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SpaceX has been focusing on getting ready to launch starship at their Boca Chica facility in Texas, but launching Starship from Cape Canaveral in Florida has always been part of the plan.
The details of those plans seem to have gotten a bit more firm recently, and that makes it a good time to talk about this topic.
To launch quickly, it probably needs to be a site that SpaceX Controls. SpaceX has three sites;
launch complex 39A where they launch Falcon 9, Crew Dragon, and Falcon Heavy.
Space launch complex 40, where they launch Falcon 9.
And space launch complex 13, which they use for landing falcon 9 boosters on some missions.
The landing zone doesn't really help, so the candidates are space launch complex 40 or complex 39A.
How about Space Launch Complex 40? You can call it "slick 40" if you want to sound cool.
Changes here wouldn't affect Falcon heavy or crew dragon launches.
Unfortunately, it's close to other users.
To the north we have slick 41, which ULA uses to launch sensitive DoD payloads as part of National security space launch and also Starliner astronauts to the ISS. This makes it a very valuable launch site, and unfortunately their launch integration building is quite a bit to the south of the launch pad, placing it only 1700 meters from slick 40. To the southwest, there is an electrical substation at 1180 meters. And finally, the very popular astronaut beach house is 1450 meters to the northeast.
More problematic, the pad is fairly small - only about 330 meters across. That means that all the pad facilities are close to the launch pad.
Everything on the pad is designed for medium rockets and it doesn't have facilities for cryogenic fuels like liquid methane.
Another factor in pad 39A's favor is that SpaceX already has an environmental assessment done to launch starship and super heavy from launch complex 39A.
The plan is to build a launch tower like the one at Boca Chica in the indicated location.
https://netspublic.grc.nasa.gov/main/20190801_Final_DRAFT_EA_SpaceX_Starship.pdf
As of June 2022, SpaceX has a number of launch tower sections constructed and has started assembling them at pad 39A. The curved structure on the right is probably a flame diverter.
If you look closely you can see two humans fitting a crossbeam in place.
Initially, starship and super heavy will be shipped from boca chica to florida.
I discuss how that might happen at length in the linked video.
In the longer term, SpaceX has two needs.
SpaceX needs a place to build starship in florida so they don't have to ship it.
And spacex needs an additional launch site for starship, as one site isn't going to be enough.
In 2018 SpaceX leased a plot of land near the Kennedy Space Center Visitor's Center, known as the Roberts Road site.
Here is the site on a map
Is this big enough for a starship factory?
I did a quick estimate of the area that Starship is using at Boca Chica, and it came out to about 2.8 million square feet, or 263,000 square meters.
Interestingly, the Roberts road site is pretty much exactly the same size, about 2.8 million square feet.
It's not clear exactly how SpaceX plans on using the whole site, but there are some initial site plans to deal with water management that can be referenced to make some guesses.
The hanger on the right - since completed - was started as a building to do Falcon 9 refurbishment, and it is probably devoted to that operation rather than Starship.
This space here is currently being used to construct the tower sections for the pad 39A launch tower. You can see the concrete bases for the legs of the tower.
The space on the far left is being used for surface water management. The elevation of Kennedy space center is only about 7' about sea level, and these big ponds to manage surface water are very common.
Near the water is a large factory building, roughly as big as the 4 large tents at Boca Chica. Next to it is a possible extension to the factory building.
And then finally, two buildings that appear to be high bays; they look to be the same size as the mega high bay that Spacex is Building at Boca Chica.
For a little sense of scale, I put a Falcon 9 with dragon in the lagoon. This is a big site.
This site is about 5.7 miles to Pad 39A.
That's more the double the distance from the Boca Chica factory to the launch site there, but less than half the distance from Blue Origin's factory to launch complex 36.
That covers the factory side. What about an additional launch site?
If you transplanted the Boca Chica starship launch site to LC49, here's what you would get.
Plenty of room for multiple towers if SpaceX is willing to accept close separation, and given their choices on LC39A, that appears to be true.
There's another possible option that *might* happen.
Back in Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, ULA launches Delta IV rockets out of LC 37, but there are only 3 remaining delta IV launches remaining; one in 2022, one in 2023, and one in 2024, and after that it is done flying.
Would ULA give up their lease to SpaceX?
They might want to keep it for future use, but one of the focuses of Tory Bruno as CEO of ULA is to reduce the duplication of facilities. They have shut down the Delta IV factory to save money, and it makes little sense to continue to pay for a launch complex you aren't using. That assumes that the cost of keeping it around is meaningful and/or there's a requirement to use it if you want to keep it.
How would this site work for starship?
The pad was built for Saturn I and IB which were considerably smaller than Saturn V and therefore smaller than Starship, but LC37 was planned to have two launch towers so the actual pad area is pretty big - about 600 meters in size.
It currently has liquid hydrogen and LOX infrastructure, which is easily adapted to liquid methane and LOX.
It has good separation. The closest pad is launch complex 34, but that has been abandoned for years and is the location of the Apollo I Memorial, which would be far down on the list of sites to redevelop.
To the south, there's LC 20 which is currently leased by Relatively, but it's 2200 meters away.
To the north, the situation is even better. The nearest launch pad is 3600 meters away, and that launchpad is slick 40, which SpaceX already leases.
Here's an image of the Starship launch complex at Boca Chica. It's about 300 meters by 200 meters.
And here's what it looks like on top of space launch complex 37. It fits very easily.
In fact, you could likely built a whole series of pads along this section of land if you could get environmental approval to do so.
We can call it "starship row"...
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