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SpaceX Chooses Texas Site For Private Spaceport

Posted by Unknown on from the to-the-moon dept.

AcidPenguin9873 (911493) writes Today, Texas Gov. Rick Perry and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced that SpaceX has chosen a site at Boca Chica Beach, Texas, as the location where SpaceX will build its rocket launch facility. The Boca Chica site, at the southern tip of Texas near Brownsville and South Padre Island, had been competing with sites in Florida, Georgia, and Puerto Rico, but had been named the frontrunner to land the site by Musk when he testified to the Texas state legislature in 2013. The spaceport will be the first privately-owned vertical rocket launch facility in the world, and will target commercial customers. State and local governments have pledged to provide a total of about $20 million in incentives to attract SpaceX to the site.

4 of 113 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Port facilities + cheap land by Noah+Haders · · Score: 2, Informative

    the most southernmost point in US is on the big island of hawaii.

  2. Re:How much cheaper would a a puerto rico launch b by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Informative

    For a while i suspected he would choose Puerto Rico for the extra benefit of being a little closer to the equator. How much of a difference in the cost of launching exist between these two locations?

    The big problem with Puerto Rico is the lack of industrial infrastructure. Nearly every part will need to travel by ship or air freight. The Texas site is five hours by truck from Houston, the fourth largest city in America.

  3. Re:How much cheaper would a a puerto rico launch b by gman003 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Not too much - it's one of those exponential curves that's shallow near the equator but steep near the poles.

    Escape velocity is 11,186m/s. The ISS is at 7,650m/s. Keep those numbers in mind for a sense of scale..

    At the equator, you get an extra 465m/s of velocity. At the poles, you get zero.

    Boca Chica Village is at 25N. If I did my trig right, you'll get 420m/s of "free" velocity from a launch there.

    For more comparison, Canaveral (28N) gets 410m/s, Wallops (38N) gets 365m/s, and Baikonur (46N) gets 320m/s of boost.

    San Juan, Puerto Rico, is at 18N, which would get you 440m/s. A 20m/s difference, at the cost of shipping your rockets and payloads across the ocean, and building substantially more infrastructure. The economics does not support building a spaceport there.

  4. Re:How much cheaper would a a puerto rico launch b by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Not too much - it's one of those exponential curves that's shallow near the equator but steep near the poles.

    Sinusoidal, to be pedantic.