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Comment by servo_sausage | Hacker News Reader

If one pad is the bottleneck, and the goal is to ramp up to be a spacex competitor, then build more than one...

Falcon has shown the playbook, and the demand for launch... The goal should be 2-4 launch sites in the medium term; with a second site very early to avoid exactly this.

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Until recently, SpaceX only acquired new pads because they needed a completely new launch site (SLC-4 in Vandenberg) or needed to launch a vehicle that their existing pad(s) didn't support (Falcon Heavy for LC-39A, Starship for Pad A in Boca Chica/Starbase). Currently, Blue Origin's only orbital launch vehicle is New Glenn, and their Vandenberg pad is still under construction.

Waiting until you need something and don’t have an easy replacement is how you end up with delays and bottlenecks.

Launch pads are not something you just buy on a whim to keep around just in case you need them. They're very expensive pieces of infrastructure that you only acquire when you have an actual, known need. That's how every launch provider that I know of behaves, including SpaceX.

I don't disagree at all, but I'm quite curious where the cost actually comes from. Even including all the harnessing and other hardware, it doesn't seem like something that should be a bank-breaker when we're casually talking about vehicles worth tens of millions of dollars blowing up, if not being discarded after a single launch.

If you’re NASA, the cost comes from a cost+ contract with an incompetent vendor.

If your Blue Origin, the cost comes from each launch complex being essentially bespoke and built on-site.

If you’re SpaceX, you plan ahead to use lego construction, mass produce the pieces, the tanks, etc in a factory setting, and assemble the pieces on-site for much less and much faster.

I'm guessing its a combination of needing to acquire a massive amount of land among a limited number of candidate locations and then layering logistical constraints on top of that.

Actually SpaceX is in the process of building multiple Starship launch pads in multiple locations with only an expected theoretical need.

SpaceX is "in the process" of a lot of things, not all of which pan out. So far the cases that have actually started serious construction are in Cape Canaveral, and will absolutely be necessary assuming Starship becomes operational (because the number of launches SpaceX is allowed to do from Starbase is limited).

Except that they are a competitor trying to catch up; it's not enough to follow what spacex did. They need to target where spacex will be when their own product is mature.

I was going to say this too. And since we're at it: does anyone know how many launch pads the Chinese private space companies have, combined?

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