Posts Tagged ‘International Space Station’

No Wonder They’re Scared Of Elon Musk

Saturday, October 14th, 2023

I’m not an Elon Musk fanboy. I’m not a fan of electric cars, and not everything he does is genius, and some of it is just strange. But I do appreciate how his purchase of Twitter has put the left into tizzy over no longer being able to censor their opponents (though, as I’m still suspended, Musk needs to fix the broken appeals process).

But this video on the rapid pace of SpaceX expansion shows another reason Musks’ political opponents fear him: The man simply gets shit done.

  • At Orbital Launch Site 2, co-located at Kennedy Space Center’s lc39a pad:

    Because of NASA’s trepidation at the thought of a Starship failure and definitely delaying SpaceX from completing its Crew Dragon or Falcon Heavy contracts for the agency [And probably because the Biden Administration is pissed over Twitter and Musk’s resisting the Flu Manchu shutdowns. -LP], the company de-prioritized Starship Florida’s pad, slowing progress. SpaceX has nonetheless made significant progress. In 13 months, SpaceX has:

    • Created foundations
    • Modified one of pad 39a’s giant spherical tanks to store cryogenic methane
    • Installed miles of plumbing
    • Built and assembled a second skyscraper sized Starship launch tower
    • Installed the legs of the pad’s Orbital Launch Mount (or OLM)
    • Installed a water Deluge system at the base of the OLM
    • Assembled most of the OLM’s donut-like mount offsite
    • Constructed a new super-sized storage tank
    • And delivered a forest of smaller storage tanks.
  • “SpaceX has also completed the fabrication of a massive pair of steel arms transported them to pad 39a, attached them to a wheeled vehicle, and installed the structure on the Starship launch tower in Florida.”
  • “SpaceX employees have affectionately dubbed these arms ‘chopsticks,’ and they are an essential part of what CEO Elon Musk refers to as mechazilla,” which can stack and unstack Starship components. NASA never assembled components on the launch pad, they assembled them in the massive Vehicle Assembly Building and then rolled them out (very slowly) on crawlers.
  • “Many engineers even consider this ground structure to be more challenging than the production of the Starship spacecraft itself. However, SpaceX has not only one watchtower in Texas, but also constructed an additional launch Tower in Florida.”
  • “Currently, Falcon 9’s completed 66 launches.”
  • “It’s not unreasonable to expect more than 90 missions before the curtain Falls on 2023.”
  • “SpaceX has launched three crewed missions to the ISS along with three Falcon heavy rockets.”
  • They’re also launching payloads for Northrup Grumman.
  • “Lastly the missile defense agency has plans to launch the hypersonic and ballistic tracking space sensor mission into orbit later this year using a Falcon 9 rocket.”

    • That sort of breakneck pace is one the old NASA used to work at, the one crewed by the guys that won World War II (plus a smattering of indefatigable German scientist snatched up during Operation Paperclip) and who beat the Soviets to the moon. If today’s NASA had undertaken the expansions SpaceX has on pad 39a, they’d probably be in their third round of finalizing the Request For Proposal to send out to ask other people to bid on the work.

    Musk gets shit done and his company is now vital to the Military Industrial Complex.

    No wonder they’re scared of him…

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