Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Building Spaceships at SpaceX With Jeff Richichi

Episode Date: January 10, 2011

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Building spaceships at SpaceX, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. Did you catch our PlanRad live show last spring? One of our guests was Jeff Rakiki, the Director of Structural Engineering at SpaceX. This time, we are Jeff's guest at the California plant that built both the Falcon 9 rocket and the Dragon spacecraft that recently made commercial space history. Join us on the factory floor in a couple of minutes. Bill Nye wants to know if his Flash Gordon-style single-stage-to-orbit spaceship

might someday be built in the United Kingdom. And Bruce Betts will share his view of the current night sky just before he conjures up another random space fact. He'll also help me give away a Planetary Radio t-shirt in our latest space trivia contest. As always, we'll first visit with Emily Lakdawalla, the Planetary Society's Science and Technology Coordinator and the editor of its blog that you can find at planetary.org. Emily, we're going to check in with a couple of old friends this week,

beginning with Akatsuki, and there was some interesting and positive news. I wouldn't exactly call it news, but it prefigures the kind of creativity that JAXA is going to be coming up with as they try to figure out what to do with their Akatsuki spacecraft, which of course was supposed to go into Venus orbit, but failed to enter orbit because of a possible serious problem with its main engine. They still have a very capable spacecraft that's in orbit near Venus's orbit. And they've got about six years until the spacecraft gets back around to Venus. In the meantime, it seems like they're considering actually trying to do flybys of a couple of asteroids. Now, it can be kind of hard to do asteroid flybys with in-flight spacecraft because

usually there's not a lot of maneuvering fuel to spare. But this spacecraft still has all the fuel on board that it was supposed to use to enter Venus orbit. So it actually has a ton of fuel available. And so they could actually send this spacecraft, a perfectly capable one, to do flybys of a couple of asteroids that are very close to the sun. And these are the kinds of bodies that we've never visited before with spacecraft. So that's a very exciting possibility. Another possibility is they're trying to figure out how they're going to be able to enter orbit with a possibly damaged main engine. And one thing that could help them get into orbit is if they do a lot of the velocity correction before they even get there. And so if they manage to slow down the spacecraft a bit before they next get to Venus,

not only could they reduce the amount that they'll need to get out of their main engine, but they could actually get to Venus a whole year faster than they're currently talking about. So both of these things just show how creative the Japanese engineers can be when they've got a damaged spacecraft. They can always come up with great ideas to get new missions out of them. Yeah, I'm sure they would prefer not to go this route, but they have proven in the past that they are quite capable. All right, let's go over to the Dawn spacecraft. I see that there is another update from Mark Raymond in the past that they are quite capable. All right, let's go over to the Dawn spacecraft. I see that there is another update from Mark Raymond in the blog. Yeah, Mark checks in once a month. And for the last several updates, he's been going into great detail about what exactly

Dawn's going to be doing at Vesta once it gets there next summer. And the latest update is about the low altitude mapping orbit when the spacecraft is less than 200 kilometers from Vesta. And I'll remind you that Vesta is about 500 kilometers in diameter, so it's less than one Vesta radius from the surface. And at that distance, it'll be close enough to actually feel the lumps and bumps in Vesta's gravity field. So not only will they be doing high resolution imaging, but they'll also be pointing the spacecraft's radio dish at Earth and watching the Doppler shift. And with that, they'll be able to map the gravity field in great detail, which not only tells you about the shape of the body, but also tells you if the mass inside the body is distributed maybe asymmetrically. And they think that Vesta is the remnant of a larger body that was blasted into numerous pieces by a large collision. Vesta is probably the biggest part of that proto body.

But it's quite likely that the mass and cyta is distributed, you know, with lumps and bumps here and there. So it'll be a very interesting result to see from the Dawn mission. Well, there you have it. It's all in the blog and a lot more coming from Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, thanks as always. Thank you, Matt. She is the science and technology coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. We'll talk with Emily again next week. Now it's time to hear from Bill. Hey, Bill Nye, the planetary guy here, executive director of the Planetary Society. And this week in the news of space, once again, is the Skylon rocket plane.

Once again, is the Skylon rocket plane. Okay, this would be a plane built in the United Kingdom for 12 billion euro or so. And it would fly from a runway with wings up above the atmosphere, turn on another engine, and be in orbit. It would be fantastic if you could really pull this off and all the claims, the extraordinary claims that they have of making the thing sufficiently lightweight and the engine sufficiently powerful and reliable. You could take so many people and so much stuff into low Earth orbit, it would change the world. It would make space more accessible for more of us. And then who knows what we would find beyond that. more of us. And then who knows what we would find beyond that. If we could get to low Earth orbit more cheaply, fewer euros per kilo, fewer dollars per kilo per pound in the old 20th century terms,

it would change the world. It would be very exciting. Now, this gets back to the old beer can problem. This is to say the amount that the liquid in a soda can or beer can weighs compared with the weight of the can is about the same as what you got to do for this space plane. You got to make it extremely lightweight, and yet you still want to carry something up there and bring it back. Now, is this problem not solvable, or is it just so close? Well, maybe in this coming year, 2011, we'll find out. Because you know what we're going to discover out there, out there in space? Nobody knows. That's why we're going. I'm going to fly Bill Nye the Planetary Guy. First, a successful flight of its powerful Falcon 9 rocket.

Then, barely a month ago, a second Falcon 9 put a Dragon capsule in orbit. That capsule soon became the first commercial spacecraft to return safely to Earth, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean. Designed to carry cargo and eventually people to low Earth orbit, Dragon this time carried a no-longer-secret cargo of cheese, a 17-inch wheel of Le Bruer. SpaceX CEO and Chief Technology Officer Elon Musk said it was a tribute to Monty Python's cheese shop sketch.

If all goes well, the next Dragon will approach the International Space Station in a demonstration of its rendezvous talents. That dragon, like all others, will be built at the huge SpaceX plant in Hawthorne, California. Jeff Rakiki has a cubicle there, not far from the one occupied by Mr. Musk. There are no private offices at SpaceX, but there are conference rooms, and that's where I began my recent conversation with Jeff, the company's director of structural engineering. Jeff, it is always a pleasure to talk with you and always a pleasure to come here to this place where you guys build spaceships. I'm glad you could make it there, Matt.

It's always fun to talk with you guys and do a lot of work with you folks out there at the Planetary Society. I got to ask the question that everybody is most curious about. Where's the cheese? Where's the cheese? I wish I knew. We've been talking about it. We had a Christmas party, and we were all wondering whether or not we were going to be served up pieces of cheese at the Christmas party or not. Could that mission, could that test flight have gone much better?

I really don't think so. I mean, we've been going through the data for this particular flight. We're still going through it. The one thing that kind of makes us a little bit nervous is the fact that everything seems to be going perfect. As an engineer, you always get kind of nervous when that happens. I think so far the only thing I've heard that we've had any issue with is we had one temperature sensor that broke on us. That was it. Out of the

thousands of sensors we have all over it, and we do triple redundant on any really critical one, and this one wasn't even critical. It was just, oh, what kind of temperatures do we get in this area type sensor? So it went really, really good. You know, I already told you what a thrill it was to see, once again, a capsule coming down under three big parachutes. You must have had some sense of history out of that as well. I did. A lot of this now, I was back out in Florida for this particular flight, but last August when we did our parachute drop, I was camera two in one of the helicopters. And as it was the capsule, we dropped it there it's coming down under three chutes i did have a flashback of when i was in the fourth grade watching the apollo

capsules land on the black and white tv it's funny is you sit here you work with it every day you're really close to it and you kind of forget a little bit on the significance of what's being done and kind of the cool factor of what's being there but But then every once in a while, you see it, and it hits you, and it just kind of floors you a little bit. You don't kind of realize it because you're so close to it. But it's a lot of fun. I think those moments are very important. Let me go back to what you said a moment ago, because I thought about that for a second. You said that as an engineer, you kind of worry a little bit because things went so well. I guess, you know, maybe you do want things at this stage to fail in minor ways so that you can say, oh, look, there's something we need to improve a little bit.

Right. I mean, what you do is, you know, a lot of this stuff is you go through and you test as much as you possibly can on the ground before you fly. Obviously, no one wants anything to go wrong. They want their stuff to be, as we like to call it, nominal. You know, the joke going around is the fact that the way we greet everybody is, how are you doing today? Oh, I'm nominal. But you don't want anything to go wrong. You want it to work perfect. But you always are kind of apprehensive, you know, prepared for

the worst. But because we do a lot of testing on the ground beforehand, it's really not too much of a surprise that things weren't great, because if we had a lot of problems with it, we wouldn't be flying it. You know, you get it to where it's bulletproof here on the ground, then you fly it. And the main objective there is to find the things you either didn't think of or you were just, you know, miscalculated when you were worrying about making the difference between a ground-based test versus an actual flight test. Something that has become almost iconic, by iconic I mean representative of something maybe that has been lost in aerospace, is what you guys did just before the launch with that Merlin engine. Right. Trimming the skirt on the Merlin vac.

Yes, we had Marty Anderson and Flo Lee. Both of them, they went on up on one of our man lifts, crawled through the interstage door, got inside there. Marty pretty much laid it out. He did what he normally does at the shop here. The difference was he was up inside the vehicle, 100 feet up off the ground inside the vehicle doing the exact same thing. Those two were able to go through, get that thing ready to go, trimmed it up real nice. We cut up all the little pieces to feed it back out the door.

And it's like it's ready to go. We're ready to fly. And we were doing this up until fairly close before we actually were getting ready to launch. Did that remind you at all? There was a story that we heard when we did PlanRad Live about, really, it was John Glenn's Atlas, I think. Correct. That we heard the story about crawling up inside and actually doing some welding. And I brought that up, that exact same story that we talked about on Planetary Radio.

I brought that exact same story up while we were out there doing this. I said, look, guys, we're not the first ones to do this. And I kind of told the whole story about it. And they're like, you're kidding. It's like no history is repeating itself. And hopefully we'll have a successful flight just like John Glenn did. And it looks like we did. We're in a conference room right now.

You spend most of your time, I assume, out there on the floor? Yeah, a little bit of both. You know, sometimes I'm stuck at the computer, which that gets boring, but the fun part is going out on the floor, making sure everything is working. You know, a lot of times if technicians have questions, I'll be out there standing on my head looking at something to try to give them an answer to try to solve a particular issue. Can we head on out there? Yeah, let's head on out there. We'll be able to talk a little bit. I'll be able to show you some of our toys. Excellent. Well, we will take a quick break, and when we come back, we'll continue with Jeff Rokicki of SpaceX out on the floor where they are building those rockets and spaceships. This is Planetary Radio. I'm Robert Picardo. I traveled across the galaxy as the doctor in Star Trek Voyager. Then I joined

the Planetary Society to become part of the real adventure of space exploration. The Society fights for missions that unveil the secrets of the solar system. It searches for other intelligences in the universe, and it built the first solar sail. It also shares the wonder through this radio

show, its website, and other exciting projects that reach around the globe. I'm proud to be part of this greatest of all voyages, and I hope you'll consider joining us. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Our nearly 100,000 members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. We are out on the floor at SpaceX where they actually build this amazing hardware.

Still with Jeff. And Jeff, we are looking at something magnificent that was not here the last time I got to visit. What you're looking at here is all nine of our engines attached onto our truss and skirt. And this goes on to the bottom of our first stage engine. Each one of those engines you're looking at has already been tested and is ready to go. This process, what you're seeing right now, is all nine of them being integrated together, and then these are going to be heading on out. We will do an acceptance test of all nine engines together, and this is for one of our future flights coming up.

And so you do that testing in Texas, right? You've got a facility there. That is correct. We've got a facility out there. We'll make this up onto our first stage tank, bring it up to the top of what we call the tripod, and then run all nine engines together at the same time, make sure everything's working correctly. And if all goes well, this will at some point be part of a flight into space. Definitely. This is flight hardware.

We don't have too many parts just for looking around. It's everything we have here, we're using it because we're planning on flying it. Speaking of things holding together, what's the condition now of the Dragon capsule, the one that was on what you call the C-1 mission that was so successful? Actually, I've seen it. It looks amazingly good. The sides of it, you know, we jokingly said it looked like a toasted marshmallow. It's kind of brown on one side and a little bit darker on the other side. But the heat shields we're going through, slowly disassembling it. We're going to go through it with a fine-tooth comb. But everything looks really, really

good now. We're looking at all of our different temperature labels that we have inside to see how the temperature's performed. We're going to be cutting up little pieces of it to inspect it, you know, make sure everything works out really good. But, you know, we were saying it looks like we could probably put it back on there on top if we wanted to and probably fly it again. And this heat shield, this is this ablated material where you guys kind of built on some NASA technology, improved it a bit? That's correct, yeah. The PICA, the phenolic impregnated carbon ablator. Actually, we've got a newer version of what we call PICA-X. We've tweaked the formula a little bit.

It actually performs a little bit better than the original PICA developed by NASA Ames. It's worked really, really good. And when we were looking back at the capsule when it came back, the stuff worked like a champ. Really, really good. Let me bring up a story you were talking about a few moments ago about the parachutes. And some stuff that I wasn't aware of, that you could actually come down on one parachute. I mean, they used to talk about Apollo was fine if it came down under two. In fact, that was one of our trivia contest questions recently. Because Apollo 15 did just fine under two.

But you guys are okay with even one. But a lot of this came out of your study of what came before of the Apollo program and other NASA programs. That's correct. One of the things that was really good from an Apollo program is they cranked out just a ton of different documents called the Apollo Experience Reports. They would take some subsystem, let's say parachutes, they would write through it and give you a 40- to 50-page report. They all pretty much followed a similar format. They would talk about what was the subsystem, what were the requirements,

what were the different ideas they looked at, why was it they chose the one they did, what were the problems they ran into during testing and flight? How did they fix them? And if they were doing it again, what would they do different? So it was really nice because in 40, 50 pages, you can quickly get up to speed on the whole history behind it and what worked and what didn't. And so we did a lot of research

when we were putting both Falcon 9 and Dragon together so that we could do this. One of the things that was really kind of important on the parachutes was vehicles always have a tendency to get a little bit heavier than you first anticipate, so you might want to put a little bit bigger parachutes in than you originally expect. One of the things they didn't do that in Apollo, and they had to jump through so many hoops to stuff those parachutes into a tiny, tiny little spot. So one of the things we took away from that was put really big parachutes on, and that really paid off a lot because it saved us a lot of weight on other components because our splashdown loads are so low because of that.

And we can come down on one parachute and survive. We'll be doing much better than Apollo did on two parachutes. I've learned to expect almost anything when I come to SpaceX, but sewing machines? Yeah, we do a lot of our own soft goods out here. There's different thermal blankets that you have to make. You can imagine as an engine gimbals back and forth, obviously it's going to move. Well, you need to close out that area from any type of heat coming back, any flames. So we have thermal blankets that we make ourselves. Also, what you're looking at right here, we're making some thermal blankets that go around our

fuel tanks, fuel and oxidizer tanks in our Dragon spacecraft. So we do a lot of our work here. I wouldn't be surprised if you show back in a few years we might be actually making some spacesuits out here. I want to see that want ad for seamstresses. It'll be pretty good. Actually, some of the folks we have here are fantastic. And in addition to making flight hardware, every once in a while they can get talked into by some of our shop personnel to go and make some of the most trick toolbox covers you have ever seen. I'd pay for one of those. Yeah, I would too. They look really good.

We're standing next to this engineering model that really forged the path for you to develop the actual dragon capsule. And I remember when we were here before, there was a Dragon under construction. And I peeked inside, and I was so impressed. There was LED lighting. Now, that's silly. It's like being impressed by the cup holders, right? But there was still something about that little bit of detail. And the fact that, you know, there are going to be people in here someday.

That's correct. The reason why we use light-emitting diodes, LEDs, is very low power consumption, and they last forever. They're really good. I think there's something like 10,000 hours before you have to start worrying about them breaking on you. The ones that you were looking at are actually used in aircraft. So we just bought more or less off-the-shelf LEDs, which have already been approved for aerospace-type applications.

So, yeah, we try to look around, see if anything has already been invented, and we try to take advantage of it. You've got the portholes already. We all know about the portholes. How many cup holders are you going to have? Oh, well, let me see. If we have seven people, we'll probably have seven cup holders. You've gotten to see so much happen here, and there's so much still in store. Are you still excited about working at this place? It's fun every day getting up looking forward to going to work because, you know, it is work, but it's fun work. And you look forward to this, and a good example of how much fun it is is when you come by here 7, 30, 8 o'clock at night,

and you'll see people still working. And it's not because we're cracking the whip saying that you have to. It's because people want to. Jeff, it has been such a pleasure to talk with you once again, and it is always a great pleasure to come here to SpaceX. Matt, love having you out here. Believe me, you can talk to all my friends. They know I love talking.

So it works out well. I appreciate you coming on out. And I hope we can do it again sometime because I know things are going to keep changing and stay exciting. It's only going to get better. Our guest has been Jeff Rakiki, the Director of Structural Engineering for SpaceX here in Hawthorne, California. When we come back, it'll be time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is with us at the other end of the Skype line. He is the director of projects for the Planetary Society. Welcome back.

Thank you. Good to be back. Go ahead. Tell us about the night sky. Okay. I'll start with the pre-dawn this time because things are happening there. We've got Venus, extremely bright, just past greatest elongation, so highest up. You're going to get it this time around in the pre-dawn sky. Extremely bright star-like object. And if you go look down below it, there's a reddish star. That's Antares, a red giant in Scorpius. If you look to

the lower left of that over the next week or so, you can see Mercury, which will appear white, basically, as a white star-like object much closer to the horizon to the lower left of Venus. And high overhead is Saturn. In the evening sky, we have Jupiter dominating in the southeast bright star like object in the evening sky. And that's what's going on in the night sky. This week in space history, it's the five-year anniversary of Huygens, of the Cassini-Huygens project. ESA's Huygens landing or descending successfully through the atmosphere of Titan and even surviving to land on the surface and return all sorts of amazing data. And that data even included some acoustic sensor data, which the Planetary Society worked with ESA and turned it into sounds that you can actually hear the sounds of Titan, which you can go to our website under what we do. Planetary microphones hear that,

and also some Marsinator simulations of what sounds will sound like on Mars someday when we hear them. But I can also do, if you'd like, I can bring back my impersonation of the entire Huygens descent, the three-hour descent through the atmosphere, into about five seconds. Yeah, give us a five-second compilation. Okay, sounds roughly like this. Did you hear the landing?

That's quite exciting. I did, I did, and I'd forgotten how exciting that was. Have you got something more wacky and exotic from the listeners for us? Why not? We got a bunch more stuff from Brandon. Brandon Cook, he cooked up something new for us, and it's all part of his Tim and the Engineers series. Here it is. This week on Random Space Fact,

we'll discuss the cost-benefit analysis of renting commercial space, the cubic footage of Louis XIV's primary bedroom, and how to get all the contents of a four-bedroom house into a five-by-five storage unit. Tim, what are you doing? I'm doing the segment, Random Space Fact. Last time I misunderstood the space fact part, but now I've got it right this time.

You know, space. Space, I got it. Tim, it's space as in outer space, not interior space. Think planets, stars, nebulae. You mean I got it wrong again? Okay, maybe... Dr. Bruce Betts. Yeah, maybe he can help us out one more time. Here I am, and here's your random space fact.

Matt, I encourage you to take a flight and fly around the Earth in an airplane 10 times, right around the center, maybe the equator, any great circle. Do you know what that would be equivalent to doing? Around the Earth 10 times in the great circle? No, no. Where will I actually have gone? Well, right back to where you started.

But that's not important. What's important is you will have simulated the distance or traveled roughly the same distance from the Earth to the Moon. Ten times around the Earth. Really what that says to me is how very close the Moon is. Okay. Tells me you've never actually tried to fly around the Earth. No, no.

Maybe someday. Not that I have either. But anyway, there's your random space fact for you. Thank you. Quite a contest. A couple of weeks ago, the question that we threw out, and it generated a lot of interest because of a great prize. Remind us, what was this about?

Well, I was playing, once again, where in the solar system? And in this case, I asked people, where in the solar system is Noctis Labrinthus? How did we do? What are those amazing entries you you you speak of we got a pile i think i know why it's because we're giving away that mike brown book how i killed pluto and why it had it coming along with a 2011 year in space calendar i'm going to tell you who the winner was it was carol nowak carol novak maybe it's novak. Maybe it's Nowak. He's our first Polish winner, as far as I know. He lives in Lubin, Poland.

And he said that Noctis Labyrinthus is on Mars, which indeed it is. We did get another response from Ed Lupin. He knew that it was on Mars as well. But he says it's also sometimes in his home at night when he's trying to find the bathroom in the dark. Because it means, did you know this? It's the labyrinth of the night. Very dramatic. It is. It is. It just has a nice ring to it. That's why I ask people. It's on the western end of Valles Marineris. Big set of cracks and such. Carl, congratulations. We're going to get those two books, a calendar and a book, out to you shortly. What do you have for us next time? Here's your question. Who of the Mercury

7 astronauts are still alive? Who of the Mercury 7 are still alive? Go to planetary.org slash radio, find out how to enter. You have until the 25th of January, Monday, January 25 at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us that answer. By the way, this is our first opportunity to welcome Radio Kansas to the fold, three big radio stations, public radio stations in Kansas that are beginning to carry planetary radio, and we welcome listeners from that wonderful region of the country where I believe Dorothy Gale hailed from. Because there's no place like home. Oh, we all know that.

I'm sure they're not tired of hearing those references either. I bet, I bet. We are in Kansas now. And we here in California will go out and go surfing when we are done here. Say goodnight, Bruce. All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky and think about darkness. Thank you, and goodnight.

The Noctis, the Noctis Labyrinthus that you must be thinking of. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, and he joins us every week here on What's Up. The contest deadline is Monday, January 24 at 2 p.m., not January 25.

Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and made possible in part by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation. Clear skies. Редактор субтитров А.Семкин Корректор А.Егорова