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Construction At SpaceX's New Spaceport About To Begin
schwit1 writes: SpaceX has begun prepping the construction sites at its private spaceport in Brownsville, Texas. The county has begun work on a road to where the spaceport command center will be, and SpaceX has established its construction headquarters in a double-wide trailer there. It is expected that actual construction of the command center will begin in August, with the launchpad construction to follow. The expected cost for building the entire spaceport: $100 million. Compare that to the billions the Russians are spending for Vostochny, or the billions that NASA spends on comparable facilities.
The bigger problem I see is that in the budget for Vostochny isn't just the bare bone cosmodrome, but whole supporting infrastructure, including city for 30,000 people. If Musk is able to build the same thing for $100 millions, that would be indeed interesting. However, I'm not holding my breath.
The expected cost for building the entire spaceport: $100 million. Compare that to the billions the Russians are spending for Vostochny, or the billions that NASA spends on comparable facilities.
Well, Vostochny is a 551sq km site. That's bigger than the city of Brownsville, let alone Boca Chica.
I don't think it is prudent to compare them, the facilities are likely to be quite different in scope. You might as well comparethe cost of the Vehicular Assembly Building to whatever they build in Texas.
It will be like comparing Grapes to Watermelons.
left the US with no manned launch capability and no heavy lift rockets Let's hope history will not repeat itself.
What is to compare here? This is a private launch facility that will likely never see any crews launch from this location, as it will be mainly commercial communications satellites and a few other commercial payloads that will be flying from Texas. It is also being built with mostly (but certainly not exclusively) private funds with the idea that the company building this facility will use it to earn a healthy profit from its activities.
There is no history to actually repeat in this situation, other than following the history of other commercial launch endeavors that simply went bankrupt. SpaceX, on the other hand, seems to be profitable and doesn't show signs at the moment of even struggling to make payroll. Far from struggling to make ends meet, they are doing some serious capital expenditures to expand their existing business. This launch facility in Texas is proof that SpaceX plans on increasing their launch rate considerably over the next decade or more.