Shadowing Practice: Starship - Test Like You Fly - Learn English Speaking with Video

The T-minus 4 minutes, a lot of stuff starts going down.

T-minus 3 minutes, closing out the propellant load, so you're finishing out the liquid oxygen load and the liquid fuel load.

T-minus 40 seconds, we stop interacting with the pad.

The vehicle's just on its own.

All right, it's that's all V-19 operators.

This is the final gun alcohol poll for today's operations.

Our main objective today is a 10-engine static fire.

Why 10 engines instead of all 33?

This is the first V-3 booster down at the pad right now, so there's a lot of stuff that can go wrong.

And if we do have a bad day, it limits the scope of the issues that we can have.

This will be the highest chamber pressure we've ever seen on a vehicle at SpaceX.

So definitely gonna be a pretty spicy test today.

And then you're counting down from T-40.

T-4 on is when my heart rate really starts to tick up.

And then we light the engines.

The End so

We are in the Star Factory, and this is an almost 1 million square foot facility that we've built to enable that production of both ship and booster.

Starship is a fully reusable rocket.

It's two stages, so it has a ship which is the upper stage and a booster below it.

The booster accelerates the ship to get it going towards orbit.

The ship is what actually goes into orbit.

They take the people or the payload to wherever they're going.

The sound of progress.

The rivet guns and the sledgehammers.

Less sledgehammers than there used to be.

The story of Starship starts with the founding of SpaceX.

Three, two, one.

Rather than starting with the vehicle that Elon envisioned needing to get people to the moon and Mars, he thought it would basically bankrupt the company, it wouldn't be possible.

So you have to bite it off in small pieces.

And so those pieces, which at the time did not seem small at all, were Falcon 1, Falcon 9,

Dragon, both cargo and crew, Falcon Heavy.

Falcon Heavy is supersonic.

These were the building blocks that let us cut our teeth on learning how to do rockets.

Not the way the aerospace industry had been doing it, but the way we needed to do it to end up here where we are today working on Starship.

Version 3 is what I like to call the foundational design of Starship Booster and the Pad.

That's going to give us the new capabilities we need to do the missions in front of us.

It'll be the one that puts humans back on the moon.

It'll be the ones that put the first boot prints and then city on Mars.

Starship is giant and that scale is not an accident.

It's not to win some Guinness World Record prize, which we did for both the ship and the tower.

It's because we need that size to do the things we dream of doing with it.

The The

Ship 39 is the first V3 rocket.

This rocket is unlike anything anybody's ever done before.

Version 3 is basically a clean sheet design of the ship.

We essentially took a bunch of lessons from version 1

and version 2 and we took a step back

and said what were the things that were really problematic either from a performance perspective

or from a reliability perspective on the previous rockets and then we directly address those with a variety of new designs.

It can go up to orbit, it can stay on orbit for 48 hours, it can meet up with other ships and it can do propellant transfers

which is really the core technology that you need to unlock Starship.

Once you unlock that capability the whole solar system is on your doorstep.

And right now what we're doing is we're actually going through checkouts so we're actually kind of bringing the rocket to life.

We've never built a Ship V3 before and gotten it to the state of production.

So we are gonna have special things to this specific vehicle that are gonna be odd, but there's also things about the architecture as a whole

that we don't really know how to deal with because we've only done simulations, we've only built fluid models how we think a Ship V3 operates.

Now we have the real deal next to us.

First priority is your safety.

The second priority is making sure the vehicle's OK.

And then we worry about executing our schedule.

We're quite excited.

We're quite anxious.

But all things considered, we're pretty well prepared.

We think that we'll have a good result.

We intentionally started Starship with the ship portion because it was so novel.

We have done a reusable booster before with Falcon 9, and so it's at least a little bit better tread ground.

I will say, I think the booster turned out to be a lot harder than we gave it credit for.

This is an entirely new rocket.

This is the most ambitious vehicle design I have ever personally worked on, and it is a wild thing to see come to reality here.

The version one flight test campaign really exemplifies the rapid integrated test style that we do in SpaceX engineering.

It took us five flights from our first attempt from flight one to flight five to successfully catch a booster

which was honestly mind-blowing.

Flight 1 was able to get off the pad successfully.

It proved that we could get this full system together, and we learned a lot from the eventual failure of the vehicle in that flight.

We were able to put together a lot of improvements on the launch pad

and on the vehicle hardware design that led to much better success in Flight 2.

We were able to make it with the booster to MECO.

We were able to separate the ship and we were able to begin boosting back towards the launch site.

So we hit the next big milestone in the flight test campaign.

On flight three, we were able to get all the way through our boost back burn.

On flight four, we were able to do a successful water landing demonstration.

on flight five, we were able to come back to our launch site and successfully catch the vehicle with our chopsticks.

To be able to go fly that and have complete mission success at

that point of we got the payload to orbit and we landed that rocket was incredible.

I'm getting goosebumps talking about it now.

We're about to get into a really exciting period of the vehicle test campaign here, putting the thing through its faces and making sure that everything we designed works okay.

You want to stop about right here?

Yeah.

We have all of the

pieces of the system working together for the first time, and if we're going to learn anything from that, we'll learn it as quickly as we possibly can.

Booster 19 is actually the second of the version 3 boosters that we've built.

18 came before it, we had an unfortunate anomaly during our first test campaign of the booster 18 vehicle.

This is the first version 3 booster that we built, so this is booster 18.

This is really awesome because it's going to be our first full vehicle level operation and test with a version 3 vehicle, so the whole team is very excited about this.

Sure hope it works.

The The

When we were pressing the nitrogen system, we had an explosion that took out the rocket and thankfully we had designed that test to be safe.

If something like that happened, we did not have propellants or reactive things on the vehicle.

And so the test site incurred very little damage and of course, nobody was hurt in the incident.

100

Yeah, it's part of testing.

101

This is loud, so you learn to not be super skittish as you're walking around.

102

So we have our booster here on site.

103

We're going to be performing a cryo-proof.

104

It's actually a really long day, so it's normally planned to be a 12-hour overall prop load and off load.

105

It's just a ton of propellant that we're putting on the vehicle, and we do a bunch of test cases throughout the whole day, so it's a long one.

106

Taking booster SM to cryo high fill proof.

107

Cryo proof is the first time you actually put propellant onto the vehicle.

108

The liquid propellant that we're putting on, it does get pretty cold, generally in the 80 Kelvin range.

109

We want to test like you fly and fly like you test.

110

70% proof percentage.

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Affirm.

112

And two air faces for cryo now.

113

There is definitely nothing like a late night with your team in the control room.

114

It's one of those milestones where you're like, wow, if I can load a rocket, this is amazing.

115

EF-HT looks pretty stable.

116

Let's go ahead and get booster configured for offload.

117

the sea.

118

I'm sorry.

119

This is a Raptor 3.

120

V3 is a high performance boost engine.

121

It's also designed to be reusable and highly reliable.

122

We've learned a lot over the course of producing around 600 V2 engines.

123

You can see the amount of simplification that's occurred between V2 and V3.

124

The level of integration is really unique for Rocket Engine.

125

That comes from a lot of work among many engineers to consolidate the hardware.

126

The effect of that is that it's actually a high reliability design, so fewer parts is cheaper and faster to build, so that allows us to make a lighter vehicle,

127

to make a more reliable vehicle to overhaul, just build a better rocket.

128

Achieving full reusability of an engine like this is really something that people haven't done before.

129

The goal is to get the engine to behave in a similar way to the engines on commercial airplanes.

130

frequently in interactions with people outside of SpaceX.

131

The perception is that things far beyond what have ever been done before are impossible.

132

Things being impossible is really to be determined by breaking laws of physics.

133

We are not breaking laws of physics.

134

We're just trying to leverage them as effectively as we can.

135

All of the 19 operators is the final Glenelg Go-Pole for today's operations.

136

The main objective today is a 10-engine static fire.

137

Static fire is the culmination of the engineering process.

138

We are bringing all of the pieces of the puzzle together and we are lighting the engines.

139

And if you make it through that, you have pretty good confidence that you're in a good position to go fly.

140

Aboard.

141

One LB1 looks like we kicked out due to combustors from the Apex Bank being faulted.

142

Looks like we have to do an inch time of 2.135 seconds.

143

We successfully lit all ten engines.

144

They were ramping up to power.

145

Everything was looking good, stage and engines combined.

146

However, there was a pad side abort called.

147

So what that means is some sort of sensor tripped, and from there we command a fast shutdown.

148

It was a hard one, and especially since we had to drop all the engines out, the engines afterwards and thankfully 10 of them were salvageable, which is good.

149

We saw some data right after static fire

150

that showed about half the engines had what looked like mechanical damage basically as a result of the really fast shutdown.

151

So we brought the booster back to Mega Bay.

152

We then decided to remove all 10 engines from the booster

153

so that we could troubleshoot and understand what's going on those 10

154

while still making progress on B-19 by backfilling engines from B-20.

155

All right, attention to operators on LVN1.

156

Today's main objective is a 33-engine static flyer on B-19.

157

Okay, go no go poll coming up in one minute.

158

So we're doing our static fire today with all 33 engines.

159

This is the final go no go poll for today's operations.

160

Flight software?

161

Go.

162

AY?

163

Go.

164

Raptor?

165

Go.

166

Go.

167

CE?

168

GC2?

169

Go.

170

DC-1?

171

Go.

172

FC-1?

173

Go.

174

Two miles, ten, nine, eight,

175

seven, six, five, four, three, two, mission.

176

Wow.

177

We kicked out early.

178

All teams triage alerts.

179

Prepare for offload.

180

Today we aborted our second attempt of the B-19 full count static fire.

181

We actually had another padded board on the diverter.

182

We made it through engine startup and then ultimately lost some of our sensors on one of the ramp manifolds.

183

It basically said that the manifold pressure was lower than we believe

184

that it probably was and it kicked us out at T plus 1.88 seconds.

185

It's just tough because there are some things that are hard to test ahead of time.

186

So the diverter, you can test as much as you want, but you can't obviously test for what theoretical vibe environment you're going to see when the engines are turned on.

187

Any time

188

that you walk into an operation where you want to turn on 33 of these enormously powerful engines

189

and get them all to work together and walk away from it in one piece, that is a win.

190

I think every test is always a success and we had a bunch of findings on the ground systems, the vehicle and the engines that I think were really good to flag at this point,

191

but definitely a bittersweet day.

192

We have a saying called only the paranoid survive.

193

The idea behind it is that there's an enormous amount of information

194

and data that's coming to you and if you can use

195

that wisely you can usually use that to figure out where things are going to go wrong in the future.

196

Almost every time that we fail something

197

or have something go awry there were clues in previous data

198

and previous operations that if you had known what to look for

199

and had been good enough and paranoid enough to do so.

200

Could have found it there.

201

It's been 10 months since Massey's had the S-36 anomaly.

202

Ship 36 was a tough one.

203

We had a CFPV explode and it not only took out the rocket, but it took out a lot of the test site infrastructure over at Massey's.

204

How do we go make sure if we have an anomaly again, the pad can take a beating and still survive?

205

Losing a rocket is one thing.

206

We've got a production line for rockets and we can go make more.

207

Losing the physical infrastructure of the launch pad

208

or the test site is very difficult because you need to go repair

209

that over a period of many months before you can get back into testing.

210

Now we have Massey's back online here.

211

We've really built this rocket from scratch, but we've also built the pad from scratch, so it's all kinds of new systems.

212

This will be the first time that we bring together the pad and vehicle pieces to make sure that they all work.

213

The static fire vehicle is in prepaid clear about to get to our static fire pad clear top state.

214

We run 60 seconds on ship

215

because you get to see how the vehicle thermals all shake out just in real vehicle performance.

216

That if you can make it through that, that you are in a reasonable position to go fly.

217

Start it up.

218

Throttle it.

219

Plus 10.

220

The journey of SpaceX is a journey to give humans access to the solar system and beyond, which is really the goal for Starship.

221

Plus 20.

222

The impact that this rocket is going to have on the world, I don't think most people can really comprehend the change it's going to happen.

223

Plus 30.

224

This is such a wild ride.

225

The highs are high, the lows are low, as we really work to get two ultimately launching people, which is going to be amazing.

226

Plus 40.

227

It is not impossible just because it's far beyond what has been done before.

228

We've proved that time and time again.

229

Plus 50.

230

Full duration.

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163 sentences

Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This video has 230 sentences and 2655 words to shadow. The speech runs for 24:31. The speaker talks slowly, about 108 words per minute, so there is time to copy every sound. 84% 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

15 less common words from the video, with pronunciation and meaning:

booster /ˈbustɚ/ (noun) — Something that boosts.
rocket /ˈɹɑk.ɪt/ (noun) — A cylindrical projectile that can be fired to a great height through combustion, (specifically) a type of firework of this form, typically exploding with light…
static /ˈstæt.ɪk/ (adjective) — Unchanging; that cannot or does not change.
orbit /ˈɔɹ.bɪt/ (noun) — An elliptical movement of an object about a celestial object or Lagrange point, especially a periodic elliptical revolution.
successfully /səkˈsɛs.fə.li/ (adverb) — In a successful manner; with success; without failing.
boost /buːst/ (verb) — To lift or push from behind (one who is endeavoring to climb); to push up.
liquid /ˈlɪk.wɪd/ (noun) — A substance that is flowing, and keeping no shape, such as water; a substance of which the molecules, while not tending to separate from one another like those…
objective /ɒbˈd͡ʒɛk.tɪv/ (noun) — A material object that physically exists.
poll /poʊl/ (noun) — A survey of people, usually statistically analyzed to gauge wider public opinion.
operator /ˈɑpəˌɹeɪtɚ/ (noun) — A person or organisation that operates a device, system, service, etc.
minus /ˈmaɪ.nəs/ — Made less or reduced by (followed by an expression of number or quantity).
infrastructure /ˈɪnfɹəˌstɹʌkt͡ʃə/ (noun) — An underlying base or foundation for a building, organization, or system.
priority /pɹaɪˈɒɹɪti/ (noun) — An item's relative importance.
physics /ˈfɪz.ɪks/ (noun) — The branch of science concerned with the study of the properties and interactions of space, time, matter and energy.
hardware /ˈhɑɹdˌwɛɹ/ (noun) — Fixtures, equipment, fasteners, tools, and devices used for general-purpose construction and repair of a structure or object. Also such equipment as sold as…

Phrasal verbs you will hear

take out (verb) — To remove.
kick out (verb) — To eject, dismiss, expel, or forcefully remove (someone or something).
put on /ˌpʊt ˈɒn/ (verb) — To don (clothing, equipment, or the like).
bring together (verb) — To cause people to do something together; to bring about togetherness.
close out (verb) — To terminate; to call the end of.
come from (verb) — To have as one's origin, birthplace or nationality.
deal with (verb) — To handle verbally or in some form of artistic expression; to address or discuss as a subject.
do for (verb) — To doom; to bring about the demise of someone; to injure or harm someone.

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 45 contractions and reduced forms, such as we're, we've, you're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “th” sounds: theoretical /ˌθi.əˈɹɛt.ɪ.kəl/, throttle /ˈθɹɔ.tl̩/
The “sh” and “zh” sounds: essentially /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/, sheet /ʃit/, shake /ˈʃeɪk/, interaction /ˌɪn.təˈɹæk.ʃən/, explosion /ɛkˈsploʊ.ʒən/
Long words — get the stress right: successfully /səkˈsɛs.fə.li/, operator /ˈɑpəˌɹeɪtɚ/, infrastructure /ˈɪnfɹəˌstɹʌkt͡ʃə/, priority /pɹaɪˈɒɹɪti/, capability /ˌkeɪ.pəˈbɪl.ɪ.ti/

How to practise with this video

Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
Shadow it sentence by sentence at normal speed, repeating each one until your rhythm matches the speaker.
Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like booster, rocket, static.

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	we've ever seen · we've built · We've never built
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	was hurt · been done · be determined
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	ship which is · salvageable, which is · beyond, which is

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 technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

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