SpaceX Plans Facility Expansion at Kennedy Space Center | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX Plans Facility Expansion at Kennedy Space Center

floridatoday.com

182 pointsaphextron73 comments

Probably to support the increased launch tempo for their Starlink satellite internet system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_(satellite_constellat...

Would anyone be interested in creating a Space Coast Hacker House?

The idea is to assemble a small group of talented folks. Even digital nomads who want to do a short stint would be welcome. And then solicit contracts, or start New Space ventures.

Main benefit is of course proximity to rocket launches ;) For which we could host viewing parties, outdoor BBQs, photo shoots, etc.

Region is known for relatively cheap rents (compared to South Florida). Great weather. Year round golf, tennis, scuba. Not sure about high speed internet availability. And it may be a cultural backwater. But that only leaves more time for building ;)

Perspective of a current "digital nomad" that grew up in the area:

The weather is great in a sense that it's warm, but be prepared for sweltering heat and humidity for ~340 days of the year. Especially during the summer, it's hard to be outside for more than a few minutes without needing a shower.

Lots of outdoors stuff to do like you mentioned, especially water-oriented activities. If you surf, New Smyrna is the most consistent spot but even that's not nearly as consistently good as it is consistently sharky.

High speed internet would be no problem. Brevard and the surrounding areas are red but I wouldn't necessarily consider it cultural backwater. You'll be exposed to a much higher number of crusty beach people (especially in Cocoa Beach) than you will rednecks or similar.

Damn, I have never been called crusty before.

When you say "culture backwater" are you referring the the fact that the Space Coast has the highest ratio of engineers to population in the US, or b/c it just not near a major city?

To Californians anything that isn't California is a cultural backwater. This may also apply to New Yorkers. The amount of Californian "nationalism" I've seen is surprising.

Anything that isn’t coastal Californian you mean.

A lot of people dislike Florida politics, state social policies and culture. It's very, very different from Seattle or Portland. Similarly the Floridians think people in Seattle are insane.

The "surrounding areas are red but" immediately preceeding implies that being largely Republican-voting qualifies an area as a "cultural backwater".

We get a disappointing degree of "people who disagree with me are stupid" here at times.

Could just be referring to a lack of concerts, nightlife, etc. If you're used to the frequency with which major acts visit LA or Chicago or Nashville, adapting to anything else can be hard.

Sounds great! Titusville is super cheap.

Please no. We like our culture just fine:

I have a coworker with a house at the edge of a swamp. He likes to go out in his airboat and shoot alligators. He likes to set off explosions. I have another coworker, from San Francisco actually, who has sheep and can shoot his AR-15 in his yard. Trump has dropped by twice, at the MLB airport. The lines of adoring fans went for miles, and there were only about 5 protesters total. My workplace has a giant (maybe 15x7 foot) US flag in the cafeteria, and every year we hold a military-style flag folding ceremony. Everywhere you go, there are engineers who work for defense contractors. There is a stand-your-ground law, and our wonderful Sheriff Wayne Ivey has some great videos on youtube about the need for armed citizens prepared to shoot all kinds of bad people.

For those of you who aren't horrified, we're hiring for low-level hacker stuff... but the rest of you need to stay right where you are. You'd be unhappy, and you'd make us unhappy.

I've been trying to overcome my prejudices about Florida, and you're really not helping.

As someone who spends quite a bit of time just south of the cape in Cocoa Beach (I own a condo there), I'm not sure I would call the area a "cultural backwater", but it might be culture shock if you are coming from an urban area.

Many would be surprised by how inexpensive it is, but in my opinion (like much of the US) the area suffers from poor planning. Recently two buildings one block from the beach were torn down to make room for a parking lot. Plus there is a NIMBY / anti-development contingent which basically kills off any renewal efforts. Prime real estate has gone undeveloped because of height restrictions.

With that said, I do think it could be a good area for startups. There is a lot engineering talent, the quality of life is good compared with the cost of living. Plus there is access to a major airport in Orlando with direct flights to SF, LA, NY, etc.

Personally I'd really like to see more startup activity in the Cape Canaveral/Cocoa Beach area.

There are also plans to build facilities at the Los Angeles harbor, down in Long Beach. Their finances must be in good shape to enable all these, no?

The facility in Long Beach is the BFR factory. The BFR diameter is too big to move via road or rail, it can only be moved by barge or cargo ship.

Could BFR be relocated in a self-propelled manner?

I am far from a rocket launch expert, but having been to the general area, I think there is nowhere near enough empty space anywhere in Long Beach to safely build a launch facility.

Also the US has a pretty firm policy of never launching anything over land. There is no such thing as an eastbound launch from Vandenberg, for example.

Could that change in the future, assuming reliability improvements? Though, thinking about it a bit more I don’t really see why you’d want to launch eastbound out of Vandenberg. Not sure what you’d gain.

Vandernberg is generally used for highly inclined orbits or polar orbit launches. The earth's rotation is used to assist eastbound launches for equatorial/geostationary, so eastbound is preferred. Such as most of the launches from Florida and Wallops.

One of the weird bits of space trivia is that Israel's domestic rocket and satellite launch program makes the sacrifice of less efficient launches and less total delta-v in the first and second stages, by launching westbound over the ocean, because they really do not want to launch what is almost indistinguishable from a ballistic missile eastbound over their angry neighbors. Pretty much the only place in the world where low-inclination launches occur westbound.

Probably not. As their volume increases, even if their launches have a _really good_ success rate of 99.9% [1], catastrophic failure would still be frequent enough that you don't want to live under their flight path[2]. Even if they have a 100% success rate from here on out, there would still be issues with things like blowing out people's windows.

[1] They're at around 95% now, although gradually improving. Switching to a drastically different launch vehicle like the BFR will probably bring those numbers down, at least initially

[2] see https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16882600/china-long-march..., or any of the cases where rockets killed people on the ground

Rotational speed of the Earth.

You don't have to launch over land, just go the other way. BFR flying without a payload can easily go the long way around, launch west over pacific and land in Florida from the east.

The propellant for a two stage bfr has to cost at least a couple of hundred thousand dollars... plus launch prep costs and incremental cost of using up the life of engines. Even if each one is good for 100 launches, 1/100th of its fully loaded build cost had to be a lot of money.

I guess if it can fly into space then it's just a matter of math to bring it back down where you want it.

Probably partially chosen due to the proximity to Vandenberg Air Force Base. Just a barge journey away from take off and landing zones.

I would be very surprised if BFR ever flew from Vandy. That sort of capacity isn't really needed for high inclination orbits.

Unless you're the NRO/DoD and want to launch some really, really high power synthetic aperture radar satellites into low altitude polar orbits, with massive photovoltaic arrays to power the radar (or nuclear reactors, as the Soviets did)

Yeah, maybe, but you can fly those payloads out of CCAFS too. I don't think there will be enough demand for high inclination massive payloads to support BFR capable pads on both coasts.

America once launched a reactor into space, the SNAP-10A, from Vandenberg. (Unlike the soviet reactors it was just an experiment.)

At least it didn't pull an uncontrolled reentry over the Canadian Arctic.

Note that the USAF launches Delta IV Heavy payloads from Vandy on a regular basis. Vandy is also occasionally used to launch retrograde.

BFR is projected to have ~5X the lift capacity of the DIVH. That's just a crazy amount of mass. I really don't see the call for single payloads of that size to the orbits that Vandy serves. I certainly could be wrong, but I just don't see enough current or future demand to warrant constructing a pad capable of supporting BFR on the west coast.

If you give the NRO the ability to put 14,000 kilogram satellites in orbit they will certainly use it. Even if most of the extra mass is extra propellant for orbit-maintenance ion or hall effect thrusters. A lot of "big satellite" applications that use buses the size of current 6500 kilogram, largest possible telecom satellites, would be very happy to have a few thousand kj of extra propellant tanks available for the same launch cost.

There is stuff that big already. The F9 can launch 22,800kg to LEO. The BFL would launch 150,000kg to LEO. Who needs that outside of human missions?

“This is not a moon...”

Vandenberg is also used for westbound, retrograde launches for ballistic missile tests and anti-ballistic missile tests, to Kwajalein.

I think the idea of a giant fuel air bomb the size of a small skyscraper falling on Los Angeles is a barrier here.

That's crazy. Not yet, anyway. While building a rocket it'll typically not be in a condition to launch it. Plus steering? Maybe BFR will once carry smaller rockets like airplane makers are doing it, but even that's far fetched.

The next few years are going to be interesting. Assuming it all goes according to plan, this along with BFR/BFS will signal an end to the scrappy duct tape stage of SpaceX’s existence.

Is there any concern regarding the damage these frequent and big rocket launches are doing to the upper atmosphere? Are people aware of such a thing? Because I have seen very few discussion around the same....

I am also curious about this. Can you imagine trying to curb launches by private companies? Not going to happen especially in today's politics dominated by libertarian populism

It'd be easy, actually. Getting a launch permit requires mountains of paperwork.

In the US, but there are plenty of countries near the equater that would be happy to take the business. Export controls would make it tough for SpaceX, but if there wasn’t another way to launch the demand would lead to foreign companies taking the lead.

tl;dr it won’t happen

It's a matter of scale. There's about two launches per week /globally/. But for a single airport, you might have a flight every two minutes.

There is some concern from solid rocket motors, whose exhaust is absolutely terrible environmentally (big clouds of toxic smoke that erode launch infrastructure, etc). Luckily, SpaceX doesn't use any of those.

I am not sure. Why are you mentioning flights? I am talking about this [1] and [2]. It does not have anything to do with regular planes..

[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/03/spacex-launch-last-y...

[2] https://www.engadget.com/2018/03/25/spacex-rocket-carved-gia...

He's trying to say that rockets emit CO₂, but there are very few of them compared to other things that also emit CO₂ at high altitudes, namely airplanes. He's also saying that some rockets have significant other pollution problems, but not SpaceX's.

Indeed. And there may come a time when such emissions are enough to matter, but we should then just apply a proper tax to them (as well as airplanes). That’d encourage using alternatives (like hydrogen which is actually a superior rocket fuel from an exhaust velocity perspective but is harder to handle and leads to greater dry mass) and also provide incentive to pull such emissions from the atmosphere. Elon Musk has advocated such a broad carbon tax, including on SpaceX’s rockets (which use kerosene and eventually methane).

There’s no evidence that the impact on the extremely low density part of the atmosphere makes any kind of environmental problem except perhaps for sensitive radio wave measurements (ie GPS, whose satellites are also launched on rockets).

>There’s no evidence that the impact on the extremely low density part of the atmosphere makes any kind of environmental problem

That is what people thought about automobiles emitting co2. If we have learned anything, we would be extremely wary of anything that causes big disruptions in the environments, how ever innocent it might seem...

That’s not true. We knew about the warming effect of CO2 since 1897 or earlier and over 100 years ago, we knew that continual burning of coal and other fossil fuels would cause considerable warming.

>we knew that continual burning of coal and other fossil fuels would cause considerable warming.

Wrong. We didn't know that. We hoped the co2 will be cleaned up by the mechanisms already in place, and we thought the effect would only be temporary. Just like we think the holes caused by the rockets are temporary now, and will not have any cascading effects.

Incredibly short sighted and We have learned nothing from history if we continue to reason like this.

Yeah, we did know: https://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/10/21/coals-link-to-...

Does SpaceX pay rent to launch from KSC or do they just pay for the expansion and call it good?

They lease the launch pads, e.g. 39a has a 20 year lease. They can probably do a lot of spacey things on there for the duration.

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/spacex-signs-20-year-l...

edit: looking at the article map, this is patch of farmland a bit further away from the launch pad, so they probably acquired it for development.

In addition to paying rent on the land, SpaceX pays KSC/CCAFS/the Air Force for launch services support.

They pay range fees, but may not pay much for the facilities themselves. It's not uncommon in things like this for the lease to be offset by the improvements built or simply for taking maintenance of the government's hands.

Whatever happened with their Brownsville TX facility? They put in some antennas, brought in a crane, and put in some solar panels, but not much more than that.

They spent a long time stabilizing the soil there.

Some of the delay could possibly be attributed to the Amos-6 incident. Now that they've rebuilt that pad, they can continue at Boca Chica, which explains the recent activity there.

It's likely to be where the first BFR-related tests happen in the first half of 2019.

SpaceX is a total steamroller. Its insane. I think in 2005 nobody could have quite seen this comming. Even Elon must be suprised.

So good! Very thrilled -- SpaceX is a model giant, but also: the emergence of qualities MUST be due to underlying levels of Need and Demand in our human economy/ecology/world. Success that has great potential pushing behind it can soar. It's important now that we follow this example and harness the gathered beam of human intelligence as a laser or light beam would be harnessed and benefit the planet with strong focii of knowledge and need satisfaction.

edit: i'm very interested in any possible objections to what has been stated. i'm an avid observer and although i have no weight in the topic, i am of this genuine opinion.

I want some of whatever you're smoking, it sounds like some good shit.

The downvotes are because it's not clear what the heck you are saying. For example:

> the emergence of qualities MUST be due to underlying levels of Need and Demand in our human economy/ecology/world

This is a very vague and confusing sentence. Which qualities are you talking about?

Take it as an opportunity to improve your writing skills :)

Humans need rockets to Mars & Space and this need will manifest as thousands of small companies or several huge ones.

Its amazing what billions in government subsidies do for a company.

Quite amazing... why wasn't ULA able to leverage their billions in government subsidies so well?

Elon is doing it wrong. You're supposed to waste government funding, not deliver stuff.

I only half joke. He's threatening a massive gravy train by showing that government really ought to expect more from private contractors. Why didn't ULA do a reusable first stage? They got far more money from government than SpaceX over the years.

Capitalism finally kicking in, where there is waste there is opportunity.

SpaceX did have the government as their major early customer, but they charged less than other vendors of the same services (e.g., Orbital for space station resupply), so it's odd to describe their fees as a "subsidy". That description better fits the "launch capability" fee that ULA charges DOD in addition to the fees (well above commercial launch rates) that ULA charges for the launches themselves.

Do you mean the launch contracts or the milestone payments?

I wonder how much is Elon vs. the team he put in place, seems like Gwynne Shotwell is definitely front and center. Not familiar w/ the other executives/operations/engineering folks

Am I the only one who misread "Expansion" as "Explosion" when skimming the headlines?

Nope.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com