Work in South Texas for SpaceX Launch Projects – News – Valley Town Shout

BROWNSVILLE – At the end of 2015, the trucks began rolling, spilling more than 300,000 cubic meters of dirt on the future SpaceX launch pad site where Texas 4 ended in a stalemate on Boca Chica Beach, in the South Texas.

The technical term is "soil overload", a process of compressing the underlying soil to stabilize it – in this case, creating a suitable base for complex launch structures. This process is now complete and the earthworks have leveled the artificial mesa.

Once this is done, SpaceX will install a 80,000 gallon liquid oxygen tank that the company has taken delivery over the last few months. The tanks, currently stored in the SpaceX control area a few kilometers west of the launch site, will be used for propellant loading operations during spacecraft testing starting in 2019.

In February, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said testing at Boca Chica would involve "short flights into the hopper with the BFR vessel part."

BFR stands for Big Falcon Rocket, a fully reusable two-stage vehicle consisting of a booster and a spaceship. "Hopper flights" means SpaceX's Grasshopper program, which consists of low altitude launch and landing tests of its Falcon 9 rocket at the company's test site in central Texas. , near McGregor, southwest of Waco.

Musk relied on its largest rocket, the Falcon Heavy, to bring humans to Mars, but the development of the largest and most powerful BFR for flights to Mars has become an ambitious goal – an ambitious goal that Musk spoke of at the ceremony. inauguration of the works of Boca Chica to September 2014.

"It could very well be that the first person to go to another planet can leave this place," he said.

Over the last two years, SpaceX, based in the suburbs of Los Angeles, has installed two giant antennas for earth stations acquired in Cape Canaveral, Florida, and more than 600 kilowatts of solar panels to power them. The antennas will be used to track the Dragon's crewed missions to and from the International Space Station, as well as the flights taking off from Boca Chica.

"The ongoing construction of our launch pad in South Texas is progressing well," said company spokesman Sean Pitt. "SpaceX has now received the last major ground system tank needed to support the first test flights of the Big Falcon spacecraft."

Musk initially estimated that the first rocket launch since Boca Chica could take place by the end of 2016. The need to overload the soil has caused delays. However, in September 2016, a Falcon 9 rocket exploded during a refueling test at Cape Canaveral, destroying this SpaceX launch pad had to rebuild.

The company made its first launch from the Launch Pad Complex 40 rebuilt on December 15, 2017, as part of a replenishment mission to the space station using a Falcon 9 rocket and an unmanned Dragon capsule. On February 6, SpaceX led the inaugural launch of the Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Pad 39a at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral.

This is the same pad from which Apollo 11 left for the moon on July 16, 1969, four days before Neil Armstrong became the first human to walk on the lunar surface. Last August, SpaceX affixed a gateway on Launch Pad 39a, which NASA astronauts will use to board the Crew Dragon capsule for missions in the ISS.

NASA awarded contracts to SpaceX and Boeing in 2014 for the transportation of its astronauts to and from the space station. Four astronauts have been chosen for SpaceX Crew Dragon's inaugural mission, tentatively scheduled for April 2019. They will be the first humans sent into space from US ground since the Shuttle Shutdown in 2011.

The first mission of the Space Crew Dragon will be the Falcon 9 rocket, 230 feet high and with a payload of 25 tons in low Earth orbit. The Falcon Heavy has the same height, but much more powerful, with a payload in low Earth orbit of 70 tons. At a press conference held after the launch of Falcon Heavy in February, Mr Musk said the success of the mission convinced him of the feasibility of developing the BFR.

The BFR would reach 387 feet in height with a payload of more than 110 tons. This is the rocket SpaceX plans to launch from Boca Chica, where tests of the BFR spacecraft are expected to begin next year.

Gil Salinas, a member of the Governor's Advisory Committee on Aerospace and Aviation and former leader of the Brownsville Economic Development Council, who worked closely with SpaceX in negotiations to bring the company here, admitted that his first meeting with Musk in 2011 was hallucinating – especially a part on Mars, which, according to Musk, is to be colonized.

"When he told us of his vision in 2011, he was doing so well – where to start?" he said.

Now, as SpaceX prepares for 70 launches and another 35 planned, each sector of the aerospace sector is paying attention to what the company is doing in Cameron County, Salinas said.

"You can see that they are on the path to changing the world and that everything will be done from here," Salinas said.