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BROWNSVILLE – In late 2015 the trucks started rolling, dumping more than 300,000 cubic yards of dirt at the future SpaceX launch pad where Texas site 4 dead-ends at Boca Chica beach in South Texas.
The technical term is "soil overharging," a process of compressing the underlying soil to stabilize it – in this case to create a suitable foundation for launch – complex structures. That process is now complete, leading to the artificial mesa being leveled by earthmovers.
Once that's done, SpaceX will install a 95,000-gallon liquid oxygen tank and an 80,000-gallon methane tank that the company has taken delivery of in recent months. The tanks, stored for now at the SpaceX control center area, will be used to support propellant-loading operations during space vehicle tests beginning sometime in 2019.
In February, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said tests at Boca Chica would be "short hopper flights with the spaceship part of BFR."
BFR stands for Big Falcon Rocket, a fully reusable, two-stage vehicle of a booster and a spaceship. "Hopper flights" refer to SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket at the company's test facility in Central Texas outside of McGregor, southwest of Waco.
Musk had been banking on its biggest rocket, the Falcon Heavy, to get humans to Mars, but the focus has shifted to more powerful BFR for Mars flights September 2014.
"He said," He said, "It could be said that he said," It would be so.
Over the last two years SpaceX, based in suburban Los Angeles, has installed two giant ground-station antennas from Cape Canaveral in Florida and more than 600 kilowatts of solar arrays to power them. The antennas will be used to track manned Crew Dragon missions to and from the International Space Station as well as flights blasting off from Boca Chica.
"The ongoing construction of our launch in South Texas is proceeding," spokesman spokesman Sean Pitt said. "SpaceX has gotten the final major ground-system tank needed to support initial test flights from the Big Falcon Spaceship."
Musk estimated initially that the first rocket launched from Boca Chica could happen by late 2016. The need for soil overharging created delays, however, then in September 2016 a Falcon 9 rocket exploded during a fueling test at Cape Canaveral, destroying that launch pad, which SpaceX had to rebuild.
Launch Pad Complex 40 on Dec. 15, 2017, a resupply mission to the space station using a Falcon 9 rocket and unmanned Dragon capsule. On Feb. 6, SpaceX conducted the launch of the Falcon Heavy Rocket from Launch Pad 39a at Cape Canaveral's Kennedy Space Center.
That's the same pad from which Apollo 11 departed for the moon on July 16, 1969, four days before Neil Armstrong became the first human to walk on the lunar surface. Last August, NASA Spacex has a walkway to launch Pad 39a that NASA astronauts will use to board the Crew Dragon capsule for missions to the ISS.
NASA awarded SpaceX and Boeing contracts in 2014 to ferry its astronauts to and from the space station. Four astronauts have been chosen for SpaceX's inaugural Crew Dragon mission, tentatively scheduled for April 2019. They will be the first humans sent into space from U.S. soil since the space shuttle was discontinued in 2011.
Propelling the first Crew Dragon mission in space will be the Falcon 9 rocket, 230 feet tall with a payload of 25 tons in low Earth orbit. The Falcon Heavy is the same height but much more powerful, with a low earth orbit payload of 70 tones. At a press conference after February 's Falcon Heavy launch, Musk said the mission' s success of the feasibility of developing the BFR.
The BFR would stand 387 feet tall with a payload of more than 110 tones. That's the SpaceX rocket eventually plans to launch from Boca Chica, where tests of the BFR's spaceship are slated to begin next year.
Gil Salinas, a member of the governor's Aerospace and Aviation Advisory Committee, and executive director of the Brownsville Economic Development Council, who worked closely with SpaceX during negotiations with the company of part about Mars, which Musk says needs to be colonized.
"When he provided us his vision back in 2011 it was just so out there – where do we begin?" he said.
Now, with SpaceX coming up on 70 launches completed and 35 more planned, every eye in the aerospace sector is doing so in Cameron County, Salinas said.
"You can see they are on a path to change the world," Salinas said.
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