‘Starship’ prototype takes shape on a beach in S. Texas
SpaceX, the commercial space company of billionaire Elon Musk, is working in South Texas to develop and test an early prototype of its vehicle to take people to the moon and Mars.
The Starship vehicle, with a test version recently assembled at Boca Chica beach near Brownsville, one day could carry space travelers atop a powerful rocket.
The Starship, integrated with the Super Heavy Rocket, previously called BFR, is expected to be more powerful than the Saturn V rocket that NASA used to propel astronauts to the moon.
The assembly of the test Starship is reinvigorating the Greater Brownsville community after long delays and roadblocks.
SpaceX first announced its Gulf Coast launch facility in 2014, but then years went by with little or no activity. People now can see the vehicle while driving along the beach, stopping to gawk and take pictures.
Gilberto Salinas, who spent three years negotiating with SpaceX to build the Boca Chica
beach launch facility, took his family to see the test vehicle on Sunday.
“When this company gets to Mars,” he said, “we will be able to come back and say, ‘Well, we were there when it all started.’”
SpaceX was founded by Elon Musk in 2002.
He started with big ambitions and, six years later, launched the Falcon 1 rocket that became the first privately developed, liquidfuel rocket to reach Earth’s orbit.
The company’s growth has continued since then, winning work with NASA to bring cargo and, one day, astronauts to the International Space Station.
SpaceX selected Boca Chica for a commercial launch site due to its proximity to the equator and distance from populated areas.
SpaceX used a local company to help manage the manufacturing process associated with assembling the test vehicle, said Mario Lozoya, executive director and CEO of the Greater Brownsville Incentives Corp., one of the organizations that provided incentive money to help attract SpaceX.
Lozoya believes tests and launches will take place this year, which could provide data for future versions of the Starship.
“For people from the immediate area around Brownsville and the border region,” he said, “to see front-end technology in our backyard is really exciting.”
Construction of the Boca Chica launch site previously had been delayed as SpaceX discovered the ground was unstable.
The company trucked in 310,000 cubic yards of soil, enough to cover a football field 13 to 14 stories high, which was put on top of the sand and left to settle and compress before construction.
Unexpected incidents with SpaceX operations outside Texas, including an anomaly during a flight to the International Space Station in 2015, also forced the company to put its Boca Chica launch site plans on the back burner.
The problem temporarily grounded SpaceX operations and demanded the company’s attention.
But work slowly ramped up. Last year, SpaceX successfully launched the Falcon Heavy — billed as the world’s most powerful operational rocket — from Kennedy Space Center, sending a Tesla sports car into space during the test launch. Musk then floated the idea of testing an even more powmatter erful vehicle in South Texas.
Starship isn’t the first SpaceX test vehicle to be in Texas. In McGregor, where SpaceX tests all of its rocket engines, the “Grasshopper” reusable rocket prototype was used to perfect the guidance, navigation and control systems for landing a rocket booster vertically. The prototype's namesake comes from its large, insectlike landing gear. The Grasshopper started with hops of only a of inches, but ultimately it flew half a mile into the air.
In a statement, SpaceX said it’s developing the Starship test vehicle in Texas “to streamline operations.” The decision won't affect its current manufacturing, design and launch operations in Hawthorne and Vandenberg AFB in California.
In a Tweet, Musk said the test vehicle, or “test hopper,” at Boca Chica beach is at its full diameter of 30 feet, but it's not at full height. It's designed to do suborbital tests. SpaceX expects to complete its first orbital prototype around June.
In a separate Tweet, Musk said he will provide a full technical presentation of Starship “after the test vehicle we’re building in Tex- as flies, so hopefully March/April.”
It’s the kind of news that Lozoya said can help counter a barrage of negativity brought onto border communities by the border wall and immigration debates.
“Something like this kind of mitigates that narrative to more of a positive narrative,” he said.