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SpaceX Indicates It Will Manufacture the BFR Rocket In Los Angeles (arstechnica.com)
A new document from the Port of Los Angeles indicates that the company is moving ahead with plans to build a "state-of-the-art" industrial manufacturing facility near Long Beach, about 20 miles south of its headquarters. It's possible that the facility may be used to manufacture the company's Big Falcon Rocket, or BFR vehicle, which is expected to measure 106 meters tall and nine meters wide. The Long Beach location makes sense since the BFR will be so large that it needs to be built near water where it can be transported. Ars Technica reports: The company seeks to use an 18-acre site at Berth 240 in the port "for the construction and operation of a facility to manufacture large commercial transportation vessels." Operations at the site would include "research and development of transportation vessels and would likely include general manufacturing procedures such as welding, composite curing, cleaning, painting, and assembly operations." Completed vessels would need to be transported by water due to their size, the document states, as a means to explain why the company needs a facility immediately adjacent to the water. The document also noted that the 10-year lease, with up to two 10-year renewals, would "accommodate recovery operations undertaken by Space Exploration Technologies to bring to shore vehicles returning from space that are retrieved by an autonomous drone ship offshore." This would be for first-stage recoveries of the Falcon 9 rocket and probably payload fairings as well.
If you yell Big Falcon Rocket really aggressively it sounds like big fuckin rocket.
And yet, CA is not only the largest manufacturer state in America, but they outdo the next 2 combined. The fact is, that highly paid engineers would rather live in CA than.states like Texas, or Alabama, or Mississippi, or ...
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Actually, manufacturing the BFR in California is not so obvious. The only launchpad they own outright (once construction is complete), rather than the 3 they are currently leasing, is in southeast Texas. Sure they could boat the rocket from California to Texas' eastern coast via the Panama Canal... but having the manufacturing be close enough to ship via land easily, or at least on the same coastline would make more sense. I find it more likely that this California facility will produce cheaper, high-volume rockets launched from the west coast (probably Falcon 9's), or relatively small components that can be easily shipped across the country (crew capsules). It's possible the new spaceport coming online around the same time as the BFR won't be used to launch the latter, I suppose.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
And yet, CA is not only the largest manufacturer state in America, but they outdo the next 2 combined.
Not true. While California does have the most manufacturing jobs in total (hardly surprising given it has the biggest population) at around 1.2 million, the next two are Texas (840K) and Ohio (660K). And per-capita California isn't even in the top 10 either by revenue or by percent of workforce. There are WAY more manufacturing jobs in the Midwest than there are in California and the cost of living is much lower as well. Taking the states from the midwest as a group just from the top 10 they total over 2.7 million manufacturing jobs.
The fact is, that highly paid engineers would rather live in CA than.states like Texas, or Alabama, or Mississippi, or ...
Ahh, the arrogance of people thinking wherever they live must be the best. Ok smart guy, explain why there are WAY more manufacturing jobs and highly paid engineers in manufacturing in the Midwest than they are in your beloved California. Explain why there are more aerospace engineering jobs with equally high wages on the East coast. California is the leading state for some types of engineering (esp computer) but other parts of the country are stronger in other areas. And Texas especially has no lack of highly paid engineers.
There is nothing wrong with California but you don't have to tear down places you don't live and know little about to make it sound better.
You could also skip the floating platform and just launch directly from the water, such as the proposed "Sea Dragon" superheavy lifter vehicle designed in the 60s would. Note that this design was roughly 40% taller than the Saturn V.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
They should've looked at the abandoned Aerojet facility in Miami - quick intracoastal access up to Cape Canaveral from here.
https://www.abandonedfl.com/ae...
-a.e.mossberg