#^Starship program laying groundwork for huge facilities in Texas and Florida
SpaceX is busy creating launch and production capacity for the future of its Starship program, focusing on huge Gigabays at both Starbase in Texas and Roberts Road in Florida.
To cater for this future production cadence, SpaceX’s launch sites for Starship are also a focus of its attention, with the second pad at Starbase making solid progress, while activity at the Starship site at KSC’s 39A is now in full swing.
Demolition For GigabaySee Also
Demolition crews have been slowly taking High Bay apart piece by piece. Recently, crews have been cutting the steel panels off the sections to lower the risk of the wind grabbing a section after it has been cut off, thus making it a sail. It will take a few more weeks to fully dismantle the High Bay before crews can break up the concrete foundation.
While dismantling High Bay, the Stargate building was also demolished. This went much quicker as it was only two stories at most and could just be crushed by an excavator.
Once taken down, the scrap steel was loaded into dumpsters and moved off-site for recycling. With the Stargate building gone, crews started breaking up its concrete foundation.
High Bay Demolition With B14 in Mega Bay 1 (Credit: Jack Beyer for NSF)
The final piece that needs to be demolished is the Starfactory wedge, which has been cut off with a new wall built inside the factory. So far, demolition has yet to start, but it’s the last piece before the concrete entrance to the ringyard gets destroyed. Of course, all of this demolition is for the Gigabay that will be built in Starbase.
Roberts Road and LC-39AThere is now better information on how the Gigabays will be laid out at the Space Coast. This can be seen by looking at the layout of the pilings. With the pilings, the 24 separate workstations can be seen, each looks to have a wall between them, likely for installing work platforms to cover the vehicle at said workstation. There will be four rows of six stations with two transfer aisles.
Gigabay Foundation and Starfactory Area at Roberts Road (Credit: Max Evans for NSF)
SpaceX had mentioned 400-ton bridge cranes, which would be a massive upgrade over the 180-ton cranes currently in Mega Bays 1 and 2. SpaceX could lay out a set of cranes in a few different ways. One likely outcome could be like the Vehicle Assembly Building, where there is a 350-ton crane for each pair of high bays and a crane in the transfer aisle. These would work in tandem to lift the Saturn V, Shuttle, and SLS sections.
The Gigabay layout would then consist of a 400-ton crane for every two stations and a smaller crane spanning each transfer aisle. If SpaceX did this setup, it would mean 12,400-ton bridge cranes.
This setup would allow them to move any vehicle into each station and do horizontal-to-vertical or vertical-to-horizontal break-over lifts inside the transfer aisles without needing a smaller mobile crane to be inside the bay. It will take a while before this bay rises, but it will be a massive leap in the program’s manufacturing and servicing.
The orbital launch mount for Starship’s first launch pad in Florida is under construction. (Credit: Max Evans for NSF)
The area cleared next to the Gigabay will likely be for the Roberts Road Starfactory, which is set to be 50 percent larger than the one built in Starbase, at 1.5 million square feet in floor space. This doesn’t need the extensive pilings and foundation as the Gigabay, but there should be some decent progress over the next several months.
The Orbital Launch Mount (OLM) at Roberts Roads is currently several months behind the OLM at Starbase for Pad B. However, with this being the second one that SpaceX is building, things should go faster with the experience of already having nearly finished one. So far, there is no sign of the third level of the OLM, which is the water-cooled steel deck.
There is also no sign of the Flame Buckets at Roberts Road. These might be under construction inside Hanagar M at Cape Canaveral Space Force Base. If so, they will likely not be seen until both are rolled to LC-39A for installation.
The Starship Pad at LC-39A has made significant progress in the last few weeks, with most of the sheet piles installed for the flame trench. This is only the first step of many to get this flame trench to where the one at Pad B is currently. Crews still need to install tiebacks to help secure the sheet piles before digging them out and exposing the pilings.
Starship Launch Pad Progress at LC-39A with Flame Trench Sheet Piles Installed (Credit: Max Evans for NSF)
SpaceX has also destroyed almost all of the older Starship stuff that had been built up a few years ago. The expectation is that the setup currently being constructed for Pad B at Starbase will be built at LC-39A. This refers to the water deluge tank farm, the horizontal tanks, the pumps, and the subcooler setup.
Starbase Pad BPad B at Starbase has seen significant progress recently with the rollout and installation of the pair of Flame Buckets. These, along with the ridge that will sit between them, will bear the full force of 33 Raptor engines on lift off. These are constructed of many pipes that are welded together with holes drilled into them so that water can spray out at high pressure, counteracting the Booster’s exhaust and cooling the trench simultaneously.
Pad B OLM at Sanchez along with the Flame Buckets before both Rolled to the Launch Site (Credit: Jack Beyer for NSF)
Along with the buckets’ installation, the flame trench walls are also being filled with concrete, as the main vertical walls are nearly completed and the ramps are now under construction. Recently, the legs that will hold the OLM arrived at the launch site, and their design points to the top deck of the mount being flush with the top deck of the gantry.
The legs have the same bolt pattern that is currently on the construction posts at Sanchez, which points to the OLM possibly being removable in the future for major maintenance. This would be a massive change compared to Pad A, which has its OLM welded to its six legs.
The mount itself is about to progress even further as the hold-down arms for the Booster are starting to show up. It is still unclear when the mount will be ready for rollout and when the flame trench will be ready to receive it.
Featured Image: Pad B Flame Trench on April 11th Before the Install of the Flame Buckets (Credit: Jack Beyer for NSF. For L2 members, there are 100s of hi res downloadable photos from each flyover, from Starbase, to KSC, to McGregor, and more – for the past several years. Join L2 and support NSF via the banner below)
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Starship program laying groundwork for huge facilities in Texas and Florida appeared first on
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