BFR Developments

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Photo by Mauricio of RGV Aerial Photography showing the current state of the huge 'Gigabay' at Starbase.

It's located at the west side of the factory building, to the right in this photo. Visible in this photo are the 24 work stations in which boosters and (especially) ships will be assembled in mass production fashion, hundreds a year, like a Tesla factory. Lots of robot welding machines. In conjunction with a similar spaceship manufacturing plant at Cape Canaveral, Elon hopes to build 1,000 Starships a year. The day will come when they are flying back and forth to the Moon and Mars like airliners and many tanker ships will be necessary to keep the orbital refueling depots stocked up.

For scale, see the truck in the right foreground, with a tiny human standing next to it. There's a guy walking into the the tall door opening on the left. And note the cars parked on top of the parking structure.

When this gargantuan building is completed and filled with silver steel spaceships in various stages of construction, its sci-fi interior will be a sight to behold. It kind of reminds me of a medieval cathedral, in more ways than one.

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The current state of the new Pad 2 launch mount (photo by Mauricio of RGV Aerial Photography).

It's nearing completion. Only a few major visible items remain. One is 20 blast doors to protect the clamps (visible around the edge of the circle) when they retract, to protect them from rocket blast. Seemingly they are having trouble getting the doors to fit and retract properly, so they are still trying to get that completed. They are still working on the 'chopstick' arms on the tower, adding protective bumpers so that returning ships and boosters aren't damaged by coming in contact with them, and making adjustments to the hydraulic actuators that move the arms. And they still have to install the outermost portion of the Ship Disconnect Arm which supplies propellant to the second stage. That SQD extension appears to be complete at the Sanchez work area and the big crane is positioned to lift it, so it should be in place soon.

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They are installing the SQD arm extension onto the tower today

(Photo by Starship Gazer)

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Secretary of War Pete Hegseth will be visiting Starbase tomorrow, touring the place, talking to workers, and meeting with Elon. It's all part of his Arsenal of Freedom tour, in which he visits defense contractors and tries to energize them.

SpaceX is obviously an important stop, not only because of its importance to satellite launch and communications, but also because of its crazy audacity and inventiveness, which Hegseth would like to impart to the rest of the defense industry, some of which is very bureaucracy-bound. (The US had it in World War II when all sorts of visionary designs went from design drawings to test prototypes to mass production in just a few months.) SpaceX's organization is very 'flat', without the hordes of middle managers. (Design decisions don't require endless meetings and corporate approvals, just Elon saying 'Ok, let's try it!') But the real difference is that SpaceX is run by sci-fi visionaries with no end of imagination.

Hegseth will be visiting Lockheed Martin in Fort Worth while he is in Texas as well.

Note the blue jacket that Elon is wearing. He really likes that jacket and there's a story behind it. It's a US Space Force jacket and it was presented to him at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs when he addressed the cadets there.

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Mauricio's (RGV Aerial Photography) latest flyover photo of the Starbase Gigabay under construction.

This photo clearly shows the 24 work stations, each large enough to accommodate a fully stacked booster or ship.

Humans for scale: Note the crowd of workers by the blue man-lift above the letters 'RGV' in the lower right. (Everything at Starbase is Really Big.)

I expect the ships and boosters to sit on rotating stands and the platforms that we see to eventually be occupied by welding and tile application robots.

Spaceship pieces - barrel sections, tank domes, nosecones and thrust section/propellant manifolds will come out of the factory to be stacked and welded one atop another vertically in the vertical assembly bays that we see taking shape here. It's not so different than the vertical assembly building at Cape Canaveral, although the idea of mass producing spaceships like Teslas is certainly new.

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https://x.com/DOWResponse/status/2010855183459500492

https://x.com/SecWar/status/2011096242231898534

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Ship 39, the first Version.3 ship, in Megabay 2 at Starbase. (Humans at upper left for scale.)

It's still unknown when this will launch from the new Pad 2, my guess is early March. It still needs cryo testing and a static fire, which in turn depends on the Masseys static fire test stand and its associated infrastructure returning to action. I believe that 39 has catch pins that will need load testing at Masseys, even though I don't think that they will try catching the first V.3 ship. They will want to ensure that the new model ships work properly first. If the next flight is successful, there are pieces of several follow-on ships in the 40 series, as many as half a dozen of them, in the factory. They can be speed-assembled and used to perform the first ship catches, deploy the big new next-generation Starlinks and conduct the orbital refueling demonstration, hopefully as soon as this summer.

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The US Army Corps of Engineers, which for some unknown reason has jurisdiction over wetlands, has given SpaceX approval to expand its Starbase launch site to approximately twice its area. This involved SpaceX buying the vacant wetlands adjacent to the former Boca Chica village from its private owners, and doing a land swap. SpaceX has already put out new boundary markers.

(RGV Aerial Photography graphic by Niall-Ian Anderson)

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Here's a very rough idea what the new land will be used for

(SpaceX graphic from one of their applications)

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The sandy soil will need a lot of ground preparation work before it's suitable to build on. I expect them to compact it and bring in lots of new dirt to bring the surface up at least a meter to discourage flooding. (Something like that, I'm not a civil engineer.) Anything big will have to be supported on piles. The trench along the property line in the photo below is for silt fencing which was put in Wednesday afternoon.

(Photo by Amy Doehring)

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Booster 19, the first Version.3 booster destined for flight 12, is at the Massey's test site being cryo pressure-tested.

(Nasaspaceflight.com photo by Ceaser G)

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We all know that Ship 36 and booster 18 were both destroyed by explosively rupturing COPV's (composite overwrapped pressure vessels). Since then SpaceX has hurredly constructed a COPV test stand at their Masseys test site to retest newly purchased COPVs which supposedly were already tested by their manufacturers.

Well, now there's word that vertically-integrated SpaceX has purchased Hexagon Masterworks, the aerospace side of Norwegian company Hexagon Purus, a COPV manufacturer, for a reported $15 million. Hexagon Purus will retain its business manufacturing COPV pressure vessels for hydrogen fuel-cell road vehicles which are a thing in Europe, but not really in the United States.

https://www.globenewswire.com/news-relea...paceX.html