SpaceX Fire at Cocoa Starship Facility
Fire at SpaceX Starship facility in Cocoa causes damages to equipment, Florida Today
“Emergency crews responded to a SpaceX prototyping facility in Cocoa Monday afternoon, putting out a small fire that caused damages to equipment and infrastructure but no injuries.”
Marc’s note: Emre Kelly (@EmreKelly) of Florida Today is reporting there is about $50-$100K in damages.
UPDATE: Cocoa Fire Department now says damages at #SpaceX facility estimated between $50K and $100K. Crews noted there was damage from a previous fire (wonder when this was?) and lumped that repair / replace figure in. So just today's number = $50K to $100K.
— Emre Kelly (@EmreKelly) July 8, 2019
Hopefully it won’t slow them down. It will be great to see it launch from Pad39a when the flight tests start.
It was an electrical fire in a trailer. That had better not slow them down. But I’m a little worried about LC-39A becoming a bottle neck. They need it for Falcon 9/Dragon 2, Falcon Heavy and, eventually, Starship launches. As I understand it, a fair amount of time and effort goes into reconfiguring the facilities between Falcon 9 and Heavy flights, and that will certainly be true for Starship as well. I don’t see how they can sustain a high launch rates with three different launch vehicles sharing the same pad.
They still have SLC40 at KSC so I don’t think it will be a large issue
I don’t believe they ever put in the modifications to support Dragon 2 flights out of LC-40. The could, but that’s still only two pads to support a very large number of flights at a high rate.
Yes, Dragon2 may be the hangup, but it will likely get pushed into next year as NASA reviews it. There are no FH until late next year so it should be all clear for the Starship/Super Heavy to use it. Since Starship is intended to operate from the Moon/Mars one of the SpaceX landing pads should work for just doing the suborbital flights.
And there is Boca Chica, although they will need to get busy with building facilities for the Super Heavy. But the pad for the Starship should be easy enough. Probably just upgrade the one being used for Starhopper.
NSF hints the SS/SH infrastructure would be built next to the F9/FH ramp, not on it.
https://www.nasaspaceflight…
Not sure there would be a high launch rate anyway for those three vehicles at least for the foreseeable future. Not very many Dragon crewed launches per year assuming they alternate with Boeing in supporting crew rotations. FH will presumably have a flight rate similar to DH since the need for that much lift is less frequent, especially now that F9 has been upgraded. As an example the Arabsat-6A launch in April could have flown on F9 but they had previously booked it on FH when the upgraded F9 wasn’t ready yet. SpaceX later said they could switch to F9 for a lower price if they wanted but Arabsat chose to stay with FH apparently not wanting to change launchers that close to launch and if I remember correctly FH was able to put them in an orbit with a little more margin if the satellite used more fuel than expected getting into position.
Starship should be able to fit in between those flights I would think. I think pad reconfigure currently takes three weeks or something like that and they will presumably be able to reduce that some more after they have done it a few more times. SpaceX might take their time building new designs but they seem extremely agile when it comes to operations out at the launch site.
Now if they start building Moon bases or something then sure there could be a bottleneck, but by then they will probably have secured additional launch pads and locations.