They Want 5000% More… Of WHAT Exactly?

We are getting closer than ever to the first Version 3 Starship flight, but behind the scenes, SpaceX is pushing hard at Texas and Florida with huge progress on the sites. With that, here we have a newly announced future that seems to blend science fiction with reality, and it seems like that wasn’t near enough for the week though because NASA dropped the mother load here around the future of the Artemis missions with SpaceX and Blue Origin, and gone is the Lunar Gateway? Yes after digesting all this, there is more to unpack than many may realise. This video is sponsored by Surfshark VPN! Hey, Hey Marcus House with you here, and as we continue to patiently watch the preparation for the highly anticipated first Version 3 Starship Flight 12 to arrive SpaceX is continuing to squeeze every last bit of data out of the test articles that they can before the beast takes to the sky. On the Super Heavy side of things, the B18. 3 test tank which will validate the hot stage and grid fin design has been partially reconstructed and repaired. Avid Space cameras had a nice view of it rolling back out of Mega bay one and into the ringyard here and the team spent the next couple of days working on it. Although it doesn't appear to have any significant design changes over the previous configuration, what it does now have are these new additions just as we suspected! These pieces of hardware were previously being stored in the Sanchez area of the production site and will be used to stress test the three grid fin sockets in multiple directions. They want to test all the expected flight forces beyond the needed limits to ensure that the design holds up as expected. Well, it was soon making its way towards the Masseys test facility to be put through those very tests. That wasn't the only test tank being put through its paces this week though as we could see clearly with the help of RGV Aerial Photography. The S39. 1 tank is completely strapped into the can crusher now using the blue cap and 20 individual rods around the outer perimeter, all to kick off the big squeeze. Now the cameras are too far away obviously to see that squeezing effect, but it was filled with cryogenics even before the booster test article made its way to the site. It seems to have gone well because it was soon detanked without incident. Now in terms of progress on the Booster and Starship stages for Flight 12, we know that Booster 19’s next step was having the full set of 33 Raptor Engines installed. What wasn't so clear was whether or not Ship 39 was done with its cryogenic testing campaign or whether it would need more testing before the engines were placed. We thought they may be wanting to do some more thrust ram testing like we saw on previous ships, but apparently not! Instead it seems that SpaceX was happy with what was learned on the S39. 1 test tank because we were already starting to see not one, but two vacuum raptor engines rolling out if you look very carefully! They came out of the Raptor’s Nest building attached to Megabay 1 where they are stored, and rolled into Megabay 2 with the Starship. In front of all that of course the Gigabay continues to grow with more cladding sections coming in this week. Speaking of cladding we left you last week with the huge new precladded roof for Pad 2 being lifted. That is now firmly placed on top and the crane soon detached. That looks wonderful now, especially with this wall in front here. Indeed after all this time we have the return of the GATEWAY TO MARS. Can’t wait to see what Shaun will be able to capture with us here when the full stack is on Pad 2 and the sign is all lit up! Thanks as always for being subscribed here so we get to be out there to do this each week. I’ve got to say it has also been a fun week of investigation at the Florida sites all thanks to Greg Scott helping us with this. Kicking right off with the biggest elephant in the room so to speak, the Gigabay here now monstrous. How sleek does that all look with all that cladding installed, especially with a lack of external bracing. Unlike Starbase in Texas it appears that this will only have the single lower entrance for each corridor on the one side of the bay. To compare, in Texas they have both these entrances, as well as one for each of the six workstation locations next to the Starfactory. On the opposite side we can see that they’ve now started installing the first walkway above the full height door, so this will leave about 90 meters of height for a Super Heavy to roll out. That should even be enough for that Version 4 booster hinted at several times now. Not far off we can see where those tower sections were previously stationed. Interestingly SpaceX seems to be completely reworking the layout of the site here because all the footings are now invisible and the ground has been flattened. Even a part of the tent where they’ve previously made the launch mount is being taken apart again. What we do see though are parts for the top water deluge pancake for the next launch mount

at Space Launch Complex 37. It’s just staged inside the other half of the tent over here, so it does seem they’ll be building at least some of the next launch mount here. I mean, perhaps that groundwork is simply to finally add a concrete surface to improve the working area. After all, it can get pretty muddy out here with all that Florida rain. Close by we still see the tower arms and carriage progressing for that same pad. If we head over here to SLC-37 itself even at this distance you will notice the progress. We even have this new angle all thanks to Harry Stranger and Planet Labs! As we can see all nine tower sections have recently arrived here and are staged at the far end of the site waiting for the tower base to be ready for stacking. This is getting closer because the tower base pile cap has already been poured and that huge LR13000 crane is seen here right next to it fully assembled ready to go. At the end of the jib the main parts for the tower base are sitting here waiting so we will soon see that rise. If we look a bit further south, these four rows in the soil indicates that piles were dug there. That we think is very likely where the main cryogenic storage tanks will go. So yes, thanks Greg and Harry for giving us the views to check out, and links to their Social media and Patreon are in the description so give them a follow if you aren't already. Now you may remember that we have just recently had this announcement that xAI would be merging with SpaceX as part of a pivot towards orbital data centers. Well, that is kind of dwarfed by the follow up announcement this week as SpaceX plans to take full advantage of the moon. This now becomes a joint project that involves not just SpaceX and xAI, but also Tesla. This almost absurdly ambitious plan which feels like it is straight out of a sci-fi movie is called TERAFAB. What they want to do is make the largest chip manufacturing facility in the world to power the many products across each company. Think chips to place into all these constellation plans, and also Tesla products such as Optimus robots and the self driving fleet. Elon kicked off here explaining this staggering 100 million square foot factory as the planned size. To put that into some kind of perspective, here’s that area compared to Starbase in Texas assuming that it would all go on one floor. They will go vertical with it too of course, so it’s not going to take up quite that land space, but all the same, it is insane to think about. The reason for making such a massive plant is because the total amount of compute currently available to buy worldwide is about 20 gigawatts, which is far less than the 1 terawatt target that is apparently needed for both SpaceX and Tesla. Of course the ultimate question is what on Earth could possibly require about 5000% more compute than the entire world currently provides? I mean it would certainly be great to see more capability worldwide considering the shortage going on, although admittedly, this is all caused by this crazy AI race the world seems to find itself in for better or worse. Anyway, many of these chips would find themselves in these data processing satellites that SpaceX has been talking about, and check this out! They have absolutely huge solar arrays with the comparative radiator. What is also bizarre is that this is apparently only the ‘mini’ version that would generate 100kilowatts of compute for each unit, but bigger versions they want to target will be in the megawatt range. This high tech sci-fi future would need to start somewhere of course but they are still talking about the distant future and adding 1 terawatt of compute annually which would require 10 million tons to orbit each year. Now look, to me this is just too far down the line at this scale to really dive into. They even went right down the line talking about manufacturing these data satellites and launching them from the lunar surface with a mass driver. The thing that everybody needs to remember is that you need every element’s raw materials extracted from the lunar surface, many of which would be very difficult and some perhaps impossible in useful quantities, and then you need to set up every layer of the industry from mining, process and manufacturing. It’s worth checking out Dave with the EEVBlog channel here because he did a great video recently which dives right into the ridiculous complexity of the supply chains it takes to do what we do on Earth now in regards to compute capability. To set all that up on the moon would take I’m sure many decades assuming the robots haven’t already taken over. So yea, that’s just my opinion but that doesn't mean that we can’t dream big! Regardless, even baby steps in this direction with Earth manufacturing would be an amazing thing to see kicking off. As always, I would love to know what you think about all this. Now this week might just be the beginning of something bigger than we have ever before. NASA conducted the Ignition event, unveiling more depth into their new plan to build out a permanent human presence on the moon.

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This Virtual Private Network creates a secure, encrypted tunnel between your device and the country you choose. Once installed, you just pick the country you want to appear to be browsing from such as New Zealand here, then you just hit refresh, and that’s it, you now appear to be browsing from within that country. You can use it simply as a browser extension only like this if you prefer, or you can install the app so that all internet traffic is routed through it. It’s also great to have on your phone so that if you find yourself needing to connect to public WiFi at airports or accommodation, you can just fire up the VPN for added protection. I mean, you can even use it to compare prices from different countries when trying to find more affordable travel options because it is common for prices to appear more expensive to select countries. It’s so great because with the one subscription, you can have it installed on all your devices at no extra cost. In fact you even get a 30-day money-back guarantee. Check it out by heading to surfshark. com/marcus or use the code MARCUS at checkout to get 4 extra months for free. You can also scan the QR code right there on screen to get started. Thank you, Surfshark! [Ad End] Ok, so back to NASA’s Ignition event this week! We have been very excited about the shakeup around the entire Artemis architecture that Jared announced over the previous few weeks, but there wasn’t a huge amount of detail that came with it at the time. We knew that Artemis III was a new mission that would serve as a test mission to evaluate the Moon landers in Low Earth Orbit, and then want to land crews on the Moon at least once a year following the Artemis IV mission for 2028. Well, we got a lot more released this week! They first confirmed that the Artemis II mission was still looking good for an April 1st launch, and that is still looking to be the case so this coming week is looking to be an epic one! Moving further into the future though we have now had NASA confirm that they are replacing the Exploration Upper Stage with Centaur V so United Launch Alliance do have a bigger part to play here moving into Artemis IV and beyond. Now speaking of Artemis IV, listen to this statement by Dr Lori Glaze. “Both of the providers are required to complete a successful uncrewed landing prior to carrying any of our crew. We’ve been looking at talking with both of the providers. SpaceX has been considering alternatives of the HLS Starship design while implementing a more streamlined approach to try and speed things up and pull things forward” Now, none of us have got any idea what that actually means. I wonder if SpaceX may be looking at a shorter lander for initial missions but there is nothing but speculation on all this so I’d love to hear your thoughts on it. As stated here both SpaceX and Blue Origin have asked if they could please remove the Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit requirement for the mission which would reduce the workload required for the HLS vehicles and improve the surface mission planning. NASA has already agreed to begin looking into other orbits options, so it sounds like they would like to offer an orbit closer to the moon that gives a better outcome. Now we of course had much more than a near future Artemis update here. This extended way out to a full-scale shift in the strategy. As we had hoped, NASA is now officially “pivoting” from the Gateway program and is putting all of its resources and efforts into building a lunar base. Something built step by step, with a relatively clear plan one mission after another. If you have been watching here for a while you would know that I’ve never really loved the idea of Gateway and the Near Rectilinear Halo orbit requirements. It’s a constant radiation hazard for one so it never made sense to me for humans to spend extended periods up there in my opinion, and why restrict HLS missions and return options with this huge orbit that makes timing and planning for every mission more difficult than it needs to be? Well, we know one of the critical reasons for that plan was largely due to the limited architecture of the Space Launch System and all the stages above with Orion stacked on top. All of this didn’t have the delta V requirements to use a low lunar orbit. With upgrades to the SLS now already cancelled, Gateway seemed like it wouldn’t

be far behind, and now we have that confirmation. The great thing is however much of the hardware developed for Gateway will still be repurposed for the lunar base so it isn’t really wasted. Carlos Garcia-Galan the Deputy Manager for the Gateway Program, is now the Moonbase Program Executive, or as he put it, the “moonbase guy. ” If you haven’t yet listened to his talk on how NASA is planning to proceed, I’ve got that linked in the description for you because it is the first time in a long time that I’ve felt like NASA are moving in a clear direction toward this reality. The Moonbase program is split up into three phases. The first phase kicks off right away this year and runs until 2028. NASA aims to land 21 missions on the lunar surface in order to place down around 4 metric tonnes of payload. This would include multiple Commercial Lunar Payload Services missions, and also a crew mission with the Human Landing System vehicle either by SpaceX or Blue Origin. They will also develop a lunar communication network by sending two satellites around the Moon, aiming to bring the throughput to and from lunar orbit to over 500 Mbps. I can’t wait for that, and to be honest, it’s strange to me that we don’t already have that capability. NASA is still very seriously looking to be aiming for Shackleton Crater as an area for key research. Because this is twice as deep as the grand canyon, areas in here have permanently shadowed areas or significantly low periods of sunlight. This is a really great animation of how the sunlight moves around the top of that crater. If you are inside here, power systems are critical of course because you can’t rely on solar power. Why choose to go into this tough area though? Well, it is because we believe there is a lot of water ice and other useful materials to exploit down there. It may in fact be one of the most important areas of the moon to explore. Moving on, we have a series of Lunar Terrain Vehicles coming such as VIPER which is to land on a Blue Moon Mark 1 lander. NASA wants future vehicles to be no more than half a tonne, be capable of driving up and down 20 degree slopes, and be able to survive up to 150 hours in shadow and the temperature considerations that come with that. Now even more exciting I think are these awesome Moonfall drones that they’ve mentioned. NASA plans to send four of these up so that they can hop up to an altitude of 1 kilometer or so. They want several hops each lasting around 150 seconds from launch to landing. With all hops combined for an individual drone, they will have it, ideally, covering around 50 kilometers or 31 miles of distance which would be a massively useful amount of survey data for each drone. They will of course host optical cameras, so hopefully some live stream opportunity there, and various other light weight scientific instruments that allow them to survive the lunar night between missions. This will be incredibly exciting to watch, and with it all in that first phase ending at the end of 2028, this will obviously be a challenging timeline with a challenging 10 billion dollar budget, so they better get moving! Onto the second phase starting from 2029 this is all about preparing for the moon base while expanding the capability, all while having a monster mobile habitat to explore with. NASA aims to fly two crewed missions to the Moon every year at this point. This will mean around 27 rockets lifting off from Earth, and 24 spacecraft making its way down to the Moon. That will put a whopping 60 metric tonnes of payload on the surface. Here they want to be generating energy on the Moon using nuclear radioisotope thermoelectric generators or RTG’s. This is absolutely crucial if the area is in darkness a lot of the time. Now getting to this rover, here is this fantastic pressurized beast being built in collaboration with JAXA, and this is going to allow astronauts to travel a long distance. This is fifteen tonnes by itself which will be able to carry 3 tonnes of cargo. I mean, it is essentially a mobile habitat with a 10 year lifespan. They also specifically mention excavator rovers to start working on the area to prepare the uneven surface for the missions that follow. With all this power, communication and rovers being supplied there is a lot here and this takes us through to the end of 2032. Now even when delivering 60 metric tonnes to the surface with all this complexity, the investment still seems to be 10 billion dollars, so that looks even more optimistic again. Now, once they have established a semi-permanent presence, they look forward into 2033 and onward which increases the target lander payloads to 8 tonnes to the surface. During this phase in comes the habitat modules, fission surface power, the start of in-situ resource utilization capabilities, more rovers, and even capability for cargo return missions back to Earth. In this phase in total they want a colossal 150 tonnes of payload delivered to the surface

before the end of 2036. Now for this four year period I would like to point out that they did add $10 billion dollars plus this time. He does say that they are looking at trying to achieve the near impossible here which is certainly true. You do need to dream big though to make a huge impact and certainly it is inspiring to watch the planning phase of all of this. Now obviously with all of this focus on the lunar missions this means a big shift elsewhere. That means not-so-great news for the future of Low Earth Orbit habitation. With the International Space Station reaching the end of its life, NASA would still like to find a way to maintain a continuous U. S. human presence orbiting Earth. The hope was that a commercial market would help share some of the costs, but NASA now doesn’t believe the market will be big enough to be self-sustaining. Not without the agency carrying most of the financial burden. To try and ignite the market though, NASA is still looking at expanding private astronaut missions, and even opening up the commander’s seat to paying customers. For now they’ve announced they’ll just be awarding only one contract under the Commercial LEO Destinations program. Of course with only one provider, it becomes a bit more of a gamble. As an example back in 2014, both SpaceX and Boeing won Commercial Crew contracts and over a decade later, Dragon is the only spacecraft flying crew reliably. That means that if NASA had only picked Boeing back then which seemed the more obvious choice, well… you know where we would be. Still, in order to achieve this lunar plan, without drastically increasing budgets, something must go. Interestingly NASA have also proposed an alternative which would have a commercial station module could dock with the ISS well before it is deorbited. That way they could gain operational experience while helping transition cargo and critical infrastructure over. I am intrigued to see how companies like Axiom, Vast, Sierra Space, and others respond to this, and whether there’s still a way forward that keeps a station alive in orbit. Now along with all that exciting news NASA has also announced that they’ve finally bringing nuclear electric propulsion out of the lab and taking it into deep space. Yes, they have yet another ambitious target of doing this by 2028 launching Space Reactor-1 Freedom. This will be the first nuclear-powered interplanetary spacecraft. It will head to Mars and perhaps even beyond! On this mission they want to repurpose the Gateway's Power and Propulsion Element to power it, so again, there should be little waste in the cancellation of Gateway. Once at Mars it’s going to deploy a fleet of next-generation Ingenuity-style helicopters to continue the aerial exploration of the planet. We had just the two batches of Starlink satellites being sent into orbit this week so a quiet week for Falcon 9 for a change. Sunday morning the Starlink Group 10-62 mission was away from Space Launch Complex 40. 29 were in the stack for this but we only got an external shot of the fairing falling away rather than the stack itself. The touchdown for this one was on the droneship A Shortfall of Gravitas, and that was landing 27th for booster 1078. We were waiting right through until Thursday afternoon for the next. Group 17-17 here obviously leaving the Vandenberg pad behind with 25 on board. Again, no shot of the stack, so not sure why we didn’t get to see those this week. It is however nice that both missions were in daylight because there is the next gorgeous shot of the landing on Of Course I Still Love You. Touch down 23 there for Booster 1081. Now getting back to the International Space Station on Sunday, we had another resupply mission with the Progress MS-33 launch. It carried over 2. 5 tons of cargo in this mission, but what was quite amazing about this, I think, is the speed of the repair here at the launch site! This mission was originally planned for late last year, but that was delayed. Why was that!? Well you may recall after the liftoff of the crewed MS-28 launch, the huge maintenance cabin that sits under the Soyuz was damaged. Well, the whole cabin was actually liberated from its location here and ended up falling into the flame trench. The repairs took several months which to me seems super fast considering that damage. By this week they were already set to go and of course the launch went perfectly! A little issue though! One of the Progress MS-33 rendezvous antennas failed to deploy. That was preventing the use of the fully automated docking system. Instead, the spacecraft performed a partial autonomous approach, stopped about 200 meters from the station, and needed cosmonaut Sergey Kud-Sverchkov to manually guide it in remotely for docking. So there we go my friends, a week just packed full of exciting new information to dive into. It sure was the week for announcements wasn’t it!? I hope you enjoyed this video! If you did, don’t forget to hit subscribe so we can keep making

them. Again a massive thank you to Surfshark VPN for helping us to put in all the work we can into these videos. If you want to continue with more space awesomeness, check out this video here next! Thanks for watching all this way through as always, and I’ll catch you next week!