"All Gas No Brakes towards Flight 11" | SpaceX Starbase

It's all gas, no brakes at Starbase as SpaceX is barreling towards Flight 11 for Starship. In this video, we're going to get all the way down to the static fire of Starship Booster 15-2. I actually slipped the video a day for that so that we could get it in for you, but here we go. It's another Starbase summary. You can actually see the camera shaking as the trucks drive by. It's actually the ground shaking because of the way the road is built and the soft soil transmitting the shaking because, you know, there you go. We see it all the time when we have cameras set up like that. Moving around some pipes over there. Those blue pipes, if I'm not mistaken, are for water. I think they're connecting the Rio West area with the Starbase proper area with those. But we're going to run all the way back over and look at the interesting things here. Instead of Starbase pipes, it's the launch sites. So here is pad two. You can see everybody loves it when I say scafungus. It's like we should add that to the bingo card if we ever do a Starbase summary bingo. But I love this fixed shot from Jack with sort of the ants scurrying all over sort of set up there. Here we've backed off a little bit. We're further in the dunes down or up north the beach a ways. In the foreground, you have the work for that air separation plant. Appreciate all the comments on the air separation mechanisms. I 100% would love to reach out and talk to an expert. Maybe do a tour of a plant like that. I assume that's something y'all would like. Let me know down in the comments if you'd come along for a tour like that. But we have so many things on the schedule this fall. That may very well be a next year sort of thing. I don't know. Unless one of you happens to work in at Air Liquide or whatever and can send me a message. Just let me know. There we've got a little flame trench wall section. You see that's some shielding that's going sort of up on the top there. We've got a scrap barrel moving to the scrap yard. That's super exciting. It's good for your hair, cable guy. We don't see stuff like this too terribly often anymore. We're going to see it less in the future. But look at the wibbly wobbly jello barrel being moved out for scrapping. Here we've got a second stabilizer actuator being installed. Of course, we're on pad two here. And you saw it lift up with a crane and sort of dropped in. There you go. It was on the bottom part of the chopsticks there. That's a booster transport stand. And you know what they say about booster transport stands. If you see one running, try to keep up. That's not what they say about booster transport stands. If we see a transport stand moving around, it's a good sign that a booster will likely be moving. Especially if the stand is going towards a booster. And especially if we have road closures that indicate a potential static fire and transport. That's what was happening. That door in Star Factory rolled up and Jack caught the timing just right and had a little bit of an opportunity to peek in the huge door there. In fact, what we caught coming out of the door is a booster 18.3 test section rolling out. Of course, the interesting feature here you can see right on the top of the thing. Those huge N1, should I say N1 Soyuz? Not really. Style struts. Instead of the cut stainless steel ring, those struts really sort of maximize the structural... I guess the structure? Structural load that that thing can carry, while minimizing the troublesome nooks and crannies that exhaust gases can get stuck into when you put three rocket engines on top of that dome there and then light them up while the rocket is still connected. Of course, the Starship goes on top of that right there for the hot staging. I wonder how the hot staging is going to look different when we have this style design on top of that. One way to find out. Hang out with us here at NSF because we'll be around to live stream it for you when it happens. Y'all know it. You know how to like subscribe to the channel and stuff like that. I know how to remind you. All right, what do we have here? A barrel section rolling out. Interesting. Ah, ah, yes, there in the background. There's booster 15-2 coming out of Mega Bay One with the cool crepusculant rays there in the upper left-hand corner. Is that a concrete smoother that just flew across the frame? I think it was. That is an interesting thing. Look at that little miniature SPMT thing. It's like those things you hook up to your travel trailer so you can move them around in your driveway because the stand has wheels on it, but there's like some sort of... I don't know if it's robotic because it's got a handle on it. You can see the guy's hands on the handle there. That's cool. I've been looking for stuff like that to move our live streaming camera platform trailer around instead of us having to lug at it, right? But anyways, it's like a Looney Tunes noise as we get to booster 15-2 scooting around. Again, no pun intended, barreling towards... Nice. The static fire. We did slip the video a day so that we could fit that static fire in for you to get it to you soon after it happened. And right now it just happened this morning. So Caesar catching the sweet underglow on the SPMT. Look at that shot. Caesar, this is a fantastic spot here. This is a thing. Wow. That's too cool. You can... Look, I'll be honest. You can tell the difference between Caesar's nice camera with a human being there. Just let's say Caesar's nice camera. And then this 24-7 camera that has lived outside for hundreds of days. A little bit tougher to run things. Is that the... Oh, that's the super wide Skycam. That Skycam had a booster land on top of it once. There's some footage from Danger Dune where I pointed that thing straight up in the sky and the booster coming down like lit the engines directly above that thing. Maybe that's why it's a little... Hey, look at that. It's CP-11. In the side. In any event. Hey, Caesar. Thanks for getting out there. I know that was a late night or early morning roll to catch those views for us. We love having the 24-7 cameras. It's fantastic when we can get out there with the nicer fancier cameras. We could never leave out 24-7 on the beach with the salt and the sun and heat and everything like that. But it does capture some fantastic footage when we do. So rolling all the way up Highwood... Highwood? Highway. Highway 4. Not Hollywood 4. It's Highway 4. Out to the launch site. This, of course, going all the way up to Pad 1. That's actually Pad 2 on the left. It was so bright. I was like, wait, is that Pad 2? But that was Pad 2. And we're going to scoot all the way over towards the beach. Still see the SPMTs under there towards Pad 1. Now, the interesting thing here is this should be the last booster static fire on this design. They've been working on Pad 2 which is the completely different design. Not the stool sort of design with no flame direction or energy mitigation beyond trying to spray some water underneath. Spray a lot of water, to be fair. But moving to a more traditional design like you would see at one of the NASA launch pads that has those two big flame bucket exits to divert and channel the energy in two directions. So this could be the last static fire we see assuming the static fire all checks out and they don't need to do it again. We do expect to see a ship static fire potentially. But if this all went well and SpaceX posted up some pictures of it showing if they don't need to do this again that might be the last time a booster static fire is here. Now, it's possible a booster could dynamic fire from here. I mean, that's going to be the whole thing with Flight 11, right? When it... Oh, hey, time out. It's a Raptor. Raptor scooting behind the top of the booster there. Oh, hey, it's a static fire. If I've done my job correctly, I'll increase the audio there so you can hear the static fire in the first shot. I'll talk over some of the other ones here. You got the big... Look, you got the big deluge fountain on the right-hand side. You got the water start to come out under the pad. Then you get the static fire here. We get the glow. I don't think we have very strong winds here today. So the size of the plume was really blocking those shots. In fact, some of the wider shots coming up are the most interesting shots that sort of show where this plume went. But oh, here we go. This is DY's slow motion from Danger Dune. Look at this. It's like the slowest of motion. That's cool. It's not the slowest of motion. I need to ask DY. This is probably their 120 or 240 FPS on the slow motion just how long the deluge took to go there. Here's another wider shot you'll see here at the highway site. It was literally raining. Answering the age-old question, or at least the two-month-old question, can they static fire in the rain? The empirical answer is yes, they can. Rain drops on the camera. Static fire in the background. I guess it is like one point something miles away. So it's possible that it was not raining at the launch pad, but it was raining at the camera. Wow! Look at the shockwaves coming up in that shot. That was cool. You could really see those shockwaves sort of emanating from where they're bouncing off the ground and coming back up again. I say bouncing off the ground. I don't know if they're coming straight out around the side of the OLM or what. But rewind that one and watch that again and just look at the shockwaves. You can see it in this view as well. God, the way those pressure changes just make the clouds... I'm going to say pulse, right? Like the higher and lower pressure areas moving through those visible... I guess they're technically not vapors. The visible mist or whatever you see there. A lot of that's particulate because it's brown, right? It's dust that's been kicked up. I think in a previous video I was corrected as to what the difference between a steam and a vapor and a whatever is. But in any event, folks, not kidding. We might be able to see Flight 11 in a month or so. We'll see how the rest of the test campaigns go. Be on the lookout for the ship going out there. It's a Starbase summary. My name's there up at the top. John Galloway. Big thanks to the team out in the field catching all of that. So we can share it with you. We will see you nerds later.