SpaceX Tower Could Take a Long Time
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Hey everybody, welcome back to the Elon Musk Podcast. This is a show where we discuss the critical crossroads that shape SpaceX, Tesla, X, the Boring Company,

and Neuralink. I'm your host, Will Walden. Can we talk for a second about SpaceX's Starship and Starbase Texas? Because they're building the most massive launch tower at Starbase. It's going to be over 400 feet tall. It'll launch and catch starships.

on the Gulf of Mexico. It's going to be the wildest thing that's going to happen in the next some amount of time. We're not exactly sure yet, but let's go back in history if we can. Let's rewind a little bit in the journey to SpaceX's Starbase's first launch tower, the Mechazilla, if you will.

It's a complex process. It was about 13 months from the beginning phases until they actually stacked a starship on the launch tower. Then it took them a while to actually launch a starship. But we're not going to talk about the actual launch. We're going to talk about how long it may take them to do starships. Tower number two at Starbase. 13 months for the first one. The tower began mid-2020-ish, and

and significant process and milestones were achieved throughout 2021. So think about this. In the middle of the year, August-ish, they started construction.

First significant structures began to rise in 2020. So the base of the tower started being put together. The tower assembly, the structure of the launch tower started taking shape in early of 2021. But by August, the major components, including the chopsticks, I was there for the delivery of the chopsticks. Actually, I watched the chopsticks drive down the road right past me.

And they're used for catching and stacking of rockets. And that's when they were installed about August, 2021, I believe it was August, um, 2021 that they got all of the major components together. And then by January, 2022, the tower was fully constructed and underwent various testing.

You know, it was integration of the launch or the catch arms, the lift arms, if you will, the chopsticks and other systems which actually controlled the launch systems and the tower itself, including venting and lighting and the pneumatics to raise up the rocket when you put it on those arms. All of that.

was being built about early 22. The tower was fully constructed and underwent numerous tests for months, you know, integration of the towers, other systems. And they finally lifted a test fully stacked rocket in February of 2022. And I believe it was February 10th of 2022. I was there.

in Brownsville at Starbase when they did this first lift. I went down February 14th and I got footage of it February 10th after they stacked it and they opened up the roads again. I got some footage of it. And then this was what we all thought was going to be the first test article that was going to launch from Starbase. Ship 20 and booster 4. So 420 was going to be in all rights the first test

rocket to launch, but that wasn't the case. So they took it all down. It was a beautiful site. I got to see it from numerous angles. I got really close to it. It was wonderful. And Elon did a talk from there too. Now, what we're going to talk about today is

is how much time it's going to take for them to complete Tower 2 as Starbase. So now that we have a backstory here, about 13 months from the initial groundwork around the first tower till the complete construction and stacking around 13 months,

Um, we're already into tower two, all of the, um, the major components have been, uh, delivered of the, of the core of the tower, uh, to star base, at least most of them, as far as we know. And there could be more, um,

Because they haven't shown us exactly how tall this is going to be. And they also, Elon hinted that this is going to be more complex than the first one. So we actually don't know all of the components for this yet. We know a lot of them. We know there's going to be catch arms. We know there's going to be a pneumatic system to raise and lower it. We don't know what's going to be used as the actual kind of engine to push the rocket up and down.

you know, we're not exactly sure because there's more piping, more, it might be actually a very more, a much more simple process than tower one. Cause Elon said his engineers came to him and said, Hey, the tower one, let's just kind of throw everything away and let's start over. We have this really great design, which we think will be better than tower one.

So what they're doing is they're probably simplifying all of the parts. Elon has said this so many times. The best part is no part. And as an engineer myself, I'm a front-end developer engineer. I know this is true.

the less amount of code that I can use to get the job done, the better off the final product is. So that's exactly what they're doing here with Starbase's Tower 2. Now a lot of us in the media here have thought that Starbase's Catch Tower, which was going to be Tower 2, we thought Tower 2 was going to be just catching and Tower 1 was going to be launching and stacking.

But that's not the case. Elon has said Tower 2 will be for launching, catching, refurbishing, basically everything you need to do for the tower, you know, as far as the tower goes. And then, of course, well, it won't be refurbishing, but, you know, doing some a little bit of labor to get it ready for launches. But.

if there needs to be a really like massive refurbishing, it can go back to the production facility right down the road, about a mile away. And Starbase is becoming a massive city almost. It's crazy. They're, they're building new housing down there. So the, the people that work there will have a place to live nearby because Brownsville, Texas is actually about 30 minutes away and you have to drive down this crazy long highway to,

in the middle of nowhere with no facilities. There's no gas. There's no chargers for Teslas or anything along the way. It's just like 25 minutes of nothing. And then finally at the very, very, very end of this road, literally at the Gulf of Mexico, you get to Starbase. So they were, they're building these, this launch tower, the quick release, everything's going to be completely different. And the engineers at SpaceX are literally the best in the business. Yeah.

So when they start stacking this, we're going to see pieces of this stacking on top of each other, of course, like a normal tower, but we'll see it simplified and it's going to be a mega structure. It's going to be over 400 feet tall. The Starship itself is about 400 feet. So if they want to do Starship version two, Starship version three, it has to be a massive tower down there. So,

It could be 450, almost 500 feet tall by the end of the stack. I'm not sure. They haven't told us what they're going to, how high they're going to stack this thing yet. I haven't heard anything from Elon or anybody at Starbase, how tall they're going to make this thing.

I've seen drafts of this blueprints that I've gotten behind the scenes. I can't show them to you, but somebody has shown me some some items that I can't really talk about too much, but it looks massive. That's all I can say. That's all I can say. I was I wasn't supposed to tell you that I got those blueprints, but we're going to keep it in there because, you know,

Yeah, it's, it's a fun, it's a fun thing to know, but it could be massive. The second tower could be much bigger than the first tower. And we've had hints of that from Elon. He said, yeah, it's going to be bigger. We, but we don't know exactly how big it's going to be. Right. We can guess all we can do right now is guess because the components that they have now stack those up and we'll have pretty similar to what we have now, probably a little bit bigger, um,

And then they might add more components in the future. So who knows? We've had, I've had a comment on my last video of somebody that said they're not going to catch the booster until the next tower is done. Elon said the next booster will be caught at Starbase. So tower one, which you see over there, over that side, over there, that's tower one. They, they want to catch it.

for IFT5. And if that's the case, if they want to catch it for IFT5 and something goes wrong, it could be months before they rebuild it. And they're not going to be ready for IFT6 or Tower 2 isn't going to be ready for IFT6. It's going to take if they do a similar strategy to the first one, which I think they're going to have a streamlined process.

So I don't think it's going to take 13 months this time. It may, because it might be more complex, but simpler, if that makes sense, like a much more complex structure, but with simpler hardware and simpler piping and electronics and stuff. So it could be just the build of the thing is simpler, but it could take preparation and could take months, almost a year to get this thing completed and

So if they do catch it, if they go for it on IFT five and Kathy leaders has said, I, we're not sure yet, but then Elon came out on Twitter or on X, um, saying we're going to catch it on IFT for IFT five. So it's all still up in the air. If they run the numbers and they think they can do it and it looks good during the flight, they'll probably do it for IFT five. Um,

Also, Elon's the biggest hype man. So we all know that Elon is up in his head thinking we can figure it out. Like, why don't we, why can't we figure this out? And for him, that's how he thinks. He doesn't think in absolutes. He thinks of what happens if we don't do it well, then we failed. You know, what, why can't we do it? That's how he thinks. Like, why can't we, he never thinks like, oh, there's all these roadblocks in the way. He doesn't think like that. And that's why he's so successful.

It's not about the roadblocks. It's not about the things that the engineers and typical engineering, typical engineers put up roadblocks for themselves. Well, these systems work, so we can't go around these systems and build something new. We can't innovate because our systems work. Why do you think ULA and Blue Origin are so mad at SpaceX? Because that's how they think. They're boring. You know, they think like strict guidelines. They have strict guidelines.

SpaceX, Elon especially, goes, what are these strict guidelines? Okay, engineering guidelines definitely have a purpose. If you don't have these strict guidelines, then things go wrong. But if those strict guidelines get in the way of progress, get rid of those guidelines, throw them out the window and move forward. So this next tower, the engineers were like, we're throwing all this stuff out of the window that we did for IFT or for the Tower 1, and we're going to build our dream tower.

We're going to build an engineering marvel that's going to put us so far ahead of ULA, Blue Origin, basically the only other heavy lift rockets out there that nobody can compete for a very long time. Modern Marvel. That's what this thing is. It's going to be a modern marvel. It's going to be an engineering feat that no one's seen before.

The SLS tower, massive. You know what's cool about the SLS tower too? It moves the whole rocket. Like it moves it incredibly slow. The crawler moves a giant 300 some odd foot tall rocket from the production facility, from the high bay all the way to the launch site. SpaceX doesn't do that. They take the booster and the ship separately. They raise them up with the arms. They stack them on top of each other and then they're ready.

Of course, there's things in between. Like, they're not just ready. They have to, you know, do some testing or whatever. But they don't drive it down the road all put together, which is a smart thing to do. You know, you don't need a massive tower. Plus, they only have a little road. They have like a two-lane road to get down. And they're like, how do we do this? And their rocket is as big as a road, is a two-lane road. It's like 30 feet wide. The thing is massive. So they couldn't do that. There were constraints for them to build here.

So they had to build what, you know, the, uh, basically like a, uh, a, a barge, like a land barge basically to move this thing down. Um, or they, they hired one and they rent one or whatever. So, and then they finally have their own. So the funny thing about this next tower is that we don't really know what it's going to look like. We know, actually we, we know one thing, Elon, Elon has said this, uh, the, the arms are going to be a little bit smaller, uh,

They're going to be just big enough for the rocket or the booster, I should say, or the rocket too, to be caught on. So the rapid reusability of the booster and the rocket itself, the Starship, we may start to see that happen really soon. And the reason why we need this is because SpaceX wants to go to Mars eventually. But the first step is to get to the moon.

Artemis three, they'll be sending people to the moon. SpaceX needs to refuel Starship numerous times. And the only way they can do that is to catch the boosters, refurbish them, you know, uh, set up another Starship. They could have a fleet of 50 boosters in 50 Starships or whatever, you know, or 20 Starship or whatever, you know, it depends on the ratio there.

But could they just have four boosters that work really well? It's just continuously launch land, launch land, launch land, and send up 10 starships to, to the refueling station. That's a possibility. All they have to do is stack them up. It would take, especially for the Artemis program would take them about a week to do all the launches. I think, but,

seven days to a week or something somewhere, somewhere around seven, seven days. I think the calculations were that SpaceX could possibly get all of the boosters and all of the starship fueling starships into orbit, the tankers. And also they need the tankers. They need to test the tankers at star base before they launch them from KSC. Yeah.

So we're probably not going to see the tower at Kennedy Space Center be built until after Tower 2 at Starbase is completely finished and tested rigorously with different variations of starships. Because they need to know that it works. You know, they could probably start it

And realize that the design works really well. And then they can build it over at Kennedy Space Center. They'll go through all the testing, make sure everything is great. And then they'll start building over at Kennedy Space Center. But I'm guessing Tower 2, I mean, Tower 1 was 13 months until full stack, around 13 months from 2020, like mid-2020 to February 2022. That's a long time. So somebody said they're not going to catch the booster until Tower 2 comes.

Yeah. If you want to wait a year, you know, IFT six, no, they're not going to wait a year for IFT six, but there will only be a few launch attempts left in this year at star base. So there's a possibility they continue to launch from star base in the beginning of next year. They also continue to build the, the tower to the refined tower one, because they're going to need both towers, right?

You know, they're going to need both towers to continue testing. So one of them will probably primarily be for catching tower two, I think is going to be more of a catch tower or more something that they can catch with because that's going to be their final design tower one. They could probably catch with that too. I'm not a hundred percent sure. I'm not. So that's, that's where I differ from a lot of YouTubers out there is that like, I'm not a hundred percent sure about this stuff. And people that say that they're sure about this stuff are full of crap.

Like they have some data, right? But like, we know everybody that's, you know, that's been right. Eric Berger is like the only dude you can trust a hundred percent. Think about Eric. So what I, what I do with my timelines is like, what does Elon say? And then what does Eric say? And then it's somewhere near what Eric says is when things actually happen. Elon is very, uh,

Um, he's a hype man and he wants stuff done as fast as possible. His timelines are ridiculous. Like if everybody worked as hard as Elon, um, it would be done by now, but then you get Eric Berger in the process and he knows engineering, you know, he knows what's up. So, um,

I kind of look at both of those numbers. Elon says it'll fly in four weeks. Eric says eight weeks, probably seven weeks, you know, somewhere around there. So the tower, the second tower probably be done in a year, somewhere around there, just because the first one, unless it's massively more complex or they run into something with, with, you know, building these things out, fabricating something, it could take longer, but yeah,

Somewhere between somewhere in a year before the actual tower is completely constructed. So next year, like mid next year, maybe, maybe first four months of next year would be a good estimate for this. So let me know in the comments down below and thank you for watching this. I really do appreciate you. And please take a second, of course, because I'm a YouTuber. I have to ask for this. It helps me with the algorithm. Hit the thumbs up button.

hit the comment button, leave a comment. And if you don't have anything to really contribute, or if you just feel like, Hey, I just want to listen and watch, um, just leave a rocket emoji down below, but I want to know what everybody else thinks. Like when will the tower actually be built? Let me know in the comments down below. What do you think? And give me a reason if you have one, because I know there's information out there and the information I've sifted through, um, most of it is like,

It's there, you know, the information's out there, but there's not a lot of like complete information out there, but I can tell you what, that design I saw of the tower. And it was, as far as I know, was an official design. It looks incredible. And it looks like there could be, um, let's just say more than meets the eye. That's all I can say. That's all I can say. So thank you for watching everybody.

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