I'm so happy to see it make this far and hoping to see it come home. I'm Scott Manley. Fly safe.