This video is sponsored by Skillshare.
The SpaceX Starbase is in constant motion.
Moving at ten times the speed of a regular Rocket development.
And now comes the switch to Raptor 2, boosting the project even further!
My name is Felix, and I am your host for today’s episode of What about it!?
And as always, there’s been a lot going on in the space industry lately, so let’s dive right in!
Starship Updates
Today we’ll take a look at Starbase, Texas again.
There’s a lot of talk in the community concerning a possible shift of SpaceX’s activity towards Kennedy Space Center in Florida and so I focused
my research on SpaceX’s activity in Boca Chica.
It might give us some more clues regarding SpaceX’s future plans.
And we’ll start it off with a rather good sign for Starbase.
SpaceX keeps on testing prototypes at a crazy pace.
Where other rocket developments have tests every few months at most, SpaceX is testing multiple times per week.
This is Ship 20 on a mobile test stand.
Where the Starbase team used the suborbital pads before to do cryogenic tests and even the suborbital test flights we saw last year,
they’ve changed their ground equipment.
These mobile test stands are lighter, less complex and seem to do just fine for cryogenic testing.
They also have one significant advantage.
They’re temporary and they can be moved around.
They’re not a rather permanent infrastructure like the old suborbital pads A and B close to the suborbital tank farm.
Everything at Starbase focuses more and more towards the orbital part of the launch site.
And as you can see, Ship 20 did just fine on its 4th cryogenic test run.
These tests likely have their focus more and more on the ground equipment.
If you perform a cryogenic test on a prototype, you not only test the prototype itself,
but also all the infrastructure needed to perform the task.
The orbital tank farms tanks, pumps and plumbing.
All of this needs rigorous testing before an orbital flight attempt as a launch is not fueled with liquid nitrogen.
As used in all these cryogenic pressure tests, liquid nitrogen is inert.
Even if something went wrong, not much would happen.
The worst-case scenario would see debris from a ruptured Prototype hitting vital infrastructure.
Even though this doesn’t sound good, it’s much less of a problem than a methane oxygen explosion.
Rocket fuel packs a punch, when something goes wrong.
Methane and Oxygen mixed together in an uncontrolled reaction creates powerful explosions as we saw with Starship SN4.
In February 22nd’s case, though, nothing happened.
The test went okey. The Starship iced up all the way to the top of the tanks.
It’s unknown, if the test matched SpaceX’s expectations,
but all the systems needed to fuel a Starship on an orbital launch attempt worked as intended.
And as said, this isn’t the only test we’ve seen in only a couple of days.
Chief, our WAI Cam operator has constantly been busy, running between production and launch site.
This footage was captured on February 18th, and it shows Booster 4 on the Orbital Launch Mount undergoing its 4th cryogenic test run.
Again, utilizing the orbital launch mount and everything that connects to it.
Validating installed systems,
uncovering flaws in the construction and iteratively improving the design of Stage Zero more and more while at the same time testing the booster itself.
Chief was also on site, when this monster came in.
A sizable new methane tank for the orbital fuel farm.
SpaceX has already put two of these in place, as one of the large vertical GSE tanks didn’t pass certification and now they’ve added two more.
This time it’s unclear, why the tanks are being put in place.
Either it’s another GSE tank replacement or SpaceX wants to ramp up the capacity of the farm even further.
The new tanks are being put in place here and if you look careful, you can see,
that there’s at least room for two more before they’d hit the newly added fuel pipe.
After removing the launch pad facing blast berm SpaceX gained more space for tanks.
After all this could be the whole reason for doing it in the first place.
Iterative design, even on the tank farm.
I talked about my theory before, that SpaceX won’t launch booster 4 and Ship 20.
Even though the prototype designations would be the perfect meme, the orbital flight will very likely not be done with these two prototypes.
Adam Cuker is on site at the McGregor test facility almost every day right now.
The reason? Raptor 2. There are tests nearly every day.
As seen here on a horizontal test stand and also on vertical test stands.
And where there are tests almost every day, there are many engines being produced.
This likely is the main reason for SpaceX not sending Starship 420 to Space.
They have the new engine. Sending the old one would not make much sense.
This footage of course is excellent news.
If Raptor 2 is ready for business, SpaceX can check a critical box on the to-do list for an orbital flight.
Looking at SpaceX’s Starbase production site shows the same picture.
There is no visible slowdown.
Quite the opposite. The tents are spitting out new Starship and booster parts every day.
The Ring Yard in front of the high bay is filling up more and more and the ring segments look almost perfect by now.
The quality has improved tremendously over the past 3 years.
This Super Heavy aft dome picture shows a Raptor 2 capable design, indicating a bright future for Boca Chica.
This booster downcomer was shipped out to Boca Chica and arrived on February 21st.
It’s the connecting pipe between the upper main tank and the engines themselves and the diameter tells about the flow rate and thus the fuel consumption
of 33 Raptor engines. Chief was there to take these pictures.
It’s unknown, if it will be used for Booster 7 or 8 or even a later version, but again, the production quality is showing in every detail.
And the growing rocket Garden has seen a new addition.
Ship 22, which was just stacked a few days ago has been moved to the rocket garden.
It’s unknown, what the plans for it are,
but it could be yet another sign for SpaceX completely switching over to Raptor 2 with their orbital launch.
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On we go with Gene from South Padre, who posted an idea on Twitter and Elon responded.
How about a Starship for Brownsville or South Padre Island?
Granted. Rumor has it, that a location at Brownsville international Airport has already been found.
Is this, where Ship 22 or maybe 15 or 16 will go?
The space community would sure love that.
Staying at Brownsville international Airport with our investigations, Chief has taken some fascinating pictures here on Wednesday.
This is SpaceX’s storage yard at the airport and it’s filling up quickly.
This likely is in and outgoing inventory.
There are labels on some of the packages.
Most of them point towards Boca Chica.
Others are less clear. There was an inventory purge at Starbase a while ago.
On the latest flyover done by Mauricio from RGV Aerial Photography on February 11th the cleanup can be seen.
Where before there was a mess of storage in between the large production, the site has changed.
Most of the storage racks between the tents are gone.
Inside the tents the picture is likely the same.
Over the past 3 years a lot of inventory cluttered the site more and more and now that the orbital test phase is about to begin,
SpaceX wants the place clean and focused on the new goals.
I’ve been expecting SpaceX to start building a new large production building at the same location where the large tents can be found right now.
The smaller white bakery tent has already been moved to make more room and the inventory purge could be directly connected to it.
My thought is that SpaceX will be building this new Starship Giga Factory – for lack of a better name – in this area.
The clearing on the lower right corner would make the square complete.
This would be needed for the production rate SpaceX is proposing for their future milestones.
1000 Starships in 10 years. That’s 100 per year and so roughly one Starship every 3 and a half days.
That’s just not possible with those tents.
And then we also have what’s internally at SpaceX referred to as the Mega Bay.
The Starbase skyline is in constant motion and this new and largest building so far is dominating the view more and more.
After stacking level 5 of the buildings frame, the SpaceX workforce is now focusing on fleshing out the structure.
Another indicator for SpaceX not going to leave Boca Chica?
The amount of work and money put into all this infrastructure would almost completely go to waste.
Boca Chica has done the prototype work, and this moved SpaceX’s Starship program to the next level,
but the Mega Bay is intended for a full scale production pipeline.
For the next step of the project.
Mass production. If SpaceX decided to pull out of Starbase and move their main focus to the Cape, all this would go to waste.
I did a deep dive into this on my last episode.
I’ll link it in the end credits for you to get all the info.
As of now, the FAA plans to release the Final PEA of their draft programmatic environmental assessment,
their decision on whether SpaceX will be able to launch Starships to orbit and out of Boca Chica any time soon, on March 28th.
This brings it up to more than 6 months of reviews.
SpaceX would need to apply for a new environmental assessment, if the permission is not given, which can take years to process and grant.
According to Elon, this would lead to SpaceX pulling out of Starbase and moving their main Starship operations to Florida.
Right now, everything is up in the air, pun intended.
But it does look like SpaceX has not lost faith in Starbase yet.
Work continues and we’ll keep watching them.
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