SpaceX reveals the grand extent of its starport plans in South Texas

To be fair, "Elon time" for the first orbital Starship launch was 2020. Shotwell was saying that she would bet yes on an orbital Starship in 2021.

I think "Shotwell" time is generally much closer to 1:1 time than Elon time.

But I agree, Starship has a fairly plausible path to being orbital by the end of the year.

> At the rate SpaceX is moving at, they may have the world's largest orbital launch system by the end of the year.

Bit late for that. Falcon Heavy is already the world largest orbital lanunch system.

Actually, it will be the world largest orbital system ever. And on of the biggest flying machines in human history. Easily the most powerful.

As mentioned at the bottom of the article it’s super cool he’s trying to rename the entire area into a city.

Additional source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-02/musk-floa...

I know this is a digression, but can you expand on the checkpoints a bit? Are there actually random roadblocks within 100 miles of the border where you get stopped and need to provide proof of residency or citizenship?

Just curious as a Canadian.

South Padre may be 4 miles away as the crow flies, but it's a one hour drive due to the lack of bridges over the Brownsville harbour.

One of Elon main points was that you can't have all these ships built in clean rooms by PhDs.

You need a large number of workers, who can weld, move stuff around install stuff onto the rocket.

The most difficult to produce things, like the engine will be delivered.

There will still be a lot of engineers required, but maybe not as much as you would traditionally think.

There is also already a fair amount of heavy industry there so, its not like they are going to some total backwater.

Not sure about checkpoints, but gmaps shows it is 4 hour drive to San Antonio.

Fly them from somewhere else?

When launching rockets, you generally want two things:

1. Open ocean east from your site, because launching to the east adds velocity - this is the direction in which the Earth rotates, so free speed for you; and ocean is better than land, because no one lives on the ocean and the nearby waters can be closed during launches. If you launch over the sea and anything goes wrong with your rocket during ascent, at least it won't crash on anybody's head and home.

(Russians can afford launching over land, because the steppe is thinly populated and they had no qualms removing the nomads from around Baikonur.)

2. To be as close to equator as possible, because the boost that you get from Earth's rotation is multiplied by cosine of your latitude.

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That is why the French are so happy to have French Guyana. In the contiguous U.S., you only have two states that are suitable: Florida and Texas, both pretty far south and with open sea east of them. That is why the Kennedy Space Center is in Florida.

But real estate in Florida is more expensive than that in Texas and building a new cosmic base there would not only cost money, but bring hassle with the locals because it means sonic booms in the proximity of cities and villages.

Boca Chica is ideally suited for this purpose, fairly cheap land and not much population to speak of.

> political capital of bringing 'space jobs' to the middle of nowhere

Middle of nowhere is a non charitable as well as non accurate characterization of the area. South Texas and Brownsville are huge in the oil and gas industry. The number and quality of industrial, large structure welders available made the area very intriguing from that perspective alone I wager.

In fact the facility as it exists today is actually quite benign; you should visit if you haven't. It's literally right off the road down there. You can almost touch Starhopper through the fence.

Canaveral is evidence that sensitive wetland in a state park is a great place to build a rocket launch facility. Rocket launch pads have huge keep out zones, and those zones are monitored a lot more closely and effectively than any other state park. Poaching sea turtles from Boca Chica would not be a safe activity.

I'm sure it's a factor, but they are also situated at the lowest possible latitude in the lower 48 states (it's right on the Mexican border), which is important for orbital launch efficiency.

Like Washington, Oregon, Michigan or NY?

Isn't the latitude the most important characteristic?

If you add the massive Starship+SuperHeavy in for scale, it looks even smaller.

https://twitter.com/Caspar_Stanley/status/136834862870895001...

Closeness to the water is a requirement so that if a rocket fails it doesn't land on people. And you don't want to launch to the West so that you can take advantage of the Earth's rotation rather than fighting it. (Launch sites on the West coast are for polar orbits which launch either North or South).

Given those requirements, there's no location that isn't vulnerable to hurricanes. Boca Chica actually doesn't get many hurricanes compared to Florida or further North on the Texas coast.

By design, launch pads (and landing pads) will be more compatible with varying sea level than most other structures.

Pads are generally flooded with water on every launch, starting shortly before the engines ignite. The water deluge system absorbs some of the energy of the rocket exhaust -- this reduces damage to both the pad and the rocket (from reflected sound).

"What is striking about this architectural drawing is its compact nature, largely because SpaceX has limited land to work with at the facility and must include stormwater ponds to mitigate against flooding."

Not sure it is any worse than KSC in terms of proximity to danger water.

Being on the cost is also nice because eventually they'll ship/fly the ships to the converted oil rig launch facilities.

I'm thinking maybe the solution would be simple as they'll just need to raise the platform and other areas by building up. The mostly empty land is not used for anything and allows for explosions without causing harm to people, they can be under water (maybe). You can raise the roads going to the platform too.

Yeah, it’s a real concern (at high tide, the area around it is flooded), but SpaceX has traditionally addressed such things with a “we’ll just rebuild or adapt if/when that happens.” They built a huge, thin-gauge horizontal assembly building right on the old crawlerway at LC39A in Florida right by the launch pad. It could well be destroyed if a fully Fueled Falcon Heavy (or Starship) explodes or if a Cat 5 hurricane gives it a direct hit. Unlike the more hardened historic VAB that NASA uses. But SpaceX built it quickly and cheaply and it has stood for most of a decade already, so it seems to have been a fairly good decision so far.

They will truck in thousands of load of soil to build it up. The production site is probably in greater danger of flooding at the moment.

There is the "Integration Tower" structure at the south side next to the new orbital launch pad. If the plan is to catch and re-fly then that would make sense.

Why would they? It lands under thrust like the Falcons, with two major differences:

1. it goes back to its launch area rather than merely going down as the Falcons do (why the Falcons need to land on a ship)

2. it's too heavy to get enough air resistance by falling vertically like the Falcons, so it does this amazing belly flop with a "flip and burn" at the last moment

If they do that, it'll probably be a couple of miles away at the old natural gas well site they own. That's where they're putting an oxygen purification stack.

I think that plant is just for oxygen and nitrogen (plus the bonus argon for the welders.) Somebody did a calculation that showed that the number of truckloads of methane needed to power the plant was substantially less then the number of truckloads of oxygen that would otherwise be needed.

Do you really want a fuel plant next to a launch site?