Starship updates and Crew Dragon parachute system driving innovation. My name is Felix and I am your host for today's episode of What About It. First of all, I want to invite you all again to set a day's livestream covering Elon Musk's Starship presentation 2019. Rumor has it that the stream will start at 2pm Texas local time, which would be UTC-6. The stream will start 2 hours prior to the presentation to give us some time to speculate on what we might learn, and end roughly 1 hour after the presentation to give us some more time to speculate on what we just saw. As soon as I know an exact time, I'll set the stream up so watch out for that notification. Now, as always, there has been a lot going on in the space industry lately, so let's dive right in. Starship updates. As I recorded this episode on Wednesday because of an upcoming radio interview with a Melbourne-based radio station, there might be some things missing in this episode, but still, I'll do my best to keep you up to date on the latest progress right before the presentation. Elon recently tweeted that the Starship prototype has a problem with weight distribution. It's too heavy on the tail end, making the flip-over maneuver needed for a good landing difficult to do. Musk and the SpaceX team decided to put as much hardware in the nose as possible to counter this problem. Amongst header tanks that originally were supposed to go into the tanks on the bottom section, Musk also spoke about three batteries needed to run internal systems. Now here you can see one of those batteries. Now where would SpaceX get their batteries from? Right, this is a Tesla battery no doubt, and three of them are going to be installed in the nose section of the orbital prototype. Smart move. Why reinvent something you already have? And it's also by now known what Starship will need all that power for. Elon Musk tweeted that the fins won't be actuated with methane or any hydraulic system. They will be moved with extremely powerful electric motors, as the whole fin will be moving and this takes huge amounts of force. Also, an electric motor will be more precise and faster. Musk tweeted that the fins will have to move extremely fast to be able to control Starship on its reentry. He also said that we will learn more about this on the 28th. Huge tanks go out to Michelle Lamontania for these really really nice renders. Heter tanks have been installed in the nose cone already, so they will be at the upper most point possible, again to shift the center of mass away from the tail as much as possible. And the nose section has been stacked as well. It took them only 20 minutes and a pretty powerful crane to lift the nose up onto the fairing section and against lots of rumors this time it was a pretty good fit. Compliments to the crane operator well done. There were holes visible on the sides of the nose cone. These could possibly be hinge mount positions for the canard fins. This would underline Elon's tweet that the canard fins would be mounted on the nose cone rather than on the fairing section. Also, aerodynamic covers have been placed on the fairing section to again shield the methane pipes on the outside. This would actually be in favor of a Starship configuration with the canard fins being attached all the way on top. And SpaceX has been very busy lifting the tank section up with a really big piece of machinery. Behold, Barry. Forchbongerstechnik. Barry is a German leaphair LTM 11200-9.1 heavy lift crane. It has a total of 770 kW of power and can lift a maximum of 1200 tons into the air. It has one of the largest boom extensions of all mobile cranes in the world, giving it a maximum hoist height of 188 meters or 616 feet. Barry will be the one to stack our rocket dream come true. Given that Starship and Super Heavy should have a maximum height of 380 to 400 feet together, Barry would even be enough to stack a finished Starship on top of a Super Heavy booster. And SpaceX has right away put Barry to good use already. Barry lifted the tank section without any problems and put it next to the fairing section for later stacking of the two main segments. While the tank section was lifted up, we were able to see that the already mounted raptors were not visible. They are mounted within the last ring segments to cover them up completely. Unusual on a rocket this is needed for Starship. As the engines need shielding on a reentry and Starship needs a flat bottom for the proposed tail-to-tail docking maneuvers for in-orbit refueling on the finished Starship. We can also see the first cover put over the CH4 pipes that are running down on the outside. This also gives us another information. We now know which direction Starship will be facing on reentry. As you can see the angle on one side of the cover is much steeper than on the other side. So the reentry facing side on this picture is facing away from the camera. There's another interesting thing that's been added to the tank section. Do you see this gray stripe? Let's zoom in a bit. This makes obvious how much more stress the Orbital prototype will have to take on its flight compared to Starhopper, which only had one engine and made it up to 150 meters. The Orbital prototype will go up to 22.5 kilometers possibly on its first flight. And do you remember these? Those were test articles of newly developed heat tiles for Starship. They were tested on the Starhopper to test mechanical attachment methods and on the crew dragon to test their heat resistance. Apparently they worked very well. Elon tweeted that methane transpirational cooling as it was proposed by SpaceX a while back might be off the table. As the heat tiles are much lighter, cheaper and do the same thing. As the large fins will actually generate lift while hypersonic, according to Musk, the tiles will be enough to protect the Starship on reentry. And another one from Elon's never-ending Twitter parade. He said that Starship will do arrow brake maneuvers re-entering from interplanetary trips. To Marsy said one pass could work but two would probably be wise. And on return to Earth, definitely more than one would be needed to lose enough speed for a savory entry. Arrow brake maneuvers are known in spaceflight and nothing new. The first use of the technique ever was on the Magalan mission which arrived at Venus in 1990 and used arrow braking on its final approach. It means that the Starship will enter an elliptic orbit around its target planet, skimming the upper atmosphere as often as it needs to lose enough speed to do a savory entry, as reentry speeds coming from Mars are much higher than coming from Leo for example. SpaceX is keeping us really busy right now and it looks more and more like they could really pull off the assembly at least on the outside until Friday. Let's cross our fingers and hope that nothing's done wrong or in a hurry just for the presentation as there is one thing more important than that, the first flight in October. Crew Dragon parachute test is praised even by NASA. NASA recently released a blog post about SpaceX's efforts to develop a better parachute system for its Dragon capsule. SpaceX has had to do 48 tests for NASA so far to evaluate its parachute deployment system for the crew flights in the future. It's an open secret that a space agency is putting SpaceX through its paces to get the approval needed for a human rating of its crew Dragon capsule. No other company has ever had to do so many tests to be allowed to fly crew for NASA. Apparently SpaceX had to do so many tests and come up with so many improvements on the parachute system that NASA now has to re-evaluate its own standards and certification process as the own parachute system would not pass the SpaceX standards anymore. As you can see in the video the capsule first releases two drogue shoots to stabilize the capsule while falling. Then a cluster of four ring sales is deployed. First with a narrow opening to not put too much force on the shoots, then widening up to full size, slowing the capsule down to touchdown speeds. The cluster of shoots apparently works so well that NASA was impressed and released an article about it. This definitely is a very nice gesture and hopefully a step into the right direction. We will most likely not see crew Dragon fly to the ISS this year, but better save than sorry. If anything would happen on that slide that would put Crew Dragon in the spotlight a second time after April's explosion. Who knows if it would survive that. So this wraps up today's episode of What About It. Will you be watching the presentation on Saturday with me and what do you think about NASA's rigorous Crew Dragon requirements? As always, tell me in the comments. Welcome to the Patreon shout out. They are helping me so much with ideas and thoughts and last button on least with some very needed funding that I can't thank them enough. So here's to all of those who chose to support What About It in the most helpful way. Thank you. Everyone please give a warm welcome to Martin Anselm, Jim Vanders and Lauren Leah-Han, Urock. Thank you for watching this episode of What About It. If you liked what you saw, remember to like and subscribe as this helps me the most. Feel free to hit me up on my Patreon page so I can get additional help in doing more and better content, as this gives me the time to focus on what I love doing the most, to give you the latest and greatest about space and science. I hope to see you on the next episode. Until then, have a great time. It was pretty good fit. It was pretty good fit. Let's do it wrong. Also gives us another... and that that that... SpaceX is keeping us all very, very busy lately. Yeah, me too. Whatty-A-Tests. 40, 40, 40. Cookie. Cat. Ooh.