Shadowing Practice: SpaceX preparing two Starship flights in parallel - Starbase Summary - Learn English Speaking with Video

Well, if you're trying to keep up with what's happening out at Starbase, you've found yourself in the right place.

It's time for another Starbase summary.

We're going to start it off with the next Flight 15 vehicle, Booster 22, headed out for testing.

Here, a work stand is ready for the orbital launch mount.

It's like pre-assembled scaffolding.

We'll talk a little bit more about that in just a little bit.

And it looks like Pad 2 is practicing for flight, including maybe a catch.

Now, is it a Flight 14 catch, or are they just using the time to practice?

Well, I guess you'll have to stick around and see what I have to say about that.

I mean, I'll have to stick around.

You can leave, or you can fast forward, or whatever.

But it's fine.

It's a Starbase summary.

There is Ship 42 coming back from Massey's, it looks like.

Going to be rolling out the road.

It's interesting that that red light disappeared.

I wonder if that's like a timing thing or a frame rate capture thing.

The red light stopped flashing.

But here we have it passing, getting closer over to the production site.

It's passing our river property.

You can see the stop sign there and the Cybertruck blocking off things,

but rolling all the way back over from Massey's going on here.

Now, big thanks, hey, real quick to Ryan Caton for holding it down while I was on another assignment.

If you all saw the Isar Aerospace launch, I was out in Andria, Norway hosting that launch for them.

Big congratulations to the Isar team, by the way.

A lot of hard work into that orbital flight from Norway.

But back over at Starbase, here's a shot of the Gigabase sort of looking in from the road.

This bit of an angle shot looking up.

Starting to get some roofing panels in there as well.

The cranes are still stacking through there.

It'll be interesting to see how those extricate themselves from the building.

Interesting that the bottom level doesn't have any paneling on it yet.

But you can sort of see how this building is starting to, I want to say, close down the views.

It'll be a nice place to work on things once they get the building ready to go.

Here's Booster 22 rolling out to Massey's for its tests.

I like how they have those sort of 22-42.

They match.

It'd be difficult if it was like 13-68, 24-86, 47-hike-hike sort of deal.

I don't think anybody overseas will understand what I just said, but, you know, my American people.

Y'all know what I'm talking about.

Anyways, got some stars or pixels.

Don't know which those were.

in the background.

So the hot staging ring, of course, we've got the mural.

The interesting thing is we're skipping a flight here, right?

We've got 2242 for flight 15, and we haven't even done flight 14 yet.

So they are continuing that pace.

Of course, this is not surprising.

In order to get a higher cadence, they're going to have to be testing ships

and boosters down the line for future flights

while current ones are getting ready to roll out to the pad for their own flight.

so y'all have seen uh the speculation maybe middle of next

week we saw some notices starting to shape up of course the highlight on

that is always the thing that nobody wants to hear.

You want me to title the video like, Flight 14, date revealed, SpaceX just said, like, you know, all that sort of nonsense you see in the thumbnails.

Yeah, as it turned out, they didn't reveal the date.

We'll stay, and we'll wait, and we'll see.

There's some notices, no promises, that flight's going to happen on any given date yet.

You know how I know, I have to book travel for a bunch of people to get out to Starbase to cover it for you.

So in any event, all the way over to Massey's, here's a nice shot from Colleen in the morning.

I'm going to say this is a morning light here on September 8th.

Got some friendly little yuccas.

Anybody remember the three amigos that got taken out very long ago?

They got like absolutely shredded by, what was it?

It's an 11, I think, came down on them in any event.

Ah, yes, good times.

So this is a weird one.

We saw this in the intro video, right?

This is rolling from sort of the Sanchez assembly area over to the production side.

And look at this.

Do you see the little feet that are sort of sticking down halfway up?

There's three of them.

It's like they pressed the button in KSP where they got 3x symmetry.

But why is this 3x symmetry?

Because the pad itself isn't really...

Let's back up real quick.

If you've seen them working on pad 2, right, to get to some of the parts of pad 2, they have to assemble scaffolding.

It's difficult for lifts to get to, there's not a flat floor underneath.

Remember the old pad one with the upside down shower head where they could roll the taco stand, dance floor, whatever on and attach it so they could work underneath.

Pad two with its angled thrust diverter underneath does not support any sort of structure like that.

So if they want to work on the underside of the deck or the sides of the deck, you either gotta hang out the window, like open up a booster clamp and like hang out like you're in hee-haw or something,

or you have to put scaffolding out.

this piece here is basically some pre-assembled scaffolding.

It's clearly not made of scaffolding, but it serves the purpose of scaffolding, right?

And what they're doing is they're rolling this out to the pad, and the thinking is that they will pick this up with something.

Is it a crane, or is it the chopsticks?

I have thoughts.

Big thanks to Alex.

I chatted with Alex a little bit about this to get caught up, by the way.

But there are some thoughts on how this will work, But you pick this thing up somehow

and you put it down in the middle of the launch mount and it actually fits.

It slots in there like, you know, in the square hole sort of deal, but it's round.

And then you can climb down those little ladders

and you can work on the parts of the mount without going through the tedious staff,

tedious task of installing scaffolding like piece by piece, right?

Like dozer style or trying to get around somewhere with a lift

or whatever this is supposed to be sort of the replacement structure for enabling, let's say, quick-ish access to the inner and under parts of the launch mount, right?

Now, look at the bottom.

Do you see down just above the SPMT, there's a bunch of little pre-welded stepladders.

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Do you see?

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They've actually got little steps, and it's about the size of a stepladder, I think.

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I'm wondering if those are little installed work.

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See, it's a little platform on every one.

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You can see there's a little stepladder and it goes up to the work platform.

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And I wonder if that matches up with some parts of the, uh, the hold down clamps or the moving parts, right?

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The little doors that open and close on the launch mount.

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Like, does that fit down in the middle of the launch mount?

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Then you can climb up those little work platforms and work or inspect or whatever, uh, those different things.

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I, I guess we'll find out.

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You can also see the two booster quick disconnects here on the launch pad, and then those three feet and the two ladders on the top, you're probably going to want to scroll back and look at this thing in more detail,

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but it looks like those two pre-built steps on the top part might sort of match up to the area, there's the steps, see them going down on the left and middle,

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might match up to sort of the access hatches where you can come out of the orbital launch mount.

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But in any event, the whole thing is looking like, Look at that.

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Security Cybertrucks.

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Huh.

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Neat.

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The whole thing is designed so that they can put that down in there and have work areas, like safe places to work from, to tie off to, etc.,

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etc., without having to build a free-range, grass-fed scaffolding system from scratch every time they need to access something,

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or lean off the edge of a lift that doesn't really have a good place to park, right?

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It'll be really interesting to see.

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Now, here's the chopsticks, by the way.

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Are they going to pick that thing up with a chopsticks or a crane?

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I can see it work in two different ways.

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It could be a crane that goes over and picks it up

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and swings it and puts it in a little launch mount.

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Why, though?

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Because you have a massive crane here.

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This is the ship QD umbilical, by the way.

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But you have a massive crane in the form of the chopsticks that they use to pick up the ships and boosters.

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Why would you not use the chopsticks to pick up the work platform and put it in?

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Well, the chopsticks don't go particularly low.

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They pick up both the ships and boosters from the top, but maybe there's a sling system

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or there's going to be something in there where they can use the chopsticks to pick up that platform

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and then put it over it makes no sense to me

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to need as a daily test it makes no sense to

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me to need a separate crane sitting on the side of the pad every time you want to use

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that thing when you have built a huge crane right next to it

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if they don't start with an adapter and they use a different crane to do it i really wonder nice

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a little nighttime a little nighttime action here um i really wonder

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if we won't see them evolve into something where

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that connects to the chopsticks and picks up

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and goes down in the middle of the launch mount

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so they can work on it also i wonder

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if it's going to match both pad one and pad two

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but i should be talking about the deluge now

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because this is a fantastic sunset shot of the deluge going off

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and an interesting thing here i think we're going to have to watch

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can't see it through all of this water

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but this is potentially not only a deluge test I want to see

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if we can observe clamps moving or any other movement of the launch mount that might indicate

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see okay the circle ring clamps are still and then the doors are still open are they going to move

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okay nope we're just getting another activation of the top deck

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see okay the note there said with correct timing for a booster catch

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so if i'm not mistaken they did the big test of everything

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and then this we didn't show it to you in real time she had to sit around for eight, ten minutes, whatever, right?

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But the activation of just the top deck here

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was sort of in the right timing that it would take the booster to go out, hot stage, boost back, come back around, and come back to the pad and land.

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And that's why you're just protecting the top deck here.

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You don't need to fire the bottom deluge.

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You just fire the top because the boosters come in from the top

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that the engines aren't already down in there firing into the middle of amount so does

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that mean anything for flight 14 probably not wait no normally

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the water level smoothly lowers it's at a harmonic shutdown interesting huh it's like surging

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and this instead of just running out

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and stopping it's like content interesting i'm gonna have to do some looking into

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that why would they make it sort of surge over

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and over again talking about booster catch does the fact

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that we just saw

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that mean anything about flight 14 no we saw them do

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tests like this before flight 13 they have the stuff they're testing it why wouldn't they

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but that i don't think that you could look at that

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and be like oh my god flight 14 booster catch confirmed i'm not sure

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that that is a uh a statement well maybe

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if you want to make a thumbnail to trick people into

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clicking on like you know what's going on at starbase you could do

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that um but i don't think that anybody should take

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that as evidence

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or go out to social media screaming oh god they did

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a catch test clearly it's going to be a catch right um who knows it's spacex

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but uh over here on pad one you can see that big buckner crane lifting parts around here is pad one chopsticks.

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Did we get those things repaired since I've been on the road?

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Yeah, it looks like we put the structure back in.

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We're still working up underneath here, but remember when we had the stickectomy or whatever it was they did previously?

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It looks like that's mostly been replaced or repaired, whatever you want to say.

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In any event, watching all the different tea leaves and stuff like that, of course, our team is on standby we're already spooling up some folks

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because we've got some maintenance and repair stuff that we need to do

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so we've got some folks that are going in regardless of

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which launch date is but we are closely watching for

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when we should get the rest of the team there for flight 14

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so that we can share it with you as always hey look here's some more of this

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if y'all want to scroll back

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and look at this thing in more detail it's just

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so weird that it's in 3x symmetry and two staircases

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and a bunch of little step ladders i like it it's like specify special tooling just for that sort of thing.

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But that's Starbase summary this time.

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Appreciate y'all watching, and we will see you next time.

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.

Shadowing Practice: SpaceX preparing two Starship flights in parallel - Starbase Summary - Learn English Speaking with Video

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