Tim Dodd is host of the Everyday Astronaut YouTube channel, where he teaches about rocket engines and all things space travel. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Tim's YouTube: https://youtube.com/@EverydayAstronaut
Tim's Twitter: https://twitter.com/Erdayastronaut
Tim's Instagram: https://instagram.com/everydayastronaut
Tim's Website: https://everydayastronaut.com

PODCAST INFO:
Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast
Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8
RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/
Full episodes playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4
Clips playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOeciFP3CBCIEElOJeitOr41

OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
0:48 - SpaceX rockets
21:26 - Falcon 9
25:37 - Starship
29:57 - SpaceX rocket engines
37:35 - Elon Musk
53:10 - Twitter
59:15 - How rocket engines work
1:04:07 - Rocket fuel
1:07:33 - Rocket engine cycles
1:19:57 - Rocket cooling
1:34:54 - Multistage rockets
1:38:27 - Single-stage-to-orbit
1:44:03 - Aerospike engine
1:51:48 - Greatest car engine of all time
1:56:57 - Starship
1:59:48 - Wet dress rehearsal
2:05:59 - Landing
2:20:17 - Seeing starship in person
2:29:24 - Starship orbital test
2:36:02 - Gwynne Shotwell
2:41:12 - dearMoon project
3:00:16 - Fear of death
3:08:42 - Everyday Astronaut origin story
3:34:33 - Soviet Rocket Engine History
3:53:20 - Russia, China, USA
4:07:49 - Starlink
4:15:36 - First human on Mars
4:18:34 - Moon landing
4:24:41 - Nuclear propulsion
4:32:21 - Bob Lazar
4:39:24 - Aliens
4:43:11 - Sci-fi books
4:46:29 - Long-term space travel
4:53:17 - SpaceX competitors
5:04:37 - Kerbal Space Program
5:11:02 - Advice for young people

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And having every student in the United States tune in to a tragedy.

But that's something I'm pushing for really hard just because I think it could be magical.

I think it could really connect with people in a way that hasn't been done before.

Speaking of Challenger, have you thought about the fact that you're riding a thing, as we've been talking about, that's a giant, explosive, powerful rocket?

Have you thought about the risk of that, the danger of that?

Have you contemplated your own mortality?

You know, I've seen and felt 4 of these prototype vehicles blow up, you know, with my own eyes.

I don't know if there's anyone else, you know, early days some of the, you know, Mercury and Gemini astronauts watched failures of rockets and then got on them.

I don't know of too many people that are dumb enough to do that though, these days, this day and age.

It's obviously I will have to see a lot of successful launches and have to have a lot of confidence in the engineering, the data that they've developed a safe system.

Because currently, the current iteration of Starship has no abort system, has no escape tower.

So, you know, Dragon capsule, which is currently flying people, has a launch abort system.

It has super Draco engines that either by the push of a button or by the automatic triggering of the flight computer can shoot the capsule off of the rocket in milliseconds and pull it safely away, get it far enough away that it can pull the parachutes and safely splash down.

Starship by all iterations I've ever seen does not have that.

The space shuttle also did not have that.

So it's not absurd to not have an abort system.

Like it is, there is, you know, certain engineering principles that prove that that could be a completely valid thing.

The space shuttle flew 133 times fully successfully.

It did have 2 failures resulting in the loss of 14 lives.

There's other, I've probably done things that are a lot riskier.

I have raced motorcycles, drag raced motorcycles, and ridden like an absolute jerk on the streets on a motorcycle.

I'm sure I've had a higher than a 98.5% survival rate, or lower than that, I mean, at some point.

So it's, you know, yes, it's risky, it's scary, and I think about it a lot, a lot.

It definitely is 1 of those things that I will have to see.

And I'm in no hurry for this to happen either.

Personally, I'm in no hurry, because I would rather see this thing be developed and iterated and see 10, or I was going to say 10 dozen, but I'd be happy with a dozen fully successful like, oh, we've got this thing totally nailed down before I get on it.

There will likely be a dozen or 2 or 3 launches because just even to get to the Moon on Starship, they have to refuel it in orbit.

So it will get to Earth orbit basically empty and out of fuel.

So I'll have to dock with a fuel depot, fill up, and then go to the moon.

So just to even get that full, we're already talking about a handful of launches.

So there will be a lot of launches before we fly.

Would they do a test flight without humans on board that goes to the Moon, or no?

I'm not sure if they'll do that exact flight profile, but by then they will have already flown most likely the Artemis III program will have flown a Starship variant to the Moon that lands on the Moon.

So doing at that point you're pretty much...

I would like them to test the heat shield at that entry velocity though, because it is, you know, it takes another, it's about 30% faster to get, like, you have to go 30% faster than the low Earth orbit to get out to a translunar injection.

And although that only sounds like, oh, it's 30% faster, it's, you know, the re-entry heating experienced by a vehicle goes up by velocity cubed, not squared.

So it's not like if you go twice as fast, you see twice as much heat, 30% faster, 30% more heat.

It's not go twice as fast, get 4 times as much heat.

It's go twice as fast, get 8 times as much heat on reentry.

So 30% faster on reentry is actually a really, really big deal.

You know, there's certain things that I would love to see milestones that I would love to see tested out and proven before I get on board.

But at the end of the day, I really do believe that just like Falcon 9 and the success of that, that they're going to push it and get all the kinks out well before anyone's on top of it.

Nowadays, Falcon 9 and Dragon is arguably 1 of the safest, most reliable and best rides you could take to space.

Is this 1 of the first times you get to, you're young.

Have you gotten a chance to think about death as 1 of the first times you've really contemplated it?

I mean, like I said, I've had dumb moments on motorcycles where I kind of saw, you know, like I'm going to smash into this thing at 120 mile an hour and I'm

So you've had moments when you realize it could end just like this.

Where you literally, and I have, for most of my adult life, had dreams of falling and hitting the ground and it just all, you get a ring in your ears, it all goes black, and in my head I go, oh shit, that was it.

I'm sure there's a Freudian interpretation somewhere in there.

That I'm going to also apply to my dating life.

No, the joke, the running joke continues.

Okay, so I mean, it's fascinating in general, as I hope we'll talk about in the early days of spaceflight, that there is, the task of reaching out to the stars is a fundamentally risky 1.

And of course, there's really rigorous safety precautions and so on, but it's still a risk.

Well, and I think like most people, that For me, the idea of dying isn't so much about myself, it's about those affected by it, my loved ones, my family, my girlfriend, my friends.

Obviously I don't want to have this be a traumatic experience for anybody.

I know my mom gets, my parents and family and friends are very supportive.

And my parents are all about it, of course, but my mom is also very emotional too.

So, speaking of athletes, my brother-in-law has actually been on American Ninja Warrior 2 seasons, phenomenal athlete.

And even just when he competes, my mom gets so emotional, like she can't even hold it together seeing that.

So what's it going to be like when she sees her son get on top of a skyscraper and ascend on a column of flames into the heavens, that's going to be very difficult.

And I've taken them out, they've seen Starbase and they've seen Starship, they've seen a couple launches.

I don't know if that's gonna make him feel better.

Have you had that conversation with them about this?

I mean, was that, Or is it 1 of those things like, you just, you don't have that conversation.

I suppose it's understood that there's a love, there's a passion here.

And realistically, I'm not, I'm going to be convinced and statistically convinced that this is relatively safe.

You know, like again, in the 99s percent safe.

Again, there's things that people do every day that are less safe than this,

Again, yeah, riding a motorcycle, doing wheelies at over 100 mile an hour, not the smartest.

Formation flying the fighter jets was likely a more dangerous thing.

So as surreal as it is, we're talking about you flying around the moon.

Let's rewind and talk about the origin story.

What's the origin story of Everyday Astronaut?

I used to be a professional photographer.

So from 2008 until the end of 2016, that was my income, was photography full-time.

Like you were an Instagram model and took butt pictures of yourself?

I shot 150 weddings all around the world.

So subjects, all kinds of material, like do portrait also?

A lot of portrait work and then just random commercial things like food and beverages for businesses or wheelchair ramp company, I shot their product line.

Random, whatever a professional photographer does in Cedar Falls, Iowa.

When did you fall in love with photography, with a visual medium?

I was the weird kid that I would bring a sketch pad to the restaurants.

Every restaurant when I was growing up until I was like 18, 19, I literally would just sit there and draw or waiting for food.

I'd be the weird kid, but I'd be engaging and talking, but I'd be sitting there drawing.

And I was always obsessed with realism and like recreating and visualizing things.

And so when I got my hands on a camera, it was actually my dad's old Pentax that I first shot on a film camera and developing the film.

I didn't personally develop it, but getting the film back back in those days, I just was so excited about the idea that I had this visual thing that I saw with my own eyes, and now I can stop time and capture it and show it to other people.

Just kind of like, to me, that was like the ultimate form of realism, was like literally showing you the photons basically that affected this film.

And so, I mean, I was 19 when I got my first digital SLR, a Canon 20D, and started shooting.

And yeah, I just, I fell in love with it.

It became like I got a job at a camera store and basically all my extra money went into buying everything that I could at the time.

And I only worked there for about exactly a year before I went into pursuing photography full-time.

And I basically was shooting weddings so that I could travel and pay like, you know, afford to be able to do some big trips every year and develop some kind of, you know, portfolio of traveling and Not necessarily like, not for, you know, I guess Instagram wasn't much of a thing at the time.

It's really just, I liked making big prints and having them displayed and that kind of stuff.

I still kind of shoot mostly Canon glass, but adapted to either Sony, like lenses, sorry, like Canon glass.

What do you think about these things that I'm using Sony a7 IV?

I've been, I Googled around just trying to find a camera that can do video and photography pretty well.

And obviously going with just like generic lenses, prime lens, I resisted everything.

My whole journey with these camera thing, I'm trying to figure stuff out, is like prime lens, it seems so stupid.

So prime lens is like a fixed zoom thing.

Because I remember I was going to Ukraine and thinking it's similar, yeah, very similar to space flight.

But you're very constrained because you're going into an unknown environment.

You go into a war zone, you go into a front, you don't know what, you don't know anything.

there's like a little suitcase you have to like see, figure out like how do you film this, what's robust, what gives you like a good image versus the flexibility versus the weight, because weight is important there.

You have to think about like, can you really bring like a bunch of zoom lenses and all that kind of stuff.

So I had to learn really quickly, but yeah.

I've, it's a whole journey that you've already been on, but it's nice to have a beginner like me, like to explore that.

I think there is, There's a nice thing, just like as we've been talking about with the beginner's mind, to not let equipment get in the way of what your vision is of what a thing should look like.

Sometimes, especially if you're a professional videographer, photographer, cinematographer, whatever you call it, you can fetishize equipment too much.

And I've interacted with that because I've been trying to learn from other people that have so much more experience than me, I think their advice is often like, pushing a lot of equipment versus like the final thing, like how do you create the art of it?

Because to me, even photography is just like storytelling.

And so a lot of the discussion to me that I enjoy, especially talking to creative people, is like the final story.

It's so interesting how you can create emotion with light.

Like with a little, you can take a phone and like you light your face in different ways, and it changes the emotion.

Because that's the conversation I wanna have.

People give me advice how to light a scene, all that kind of stuff is great, But the reality is that a little bit of light in a different direction, that you have to understand how that changes.

And the expression that your face can, like the expression that could be effectively communicated under different lighting conditions.

And then like the mystery of like having some of your face in darkness and some not, or when you can only see the eyes and not the face, when the background is visible or not.

I mean, yeah, it's all just like this interesting art form that can be so powerful when you're telling a story.

Well, and what's fun for me with photography and rockets, they're both like the ultimate story of compromise.

Because When you start learning about photography, learn about how the aperture affects both your exposure, but also your depth of field, higher shutter speed affects both your exposure, your depth of field, how a medium format camera versus a crop camera affects, everything is a compromise, and price versus performance.

You're always literally doing like a trade study of what can I afford?

Like, there's a million choices, and every single 1 of them affects every single thing.

So there's always all these trades and it's so cool that you can see the same, totally different outcomes based on the same requirements.

Do X, then here's how we're going to do it.

And 2 teams of people will come up with wildly different things.

So yeah, so the story kind of keeps going for me.

So it ended, you know, I'm through all this doing a lot of weddings.

I was already getting saturated and feeling like I'm not being as creative.

You know, you can only shoot them so many weddings before you're like, well, now we do this pose, this pose, this pose.

You know, even if like they're amazing places, like, you know, in front of a castle in Germany or something, I'm still like, well, it's the end of the day, I'm not being very creative, you know?

So I remember craving like some projects.

And so I was sitting at my friend's coffee shop in my hometown in Cedar Falls, a sidecar coffee, and I'm sitting on this red couch, and I see this article from I think Gizmodo, and it said, you could own the flight stick of an Apollo command module.

And I knew enough to know what that meant, but that's really about the end of my space knowledge.

And so I clicked on it, the clickbait got me.

I'm like, oh yeah, I'm going to see if, and I see that the minimum bid was like $250, 000.

I'm like, okay, no, I can't own the Apollo joystick, but it got me on this website called RROction.

And so I started scrolling through that, looking for things that hadn't been bid on.

And they had, at the time, they were doing a huge space auction.

And so I'm looking for things just out of curiosity, fun.

These are cool, like starting to really, you know, like I said, I like space, but I wasn't in love with it or anything.

I ended up seeing a, there's an article for a VMSTK-44 flight suit, high altitude flight suit that came from the Soviet Union.

And looks, it's like a MiG fighter jet, fighter pilot suit, very similar to the SR-71 like kind of pumpkin suit.

I mean, it looks like a spacesuit, for all intents and purposes, it's kind of like a spacesuit.

And I just bid on it, I bid like, I think $325.

And next thing you know, it arrives at my door.

And from that point on, literally I got it out, I immediately tried to put it on, and the first thing that I do is almost die in it because I closed the helmet down on myself and locked it and didn't know how to unlock it.

So I'm literally, and so as soon as I seal it up, I'm realizing I can't breathe.

So luckily, like there's a hose, you know, kind of that long hose thing that would normally plug into an air supply, had a little plug on the end of it, so I just unplugged it and was able to temporarily breathe through the hose until I figured out the locking mechanism.

So there was my almost, that was my mortality rate thing right there.

So that was probably above a 98 or below a 98.

you're there panicking inside for a few seconds.

Already reading my premature obituary, like idiot dies alone in space suit in his living room.

Just imagine, That would be like Darwin award for sure, for sure.

You introduced Creed to me, so you should feel bad about that 1.

Okay, so I ended up, the space suit kind of more or less haunted me, because it kind of just, it sat in my living room for a long time and I didn't know what to do with it.

And I actually had a friend who is also a photographer, wanted to do a photo, he was just kind of taking pictures randomly.

He's like, hey, bring your space suit over, we'll do a picture.

It's like, all right, I walk across the street, literally lived across the street, Taylor, and I put the space suit on, I took this funny picture, and I'm like, this is awesome!

And I got a lot of fun out of creating a character, you know, of everyday astronaut.

I was like thinking of more and more funny situations where I could have this astronaut on Earth doing mundane, everyday things, and came up with the name Everyday Astronaut.

And originally, it was just literally a photo project, like this whole art series of an astronaut doing these things, these funny, whimsical, silly, mundane things.

But I was researching a lot about like, you know, I was trying to hide Easter eggs.

Like I was going to hide in like the, you know, the echocardiogram of Alan Shepard, you know, like his first flight into space and photoshopping that into pictures.

And like, you know, doing all these little like facts about space flight, but they're just hidden little elements in these photos.

And man, doing that, I just fell in love with it.

I just was going over every little detail that I could, learning.

And I was getting excited because I was like, I could be teaching people about all this exciting stuff and all the cool things people figured out 40 years ago, 50 years ago, and was trying to portray that through images on Instagram.

And it took me a little while, but eventually I realized, on Instagram, your retention rate, you're lucky if you get like 2 seconds of someone looking at an image, or maybe nowadays 60 seconds of a quick little Instagram short or something.

It doesn't give you a chance to really teach to explore a little topic that you felt, Like you felt the curiosity about the thing.

There's so many opportunities to have a light bulb go off for someone and be like, this is awesome.

And so, yeah, I think I started, so by the end of 2016, like throughout 2016, I realized I want to be done doing photography as a profession and I want to pursue everyday astronaut.

And at that time, I'd been doing it for roughly 2 years and had seen, I don't know, like 50, 000 Instagram followers or something.

I thought, like, I could just be a full-time influencer now.

Just go around taking pictures of myself in a space suit and doing public appearances and write a children's book or something.

I don't know, I don't know what this thing is.

And so it basically, I gave myself like a runway of 1 year of 2017 of like, I'm gonna throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks.

So I was doing like Twitch streams, I was playing Kerbal Space Program, which is like a video game, like a physics based rocket building simulation game.

But It's also like, it's fun and silly because you're not playing with like humans, you're playing with these little Kerbal, like little alien guys and it's fun and silly.

You know, streaming that on Twitch and doing things and posting some of those things onto YouTube.

But finally, like I said, it actually happened to be February 27th, 2017 when SpaceX had that announcement that they're flying somewhere on the moon, that I'm, I gotta tell people about this, and stood there and made my first produced YouTube video.

And I didn't want it to be over 3 minutes.

I was afraid that'd be way too long for YouTube.

And I got it down to like, I don't know, 2 minutes and 40 seconds or something.

And that video- Were you wearing the- I was wearing the space suit.

It looks like it was color graded by a 7 year old with a tan marker or something.

Like it just looks terrible, sounds horrible.

And as it should be, you know, your first video should be terrible.

If it's not terrible, then you spent too long trying to make it.

So the thing that clicked for me is I had very little audience and all of a sudden that video kind of took off, you know, relatively.

I think it got like 10, 000 or 12, 000 views, and I was like, holy crap, that's way more engagement than it would

10, 000 people, that's almost my whole town.

Like if you had 500 people attend a thing that you do, that would be like, you're like a rockstar.

And I had, before photography, actually, I used to do like wedding videography too.

So I had done my woes with videography and weddings and stuff.

You know, I love photography, it's like, boom, you snap it, boom, post, you're done in an hour, you know?

And video, it's like this whole cumbersome thing.

And here I was making this long, what at the time seemed like a long 7 minute long YouTube video about how the Falcon 9 lands.

And again, that 1 I posted, and actually it did really bad, and I was really upset.

I'm like, I spent 2 weeks on this stupid video, worked really hard scripting and blah, blah, blah.

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Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel | Lex Fridman Podcast #356