51–60 of 91 posts
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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.
If the spaceport grows enough maybe they would fund a bridge or ferry!
It looks like a commercial harbor/causeway for largish oil/gas ships, so the bridge might be a ways off.
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Yeah, it's a thing. They're primarily in the 100 miles of the southern border, and generally you only get stopped if you have brown skin if you're worried about being a Canadian in the US. Check out the term "constitution free zone" if you want to learn more.
> you only get stopped if you have brown skin Maybe, though I think it's fair to point out a large number of CPB agents on the border also have brown skin, if for no other reason than they need a huge percentage of native Spanish speakers.
I wonder if Elon settled on Texas due to the local regulatory environment not really caring about the local ecology. The current site is built on a sensitive wetland literally in a state park. No clue how Elon managed that one, but it probably wouldn't have been kosher in a blue state. Local TX officials probably saw how the political capital of bringing 'space jobs' to the middle of nowhere outweighed local flora an…
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.
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Sure, but Starship wasn't going to be orbital in 2020 even without the pandemic. It was a wildly unrealistic estimate to begin with that characterizes "Elon time" as a concept. Starship development has been blindly fast, and even still is a maybe on getting to orbit this year. I just don't think the pandemic pushed their timeline back significantly. I could be wrong, but that's my take from the outside looking in
To be pedantic, it actually seems pretty likely the first stage could have reached LEO. There were no issues at all on ascent, and it has the fuel capacity. At one point Elon was talking about possibly testing this. But they decided not to do this, because their first priority was to get it to land, and they don't envision LEO launches using only the first stage. That will be in conjunction with the much larger secon…
I hadn't heard about that. I know he's said that the Starship is theoretically _capable_ of SSTO w/ no payload, but I don't recall any suggestion from him that he'd test it.
Elon says a lot of things though, and I probably just missed it somewhere. Any chance you know where/when he said it?
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Sure, but Starship wasn't going to be orbital in 2020 even without the pandemic. It was a wildly unrealistic estimate to begin with that characterizes "Elon time" as a concept. Starship development has been blindly fast, and even still is a maybe on getting to orbit this year. I just don't think the pandemic pushed their timeline back significantly. I could be wrong, but that's my take from the outside looking in
To be pedantic, it actually seems pretty likely the first stage could have reached LEO. There were no issues at all on ascent, and it has the fuel capacity. At one point Elon was talking about possibly testing this. But they decided not to do this, because their first priority was to get it to land, and they don't envision LEO launches using only the first stage. That will be in conjunction with the much larger secon…
The bragging rights of being the first to achieve SSTO seem too tempting for Musk to ignore.
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If you add the massive Starship+SuperHeavy in for scale, it looks even smaller. https://twitter.com/Caspar_Stanley/status/136834862870895001...
Hmm can they stack and fuel and launch multiple in parallel if the pads are so close?
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I'm generally inclined to give people a break on missing 2020 deadlines.
Sure, but Starship wasn't going to be orbital in 2020 even without the pandemic. It was a wildly unrealistic estimate to begin with that characterizes "Elon time" as a concept. Starship development has been blindly fast, and even still is a maybe on getting to orbit this year. I just don't think the pandemic pushed their timeline back significantly. I could be wrong, but that's my take from the outside looking in
My hot take was that they skydiver maneuver and landing flip would be the hardest part for starship. They've actually done that part perfectly three times now, but haven't fully nailed the landing bit.
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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.
Yeah, it's a thing. They're primarily in the 100 miles of the southern border, and generally you only get stopped if you have brown skin if you're worried about being a Canadian in the US. Check out the term "constitution free zone" if you want to learn more.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you add the massive Starship+SuperHeavy in for scale, it looks even smaller. https://twitter.com/Caspar_Stanley/status/136834862870895001...
Hmm can they stack and fuel and launch multiple in parallel if the pads are so close?
Basically, I think they want to keep up the testing cadence without having to delay things due to maintenance. They say in one of the applications that there will be no more than about 10-12 orbital launches from Boca Chica per year.
Quick question - since it's South Texas and I can see the Gulf of Mexico in the screenshot... isn't that a little close to the water? Not just maybe global warming + sea level rises but storm surge from hurricanes. Or is that not a concern? Anyone with more knowledge on the topic could share?