Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog 10/14/2023
I’m not an Elon Musk fanboy. I’m not a fan of electric cars, and not everything he does is genius, and some of it is just strange. But I do appreciate how his purchase of Twitter has put the left into tizzy over no longer being able to censor their opponents (though, as I’m still suspended, Musk needs to fix the broken appeals process).
But this video on the rapid pace of SpaceX expansion shows another reason Musks’ political opponents fear him: The man simply gets shit done.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6l-KiEv7B0 • At Orbital Launch Site 2, co-located at Kennedy Space Center’s lc39a pad:
Because of NASA’s trepidation at the thought of a Starship failure and definitely delaying SpaceX from completing its Crew Dragon or Falcon Heavy contracts for the agency [And probably because the Biden Administration is pissed over Twitter and Musk’s resisting the Flu Manchu shutdowns. -LP], the company de-prioritized Starship Florida’s pad, slowing progress.
SpaceX has nonetheless made significant progress. In 13 months, SpaceX has:
• Created foundations
• Modified one of pad 39a’s giant spherical tanks to store cryogenic methane
• Installed miles of plumbing
• Built and assembled a second skyscraper sized Starship launch tower
• Installed the legs of the pad’s Orbital Launch Mount (or OLM)
• Installed a water Deluge system at the base of the OLM
• Assembled most of the OLM’s donut-like mount offsite
• Constructed a new super-sized storage tank
• And delivered a forest of smaller storage tanks.
• “SpaceX has also completed the fabrication of a massive pair of steel arms transported them to pad 39a, attached them to a wheeled vehicle, and installed the structure on the Starship launch tower in Florida.”
• “SpaceX employees have affectionately dubbed these arms ‘chopsticks,’ and they are an essential part of what CEO Elon Musk refers to as mechazilla,” which can stack and unstack Starship components. NASA never assembled components on the launch pad, they assembled them in the massive Vehicle Assembly Building and then rolled them out (very slowly) on crawlers.
More:
https://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=56114
