Hopperdates changed again and presentation pushed to July. Falcon Heavy payload, static fire, and what launches is SpaceX hiding from us? And Elon's Twitter shenanigans. Hello, it's me again, Felix, and welcome to episode 8 of What About It. Thank you for tuning in. Last week, I asked you a very important question about NASA's Artemis program and many of you replied with even more opinions. Thank you for all the replies. One thing was interesting in particular. Many of you think that NASA either is not willing to change or not able to change his course. Either way, it's a very interesting topic and I might dig into that later this year. Today, I want to mention a very special person in my life. Clint, this one's for you. I hope you know what this means to me. Clint is my first patron. This is your applause. Thank you very much and I hope you enjoyed the early access to this video. Now, as always, let's dive right into today's exciting news. Hopper Dates changed again. This is not a joke. I promise, Raptor hasn't arrived yet and the dates have changed again. The new dates are June 24th to 29th with the primary dates on 24th and 27th. Hopper keeps hopping only on the calendar. But what about it? Why are the dates shifting over and over again and why is Raptor still missing? It seems like Raptor needs repairs. I have no further knowledge, but if this is right, there must have been some sort of incident which damaged the engine. I'll dig in further and I'll let you know as soon as there's something new to report on the ongoing repairs. Star Hopper presentation has been pushed back to July. The Raptor delay has further influence on the Starship presentation. Last month, Elon tweeted that the Starship presentation would happen on June 20th. Obviously, that didn't happen. As I already suspected in an earlier episode, Elon wants the Starship presentation to happen after the hopper has hopped. So what's happening now is that the presentation is being pushed back as well. That's a pity. I'm sure we would have all loved to see information on Starship conquering Mars as soon as possible. On the other hand, though, I can fully understand SpaceX. First of all, the hopper is very important. Elon does not want to do a presentation while putting as much work as he can into the prototypes in Boca Chica, Texas and Cocoa, Florida. Secondly, it's great if you can actually present success at the Starship presentation. So we'll have to wait a bit longer to see the latest information on what Starship will look like when it's done. Falcon Heavy getting ready and static fire is done. So this is it. The big launch is coming and it's only days away now. Falcon Heavy STP2 is in the middle of its final preparations and it's looking great. Engineers at SpaceX have been working tirelessly to assemble the integrated payload stack with all its different missions. Look at that assembly. We can finally see all the missions lined up to make history in a few days. This time we'll see a multi-manifest, which basically is a fancy word for a ride chair. The whole stack comes in a 3600 kilograms and has 23 satellites ready to be blasted off into space. These satellites come from the military, the NOAA, NASA and academic institutions, pursuing missions from weather observations to revolutionizing spaceflight and navigation. It's just amazing to see how much work has been put into every single detail. To me, it's a little bit like seeing a child grow up. I mean, it's only the third launch, but what a ride it was every time. First we saw Starman riding Elon's Tesla to Mars. I mean, how much more epic could the first flight have been? Next we had Aerobsat 6, a heavy beast of a satellite weighing in at 6 tons going straight to geostationary orbit. Now we will be able to see the Space Test Program 2 take off from Cape Canaveral, and this mission is quite the sensation as well. It's Space Access first refurbished Falcon Heavy. It's the DOD's first use of a flight proven rocket ever and it has quite the payload. I already talked about GPIM, a green propellant for satellites and other spacecrafts going up with STP2 in a different episode. All this is now on the pad, awaiting the go signal at Kennedy Space Center's historic pad 39A. The static fire is already complete and if everything goes well, the rocket will lift off on Monday. A number record to be broken this flight will be the longest downrange landing ever. Last time, the center car of Falcon Heavy landed 970 km downrange in the Atlantic Ocean on off course I still love you. This time though, SpaceX changed the landing site on June 19th to an astonishing 1240 km downrange. It's already been approved by the FCC, so that's going to happen. Elon himself has already said that it's going to be the most difficult launch SpaceX has ever done because the payload isn't the main mission. It's the flight itself. The DOD is putting Falcon Heavy through its paces. Multiple orbit insurgents, long upper stage coasting, multiple ignitions and 23 separations. And on top of all that, the 1240 km downrange landing. The launch window though is at 1130 pm Eastern deviation time, so don't expect the mission to make it into Monday's episode. That will have to wait until the next Friday episode. Have a safe trip, SCP-2. I think we all wish you an amazing flight. What launches is SpaceX hiding? Up front, there is no conspiracy theory in this news. I don't do that kind of stuff. If you're looking for that, go somewhere else. Now that we got that out of the way, let's dive into some really interesting facts, shall we? Last month, at the Satellite Conference 2019 in Washington, D.C., Winnie Shotwell, CEO of SpaceX, stated that SpaceX will have 18 to 21 launches this year, excluding the Starling launches. This is an incredible number, even though SpaceX is not able to break their record from last year where they also managed to launch 21 rockets. The educated SpaceX fan loves drooling at the mission's list at SpaceX.com if time needs to be killed desperately. At least that's what I love doing. Recently, I did exactly that. They just added the newly acquired South Korean and ACES-2 mission. That's good news. As always, eager to get numbers, I started counting. Seven missions done this year, minus one Starling makes six. Another 11 confirmed minus two Starling launches makes nine. Together, that's 15. So I counted again, but apparently I was right. But what about it? Why are there less officially known launches compared to Shotwell's predictions for 2019? It all comes down to the mystery launches. Launches that SpaceX doesn't tell us about until close before the launch date. SpaceX has three to six mystery launches coming up this year, if Shotwell's predictions from last month are correct. It also means that SpaceX is planning to do 11 to 13 launches in the second half of 2019. That's an insane amount of launches. If that is all true, we should see a Falcon leave the pet every other week from now on. See? That's why I love counting the launches. It fills my heart with happiness. Elon's Twitter shenanigans. I just love the guy. On Monday, Elon played another of his famous Twitter shenanigans. He posted on Twitter saying that he deleted his Twitter account. And he also renamed it to daddy.com. And that is nothing new with Elon. He did stuff like that on Twitter before. I mean, if you can still see his account, it's not deleted. That's that simple. Journalists, though, can't wrap their head around Elon's tweets. The media went into DevCon 5. Elon must have loved so hard. What happened is pretty easily explained. Elon tweeted an artwork by Mally Mello, but he refused to credit it. The artist found out soon due to traffic increase on her own account. Then, Elon got into a Twitter argument about crediting others. But oh no, somebody brought up Martin Everhart at which point Elon started a rant. Martin Everhart is one of the original two founders of Tesla. Elon came in later as an investor with $6.5 million. Everhart and Musk didn't like each other very much, though. Later, Elon fired Martin in 2007 and became the CEO of Tesla in 2008. The example brought up, which started Elon's rant, was that Elon didn't credit Martin enough for Tesla's success. Elon didn't take that very well, though, and replied with a pretty angry tweet. After the story had unfolded, Elon deleted all his tweets, Twitter that he deleted his account, and renamed it to daddy.com. The only problem here for Elon is that he's now in a series violation with a non-dispiragement agreement that he signed with Martin. We'll see how that unfolds in the coming weeks. Fun fact, after Elon tweeted that he deleted his account, Tesla stocks went up 5.5% even though the account was still there. Mellie Mello, by the way, didn't have hard feelings. She thanked him for all the traffic she had and reminded him that he should credit artists from now on. Elon has a history on Twitter. He announced on Twitter, for example, that he would take Tesla private, which never happened. He also called a cave diver rescuing a children's soccer team in a cave a pedo guy and got into a lawsuit about it. Whether that's good or not is not my point to judge. But what can be said is that it's another side of a personality that couldn't be more extra ordinary. He just never fails to surprise. So this again wraps up today's episode of What About It. Maybe we should start a lottery about when Hopper will hop. Tell me your best guess in the comments. We'll see who was closest when the hopper takes off. Thank you for watching this episode of What About It. If you liked what you saw, don't forget to subscribe and like because this helps me the most. Feel free to hit me up on my Patreon page so I can get additional help in making more and better content. This gives me more 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. you