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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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
1) don't have to worry about launch schedule conflicts when you're the only people launching at the site. Do remember the number of delays that SpaceX (and everyone else) has to deal with at Canaveral - you have a minor glitch, scrub your scheduled launch, spend two days fixing if, then have to wait weeks to launch again because someone else is launching in the meantime.
2) Much lower probability of the government deciding it needs your launch site for its own launches and putting you out of business...
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
3) Better weather: less rainy days, less tropical storms. That's the other major cause of delays at Canaveral.
#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
I can't wait for the illegals to start hitting all the northern states
They are here. They work their asses off for low wages and don't cause much trouble (compared to rednecks).
Have gnu, will travel.
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
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.
Florida is a good thousand miles away from the Texas launch facility. It would take more fuel to continue downrange and land in Florida than it would to turn back and land in Texas. Florida might be a good landing site for a recoverable Falcon Heavy center stage, but they're likely only around 100mi down range by first stage cutoff.