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SpaceX Bastrop
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#1
Yazata Offline Mar 20, 2023 01:40 AM (This post was last modified: Mar 20, 2023 09:36 PM by Yazata.)
We know about SpaceX's original site, a former Cold War aircraft factory in Hawthorne, California. This is where Falcon 9's and Dragon capsules are manufactured, and as of now it's still SpaceX's headquarters with the corporate stuff.

We know about the amazing Starbase, the subject of the 'BFR' thread. This is actually at least four separate sites, the Build Site, the Launch Site, a cryo-testing facility called Masseys at the former shooting range next to the Rio Grande river, and the Ad Astra School site near Masseys. (It's believed that the Launch and Build sites will be evacuated for the first orbital test flight and the mission control will be further away a safe distance at the Ad Astra School. All in all, Starbase stretches some six miles.

We know about SpaceX's launch facilities at Pad 39A and SLC 40 at Cape Canaveral and HangerX (where flown Falcon9's are refurbished) and the burgeoning Starship factory at Roberts Road. There's also "the bakery" at Cape Canaveral, which employs many of the old Space Shuttle thermal tile guys and now makes heat shield tiles for Starship.

We all know about the rocket engine test stands at the huge McGregor Texas site outside of Waco.

There's a lesser known but large and very important SpaceX plant outside of Seattle that churns out Starlink satellites and ground stations. And I've heard that there's a smaller Starlink plant in Irvine California too.

Well, that's not all! SpaceX is constructing a huge new industrial building in a rural area of Bastrop County Texas, southeast of Austin. It's right across the street from the Boring Company and not far from the Tesla Austin gigafactory and Neuralinks big new facilities.

Nobody is sure what SpaceX will be doing in Bastrop. Is the headquarters moving out of California the way that Neuralink, the Boring Company and Tesla have already done? Is SpaceX becoming a Texas company for tax and regulatory purposes? Is this area of Texas farmland southeast of Austin becoming the focus of Elon's empire? (He's buiding a whole new residential suburb to service it.)

All we know for sure is that there are a handful of SpaceX Bastrop job announcements for computer software applications engineers. The ads make it sound like it will be a centralized company-wide software house doing coding for Starlink, Falcons and Dragons, and the Starship program.

Aerial photo by Joe Tegtmeyer. (He's finishing a flyover video as we speak.)

Note the opening of a Boring tunnel in the foreground, marking the end of a tunnel leading to the nearby Boring building. Elon has proposed building a Boring tunnel linking his Bastrop empire with nearby Austin, and has even floated a San Antonio/Austin tunnel.

Black and White are the SpaceX company colors. I believe the black corner of the building is tinted windows.


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#2
Yazata Offline Aug 1, 2023 06:07 AM
More job announcements for SpaceX Bastrop have appeared. These include a variety of electrical and manufacturing engineering jobs, and all of them seem to be Starlink related.

So it's starting to look to me like this huge factory building might be intended to be a new Starlink factory, churning out more of the thousands of satellites and millions of ground terminals that Starlink's growth will demand.
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#3
Yazata Offline Oct 23, 2023 03:03 AM (This post was last modified: Oct 23, 2023 03:04 AM by Yazata.)
The new SpaceX factory in Bastrop county TX (just SE of Austin) is complete. It's definitely been revealed to be a Starlink plant, making the new Version.2 Starlinks.

Photo by Joe Tegtmeyer (who does drone flyovers of all of Elon's Austin operations and is well worth following)


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Posts: 7,633
Threads: 861
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Reply
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Posts: 7,633
Threads: 861
Joined: Oct 2014
#8
Yazata Offline Mar 4, 2025 07:48 AM (This post was last modified: Mar 4, 2025 08:00 AM by Yazata.)
Little video about the Bastrop Starlink factory. They say that they have 1,000 employees working there and are already producing more than 70,000 Starlink ground terminal kits a week. It's vertically integrated, in that plastic pellets and aluminum ingots go into the building and Starlink terminals come out.

https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1896704833953931419
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