Shadowing Practice: Inside The SpaceX Starfactory - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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This is the Star Factory.
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At over one million square feet, it is the biggest and most advanced rocket manufacturing plant in the world.
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It's also the location where SpaceX is building their Starship.
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And they are building a lot of them.
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With just one Star Factory, SpaceX can build up to 365 Starships per year.
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That's one rocket every single day.
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To accomplish this, they need a factory unlike anything you've seen before, and inside the Star Factory, we will find a giant,
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automated machine that is building rockets for the future of human space exploration.
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It all begins with raw materials.
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It's crazy to think that the majority of an epic starship rocket starts out looking like this.
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Just a big roll of stainless steel.
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The metal is about 4mm thick, and each sheet is 1.8m wide.
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SpaceX uses their own custom blend for this stainless steel, which they've developed to handle the unique demands of a reusable rocket.
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Of course, it needs to be strong, but that strength needs to be maintained from super low temperature conditions when the rocket takes off,
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loaded with cryogenic fuel, all the way to super hot conditions when it comes screaming back through the atmosphere.
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SpaceX Steel is actually strongest when it's cold, at the time when the rocket is under the heaviest load.
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The metal also needs to be corrosion resistant because these reusable rockets need to last for a very long time,
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and they'll spend most of that time hanging out in the salty sea air.
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But at the same time, this particular alloy needs to be easy for the Star Factory to work with,
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meaning it can be bent into shape and welded together without any complications.
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This is the first real step in the manufacturing process, an automated machine that cuts sheets of metal from the rolls and welds them into rings.
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Then the rings are stacked into segments of three or five, and everything is welded together by a robot arm
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that circles around the stack and completes the job in one quick fluid motion.
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There was a time where every Starship was hand-welded from top to bottom, but as SpaceX moves towards mass production,
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they are automating every part of the process that they can.
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Now, human welders are still responsible for attaching small parts that demand precision and adaptability, but all of the larger jobs have been handed off to machines.
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Now, for the curved bits of the rocket, like the nose cone and the fuel tanks, the steel needs to be bent into shape before it can be welded together.
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For this, SpaceX uses a process called hydroforming.
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It's basically using a very high-pressure liquid to push the sheet of metal into a mold.
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The amount of force used to bend steel like this can reach over 36,000 psi, which is twice the pressure you'd experience standing on the bottom of the ocean.
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Once the parts are formed into shape, they go into the same rotating welding machine to make the pointy end of the nose cone.
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Now, from here, different sections of the rocket will follow different paths through the Star Factory.
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So it's not like a traditional production line, where everything flows down one big conveyor belt
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and different parts get added on along the way until you end up with the finished product.
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That's the concept that was originally popularized by Henry Ford back in the 1920s, and it's remained a manufacturing standard until today.
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But this does not mean it's the best way to make a car or a rocket.
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Hey, I've got three quick things I need to tell you about.
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And hi, I'm Sean, and we are the actual humans behind the space race.
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See this?
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This is real After Effects animations being done live right now.
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All of our 3D, all of our 2D is done by real people in the house.
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No AI involved.
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This is our render rig.
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It costs us eight grand and it still takes a few days to sometimes weeks just to render out a 3D project.
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That's Ted.
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He's got a seven month old at home and he still gets up before her just to get work done. And this is Brady.
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He's got a four month old at home and Jay behind the camera.
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He's got two of his own.
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So yeah, this team is basically running on caffeine and not much sleep.
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Oh, and I've got a little fella on the way too, so if the upload schedule gets a little weird around October, you know why.
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My point is we are all real people, and it takes real time and money to produce these videos.
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So if you'd like to support us in any way, here's how.
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First, we've got a free newsletter, thespacerace.news, all the most important weekly space news straight to your inbox.
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Second, that join button gets you early access, plus behind the scenes on how we actually build this stuff.
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And it is the most direct way to keep the lights on around here
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and also help us not be so dependent on sponsorship money.
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Third, we've got new merch, including a shirt that says, I love Uranus.
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Yes, we know exactly what we're doing and we have no regrets.
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So read the newsletter, join as a member on the channel, buy the merch, or just continue watching the videos, whatever works for you.
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No matter what, thank you for supporting the channel and the people behind it.
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The unique thing about SpaceX is
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that the man in charge has just as much experience building cars as he does building rockets.
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Elon Musk has developed with his engineers at Tesla is a new approach to mass production
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that replaces the singular production line with parallel manufacturing.
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Tesla calls it the unboxed method.
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So instead of treating the car like a box that you need to put stuff in, they break the vehicle apart into chunks front, back, left, and right,
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and then they build each one of those chunks simultaneously at
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different production stations before bringing it all together in one final assembly.
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Now, SpaceX doesn't call their manufacturing process unboxed.
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Rockets are more tube-shaped, and untubed doesn't sound very cutting-edge,
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but Elon Musk has described production inside the Star Factory as a linear-adjacent flow, which does sound really technical,
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but I'm pretty sure it means the same thing as what we just described with unboxed.
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So one of the really cool aspects of the Star Factory is the way
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that they move pieces of the rocket from one production station to the next.
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Because there's no big conveyor belt running through the middle, they need a mechanism that can move really large objects through these adjacent flows.
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That's why the entire production floor is framed by this gridwork of steel beams.
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They aren't there to hold the roof up.
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They create a network of tracks for overhead cranes
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that can lift a chunk of rocket straight up
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and then carry it over to the next location where it's placed on one of these rotating stands
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that spins the nine meter wide rings so that workers don't have to constantly be walking around with their tools, they just bring the work to them.
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So what you end up with is all of these different rocket parts going through various stages of manufacturing, all in constant motion and under one roof.
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Now, we can compare that to the way that NASA builds one of their rockets, like the Artemis program's space launch system, because the general rocket building strategy is not so different,
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but the manufacturing takes place on a much larger scale.
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SLS is not built in just one factory, it actually begins with several factories spread out across the United States,
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from California to Utah and Louisiana, where different segments of the rocket are manufactured by separate contractors.
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For Artemis missions, there are even parts of the spacecraft made in Europe. And then, all of these big chunks of rocket get loaded onto boats
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or trucks or cargo airplanes and moved to NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral, Florida, where the rocket is finally stacked from the ground up.
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This is a large part of the reason why it's taken four years to launch two SLS rockets.
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So inside the Star Factory, cranes and production stations take the place of a global supply chain.
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That's how you go from one rocket per year to one rocket per day.
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But there is one big similarity here, and that's the way that each segment of the rocket is built up independently before being brought together in the end.
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If we break up our Starship the same way that Tesla breaks up a car, then we essentially have three big sections.
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Top, middle, and bottom.
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With the top consisting of the nose cone and payload bay, the middle essentially just being fuel tanks, and the bottom being where the engines go.
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The Star Factory also makes super heavy boosters, which are a lot more simple on the top with just a ring that connects the two stages together,
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but a lot more complicated at the bottom with 33 engines and all of the plumbing necessary to make them run.
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We'll focus on the ship itself, because this is the part that actually needs to be mass-produced.
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The booster can provide the muscle needed to reach space, then turn around and come right back to the launch site
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and be ready to do it all again in about five minutes.
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So you only need one or two of these per launch tower and you're good to go.
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But the ships could spend hours or even days circling the Earth before they come back down.
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Some might even fly to Mars, and even when they do come back, they'll need to be fitted with a new payload, which can also take a few days or weeks.
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So in order to maintain a high launch frequency, which is what SpaceX will demand from these rockets,
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you need many ships that are in various stages of flight at any given time.
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So when you hear SpaceX talk about building one rocket every day, this is what they mean.
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If we start from the top and work our way down, once the formed panels of the nose cone are welded together,
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another robot arm is going to come in and start attaching these little pins all over the outside surface using spot welds.
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These are anchor points for heat shield tiles, and that is our next step.
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From the welding station, the nose cone is going to be lifted over to the thermal protection station.
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Here the workers are going to install a black sheet over the entire protected surface of the nose cone.
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This is a secondary heat shield material that can work like a backup if any of the main tiles ever fall off.
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Over that goes a layer of white foam which provides insulation and folds up to fill the gaps in between tiles.
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And then lastly, these black hexagons are pushed into place, workers line up three holes on the back of the tile with the pins on the rocket, and then they click to lock in.
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SpaceX makes the tiles themselves in their bakery.
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This is really not so different from the process used to make other glazed ceramic products like floor tiles or dinner plates,
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and the Starship Bakery has a fully automated line that can produce over 1,000 hexagon tiles every day.
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Eventually, that will scale up to 7,000 tiles per day.
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Now, at the same time that our nosecone is being assembled, there are two smaller operations that are also running in parallel.
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One is building header tanks.
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These are small, round fuel tanks that are made of the same hydroforming stainless steel as the ship.
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These hold only a small amount of propellant that gets used for the final landing burn, and they'll be mounted up inside the tip of the nosecone.
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This is one of the biggest advantages with building in chunks.
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If you had stacked the entire rocket first, and then tried to install a fuel tank up in the very top,
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that would be a lot more difficult for the guys who are up there doing the plumbing work.
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The second process that's happening is building out wing flaps.
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Flat sheets of stainless steel are welded down to a frame
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or die cast metal beams that include three hinge points for connecting to the ship.
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A thin strip of stainless steel is rolled over to create the edge, and then the flap gets the same heat shield treatment as the ship.
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Meanwhile, back on the nose cone, crews are welding attachment points for the flaps onto the outside,
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while on the inside, electric motors that control the flap movements are mounted and wired up.
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Then, overhead cranes lift the flaps into position while production teams bolt it all together.
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At the same time that this is happening over at another station, the payload bay of the ship is being assembled.
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This is made from three vertical rings of stainless steel.
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On one side it gets the usual heat shield tile treatment, while on the other side crews begin cutting holes in the body.
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Starship needs one long slot removed to make a payload door where Starlink satellites can exit.
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It also needs two small round holes below that for docking ports
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that will allow Starship to connect in space and transfer fuel.
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The parallel operation going on here is building the Starlink payload rack.
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It's a mechanism that holds a couple dozen satellites in a vertical stack, then deploys them one at a time while moving the rest up into position.
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It's a lot like a PEZ candy dispenser, so that's what SpaceX nicknamed it.
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Once that gets done, it gets hoisted by a crane, brought over and dropped down into the payload section,
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and then a small door flap is installed to cover the slot and docking connectors cover the holes.
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So now we've got two halves of the top section that have been built simultaneously along with their various sub-components.
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Then all we need to do is hoist the pointy bit on top of the payload bay
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and make another robotic weld around the outside to fuse them together.
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This is why the Star Factory has a staggered roofline
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that is lower at one end where the raw materials come in
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and taller at the other end where assembled rocket sections come out.
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Okay, so that's our top segment done, and at the same time that all of this work is going on, the bottom and middle sections of the ship are being made in the same kind of way.
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There's generally one big job being done in parallel with two
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or three smaller jobs that all come together to complete the segment.
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And they aren't just building one nose cone at a time.
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The Star is always in the process of building multiple rockets all at once.
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So these are all of our adjacent flows, and while they might not appear to be linear right now,
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we are about to see where everything converges at one single point, the Gigabay.
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This building provides almost as much square footage as the Star Factory, but it then raises the roof to a height of 116 meters,
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which works out to be 46 million cubic feet of internal volume.
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For some scale, if you were to take six Costco's and smash them all together into one building, then stack that building another 13 Costco's high.
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This is the same idea as NASA's Vertical Assembly Building.
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It's the place where all of the big segments come together and a rocket is truly born.
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NASA's vertical bay was originally designed in the 1960s to hold and assemble four Saturn V rockets simultaneously,
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and this allowed NASA to actually launch four crewed Apollo Moon missions inside the span of just one year, which is pretty impressive.
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The Star Factory Gigabay has enough stations to assemble 24 ships and boosters at one time,
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allowing for 12 fully stacked Starship Superheavies to be finished simultaneously.
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The first step in
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that finishing process is to again hoist our rocket segments up on a crane and begin joining the top, middle, and bottom into one single unit.
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Once that's done, work crews on different levels of the Gigabay start the job of tying this all together.
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That means hooking up plumbing lines for fuel and compressed gases that the rocket needs to operate through flight.
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They'll be wiring up all of the different systems so that the ship has power
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from nose to tail attaching all of the final heat shield tiles
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and running final checks to make sure
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that this newly built rocket is ready to begin the final launch preparation and testing
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there's only one thing that spacex doesn't do at the star factory
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and that's make engines the raptor engines for a starship are
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still made on a production line in hawthorne california then they're
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trucked across the country to a testing facility in mcgregor texas where they they get fired up
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and run under flight conditions to shake out any bugs, and then they are moved over to Starbase.
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Engine installation is always the final piece of the puzzle.
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The ship or booster will go through stress testing under simulated launch pressure first to verify
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that the structure can actually hold up.
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Then it might have a few of its engines installed, 3 out of 6 for a ship, or 10 out of 33 for a booster,
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and there will be a hot fire test to make sure that the plumbing and electrical systems are all working as intended.
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Only after these checks are done can a rocket return to the Gigabay to have its full engine count installed
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and finally be considered ready for launch.
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Now, at this point, the Star Factory is already building ships and boosters faster than SpaceX can launch them,
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so there are many vehicles waiting in the wings of the Gigabay for their chance to fly.
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And that's how things are going to be for now, until SpaceX has a level of confidence in the Starship
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that they can start putting it to real-world use and begin deploying the new Starlink V3 network.
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At that point, they'll want to be flying Starship at least as often as they currently use the Falcon 9 rocket, which is pretty much every single day.
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So that's the point where StarFactory really gets to start flexing its muscle and ramp-up production,
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which will need to continue as SpaceX moves on to launching their Orbital Data Center satellites in addition to Starlink.
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Then they'll be doing these missions to the moon that require multiple refueling launches to support just one lander.
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And then of course, at some point, SpaceX will begin sending these ships to Mars as well.
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And that's where this whole one rocket a day thing starts to make sense.
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There's not just one big plan for Starship, there are many, and they all have to be happening at the same time, so you need a lot of rockets,
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way more than the world has ever seen, and this is where it all gets built.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “Inside The SpaceX Starfactory”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: rocket, spacex, factory, star, ship. This video has 197 sentences and 3243 words to shadow. The speech runs for 17:44. The speaker talks fast, about 183 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 82% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| starship noun | /stɑɹʃɪp/ | A type of spacecraft capable of traveling to the solar systems of other stars. |
| weld verb | /wɛld/ | To join two materials (especially two metals) together by applying heat, pressure and filler, either separately or in any combination. |
| tile noun | /ˈtaɪ.əl/ | A regularly-shaped slab of clay or other material, affixed to cover or decorate a surface, as in a roof-tile, glazed tile, stove tile, carpet tile, etc. |
| cone noun | /ˈkoʊn/ | A surface of revolution formed by rotating a segment of a line around another line that intersects the first line. |
| payload noun | /ˈpeɪloʊd/ | That part of a cargo that produces revenue. |
| stack noun | /stæk/ | A large pile of hay, grain, straw, or the like, larger at the bottom than the top, sometimes covered with thatch. |
| flap noun | /flæp/ | Anything broad and flexible that hangs loose, or that is attached by one side or end and is easily moved. |
| booster noun | /ˈbustɚ/ | Something that boosts. |
| chunk noun | /t͡ʃʌŋk/ | A part of something that has been separated; a generally squat, thick, irregular piece of something, e.g. wood or stone. |
| assemble verb | /əˈsɛm.bəl/ | To put together. |
| crane noun | /kɹeɪn/ | Any bird of the family Gruidae, large birds with long legs and a long neck which is extended during flight. |
| plumbing noun | /ˈplʌmɪŋ/ | The pipes, together with the joints, tanks, stopcocks, taps, and other fixtures of a water, gas, or sewage system in a house or other building. |
| vertical adjective | /ˈvɝ.tɪ.kəl/ | Standing, pointing, or moving straight up or down; parallel to the local direction of gravity; along the direction of a plumb line; perpendicular to something… |
| simultaneously adverb | /ˌsaɪmlˈteɪnɪəsli/ | Occurring at the same time. |
| automate verb | /ˈɔ.təˌmeɪt/ | To replace or enhance human labor with machines. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| break up verb | To break or separate into pieces. | |
| come back verb | To return to a place. | |
| go through verb | To travel from one end of something to the other. | |
| bring over verb | To cause to change allegiance or point of view. | |
| build out verb | To develop or expand (a system, structure, project, etc.). | |
| build up verb | To erect; to construct. | |
| come out verb | /ˌkʌm ˈaʊt/ | To be discovered; to be revealed. |
| come together verb | /ˈkʌm tʊˈɡɛðɚ/ | To assemble; to congregate; to combine. |
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| “Used to” used to + verb — a past habit or state that is no longer true | used to bend · used to make |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | be maintained · can be bent · are stacked |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | you've seen · they've developed · have been handed |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | psi, which is · boosters, which are · payload, which can |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 27 contractions and reduced forms, such as they'll, doesn't, we've. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: starship /stɑɹʃɪp/, complication /ˌkɑm.pləˈkeɪ.ʃən/, insulation /ˌɪnsəˈleɪʃən/, precision /pɹɪˈsɪʒ.ən/, accomplish /əˈkɑm.plɪʃ/
- Long words — get the stress right: simultaneously /ˌsaɪmlˈteɪnɪəsli/, complication /ˌkɑm.pləˈkeɪ.ʃən/, similarity /ˌsɪm.ɪˈlæɹ.ɪ.ti/, insulation /ˌɪnsəˈleɪʃən/, independently /ˌɪndɪˈpɛndəntli/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like starship, weld, tile.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.