Comment by rnk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rnk | Hacker News Reader

I've been trying to figure out if launching from boca chica is going to be a continuing thing for years, or will they transition to Florida when it stops blowing up so much and transitions into regular launches? I haven't found any details about the long term vision of the boca chica site. My speculation is they will need 3-5+ years of test launches from there as they test out their extensive technology road map before they reach some near operational level (landing starships, turning it around, being a fuel carrier, refueling, then the landing tests for the moon, and much longer term mars development). But when that happens, will they make commercial launches from there? There aren't that many places to do that in the US, Florida of course, what about the New Mexico space port, or Vandenburg? Hawaii, some southern US ocean site?

I've thought about buying (or maybe renting) one of the huge number of cheapo condos there so I could watch some of these launches. I could even imagine working from there remotely instead of sitting at home watching on the net

Unless some plans have drastically changed, the idea with Starship is to launch a lot from many locations on Earth.

Recent reports mention Gwynne Shotwell describing the factory being built at Starbase as capable of producing around 3 Starships per week. If such a factory works for a year (which doesn't look like a long time for a factory) that's ~150 Starships. 150 Starships each have a chance to launch about twice a year if the launches are daily.

Surely numbers should be modified, some of them don't look right. First, we are probably going to have (way) more than 150 Starships. Second, a Starship is likely going to fly (way) more than twice a year. It's not a Space Shuttle after all. Next, what about those plans - Moon flights, which need refueling on low Earth orbit; Mars flights which need the same; all other flights - like orbital stations, sending probes to planets, space telescopes; finally, business class-like suborbital hops for passengers on Earth?

All of that requires a lot of places to launch Starships. Unless some plans drastically scaled down, it seems like we'll have to see an industry for launchpads growing and prospering in the near future.

And how would that work exactly? they had to redesign the entire launchpad just to hopefully be able to sustain starship.

Let's say you go down in london (originally they thought basically a generic spacesport would let you, which is no longer the case).

You'd need their entire boca chica infrastructure to fly that again...

Yes, suborbital passenger transportation looks least clear now :) .

Maybe the Boca Chica launchpad will get modified/improved to be more compact. It's still at early stages of design/use, so maybe significant improvements could be added. Particularly given that the last redesign took less than half a year.

E.g., a wall around the pad, say, with diameter of ~100 meters and a significant height, would likely protect environment from steam, gas, particles and noise to some degree.

So the question with the word "exactly" doesn't have answer right now.

Yeah but what do you do about the 33 engines that literally blasted the floor off lol

> what do you do about the 33 engines that literally blasted the floor off

Worry about it when that’s the priority problem. Tackling that now is like designing blast pads before you have commercial jet liners.

I expect once they finish iterating on the boca launch site and infrastructure and it works perfectly, they will then have their template they can duplicate anywhere in the world. Like starship itself, it will be complex, but easy to mass produce

I assume a Starship could be shipped on a ship if need be?

Or the assembly line could be in a ship itself

what is more likely to happen is that they have 15x Launches for one mission, due to all the refueling needs. all these launches happen in rapid iteration from one to 3 pads over 1, 2 or 3 days. the. everything sits silent for a few weeks to a month. repeat 10 to 20 times a year.

As a satellite launcher, Starship would be incredibly cheap on shared payloads, and refueling would not be necessary there.

The Florida Starship factories and launch sites are in progress but watchers (NasaSpaceFlight channel) have reported things going on hold recently as Boca Chica makes changes.

My presumption is BC will be R&D-ish and FL PRD-ish with Vandenburg coming online after FL. If I had to bet, I'd bet on FL being where the first crewed Starship launches but BC where that vehicle class is launched first.

As a result I think the tempo in BC will be more irregular than FL where two Falcon launches in a week aren't rare.

Initially they seemed to aim to make Starbase a primary launch site on par with KSC. However, since the bureaucracy has been proving to be ridiculous (as is the case with most American megaprojects these days), they appear to have shifted towards treating it as the R&D location with KSC being the primary site for operational launches.

Some say "bureaucracy" some say "balance of priorities between the environment, local residents, and private enterprise". Elon's envisioned a dozen+ starship launches per day -- there are tens of thousands of people (and a wildlife refuge) near the Boca Chica site that rightly have a say in whether that's a good idea.

One of the bigger problems that environmental organizations have no sense of proportion. They flip out over some chunks of concrete from the launchpad, while four-wheekers are running all over the same mudflats. Seriously, they need to put a sock in it.

Also current generation rockets burn up in the atmosphere. Starship will be fully reusable! Surely they want that!?

I'd say it's pretty obvious what the activist's motivations are when they're citing risk to endangered species which haven't been seen in the area for 40 years in their lawsuits on why they're opposed to the launch site.

Boca Chica is just for testing, afaik.

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