One of my biggest turn-off’s when considering working for SpaceX was that I’d have to live in $%#@ing Los Angeles. Why are companies in love with that place? It’s impossible to work there and have anything resembling a 1st world life. (Yes, I know, SpaceX engineers aren’t supposed to have a life anyway: Sacrifice it all for the cause! – the only reason that’s “sustainable” is the absolute dumpster fire the rest of the aerospace industry is, making for a large supply of desperate candidates)
I understand why San Pedro might want SpaceX to move Starship construction there, but it doesn’t make a lot of logistical sense on top of the added costs and environmental compliance laws.
I get that Boca Chica is hardly the place to raise a family. And LA is closer to Las Vegas than Brownsville is to San Antonio.
Don’t worry, the LA city government will find ways to help Space X avoid environmental costs.
Well, there are some advantages to SoCal. For one thing, inexpensive gardening and nanny services. Restaurants and construction are also relatively inexpensive thanks to cheap illegal labor as well, particularly if you don’t mind english as a second language. You can get caught up on world events as you listen to talk radio on your 2 hour communte down one of the many linear parking lots while you dream of someday owning a highly overpriced home.
SpaceX has long intended to have multiple production facilities for SHS. Musk and Shotwell both said so even before the decision to focus initial efforts at Boca Chica rather than San Pedro. Boca Chica is the pathfinder, so to speak, but there will also apparently be another SHS factory inside the fence at KSC. This once-and-future San Pedro site would be the third.
I said well over a year ago, about the time of the shift to stainless steel structure, that Musk had obviously put the whole SHS program on essentially a war footing. So he’s just doing what the U.S. did in WW2 anent aircraft production. At that time, all heavily-in-demand aircraft types were built in multiple facilities. B-17’s, I believe, were built three different places and Boeing only built a minority of the eventual production total in its own plants. With Elon tweeting recently about plans for his own “Thousand Plane Raids” on Mars, he’s going to need all the production capacity he can build as soon as he can build it.
That makes the question of logistics less than obvious too. Future San Pedro production may not be destined for launch from TX or FL but from some third site on the West Coast – perhaps Vandy, perhaps elsewhere. Even if multiple launch mounts are built at LC-39A and Boca Chica, additional launch sites seem mandatory if SHS operations are to be conducted at the overall scale Musk has in mind.
If the San Pedro gambit is now being resurrected, I anticipate related news, especially anent additional launch sites, to be made public in coming weeks or months.
Considering how expensive housing is in coastal California, will Musk build employee housing, or just subsidize his people’s rent?
Housing on the coast in CA is priced astronomically. A few miles inland, though, prices are much more reasonable. That is, to be sure “California reasonable.” In most of the rest of the country it would still look like robbery with violence. But I’m guessing most of the new hires at the notional San Pedro facility will be locals already.
It’s way too big to transport overland. The only ways to move it from where it’s built is either barge or fly and I don’t see it flying from 18 acres in San Pedro. Can Vandenberg handle barges?
If they’re going to barge it, they might as well build it in Houston, or any other port on the Gulf Coast.
Anyone know what the bridge situation is like on the Intercoastal Waterway?
A random thought–if multiple factories are in the works, what about siting one in Mobile? Could Shelby be bought with the promise of long-term jobs? Or would that provide him with insufficient graft?
I would agree that Houston is a better site than LA. The trades he needs are all to found in the Houston Metro. Electricity is also both cheaper and more reliable on the gulf coast. This, to me, is the tall pole in the tent for any manufacturer thinking to expand in LA, electricity. You don’t want to be hamstrung by brownouts or rolling blackouts.
Generally agree. But it should also be kept in mind that Elon has a ready source of Really Big Batteries which can backstop outages of CA’s increasingly wonky power grid.
It’s designed for hundreds of flights, so it probably doesn’t matter where it’s manufactured, any more than anybody cares which state built a particular airliner.
All long-distance surface transport can be avoided if he launches each one from Vandenberg once, because he can land them where ever he wants.
For transporting SuperHeavy or Starship, I might go with a hybrid ridgid airship such as Aeroscraft (no reason SpaceX couldn’t design and build its own, if necessary). With modern radar and such, it’d work just fine with big, light, streamlined external cargo like that.
As far as LA and environs go, I’ve never understood what draws people to hideous big cities, *other* than jobs. My writing career was based in Manhattan and, in the 1990s, I was married to a woman from the Bronx. I never saw the attraction of NYC beyond my paychecks. How often does your typical New Yorker taken in a Broadsway show? Probably for the overwhelming majority, never. I did like the museums, but DC (where I grew up) has far better. Not that’d I’d live in DC or anywhere nearby.
Thanks to my other career (IT) I’ve spent a lot of time time in many big cities. Not just LA, but Phoenix, DFW, Atlanta, Miami, Chicago. Philly. Baltimore. All hideous. I was born in Boston, which seemed nice enough 50 years ago, but was hideous the last time I was there in 2006.
What I really want is a deep space singleship, FTL if possible. I’d settle for a customized Starship.
As an aside, could it be that Elon is considering moving Starship production to California to reduce his own personnel transportation distances? If Starship was being built next door to the Tesla factory, it would free up a whole lot of Elon’s “me time” (which he’d spend on the factory floors instead of in an expensive business jet).
The hyperloop that he’s proposed for LA runs from his house to Tesla and SpaceX, with a branch to the Port of LA. The test facility at Macgregor is where it is because he baught an exiting facility, which could be moved. Now consider his involvement with Vegas, the proposed hyperloop from LA to Vegas and proximity to Jackass Flats, from whence Kistler (and the original thermonuclear Orion!) proposed to launch. Not to mention the HQ of Bigelow Aerospace… This all begins to make sense.
How about just flying a lightly fueled completed starship from San Pedro to the embarkation point? These things are supposed to be re-usable aren’t they? Boeing builds a lot of airplanes at Renton, WA, but they go out empty when they are finished.
This widely suggested idea is not really possible. Starship isn’t an SSTO, and needs Super Heavy to get to orbit, or on any long suborbital trajectory. And then you’d still have to transport Super Heavy by some other means. An empty, underfuelled Starship would need about 20 hops to cross the US. A fully fuelled Starship would not be able to lift off. Suggested SSTO versions of Starship have extra engines, and no payload or passenger capacity, so they’d have to be rebuilt at the destination. And you’d still need to ship that booster somehow. Starship and SuperHeavy are light enough to piggback on a big cargo plane, like a 747, a C-5, or AN-124 or 225.
From a regulatory perspective, every comment on this article is wrong. Taking off from or (especially) landing at Vandenberg will be an unsolved problem for a long time to come. Distant focused over pressure (DFO) is a genuine problem at Vandenberg due to atmospheric and terrain conditions that focus explosions or sonic booms in destructive ways. It’s especially bad at VAFB, but exists at all of the “ranges.” Taking off or landing of a vehicle this size at VAFB will be very difficult to license. at least on the basis of an anytime takeoff or landing scenario. There will be a major, major battle before all of this is resolved.
I think the big regulatory hurdle for future space flight is overland launches of reusable LVs. These things aren’t atomic bombs, so a Starship exploding at Vandenberg isn’t going to vaporize Lompoc. But the public and various fear mongers will see Starship as if a 6,000 ton airliner that can crash on *your house*. Reminding people that Columbia coming down in pieces over Texas hit no one won’t do any good. It’s exactly the same thing as nuclear power. You could launch from Edwards and recover the booster at White Sands, but that spaceship is going to have to exit over Texas, and that’s a big hurdle.
According to the point to point transportation scenario put out by SpaceX a while back they plan to launch from off shore platforms. All they need for their California factory to work is an off shore launch pad.
All of this overlooks the need to transport the SuperHeavy booster, which can’t fly more than a few hundred miles downrange by itself. It has enough fuel, since it has to lift the Starship, but it lacks the capability to survive a hot reentry. This means no matetr how you transport Starship, you have to transport SuperHeavy some other way. If P2P becomes a thing, I’d bet on large cargo ships, as it will have to be carried to wherever in the world it will be used. And if you have to do that, then you can move Starship the same way with less wear and tear.
I think I might be wrong about the self-ferrying SuperHeavy.
When a Falcon 9 launches Starlinks to orbit from Florida, it reserves about 15% margin for making entry and landing burns, so it can land on a ASDS off the Carolina coast. If you stripped an FH side booster of recovery and attachment hardware, launched it and burned to depletion, assuming appropriate throttling, you might make orbit. If you left on the recovery hardware and launched up the east coast, reserving 40%+ margin for the entry and landing burns, where would you wind up? Nova Scotia?
SuperHeavy could do the same thing. I don’t know what it’s ferry range would be (probably not intercontinental) but it could at least make Texas from California, maybe Florida (or at least in two hops). You’d still have the overflight issue because of populated areas (especially in California), but it’s not actually impossible.
Here’s an odd question. A fully fueled Super Heavy, without a payload, should have about enough mass ratio to get to orbit, but of course it couldn’t survive re-entry at those velocities. So what if you use the initial launch burn to only get up to the survivable re-entry speed, maximizing the trajectory for horizontal distance, and then use the remaining fuel for a high-altitude skip or bounce? If nothing else, if it hits MECO with a remaining mass ratio of say 5 to 1, it could just hover vertically for about a minute of exo-atmospheric horizontal cruising at the maximum re-entry velocity.
The longest booster recovery attempt for a Falcon 9H was I think 770 miles. Superheavy should have higher heat tolerance, and in a profile optimized for transport, it might be able to go quite a bit farther. However, from the standpoint of simply transporting a piece of hardware, I’d think other methods are bound to be far more fuel efficient and a whole lot quieter.
I’m pretty sure that would use more fuel than a ballistic trajectory, but I’m not sure. I know how to do the arithmetic, but have trouble actually doing it because I’m an imbecile.
I assume a maximum range suborbital flight for F9 or SH would gravity turn for ascent and EDL, but a simple ballistic arc between MECO and Entry Burn. An arc that long would be influenced by the shifting gravitational pull (“down”) due to the curvature of the earth, as it would be 8 – 10% of a great circle.
One of my biggest turn-off’s when considering working for SpaceX was that I’d have to live in $%#@ing Los Angeles. Why are companies in love with that place? It’s impossible to work there and have anything resembling a 1st world life. (Yes, I know, SpaceX engineers aren’t supposed to have a life anyway: Sacrifice it all for the cause! – the only reason that’s “sustainable” is the absolute dumpster fire the rest of the aerospace industry is, making for a large supply of desperate candidates)
I understand why San Pedro might want SpaceX to move Starship construction there, but it doesn’t make a lot of logistical sense on top of the added costs and environmental compliance laws.
I get that Boca Chica is hardly the place to raise a family. And LA is closer to Las Vegas than Brownsville is to San Antonio.
Don’t worry, the LA city government will find ways to help Space X avoid environmental costs.
Well, there are some advantages to SoCal. For one thing, inexpensive gardening and nanny services. Restaurants and construction are also relatively inexpensive thanks to cheap illegal labor as well, particularly if you don’t mind english as a second language. You can get caught up on world events as you listen to talk radio on your 2 hour communte down one of the many linear parking lots while you dream of someday owning a highly overpriced home.
SpaceX has long intended to have multiple production facilities for SHS. Musk and Shotwell both said so even before the decision to focus initial efforts at Boca Chica rather than San Pedro. Boca Chica is the pathfinder, so to speak, but there will also apparently be another SHS factory inside the fence at KSC. This once-and-future San Pedro site would be the third.
I said well over a year ago, about the time of the shift to stainless steel structure, that Musk had obviously put the whole SHS program on essentially a war footing. So he’s just doing what the U.S. did in WW2 anent aircraft production. At that time, all heavily-in-demand aircraft types were built in multiple facilities. B-17’s, I believe, were built three different places and Boeing only built a minority of the eventual production total in its own plants. With Elon tweeting recently about plans for his own “Thousand Plane Raids” on Mars, he’s going to need all the production capacity he can build as soon as he can build it.
That makes the question of logistics less than obvious too. Future San Pedro production may not be destined for launch from TX or FL but from some third site on the West Coast – perhaps Vandy, perhaps elsewhere. Even if multiple launch mounts are built at LC-39A and Boca Chica, additional launch sites seem mandatory if SHS operations are to be conducted at the overall scale Musk has in mind.
If the San Pedro gambit is now being resurrected, I anticipate related news, especially anent additional launch sites, to be made public in coming weeks or months.
Considering how expensive housing is in coastal California, will Musk build employee housing, or just subsidize his people’s rent?
Housing on the coast in CA is priced astronomically. A few miles inland, though, prices are much more reasonable. That is, to be sure “California reasonable.” In most of the rest of the country it would still look like robbery with violence. But I’m guessing most of the new hires at the notional San Pedro facility will be locals already.
It’s way too big to transport overland. The only ways to move it from where it’s built is either barge or fly and I don’t see it flying from 18 acres in San Pedro. Can Vandenberg handle barges?
If they’re going to barge it, they might as well build it in Houston, or any other port on the Gulf Coast.
Anyone know what the bridge situation is like on the Intercoastal Waterway?
A random thought–if multiple factories are in the works, what about siting one in Mobile? Could Shelby be bought with the promise of long-term jobs? Or would that provide him with insufficient graft?
I would agree that Houston is a better site than LA. The trades he needs are all to found in the Houston Metro. Electricity is also both cheaper and more reliable on the gulf coast. This, to me, is the tall pole in the tent for any manufacturer thinking to expand in LA, electricity. You don’t want to be hamstrung by brownouts or rolling blackouts.
Generally agree. But it should also be kept in mind that Elon has a ready source of Really Big Batteries which can backstop outages of CA’s increasingly wonky power grid.
It’s designed for hundreds of flights, so it probably doesn’t matter where it’s manufactured, any more than anybody cares which state built a particular airliner.
All long-distance surface transport can be avoided if he launches each one from Vandenberg once, because he can land them where ever he wants.
For transporting SuperHeavy or Starship, I might go with a hybrid ridgid airship such as Aeroscraft (no reason SpaceX couldn’t design and build its own, if necessary). With modern radar and such, it’d work just fine with big, light, streamlined external cargo like that.
As far as LA and environs go, I’ve never understood what draws people to hideous big cities, *other* than jobs. My writing career was based in Manhattan and, in the 1990s, I was married to a woman from the Bronx. I never saw the attraction of NYC beyond my paychecks. How often does your typical New Yorker taken in a Broadsway show? Probably for the overwhelming majority, never. I did like the museums, but DC (where I grew up) has far better. Not that’d I’d live in DC or anywhere nearby.
Thanks to my other career (IT) I’ve spent a lot of time time in many big cities. Not just LA, but Phoenix, DFW, Atlanta, Miami, Chicago. Philly. Baltimore. All hideous. I was born in Boston, which seemed nice enough 50 years ago, but was hideous the last time I was there in 2006.
What I really want is a deep space singleship, FTL if possible. I’d settle for a customized Starship.
As an aside, could it be that Elon is considering moving Starship production to California to reduce his own personnel transportation distances? If Starship was being built next door to the Tesla factory, it would free up a whole lot of Elon’s “me time” (which he’d spend on the factory floors instead of in an expensive business jet).
The hyperloop that he’s proposed for LA runs from his house to Tesla and SpaceX, with a branch to the Port of LA. The test facility at Macgregor is where it is because he baught an exiting facility, which could be moved. Now consider his involvement with Vegas, the proposed hyperloop from LA to Vegas and proximity to Jackass Flats, from whence Kistler (and the original thermonuclear Orion!) proposed to launch. Not to mention the HQ of Bigelow Aerospace… This all begins to make sense.
How about just flying a lightly fueled completed starship from San Pedro to the embarkation point? These things are supposed to be re-usable aren’t they? Boeing builds a lot of airplanes at Renton, WA, but they go out empty when they are finished.
This widely suggested idea is not really possible. Starship isn’t an SSTO, and needs Super Heavy to get to orbit, or on any long suborbital trajectory. And then you’d still have to transport Super Heavy by some other means. An empty, underfuelled Starship would need about 20 hops to cross the US. A fully fuelled Starship would not be able to lift off. Suggested SSTO versions of Starship have extra engines, and no payload or passenger capacity, so they’d have to be rebuilt at the destination. And you’d still need to ship that booster somehow. Starship and SuperHeavy are light enough to piggback on a big cargo plane, like a 747, a C-5, or AN-124 or 225.
From a regulatory perspective, every comment on this article is wrong. Taking off from or (especially) landing at Vandenberg will be an unsolved problem for a long time to come. Distant focused over pressure (DFO) is a genuine problem at Vandenberg due to atmospheric and terrain conditions that focus explosions or sonic booms in destructive ways. It’s especially bad at VAFB, but exists at all of the “ranges.” Taking off or landing of a vehicle this size at VAFB will be very difficult to license. at least on the basis of an anytime takeoff or landing scenario. There will be a major, major battle before all of this is resolved.
I think the big regulatory hurdle for future space flight is overland launches of reusable LVs. These things aren’t atomic bombs, so a Starship exploding at Vandenberg isn’t going to vaporize Lompoc. But the public and various fear mongers will see Starship as if a 6,000 ton airliner that can crash on *your house*. Reminding people that Columbia coming down in pieces over Texas hit no one won’t do any good. It’s exactly the same thing as nuclear power. You could launch from Edwards and recover the booster at White Sands, but that spaceship is going to have to exit over Texas, and that’s a big hurdle.
According to the point to point transportation scenario put out by SpaceX a while back they plan to launch from off shore platforms. All they need for their California factory to work is an off shore launch pad.
All of this overlooks the need to transport the SuperHeavy booster, which can’t fly more than a few hundred miles downrange by itself. It has enough fuel, since it has to lift the Starship, but it lacks the capability to survive a hot reentry. This means no matetr how you transport Starship, you have to transport SuperHeavy some other way. If P2P becomes a thing, I’d bet on large cargo ships, as it will have to be carried to wherever in the world it will be used. And if you have to do that, then you can move Starship the same way with less wear and tear.
I think I might be wrong about the self-ferrying SuperHeavy.
When a Falcon 9 launches Starlinks to orbit from Florida, it reserves about 15% margin for making entry and landing burns, so it can land on a ASDS off the Carolina coast. If you stripped an FH side booster of recovery and attachment hardware, launched it and burned to depletion, assuming appropriate throttling, you might make orbit. If you left on the recovery hardware and launched up the east coast, reserving 40%+ margin for the entry and landing burns, where would you wind up? Nova Scotia?
SuperHeavy could do the same thing. I don’t know what it’s ferry range would be (probably not intercontinental) but it could at least make Texas from California, maybe Florida (or at least in two hops). You’d still have the overflight issue because of populated areas (especially in California), but it’s not actually impossible.
Here’s an odd question. A fully fueled Super Heavy, without a payload, should have about enough mass ratio to get to orbit, but of course it couldn’t survive re-entry at those velocities. So what if you use the initial launch burn to only get up to the survivable re-entry speed, maximizing the trajectory for horizontal distance, and then use the remaining fuel for a high-altitude skip or bounce? If nothing else, if it hits MECO with a remaining mass ratio of say 5 to 1, it could just hover vertically for about a minute of exo-atmospheric horizontal cruising at the maximum re-entry velocity.
The longest booster recovery attempt for a Falcon 9H was I think 770 miles. Superheavy should have higher heat tolerance, and in a profile optimized for transport, it might be able to go quite a bit farther. However, from the standpoint of simply transporting a piece of hardware, I’d think other methods are bound to be far more fuel efficient and a whole lot quieter.
I’m pretty sure that would use more fuel than a ballistic trajectory, but I’m not sure. I know how to do the arithmetic, but have trouble actually doing it because I’m an imbecile.
I assume a maximum range suborbital flight for F9 or SH would gravity turn for ascent and EDL, but a simple ballistic arc between MECO and Entry Burn. An arc that long would be influenced by the shifting gravitational pull (“down”) due to the curvature of the earth, as it would be 8 – 10% of a great circle.