The factory making Elon Musk’s futuristic next-generation spacecraft is a gleaming marvel
of ultra-modern industrial sophistication, right?
Nope.
In reality it’s a flimsy, temporary tent city, with an onsite trailer park – and
no running water.
How on earth does that work?
Join us now as we take a peek inside SpaceX’s Boca Chica rocket factory.
SpaceX’s day job, lobbing lucrative commercial payloads into orbit for an assortment of private
firms and state agencies, runs on rockets constructed at the company’s primary Hawthorne
headquarters on the outskirts of Los Angeles.
That side of the business is ticking over nicely, by all accounts.
But Elon Musk has bigger fish to fry.
“We’re trying to build a massive fleet to make Mars habitable,” he’s said on
more than one occation.
Why?
“To make life multi-planetary.”
Accomplishing this historic feat will require a giant leap forward in spacecraft development.
Spoiler alert, that’s the Starship currently being tested, with mixed results, at SpaceX’s
longsuffering South Texas launch pad.
But to truly colonise Mars, one starship won’t be enough.
“I think we need, probably, on the order of 1,000 ships,” Musk says.
“And each of those ships would have more payload than the Saturn V—and be reusable,”
Musk says.
The SpaceX CEO has set himself the ambitious long-term goal of ultimately running three
Starship flights a day, each lugging 100 tons in payload and passengers to and from the
red planet.
For now though, Musk’ short term aim is building one or two starships per week, and
pairing back construction costs to a mere $5million per ship.
To pull it off, Elon Musk needs a production line – something he knows a thing or two
about from his famously bruising experience scaling up Tesla’s manufacturing base a
few years ago.
“Production is at least 1,000 percent harder than making one of something,” he likes
to gripe.
“If you’re just trying to make one of something, it can all basically just be made
by the engineering team.
“But if you want to actually make something at reasonable volume, you have to build the
machine that makes the machine.
“Which mathematically is going to be vastly more complicated than the machine itself.”
So how’s that going?
For now, pretty well.
The plan with Starship was always to iterate many prototypes in rapid succession, in order
to refine the design and get it right sooner.
As Musk puts it: “If you have a high production rate then you have many iterations.
You can make progress from one to the next.”
Making Starships at Hawthorne would make this impossible, or certainly very slow, as the
cross-country road trip from Cali to the Texas coast would add unacceptable delay to each
launch.
Not to mention the fact Starship is too big to make it under highway bridges.
So the Starship manufacturing facility is situated just a short hop along Highway 4
in the once-sleepy South Texas enclave of Boca Chica.
Aerial photos of the manufacturing site taken just a couple of years ago show how rapid
development of the factory has been.
And that speed has been helped by the fact the buildings seen here, aren’t technically
buildings at all.
Some of Elon Musk’s biggest headaches scaling up Tesla vanished when he realised how cheaply
and speedily capacity could be increased just erecting vast tents to screen in production.
Tents have the advantage of being quick to erect and inexpensive, plus they don’t require
much tiresome energy-sapping engagement with local planning authorities.
If you want to build a big structure fast, tents are pretty much the way to go.
Just ask any circus.
But what works for cars doesn’t necessarily work for space rockets.
For instance, two of the most important and largest tents on the Boca Chica manufacturing
site, referred to as ‘segment manufacturing tents #1 and #2’.
That’s where the stainless steel rings forming most of the visible fuselage are assembled,
as well as the internal bulkhead domes.
These tents, by themselves, are plenty long.
But they aren’t quite tall enough from the ground to the roof.
So SpaceX brainiacs hit upon a mad idea – jacking up their tent on a layer of shipping containers.
It’s true.
And ratchet as that sounds, it actually makes sense.
Like tents, shipping containers don’t need formal planning authorisation, and certainly
no foundations.
They’re easy to reconfigure.
They’re heavy too – handy in windy spots like Boca Chica – and they can be used as
storage or even offices.
Another neighbouring long tent, with an onion shaped end, is used for assembling the rocket
nosecones and rests, reportedly, on not one but two layers of shipping containers.
What works, works.
The tents aren’t just there to fend the elements and prying eyes.
Gases used in welding often require some form of enclosure.
If not, the resulting welds are weak and the rocket potentially compromised.
Before reaching those long manufacturing tents, Starship sections will often have passed through
another structure on site, called the Hydraulic Press Workshop tent.
Inside, technicians bend the shipped-in stainless steel 301 or 304 plates in order to craft
those all-important fuel tank domes.
Water cutting is reportedly the technique used to trim steel here, and that presents
its own challenges.
Boca Chica has been without reliable running water since Hurricane Beulah flooded the town
in 1967.
So SpaceX has erected its own water tanks onsite, one of them a playful upcycle of the
long-ago retired SN2 prototype rocket.
The so-called ‘propulsion building’ is where the pipework and plumbing supporting
Starship’s Raptor engines, and the engines themselves, are put together and checked.
Raptors themselves are still built in Hawthorne, California.
For now, anyway.
Another structure, commonly referred by SpaceX followers as ‘ground fabrication’, builds
those mission components that are designed to remain on terra firma.
Think heavy duty hardware like the launch scaffoldings, and the bulk of the launch mounts
the rockets ultimately sit on before blast off.
The tallest structures on site are these three vertical construction bays, for shielding
the vertical assembly of rockets
The smallest, called ‘low bay’ or affectionately ‘iron henge’ by long-term Boca Chica watchers,
was created as a windbreak for construction of the early MK1 prototype, and is seldom
used these days.
The midbay was once the highest bay, and can hold two prototypes at a time for stacking,
before they’re transferred to the high bay.
The current high bay, at 80m tall, dominates the skyline and is where all finished prototypes
roll out from at present.
Elon Musk has jokingly suggested one day he’d like to put a bar up there, with a glass floor
so punters could look down on the futuristic construction taking place beneath their feet.
When one Twitter user noted that a temporary staircase up to the roof of high bay was being
dismantled, Musk remarked that from now on workers would “…use a catapult & air mattresses
to land on the roof, then base jump off.”
Well, if anybody can do it...
There’s also an outpost of the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley onsite, situated
in the fancifully-named ‘Stargate technology centre’.
The idea is that SpaceX can nurture local talent, without the hassle convincing smart
cookies to move down to rural South Texas.
Associating with the powerful University of Texas is also a savvy political move by SpaceX
by the way, who will need to stockpile all the official goodwill they can muster if they
want to carry on blowing stuff up.
A skilled workforce and well-established workflows with lots of opportunity for feedback and
innovation are the secret, Musk believes, to iterating fast and scaling-up production.
For instance, stainless steel barrel production for the fuselage of Starship has been at two
barrels a day.
But the target is to soon reach a production cadence of four barrels a day.
Each barrel, remember, brings us one step closer to Mars.
Also Musk’s experience at Tesla taught him quality staffing practices for factory leaders,
like providing teams free hot meals.
And there’s plenty of sophisticated innovation going on.
For instance on the novel ‘knuckle seamer’ welding process used to make those fuel domes.
Combining touch automation with a shielded x-ray pass to check for imperfections, this
new Boca Chica-invented process has turned an all-day job into a routine task that gets
done in hours.
And as for the corporate culture, Elon Musk clearly has the money to hire and is apparently
happy for workers to recommend friends and relatives for positions at the facility.
Staff maintain a three-days-on, four-day-off rota system, often staying in dedicated RV
parks in the shadow of the HighBay.
Fancy it ain’t.
But Musk’s hands-on approach means he’s content to own decisions, even those that
lead to catastrophic failures.
“There’s plenty of forgiveness if you pass me the buck,” he’s said.
“There is no forgiveness if you don’t.”
Going forwards, the facility will surely expand.
It’s probably already expanded by the time you’ve seen this video.
But given the site’s location on the Gulf of Mexico, these flimsy current buildings
may have to endure hurricanes – increasingly so factoring in climate change.
The thinking is that Elon Musk would rather quickly erect a cheap structure, then rebuild
in a crisis, than invest heavily in a decade-long conventional build.
Because it’s quicker.
That’s his plan for getting to Mars, in a nutshell : go fast.
What do you think?
Is Elon Musk’s tent city more a testament to his genius business instincts, or his disdain
for pesky government over-reach?
Let us know in the comments, and don’t forget to hit subscribe for more rapid fire tech
content.