Possible Florida Starship? - Starbase Summary [10:03]

Transcript

Chapter 1: Starbase Summary

Summary. And this week, we’ve got some pad one OM work proceeding forward. The gigabay, nice, your speed zero. Love it. The bridge crane there across the middle in the gigabay continues forward and some pipe gets laid out at the Port Connector construction. Again, this is off Highway 4 over near Brownsville. Wow, look at all that. Uh, is it technically cribbing when you’re using, oh my gosh, to stay out of the mud. If you haven’t picked up one of your flight 14 shirts yet, commemorating orbit bones, there showing it off over at.

Chapter 2: Pad 2 Dancefloor Installed

The highway site. There’s the pad 2 dance floor. That’s dance floor. I don’t know. It’s more of a dance plug. Does that get us into territory we should probably stay away from? Probably. But, uh, as we talked about before, the construction that goes into the middle, can’t really get a lift up underneath, you can’t roll a taco stand or anything underneath the pad because of the ramps and the, uh, the flame trench, the diverters, and that sort of stuff. So, you put it in from the top. It’s got the pads that sort of hold it up and then work area so you can get to the side, the inside of the o over the launch.

Chapter 3: Pad 2’s Chopsticks

Mount there on pad 2. Pad 2’s chopsticks are here as well. Are we doing some inspections? Looks like we’re maybe taking pictures of things there. Are we looking for damage or something like that after launch? Why is this important? Well, pretty likely I think that, uh, we are all.

Chapter 4: Pad 2 Chopstick Actuator Removed

Hoping for a catch here at the tower during flight 15. Not confirmed, but that’s what we’re hoping that we’re all seeing. Work good on the actuators. Again, we’ve seen an awful lot of work on these actuators. Like, are they going bad? Do they not like the forces? Is there something about the thermal expansion? Like you hit them with the rocket exhaust or rocket exhaust in the vicinity. I don’t know, but we keep seeing them doing a lot of work on those.

Chapter 5: Orbital Pad 1

Those, uh, hydraulic rams that they used to open and close the chopsticks over at pad one. I was going to make a joke about finally we can refer to it as the orbital launch mount. Yeah, but that was pad 2. Pad 2 gets that credit. It’s like christening a ship, right? You don’t get to call it the orbital launch mount until you like break a champagne bottle over the front of it. Uh, champagne bottle not enough for a structure of this size. Well, actually, oceangoing ships are way bigger than anything SpaceX has ever built. Whatever. Um, instead of breaking a bottle of champagne over it, you hit it with the exhaust from 33 Raptors and that christens it as an or. Well, even that doesn’t work. Like the Raptors have to result in the payload going all the way to. Look, it’s complicated.

All right, y’all tell me what you think the proper christening process for a launchpad should be for it to earn the rightful name of orbital launch mount. All right, bunch of miscellaneous work sort of going on over there. You can see they’re still working. They’ve got that gantry structure sort of opened up. They haven’t up-armored it, I guess, armored it in the first place or put the cladding on the sides of it or anything like that. Still an awful lot of work to do over on pad one. So, if you were interested in a double catch, if that’s even a possibility for flight 15, I think, uh, we’re really sort of leaning towards if that is a possibility, and I’m not even saying that it is. I think maybe SpaceX really wants to do that, but there’s a long way between I love you and I do. Um, you would probably see a booster come back and get caught on pad two and then the ship living in.

Chapter 6: Launch Site From the Channel

Orbit for some amount of time as they destack and get the booster out of the way. And if it was even a thing, the ship would most likely come back down to pad 2 and get caught in the same place.

Chapter 7: Water Spout Over the Gulf

Oh, no kidding. Look at this. Gage caught a water spout. I guess they were out there working in the field. Uh, Gage and Dan and Jerry are all out there doing some operational work in between.

Chapter 8: Drive Down to the Launch Site

Hey, we’re driving on the beach. Look at this. This is going to be from the South Padre side because the Gulf’s on your left and lands on your right. So, you’re driving from the southern South Padre, uh, jetty back down south. So, Mexico is behind this and if you kept going, you would end up at the Rio Grande, but there’s the ASU you can see. And of course, you saw the two pads.

Chapter 9: Tankers Unloaded at the Tank Farm

There as well. Nice. That’s a cool treat. All right, tankers unloading at the tank farm. We got Caesar, driving by here, it looks like. Quite a bit of vehicles. Well, I say quite a bit. I guess it’s four vehicles. It’s not really quite a bit, but still I will say that that is one of the most inefficient. Whoa. No way.

Chapter 10: Starlink V3 Satellites

Those are the Starlinks that were launched at F on flight 14 going over Star Base. They have little trails because of the encoding artifact and the low light camera. Um, no. We, I know that we pointed a bunch of cameras towards the sky in the current sort of trajectories and we didn’t know if we were going to catch it or not, but lookie there. How cool was that?

Chapter 11: Nosecone by the Office Building

Nice. A generic shot over the flats at the production site. Whatever. Nose cone by the office building. This has been used to test TPS is what the sign says. You can see there’s some TPS on it. Bunch of little pins sticking out of it as well there. Once again, our speed is zero. Looks like Caesar has pulled over to the side of the road here to take the.

Chapter 12: The Gigabay

Shot of the gigabay. That’s a pretty cool shot of the gigabay with the setting sun sort of reflecting on the bottom of it. It looks like one of the big panels that they use to pick up or I guess the spreaders that they use to pick up and control the panels while they cl it onto the world’s largest Easy Bake oven. Uh, you put your staff, your workers in there, you paint the outside black, you shine the South Texas sun on it, and we’ll see how that goes for them. I imagine it’s going to be pretty warm or at least it’s going to cost some electricity to keep that thing cool down. It’s like style over function here with SpaceX. I am still a little bit flabbergasted they painted that building black. Bridge can assemble. Oh, so down.

Chapter 13: Bridge Crane Assembly

At the bottom you can see crossing the aisle there. Here we go. We’re going to punch in a lot of control systems and stuff on there, but that’s the bridge crane. Of course, it needs to go up to the top and then ride on rails at the top so that it’s useful. But looks like they’re down here at ground level doing a lot of preparation on. Is that the block? That really does look like it might be the block and the cable there that’s maybe being reeved right now.

Chapter 14: Ship 43 in Mega Bay 2

Interesting. Oh, there we go. We got ship 43 in Mega Bay 2 back there as well. A lot of speculation on that. If you sort of, uh, go down the road and you just count like, you know, one ship, two ship, three ship, there is some speculation that possibly that ship ends up in Florida at some point, right? So I don’t know for sure.

Chapter 15: Pad 1’s OLM Construction

If that’s really a thing that we would say I don’t know if we’re quite there yet. And it’s just sort of guessed. It’s like, well, if you do it in orbit and you or in order and you say, well, this ship, then that ship, then that ship, and the order that they’re sort of built, and then the order of missions, we’ll come back to that. Let’s say we’ll come back to that, right?

It’s got some valve work there. This is over at the, uh, Sanchez side if I, yeah, it’s A1. We’ve got some pivot arm related stuff here. See, I was talking about will the ship end up back at Cape Canaveral at some point? That’s more miscellaneous parts. Looks like you bolt it down and then that little, uh, arm circle cylinder thing wants to stay.

Chapter 16: Prometheus Statue

Straight up. H there’s that. Um, y’all know that there was an art group that came out there and built this statue, the Prometheus statue. This is not officially a SpaceX thing. Uh, I apologize. I don’t really know how to talk about them. They’re an art group like a group of artist foundists, I don’t know, that deal in things like this. And they made this big statue of sort of Prometheus stealing fire, offering fire back to the gods. Holding fire up so he doesn’t get burned, but it looks like it drips on him. Especially since he doesn’t have like any flame retardant clothing on. At least his top. You wouldn’t want that torch to drip on your bare skin. I don’t know. I guess when Prometheus was around, stealing fire from the gods OSHA.

Chapter 17: Construction at the Port Connector

Wasn’t really a thing, but you know, you do you, Prometheus. Um, we’ll see. I don’t know what’s going to end up with that thing, but it looks like it got verticated. So, over here at the area, I’ve seen an awful lot of comments down here. Uh, data center potentially, right? There’s all sorts of, uh, documents that have been filed for the construction here. We’ve got Jerry out there. So Jerry’s been doing sort of regular drone flights to sort of see things going forwards. Um, remember we got all the little Tonka trucks driving around last time. The temporary roads that they’ve put in. Uh, new news, they’ve actually started standing this thing up. I guess it’s not particularly new. This is maybe some of the oldest news was five, six days ago that this started happening. But, uh, wasted no time. Like the whole slab’s not even poured yet and they’re already standing.

Chapter 18: Pipe Laying Operation

Up the other end of the building. It was a pipe laying operation. Interesting. It’s not like a water pipe there. Are those welding units? Oh, that has like a little sun shade looking thing. And do those things drive down the end and connect? Oh, I got to go look at those. There’s the little pipe cranes. I’ve seen a lot of those pipe cranes working on the other side over by the LG plant. Looks like we’re putting some dirt in on top of it. I really want to go. It was tough to see from the aerial view, but those look like things that actually construct the pipe from its individual pipe units.

In any event, hey folks, it’s the Starbase summary. Like I said, back into the normal swing of things out here at Starbase. We’ll be standing by for information on flight 15. That’s my name there, John. If I respond to you down in the comments, I’ll say Doss. It’s my nickname. But I appreciate y’all.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.