2020: starship launchpad live stream provided by fans 2021: falcon 9 oxygen tank live stream provided by fans

the LOX blobbing around is so soothing to watch, like a high tech lava lamp inside a mirror room.

I think something important to note is that in a failure scenario for anything rocket related, often you might only receive one or two frames of data after things "go wrong" where you see things like the vehicle yawing or engines exploding. Those few frames are *super* important to diagnosing what went wrong, which is why we've been recording the telemetry as far back as we've had rocketry. The challenge then becomes that if you encrypt the stream, you add another layer of potential for that data to become unusable. Take any block cipher, for example (most ciphers in use today are block ciphers). These ciphers could encrypt the stream, sure, BUT at the cost of only being able to encrypt blocks of size X, where X is the size of the cipher, so 256-bits for AES-256. With that in mind, it's entirely possible that if a vehicle fails fast enough there's the possibility that some of that telemetry that _would have been able to be sent otherwise_ no longer gets sent because we were waiting for a few extra bytes to add to the stream. That possibility alone may be enough to give the engineers at SpaceX pause before implementing encryption into the telemetry stream.

radio guys are like wizards. They point a stick at the sky and conjure things out of thin air

I'm always in awe at what people are capable of reverse engineering.

Spacex: suffering from popularity

Scott: "I'm just being a little silly now" Elon: "Good idea. Putting lasers in LOX tank for lightshow"

Now they need a picture of a QR-code for the "Never gonna give you up" UKposts video inside the tank.

I'm Scott Manly, spy safe

There's a lot of security though obscurity in space stuff. For good reason: if you lock your systems down too hard you risk denying legitimate access and it's not like you can go to the front panel on your satellite and hit the reset button. I played with satellite data for my Masters research. One satellite sent data that said "telemetry" but its owners refused to provide documentation so I reverse-engineered it. Used it to write a nice paper on long-term orbital changes (thus how long the satellite was in daylight each orbit) and how this correlated with the operating temperature of the satellite's systems.

As a radio amateur myself it makes me smile that someone who's specialist subject is rocket science is blown away by radio stuff.

Would be funny if they'd install an 'Oi! What are you looking at?!" sign in the next oxigen tank :D

6:34 "Look, this is obviously very cool." While showing a shot of the liquid oxygen.

This requires serious knowledge. Kudos to the hobbyists that did this

I can't be the only one who's reaction was: "oh look at those slosh baffles"

Don't really comment on UKposts videos that much, but boy are we lucky to have this man.

I love how all that work was done so we can watch "floating" Liquid Oxygen in space

Really incredible work with the decoding part! For the curious viewer: the "downconverter" mentioned about three and a half minutes in works in a far simpler manner than you might expect: multiplying two waves produces a new signal containing waves formed from the sum and difference of their frequencies (if you've ever heard of "beat frequencies", this is it!) After a special low-noise amplifier, the incoming signal is mixed with a local oscillator of just the right frequency to "translate" the signal into the appropriate range, which is then passed to the SDR.

SpaceX: *launching satellites into space* Scott Manley: "Do a barrel roll!"

*Smiles and nods politely as every word goes over my head*

The oxygen tank shots are always so pretty, always happy to see more

I never had the patience for that level of geekiness. It's really good that somebody does.

Finally some quality Liquid Oxygen tank footage

As a licensed amateur radio operator in the states, I must say Huzzah! to my fellow European hams.

Sending things unencrypted "because nobody is listening/viewing anyway" is quite common, or at least it was. I remember many years ago it was possible to watch links from US drones back to their base on normal geostationary satellites in Ku-band. You would see the video footage of them flying over enemy territory. I have been viewing it for a couple of afternoons, I think it was at 37.5W. That is, until someone boasted about this on the BBC and they showed it on a news show. That was the end of that fun, it became encrypted. I expect a similar change on this transmission.

The reason you don’t want a whole bunch of low values is that it’s hard to keep your clock synched. Basically “was that 77 low values or 78 low values?” If you get that number wrong, your bit stream ends up off by one and screws up your decode.

As a wise person once said "Everyone is a nerd for something" and its clear Scott is a sucker for spaceship minutiae and his enthusiasm is infectious.

Well done on decoding these complex extra terrestrial signals.

Amateur radio operators have been receiving spacecraft telemetry for decades.

9 flights/recoveries with the same rocket booster... that is just phenomenal 👏

Scott: Makes super cool video. My ADHD: *watches space photos cycling in the pc background*

Love your enthusiasm for this subject.

Thanks so much for this great video! Love the explanations and all the media. Excellent!

This seems like the most forward thinking reverse engineering I’ve seen.

A fantastic video from Scott. Those guys who found a way to find this info are brilliant, well done.

8:57 ....the most genuine and wholesome "I Love it" you'll probably ever hear lol

Well, I had just enough HF tech at university to know that I am not enough of a nerd for it. But this channel is awesome for the average space nerd, thx a lot Scott !

Seeing those images and plain text GPS telemetry from the Falcon, I thought "Scott Manley". :) Hats off to fellow hams.

Always great content. This was particularly fascinating news. Thanks.

Oh yess, I really like the view inside the tank. That is so satisfying to watch!

The very kinds of people that are attracted to your channel are the ones who are capable of building the stuff you can't. That is the real question.

2020: Texas tank watchers 2021: Europe LOX tank watchers

Great vid as always. This was super interesting, so thanks for bringing this to my attention, because I had not heard about this SpaceX stream hack at all.

Keep the good content coming Scott!

I've been playing with images NOAA and METEOR sats for a while, If you've never done it, it's really cool to see a live image beamed from space to your own computer, but this is really impressive!

Awww yisss. A new Scott Manley video has dropped 🔥

Hi Scott. I work in the development of SDR radios, and to me it is fascinating that they were able to select the correct waveform to begin with, but I imagine it has to do with the fact that it is a standard one as you mentioned. That is good stuff!

Thanks for bringing it to our attention!!

It's somewhat reassuring to know that 'regular people' can do this and it's not completely isolated from public knowledge

I'd love to see them do this with a launch carrying a classified payload.

I can always count in Scott for great content. He never fails.

Insanely cool. Not just the LOX tank view, the RF hacking etc is awesome on its own. Put together, it's mind blowing.

Really neat project done by the thought emporium showing how to pull images from satellites using SDR, they also used the same hardware to make a camera that can see wifi

SDR is awesome, you used to need some pretty expensive hardware to listen to HF/VHF/UHF radio outside the usual commercial bands, but with SDR hardware and freely available software the whole radio spectrum is open, it's a nerd's paradise.

This is just as cool as decrypting the signal of weather sattelites and getting IR images from geosynchronous orbit. Awesome work!

I’m loving the Lego Saturn V in your background. I’ve got mine up on a shelf, but I wish I could have the launch structure next to it.

This brings to mind the Kettering group that figured out the telemetry from an early Luna spacecraft and beat the Soviets into print.

Blue origin guys never have to worry about this. Their rocket never goes out of sight, worst case you might need sunglasses 😂

Sometimes I am amazed how much free time some people have :D Keep up the good work anyway! This is amazing!

Scott you are the one person I'll come to to hear about this type of stuff. Sure, you're not an RF expert but you seem to know enough about a whole lot of things that the main point and passion is communicated well. Cheers

i'm expecting to see some sci-fi trivia wise-crack written on the inside of the tank

I've got a couple of SDR's, you can find some pretty interesting stuff with them.

Really glad you cover this stuff, because I can't be arsed to be on twitter

Thanks for all the great content! I wish you could do a video on how all spacecraft survive the extreme temperature differentials between +200 on their sunlit sides and -200 on their shaded sides. I’m amazed how the lunar equipment can function with a 400 degree difference in materials like that. I am not talking about the roll the command module did to and from the moon, I’m talking about every other device they used that was not rolled to even out temperatures while on the moon - the LEM, Rover, etc. I would also be interested seeing how the temps break right at the fine line between shadow and light in a vacuum - like zooming into that spot and examining the temperature transitioning between the two extremes!

It’s funny because sometimes they accidentally show the oxygen tank cameras during the live feed, but just for a couple of seconds.

My grandfather was a big-time ham radio nerd, with huge antennas strung between the trees on his acreage. He passed away in 2006, but I know he would have been all over this kind of thing.

Nice short 3 second intro, very thoughtful & smart, TY!

Great vid here Scott.......keep up the good work !

classified launches are gonna be more interesting

The liquid oxygen blobbing around is just hypnotic. That should be SpaceX pause video between engine events and payload deploy.

VERY interesting video, thanks Scott!

Awesome scott. Way to go keeping it real. We can always count on u

somehow dissepointed that the funny people at spaceX didn't already put a message in the lox tank.. 'if you can read this...'

if they set up in the ocean could they get fairing separation of a classified satellite deployment.

I LOVE the idea of the in tank laser show... structured laser light would actually ve amazing to analyze exactly what blobs are forming and when...

this crazy cool thnks man keep it live man

Wow, I know something that Scott Manley didn't know, what a downconverter is and how it works! Guess I really earned that Extra Class license last year. 73, Scott. DE KB8RVU.

The MMDS downconverter is just a mixer, I think. According to the specs, it injects a 2.3GHz signal and the received 2.6GHz frequency into a nonlinear device (like a set of diodes or transistor) to multiply the signals, essentially, and output the difference between the 2 frequencies at around 300MHz. This is called heterodyning! It can be used for down or upconversion, depending on the application.

I literally just learned about LFSR for use in aviation on transponders. Cool stuff!

RF engineer here. SDR tech is a lot of a fun for radio geeks. And Manley is correct, having the raw I-Q file (which I am sure is huge) is the easy part. Decoding the bits into a coherent information stream taking some chops. Kudos to the guys that figured it out.

The spirit of Bletchley Park lives on into the 21st century !

The nature of "space" transmissions makes encryption troublesome, think data parity and error correction. With unencrypted stream worst case you loose couple of pixels/data packets. With encrypted one you loose the whole data block unless you chop it into smaller chunks which affects in the end performance etc. Almost all civilian satellites are sending unencrypted data back to earth, you can easily decode NOAA, GOES, MetOP, Meteor, MetSat and the Chineese ones. When you think about it it's not like they are sending classified national security data, its bunch of numbers on equipment perfomance.

One of my favorites UKpostsrs

The O2 tank interior video reminds me of the Saturn test footage. Very cool.

Really surprized to see my radio receiver software (3:43) in a Scott Manley video lol

What's the name of your outro? Its so catchy

Scott's videos are the best !

Props to the people who did this. Seriously cool.

Scott wants to use a rocket's oxygen tank as the world's most expensive lava lamp 😄👍

When SpaceX first started launching the Falcon 9 they did occasionally show the vide in the O2 or fuel tank but stopped for whatever reason.

Mad props to you Scott! 😎

Thanks for posting Scott Manley. You Da Man! 👍

I expect they'll switch telemetry over to StarLink at some point, which should both improve the views, and restrict the access. I think there's also a market for on-orbit communications services that StarLink could potentially fulfill.

Amateur radio has been the basepoint of many technology advances. Ham operators always impress me.

This was just great fun to watch. Scott enjoyed it as well. I assume that is an empty tank after second burn.

Reassuring that such visibility is available to the engineering team, to get a feel for what goes on inside there in the various phases and manoeuvres.

What's that piece of what looks like foil floating past the camera at 0:34?

“up in the S-band” caught me by surprize

LOX tank cams are truly fascinating!!!

Thank you for your work!