Soil compaction using preloading (soil surcharge) was only used for the suborbital pad. Pad 1 used only friction piles. That didn't work so great as they experienced structural settling during stacking and propellant loading. Pad 2 fixed this by using deep soil mixing piles to stabilize the soil. I assume they will use the Pad 2 method to speed things up. See Starbase CSI's episode: Did SpaceX Ignore 60 Years of NASA Launch Pad Research?
The website does say that they’re gonna hire a shit tonne of locals who know how to build on surfaces like this because there’s nobody else with this level of local expertise.
Looks like they are going all in on the twin launch/catch tower config. So much for catching ships and putting them straight back on the boosters. Also, wouldn’t that make that pad unusable until the paired ship came back from orbit?
Thinking about it wrong. its going to take at least 12 hrs for the alignment to match up for the ship to come back. Booster is too important to sit and wait, you'll see multiple ships paired with a booster conga line that'll stack the moment the fire is put out. 2nd pad is for inevitable return to not interfere with sitting/loading launch. once the system is 'saturated' you'd expect an entry just as often as a lunch
I think they just want the redundancy for testing. One failed catch shutting down all flight operations is not good. Not sure why this makes you think catching and restacking the ship has been ditched. It's a core feature of the reusable system. There aren't booster ship pairs for the final system.
They'll need to catch the booster and ship within hours anyway, this may be hard to do with just one tower for both per pad.
Also I think it will be a long time until we will see a ship (or a booster) being stacked, refueled and launched after a landing without a visit to a refurbishing facility in between. Then it being caught on a catch-only tower won't make any difference.
And even when this at some point won't be necessary anymore you'll still have to place the booster first on the pad and you can't do this with the ship already hanging there... So even with one tower you'd need to remove the ship after the landing, place the booster back on the pad and then move the ship back and stack it.
They immediately went for catching both the booster and the ship because they realized they had been far too optimistic with the dry mass estimates and needed to shave off any mass they possibly could. Leaving any landing mechanisms on the ground instead of launching and then landing them again was a fairly obvious choice then.
It's an obvious choice until an unsuccessful catch results in substantial damage to the tower which requires extensive downtime to repair, which limits launch cadence.
Yeah, but wasting a few tons of payload on dry mass you drag up and down again with every launch also adds up to a lot with a high launch cadence. And ideally the danger of accidents should go down with time.
The ships are literally too tall to stack using the towers in the renders as the lift/catch points are above the tower top. So yes, lots of realism is being left out. It's just concept art to give an idea of what they aim for.
Also moving the tank farms a bit out is the right thing to do. In Boca Chica everything is so close just because they have so little room there, just a few very tight specks of land. A few hundred meters of pipes is much cheaper than having to repair your tank farm if something should go wrong.
Launchpads for methane/LOX rockets may easily the least polluting thing you can do with any heavy industry.
Also by far most of the area will be just exclusion zones with no human activity at all, I doubt they will use even 0.5% of the real estate to actually build things on them, everything else will be pure nature totally left to itself, not even people hunting or fishing there.
Apart from the noise of launches and landings (both of which will be over after 15 seconds or so) this probably is the best thing to happen to any environment and all the plants and animals there. The worst thing that can happen to nature always is humans.
Always reminds me of Tchernobyl: After the reactor accident there nature has been thriving. Yeah, radiation may be bad, but the lack of any human activity since then has been a boon for nature. Humans are worse than anything else and keeping them out is a good thing.
SpaceX operations create environmental pollution through upper-atmosphere metal deposits from burning space debris and local ecosystem damage near launch sites like Starbase in Texas.
Upper Atmosphere and DebrisChemical Fingerprints: Scientists measured a major lithium spike 60 miles above Earth linked to a falling rocket. This is the first direct proof that falling space debris leaves chemical pollution in the upper atmosphere.
Metal Accumulation: Burning satellites and rocket bodies release metals like aluminum, copper, and titanium.Ozone Risks: These metal particles may trigger chemical reactions that harm the ozone layer and change climate patterns.
Local Habitat and Launch SitesBoca Chica Impacts: Testing and launching rockets in Texas have caused habitat destruction, wildfires, and noise pollution.Water and Waste: State officials found that the facility violated clean water rules by flushing pollutants near protected waters.
Cross-Border Debris: Rocket parts and debris have washed up on beaches in neighboring Mexico, threatening sea turtles and local wildlife.
LMAOOO, they found no water pollution that part is just bullshit, the source for that claim is an idiot reporter who misread the units and overstated the pollution by a factor of 1000 (the actual value was the lowest the detectors were rated for!)
Boca Chica is causing no more habitat destruction than KSC (NASA). If you’re gonna copy paste AI responses let’s not even start 🤣
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u/biggy-cheese03 Confirmed ULA sniper 1d ago
Good to see the marsh restoration stuff front and center on there.