The 2022 Starbase Update Is Here!
Let’s talk about the SpaceX Starbase facility in Boca Chica Texas. This is basically ground zero for the next generation of aerospace rocket technology. What’s being built and tested at Starbase today, will be landing human beings on Mars tomorrow. We’ve already seen some crazy things happen at this test facility, but we are only getting started and the best is yet to come. So let’s get going.
Starbase Texas
So, we know that Starbase is the name that Elon Musk and SpaceX have given to their manufacturing and testing facility in Texas. The name on the map is Boca Chica village, but at this point, the rocket launch site has grown to be just as large as the community of houses that it shares a road with.
There are a few good reasons that SpaceX chose this location. For one, it’s as far South as you can get in the United States without being in Florida, and that’s ideal for launching rocket into space, because you want to be as close to the equator as possible - this is where the rocket will get the most inertial help from the Earth’s rotation to get into orbit. Boca Chica is also a very remote location that’s difficult to access, it’s surrounded by ocean water on two sides and the US Mexico border on a third - there is only one road and one direction that leads into Starbase. That makes it really easy for SpaceX to control access to the site because they only have to close one road and it’s more or less impossible to sneak up on them. On the downside, that limited access has created a pretty serious point of contention with local residents - more on that a bit later.
We know that SpaceX uses the Starbase facility exclusively for development and testing of their Starship launch vehicle, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever conceived. The base of operations for SpaceX is in an area that they are developing just West of the existing Boca Chica Village - this is where the big Starbase sign is located along with the hangers and bays where they manufacture the rockets. It’s not exactly what you might imagine when you picture a 21st century space port, if it weren’t for the two giant Starship vehicles in the middle of the parking lot, you might not even realize what you are looking at. But they’re working on it. SpaceX assembles the rocket bodies in these tall, semi enclosed bays and then wheels them out and down the road to either a sub orbital or orbital launch pad.
The Orbital Launch Pad
The latest and most exciting development at Starbase has been the orbital launch facility for the Starship Super Heavy. We’ve seen SpaceX launch and crash and one time land the Starship on its own from the sub orbital pad. But the combination of the Starship and Super Heavy Booster will take off from this new orbital pad. What SpaceX is building on the ground is equally as amazing as the rocket ship. Elon calls this launch tower Stage Zero, meaning that it’s just as much a part of the Starship system as the booster and the lander sections. The launch tower is a 400 foot tall steel structure that will eventually have a role in every aspect of the pre-flight, launch and landing of both the ship and booster.
SpaceX have rigged up the tower with a high powered winch and cable draw work system that is borrowed from the design of an oil rig - basically the same way that oil companies get drills to the bottom of the ocean and back. The engine of the draw work is located at the bottom of the tower and is basically a very strong winch with an integrated disk brake system. This will power a carriage that can lift and lower the two sections of the rocket without the need for a crane. It’s a much better system because the crane method is really susceptible to weather, it’s unstable in strong wind conditions to have a spaceship dangling from a cable, and since Starbase is on the Gulf of Mexico, they can get some gnarly wind.
Mechazilla
Instead of a crane, SpaceX will grab their rocket stages with two giant metal arms that work together to form a kind of claw mechanism. These are referred to by Elon Musk as chopsticks after the way that Mr Miyagi catches flies with his chopsticks in the Karate Kid. When the chopsticks are attached into the launch tower, they form Mechazilla - which is of course another one of Elon’s movie references. I think he was really into that new Godzilla vs Kong movie when the arms design was being finalized, he was sending a bunch of tweets about how Donkey Kong lived in the hollow Earth and stuff - and then he told us that the giant rocket booster will be caught by Mechazilla. Which is a play on the actual character named Mecha Godzilla - a robot version of Godzilla. Anyway.
The two arms are 35 meters or 105 feet long and built with this tubular, triangular frame design to make them incredibly strong. Because in the same way that Mr. Miyagi catches flies, the chopstick arms will be catching spaceships. Both arms are attached to one, centre pivot point like a claw, and they move vertically along the tower via the draw work cable system. They can also move from left to right to transit the rocket stages from a delivery vehicle, onto the launch mount.
The first job of Mechazilla is to lift the booster stage off of a delivery truck and place it on the launch mount. Once that’s secured, it will pick up the ship stage and lift that 70 meters into the air and stack it on top of the booster. We’ve just recently Seen SpaceX install new bars on the tips of the arms that run parallel with the arm. These will be the contact points on Mechazilla for the rockets. Elon has said that the bars will have tank treads to control the movement of the rocket forward and backwards, like a conveyor belt. And we’ve just seen that the bars have a motorized system to come up and down independent of the arm - the bars will allow for very precise movements during the rocket stacking process.
After the rocket is stacked, a secondary arm comes out that will act to stabilize the 120 meter tall ship. This arm doubles as an umbilical cord that connects the plumbing of the ship and booster into a tank farm that lives right next to the launch tower. These tanks are made from the exact same rings that are used to stack the bodies of the ship and booster, and then they’re covered with a cryosleeve to keep them stable when they’re full of super cold rocket fuel. The tank farm holds just enough fuel for one rocket launch, so if the Starship explodes, we don’t have to worry about the tank farm exploding along with it, they’ll just be empty steel cans by the time the dangerous stuff begins.
The catching process is a bit more dicey. The rocket comes back down to the launch tower just off the side from where it launched and the claw is going to pivot over and open up to catch it. The rocket is going to be moving relatively slow and it’s going to be much lighter than it was when it launched, but it’s still going to be a pretty significant monster to just catch in mid air. Elon has said that the arm will have shock absorbers built in, but we haven’t seen anything like that incorporated into the real design yet. The downwards movement of the contact bars might be enough to absorb the energy, and that could maybe work in conjunction with the braking system on the winch to cradle the rocket. After the booster is caught it can be placed right on a truck and carried away - or at some point in the future it can be placed right back on the launch mount and prepared to fly again.
The worst case scenario here is if the Starship explodes during either the launch or landing process, because that would damage the Stage Zero. And the infrastructure that SpaceX have built up at Starbase is going to be much more valuable than the actual rockets. The Ship and Booster are mostly just tubes made out of steel rings that they stack on top of eachother, they can build a whole new one in a few days. But the Mechazilla is a really complex piece of structural engineering, it’s taken them months of work to get as far as they’ve come.
The People VS Elon Musk
So for most people, everything that we’ve just told you about sounds pretty freaking amazing. But of course, there are always going to be other people who aren’t stoked to have giant rockets taking off and landing on mech robots in their backyards. Or anywhere, really - some people are just haters. And as much as we don’t agree with these people, they sometimes raise some fair points, so let’s talk about the Starbase objections.
OK, so one of the key points of contention comes around the SpaceX road closures during their testing and launch procedures. The Starbase launch pad is located right near the end of Boca Chica Boulevard, it’s the one road into town that begins at the city of Brownsville and ends at Boca Chica Beach. The beach is just a little more than a stone’s throw from the orbital launch pad - looking one direction you get an endless view of the Gulf of Mexico, looking the other direction you see the nose cone of a spaceship poking up over the dunes. It’s a pretty wild place.
99 percent of the time, SpaceX keeps Boca Chica Boulevard wide open to the public. Anyone can just drive by and check out what’s going on, or those of us far away from Texas can see it on Google Street view. You can’t get too close of course, but if you look up the Starbase buildings on Google Maps, you can see a ton of reviews from people who just drove out to see some rockets and take some pictures. It’s dope.
It’s when SpaceX closes the road that things get a little less ideal between Elon and the People of Texas. Because when SpaceX are doing their engine testing and rocket launches, the people can’t go to the beach. And that makes them upset. Upset enough to sue the Texas government over access to Boca Chica Beach. In the lawsuit that was announced in mid October, The environmentalist group called Save RGV is taking the Texas General Land Office to court with the claim that allowing SpaceX to close off access to the beach is in violation of constitutional rights.
It seems that in the constitution of Texas, there is a passage that specifically says, access to public beaches can not be restricted. As it stands, SpaceX has closed access to the beach for up to 450 hours per year, beginning in 2019. That accounts for up to 5 percent of the time in a given year with restrictions in place. And those restrictions were allowed by the government of Texas under a 2013 amendment that permitted beach closures for, quote, “Space flight activities.”
It’s a tough situation, for sure. Because having the road closed 5 percent of the time isn’t much right now, but SpaceX intends to ramp up operations at Starbase by a lot over the coming years and that means road closures are going to become a regular occurrence. If this lawsuit manages to gain traction and the 2013 amendment is ruled unconstitutional, then that would throw a substantial wrench into the Starbase machine. It seems likely that this current suit will fail, it’s launched by a pretty tiny, non-profit group - SpaceX lawyers should be able to out maneuver them pretty easily.
There is a backup plan coming from one of Elon’s other business ventures, the Boring Company. This summer, the tunnel drilling operation pitched an idea to the local county officials to create an underground link to Boca Chica Beach from the North. There is an island above Boca Chica called South Padre and there is only about one third of a mile of ocean water that separates the two. If the boring company can make an underground road that connects the South tip of the island with the North point of Boca Chica Beach, then there would technically be public access to the beach that would not be affected by SpaceX operations. Some of the beach would still have to be closed during rocket launches so that chunks of flaming rocket couldn’t land on people, but most of the beach should remain safe even during those events. The county council has said that they’re not interested in paying for the tunnel, but if Elon Musk wants to cover the bill, then they would be supportive.
But this is just the start of the battle. The FAA is currently taking public comments on the SpaceX proposal to conduct orbital launches of the Starship Super Heavy from Starbase. They’ve just announced that the standard period for public comments has even been extended in this case to allow public feedback up to November 1st.
The environmental impact of Starbase is front and centre in this current review process. The location does happen to be adjacent to a wildlife sanctuary, which is not ideal, if we’re being honest. And it’s easy to cast SpaceX in a negative light when you look at the sheer volume and magnitude of the explosions that have happened there over the past year or so. A regular launch site like the Kennedy Space Centre for example, has almost entirely predictable and successful rocket launches and manages to coexist with the local environment and community pretty well. Starbase on the other hand has been the venue for half a dozen wild, experimental failures that shook the Earth around it. One Starship exploded in mid air and rained down chunks of smouldering metal for hundreds of meters around the launch pad.
Now, the fact that SpaceX have gone through all of the trouble to build the Stage Zero and the Mechazilla shows that they are at least mostly confident that their days of exploding Starships are behind them. But the minority of people don’t acknowledge that, or care, they just want the rich man to stop exploding rockets on their beach. Which again, we have to admit is not an unreasonable stance to take. Even the successful launch and landing of the most powerful rocket booster ever made is going to cause a ruckus, to say the least.
But there’s not going to be anywhere in the United States that something like Starbase can be built without pissing off at least a few people. If anything, Boca Chica probably is the best candidate possible, with the lowest amount of people and animals affected relative to anywhere else. Did you know that NASA had actually been seriously considering Boca Chica as the location to launch their Apollo Moon missions back in the 60’s? It’s no coincidence, the location just really lends itself to launching rockets.
The Ocean Space Port
It’s not like SpaceX is oblivious to the fact that building up a bigger and bigger space port on US soil is going to lead to bigger and bigger problems down the road. They already have the early stages of an idea to make things work in the long run, and that’s taking their space port out to sea.
We know that Elon has already purchased two deep sea oil rigs from defunct petroleum companies. He named them Phobos and Deimos after the moons of the planet Mars. The idea is that SpaceX can launch and land the Starship from these floating platforms. Like we said earlier, some of the technology that drives the Mechazilla is actually adapted from these deep sea drilling platforms. It’s basically the same idea that SpaceX are using right now to catch the first stage of their Falcon rocket. The recoverable section comes down and lands on a floating barge and is brought back to land. That’s obviously a lot more work to strap the Starship rocket stages to cargo ships and float them out to sea - it’s going to be harder than just cruising them down the road a bit at Starbase. But this might be the only way to make the Starship program work in the long run. If it’s out of sight, then it’s out of mind. And yes, it’s not lost on us that rockets exploding in the ocean is not necessarily better or less harmful than rockets exploding on land. Different set of problems.
Even if SpaceX are successful in passing the FAA approval to conduct orbital launches from Starbase, they are only going to be approved for 5 launches per year. It’s basically nothing for a rocket system that is designed to be launched, landed and reflown multiple times in a day. So if they’re having to fight for 5 in a year, then it almost seems impossible they could ever win enough support to get 5 launches in a week. Or 5 in a day. And they are actually going to need that much volume to build up the kind of Starship fleet that we would need to colonize Mars - which is the whole point of all of this.
