Florida Today by Emre Kelly 8/16/2021
Starship production and launch facility feels a lot like Florida's Apollo-era days.
Brand new rocket facilities near a sleepy beachside city historically unfamiliar with all things space. Hundreds of workers rushing around production sites to meet the latest deadlines. The sounds of heavy machinery, chatter through hip-mounted radios, and trucks slowly navigating potholed roads reminiscent of the lunar surface.
And, on launch days, even the occasional explosion that scatters a test vehicle into countless pieces.
To some, all this might sound familiar, like a flashback to Florida's Space Coast in the 1960s when thousands descended on cities like Cocoa Beach and Cape Canaveral to make the Apollo program a reality. But this isn't Florida.
Welcome to Starbase, Texas.
There's a camaraderie and sense of mission here – and a casualness – that resembles what life on the Space Coast was like nearly 60 years ago. One test at a time, the impossible is being made into the possible, and the workforce is growing. But it's not just the fortunes of directly employed workers and the community that are being changed – almost anyone can drive up to flight-ready hardware and experience the thrill for themselves.
"I truly believe in five, 10, 20 years, they're going to be making documentaries about this just like they make documentaries about Cape Canaveral," said Nic Ansuini, an audio engineer and podcaster, who braves stifling heat to create content mere feet away from rocket hardware that compelled him to move hundreds of miles away from home.
A thousand miles west of Florida near the city of Brownsville is Starbase, an untamed area reminiscent of the nature preserves that dominate a swath of Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Much like the Space Coast, satellite imagery paints the picture of a flat region dominated more by water features than usable land.
Here, SpaceX founder Elon Musk operates in full-steam-ahead-mode. Not only does he visit often to oversee significant operations, but he has already kicked off a legal process to get the area officially renamed Starbase. One day, a small city – well, more of a spaceport town – could take shape from the wilderness and join Brownsville on this southernmost tip of Texas.
Musk and his teams are assembling, testing, and launching the future of his company, a two-stage stainless steel vehicle known as the Starship system. There are security guards and fences, but no one stops the curious from wandering over to get a closer look at Starship and its Super Heavy booster, both of which tower nearly 400 feet in height and were stacked for the first time last week. The promised 16 million pounds of liftoff thrust is more than twice that of the Apollo era's iconic Saturn V rocket.
More:
https://www.floridatoday.com/story/tech/science/space/2021/08/16/spacex-elon-musk-starbase-texas-starship-flashback-1960-s-florida/5502243001/
