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SpaceX Chooses Texas Site For Private Spaceport
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.
I'm waiting for a 3rd one about full-body armoured combat suits.
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And about as close to the Equator as he could get in the Continental US.
Yeah, but just think - REAL illegal aliens.
... as well.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
the most southernmost point in US is on the big island of hawaii.
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?
nah, the huge island of plastic trash got wedged between california & hawaii. you can now walk to hawaii.
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.
Wikipedia says "With only a few thousand residents, South Padre Island has consistently drawn between 80,000 and 120,000 spring breakers." Is it likely that a Range Safety Officer will recommend against launches during all of the common Spring Break weeks?
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.
SPI is north of the launch site and will probably be immune from any potential hazards of a launch. Boca Chica beach however is east of the launch site and will be closed for the day up to and for a while after every launch.
The modest benefit of being slightly closer to the equator is far outweighed by the additional logistics cost and complexity.
^ I'm going to save everyone the trouble of clicking that and just let you know ahead of time that it's SPAM.
These $20M are good for SpaceX, but why are they good to the taxpayers of Texas? This feels like the "incentives" provided to sports teams where somehow the projected benefits to other local businesses never materialize.
and building substantially more infrastructure. The economics does not support building a spaceport there.
And that's even before you figure in the administrative costs of dealing with all the corruption.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
If I'm not mistaken, this is the third place SpaceX is going to be building lots of infrastructure at. What advantage could this site possibly have over Cape Canaveral?
Yeah, that's what I was wondering. Is this some dealmaking? I'm sure we will never know, but it seems to make sense.
I want to see the Horizontal launch facilities. :)
build cargo rockets that splash down in the sea. Even the N. Koreans can build rockets that splashdown in the sea.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Racism
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
And not much farther by truck from McGregor (near Waco), where they already have a cozy little shack.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Which, presumably, is why OP mentioned CONTINENTAL United States.
Note also that "most southernmost" is redundant. You don't want to be referred to the Department of Redundancy Department, do you?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
The big deal isn't the amount of extra orbital velocity you get from the equator, it's the inclination of the resultant orbit - inclination changes *really* cut into your delta-V budget, so if you're launching into an uninclined orbit you really want to be doing it from the equator coz otherwise you have to expend a lot of fuel correcting your inclination.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Kids theses days. Don't even remember Gordon Shumway.
Or Mork or Scott Hayden for that matter.
Not saying that's necessarily a bad thing.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The big deal isn't the amount of extra orbital velocity you get from the equator, it's the inclination of the resultant orbit - inclination changes *really* cut into your delta-V budget, so if you're launching into an uninclined orbit you really want to be doing it from the equator coz otherwise you have to expend a lot of fuel correcting your inclination.
Partly true-- but orbital inclination changes get easier the higher you go. It's hard to launch into low equatorial orbit from high latitudes... but nobody goes to low equatorial orbit. The higher it is, the more impulse you're putting into simply getting altitude, and the less impulse is needed for plane change.
If you're launching from the surface, the delta-V for the plane change to get an geosynchronous orbit into the equatorial plane is remarkably small.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
1) can't launch to polar orbit.
They have the pad at SLC-4 at Vandenberg to launch to polar orbits.
http://www.space.com/23023-spa...
And there's not much in the way of large commercial satellites in polar orbit anyway-- it's the GEO comsat market they're after with this launch site, I think.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
With regards to the flyout path and where and how to land the boosters:
The ocean is pretty neat in that you can put a barge or oil platform where you need it.
Waves won't give you a stable thing to approach, but perhaps really big a 6DOF table on the barge will.
This might permit flying the tail into a stablized ring with holding clamps to grab the launch hold down hard points.
The hard points would now do double duty so there may be a better compromise design for how they work.
The ring doesn't have to be stable, but can cooperate with the vehicle guidance to get the clamps in the best position to operate.
This seems something better attempted first on land with a small vehicle.
(Even though the experiments with real vehicles are free except for the lost payload due to extra fuel.)
Looking forward to seeing this economically fundamental infrastructure actually work.
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.
It's not redundant. Ggp claimed Texas is the southernmost. Well, Hawaii is more southernmost than Texas. Also, geospeaking, they are the same continent.
Wrong. Key Largo, Florida is more than 54 minutes south of Boca Chica, Texas
Key Largo is farther south, but I don't think it was ever an option. So Boca Chica is as far south as he can get.
"most southernmost" was the redundancy being referenced. It shouldn't need an explanation as to why it's redundant.
No, they are not on the same continent, geologically speaking. Perhaps you should brush up on where the tectonic plate boundaries are. Big hint: there's one running down the West Coast, which is between Texas and Hawaii. It was already pointed out that "continental" was a key word, which you have now ignored twice in order to claim your statement wasn't completely incorrect.
Damn, and I'm all out of Sudafed.
whatever. key facts: 1) hawaii is really far south 2) hawaii is part of the united states 3) hawaii has extensive access to sealanes 4) hawaii has a large population of people in the military 5) buzz aldrin landed in hawaii from the moon.
so it has all the connections to america, space, and cargo that you could want. nuff said?
have you ever even been to hawaii??
Hawaii is typically "assigned" to the American continent. Unless you think it belongs in a different part of the world??? Is the island of manhattan not part of the American continent??? somebody better call the new Yorkers and have them surrender their passports!
Sure Boca Chica has the latitude, but I think the Navy's still using it.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Hawaii has more free land per resident than any state, so it makes since as a development place. If they built their station in NYC all the launches would be in the city!