SpaceX at Cape Canaveral

[JB47394]

ULA's lease on SLC 37 is up next year and SpaceX would like to take it over for Starship Heavy launches. If it happens, that would mean four towers. Two at Starbase, Texas and two at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

SpaceX wants to take over a Florida launch pad from rival ULA

SpaceX now plans at least four Starship launch pads: Two in Texas and two in Florida.

arstechnica.com

If SpaceX isn't cleared to use SLC-37, the company could build a brand new launch pad designated Space Launch Complex 50. If this is the path SpaceX takes, SLC-50 would be built on undeveloped land north of SLC-37 and south of SpaceX's primary launch pad for the Falcon 9 rocket at Space Launch Complex 40.

 

[scaesare]

"Slick Fifty" has a cool ring to it as well.

 

[ecarfan]

Also from the article:

But that's not quite a done deal yet. Last year, a senior official at ULA told Ars on background that the company was also interested in maintaining a presence at SLC-37. ULA's new Vulcan rocket, which debuted last month and will replace the Delta IV and Atlas V launch vehicles, uses a different launch pad a few miles up the coast from SLC-37. ULA is upgrading and expanding its ground facilities at Cape Canaveral to ramp up the Vulcan launch cadence, and the ULA official told Ars the company may want to continue using a rocket processing hangar just south of the Delta IV launch pad for storage and horizontal processing of Vulcan rockets.

 

[JB47394]

The orbital launch mount at Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) has had all four legs taken down. It looks like they cut them off at the ground and pushed them over. I wonder if they're going to start over there so they can put in a deluge system - or a flame trench - without any complications from the launch mount structure.

Edit: And, courtesy of NSF, here's an image showing a flame diverter that was under construction by SpaceX at LC-39A back in 2019. Work stopped on it a year later.

 

[ecarfan]

ars: We take a stab at decoding SpaceX’s ever-changing plans for Starship in Florida

There is a lot of great information and analysis in that article, but this section really caught my eye.

SpaceX plans to land the reusable Super Heavy first stage booster back at the launch site rather than downrange on a drone ship. To do this, the company wants to build a catch tower that will use articulating arms to grab onto the rocket as it slows to a hover just above the ground. This is a separate tower from the Starship launch pad structure currently in place at LC-39A.

What? A dedicated tower just for catching vehicles during landing? I don’t recall ever hearing about that before. I thought the plan was that Starship launch and landings were done with the same tower.

 

[JB47394]

ars: We take a stab at decoding SpaceX’s ever-changing plans for Starship in Florida

There is a lot of great information and analysis in that article, but this section really caught my eye.

What? A dedicated tower just for catching vehicles during landing? I don’t recall ever hearing about that before. I thought the plan was that Starship launch and landings were done with the same tower.

It makes a lot of sense. It's just a tower tall enough to catch a booster and the arms. It doesn't have to be tall enough to stack a Starship. No launch mount. No quick disconnects. No plumbing for propellants. No water deluge system. No reinforcement for full stack liftoff thrust.

It's a fancy landing pad.

Critically, if there's an accident, there's no expensive infrastructure nearby to damage or destroy. You lose some steel, wiring and hydraulics. It's all mundane stuff.

Designing specifically for a booster catch may lead to new approaches in how they do the landing because they could avoid compromising its function. The catch system in ten years down the road may bear little resemblance to a tower with arms.

From there, I'd put in a rail line between the catch tower and the launch tower. Set the booster down on the car on rails, drive it over to the launch tower, repeat launch.

 

[Grendal]

This is SpaceX. I can also see them starting with a landing pad for safety but later convert it to a launch and landing pad once they've reached current F9 safety levels.

 

[Ben W]

This is SpaceX. I can also see them starting with a landing pad for safety but later convert it to a launch and landing pad once they've reached current F9 safety levels.

For a low-frequency launch site, using the same tower for launch and landing may make sense. (Although it still may be a good idea to have a second tower for redundancy in case something happens to the main tower.) But for a high-frequency launch site, such as launching 8000 tankers to get 1000 ships to Mars, it may maximize throughput to land on a separate landing tower and go through an "assembly-line"-style maintenance checkout on the way back to the main launch tower, rather than blocking up the launch tower during this process. They also couldn't risk a situation where a landing tower is occupied while a Starship is reentering, and a glitch prevents it from being cleared in time for the landing Starship to use it! First of course they have to show that the chopsticks catch is possible; it will be a happy problem once they get to the point of having to micro-optimize busy spaceports.