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if you're a spacex fan you will be very
familiar with this place bocachica
for 24 hours every day this small town
in texas is under constant surveillance
from youtube live streams space
photographers and curious people from
all over the world looking to experience
starship this incredible and sometimes
creepy level of attention has been with
bokuchika ever since the first piece of
stainless steel turned up and rightly so
spacex is literally building the largest
rocket ever made outside in a dirt field
but for a short period of time spacex
took over another location which could
have become the bokeh chica we know and
love today
but what happened to this place
one thousand miles away in florida lies
a spacex site located near the kennedy
space center
this small construction yard in the city
of cocoa was set up when spacex first
started building starship back in 2019.
although both sites were set up for the
same reason coco's facility was
extremely small so small that you could
fit almost seven of them into
bokuchika's site
nevertheless spacex knew that it was
about to begin a very long journey with
starship
so in order to get started a competition
was set up within the company
the teams in boca chica and florida were
tasked with figuring out the best ways
to actually make starship
the rules were simple any important
breakthroughs discovered by one team had
to be shared with the other team and
whoever came up with the best solutions
won the competition but what was the
prize
well there was no prize
but for the workers in the winning team
it meant that they didn't have to move a
thousand miles across the country
this method of healthy competition
turned out to be a great idea perhaps
even greater than spacex initially
expected but how did bokuchika end up
winning this competition
one of the first problems florida had
was with their barrel machine this is
the machine that takes the rolls of
stainless steel and transforms them into
nine meter wide rings that make up
starship
the machine kept producing rings with
slightly different diameters so when it
came time to stack them the rings
wouldn't line up and the rings had to be
scrapped
another major challenge with starship
was the welding particularly on the
bulkhead
these welds needed to endure extremely
cold temperatures and hold back the
insane pressure going on inside the
tanks evidently the first attempts were
not strong enough
but bokuchika kept experimenting with
different welding techniques eventually
automating a large chunk of the process
and it showed the welds on future
starships started to become cleaner and
the vehicle itself started to look more
sophisticated
but this was only a small part of what
made bokuchika great
despite making good progress on starship
itself it was the entire package of
bokachika that won them the competition
building a restaurant out of old
starship parts also helped the
competition wasn't all about building
the best starship you see starship is a
rocket like no other and because of that
it's being built like no other rocket
hints the dirt fields and factories made
out of tents
but if spacex wants to send thousands of
people to mars they will need to start
mass producing starships at a rate that
the space flight world has never seen
before
and so building the factories that
actually make starship turns out to be
more difficult than making the rocket
itself
this was where bokuchika excelled having
a massive expanse of land far away from
most civilization gave them the freedom
to quickly set up buildings and
experiment with many different
manufacturing methods florida on the
other hand was so space limited that the
unusable steel rings would take up a
huge portion of the land
but how far did florida actually get
with their starship
this was only the second ever full-scale
starship prototype with mark 1 being
built around the same time in boca chica
this prototype had already been
destroyed during a test so mark two was
florida's opportunity to show off their
superior building skills
in many ways mark ii looked like the
better starship with much cleaner
metalwork and more sophisticated welds
but how did the florida team plan to
actually test starship
in boca chica they already had a very
basic testing facility and a road where
starship could easily be transported
in florida the plan to transport
starship was much more elaborate
spacex wanted to test starship at the
famous launch pad 39a the same one that
sent humans to the moon
this plan sounds great but actually
getting it to the launch site was a huge
challenge
simply leaving the construction yard
would involve cutting down trees and
forming a brand new road through a field
from there starship would be towed down
grissom parkway and onto the main
highway all of which would need to be
completely shut down by the police
starship would then travel on the wrong
side of the road in order to get to a
small island on the indian river
from there starship would be loaded onto
a barge and towed all the way to the
turn basin where it would be unloaded
and moved to the launchpad
this elaborate plan was just weeks away
from happening and utility workers had
started raising power lines in order for
starship to pass through
unsurprisingly florida's starship never
left the construction site and the work
there came to a grinding halt
but whatever happened to this place and
the starship that was being built
after thoroughly winning the competition
spacex started throwing everything into
boca chica
at the start of 2020 spacex held a
career day where hundreds of young
hopeful engineers turned up to apply for
a job
after this bokuchika's workforce doubled
to around 500 employees and spacex began
operating four shifts a day creating a
constant 24-hour work cycle
since then bokuchika has been completely
taken over by spacex and turned into its
own city
the workers at the florida site were
either offered a job in boca chica or at
other spacex facilities in florida
spacex now uses the coco site to
manufacture starship's heat shield tiles
the remains of starship mark ii were
slowly demolished with some equipment
being shipped over to bokuchika
but this isn't the last we'll see of
starship in florida
20 kilometers away from their old
starship site lies a much larger area of
land which spacex has taken over
home to one of their falcon 9
refurbishment hangers this site will
soon feature an enormous
state-of-the-art factory purpose built
to make starships
this factory will be larger than all of
bokuchika's tents combined and the crazy
thing is this is only part of the
factory future plans show that the
factory will be extended and almost
doubled in size
but how will these starships be launched
and tested
luckily this facility is located right
next to the kennedy space center where
starship and super heavy could easily be
transported all the way up to the launch
pad
to add to the excitement spacex has
already begun constructing the enormous
tower that will launch and catch future
starships these giant tower sections
will be built at the new facility and
driven out to the launch pad to be
stacked exactly like they were in boca
chica
and so we now have a completely new
starship facility to be curious about
another thing to be curious about is
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