if you were an engineer in uh in mission control this on monday morning um how would you be feeling about this flight

yeah well of course there's always a trepidation especially before you get moving into the flight once you're into the flight you have your adrenaline and you're looking for the next milestone and it kind of all happens very quickly and you don't have a lot of time then at that point to kind of speculate on what's going on or get yourself too nervous about it.

Most of the nerves are before the flight actually happens.

And then during the flight, you're just so busy looking at things.

You're looking at the data.

You know what to expect.

And is that data coming back? Is the vehicle looking like you expected it to look at this point in the flight? What are the changes? What are things that you weren't anticipating at this point? And so you're kind of comparing all of that mentally in your mind.

And do you think NASA is a little less anxious after seeing Starship's performance on Monday?

Is, is that what you said? Tell us a bit about what that is.

So the engineers will sit down before the mission even flies and say, "What are the most likely things to go wrong, and, and how would they present themselves?" So it's kind of like a doctor can maybe go through and, and look at your lab test and, and look at how you're telling him how you feel, and, uh, maybe examine yourself.

And of course, with our spacecraft, uh, except for nowadays, of course, with cameras, for the most part previously we were never able to actually look at the spacecraft.

So we'd go through all of those steps and say, "Is this working? Is that working? If this isn't working, what is the major reason or, or most probable reason that, uh, that would not be working on board the spacecraft?" And then you would go down to the next step and say, "Okay, uh, from that step then, uh, what would we wanna look at next to try to figure out," say, for instance, if you're not getting the batteries to charge properly, um, you could say, "Okay, well, maybe it's the, uh, the solar panels aren't pointed properly to the sun." And so you'd look at, uh, what is the orientation of the spacecraft with respect to the sun, and do we then expect that the solar panels should be, uh, getting enough power to charge the batteries.

And then is there a problem with the batteries? Is something turned on that's not supposed to be on, uh, and it has, uh, you know, killed the battery.

We left the car lights on, and, uh, so now the battery doesn't have the proper charge in it.

And so, um, you go through each step and you say, "Is this working or is it not working?" Yeah, so like I say, they put that all together before the mission even happens, and, uh, so then they can walk through that fault tree analysis and, you know, come to a final conclusion about what went wrong.

You know, once you do figure out what went wrong, how do you fix it? It's in space [laughs].