{"id":16941,"date":"2014-09-29T01:17:19","date_gmt":"2014-09-28T17:17:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/construction-of-texas-launch-site-to-begin-next-year\/"},"modified":"2014-09-29T01:17:19","modified_gmt":"2014-09-28T17:17:19","slug":"construction-of-texas-launch-site-to-begin-next-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/construction-of-texas-launch-site-to-begin-next-year\/","title":{"rendered":"Construction of Texas launch site to begin next year"},"content":{"rendered":"

SpaceX broke ground on a new commercial spaceport Sept. 22 on the shores of South Texas, committing to the construction of the world\u2019s first privately-owned satellite launch pad scheduled to be operational as soon as late 2016.<\/p>\n

Rep. Filemon Vela, D-Texas, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Texas Gov. Rick Perry break ground on the South Texas spaceport. Credit: Stephen Clark\/Spaceflight Now<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The ceremonial groundbreaking, attended by more than 100 state and local officials, SpaceX employees, and media representatives, marked the end of a nationwide search for a location to build a new launch base for SpaceX\u2019s Falcon rocket family.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is just the first initial groundbreaking,\u201d said Elon Musk, CEO and chief designer at SpaceX. \u201cIt\u2019s going to take several years to build out the spaceport. This is going to be quite a significant building endeavor.\u201d<\/p>\n

SpaceX initially plans up to a dozen launches of its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets from the facility at Boca Chica Beach, a remote stretch of shoreline about three miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border at the mouth of the Rio Grande River.<\/p>\n

Situated where a little-traveled two-lane highway dead-ends at the Gulf of Mexico about 20 miles east of Brownsville, the South Texas launch site beat out proposed locations in Florida, Hawaii and elsewhere.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe looked all through the country, we looked at all possibilities,\u201d Musk said. \u201cAnd I have to say we thought this was the best place to put it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Texas lured SpaceX to the Rio Grande Valley with commitments of public funding and legislation to tweak laws that could impede launch operations at the site.<\/p>\n

The state offered $15.3 million in incentives to support SpaceX\u2019s development of a South Texas spaceport, and the Texas legislature passed a law permitting the closure of public beaches on launch days.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe put into account various factors, and one of the biggest factors \u2014 maybe the biggest \u2014 was the willingness of the state and local governments to support such an endeavor,\u201d Musk said. \u201cDo they truly really want it? We want to be in a place where we\u2019re truly wanted.\u201d<\/p>\n

The University of Texas at Brownsville and SpaceX are partnering to develop a ground communications station to support launches from the area.<\/p>\n

The Federal Aviation Administration will license SpaceX\u2019s rocket launches from South Texas, holding responsibility for public safety. The U.S. Air Force does that job at Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif.<\/p>\n

The FAA gave a green light to the commercial launch base in July after a review of its impacts to the environment.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe actually began environmental studies on a few different locations, but I think the fundamental point that swayed SpaceX on Boca Chica was the tremendous outpouring of support from local residents,\u201d Musk said.<\/p>\n

SpaceX\u2019s South Texas launch site is located along a little-traveled two-lane highway about 3 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border. Credit: Stephen Clark\/Spaceflight Now<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cElon \u2026 we thank you for having the vision to see that this is where you needed to be and wanted to be,\u201d said Texas Gov. Rick Perry. \u201cThis is just another one of those signals to the rest of the world that this is a state that is making a difference \u2014 making a difference in a powerful way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Officials hope the SpaceX launch base will revitalize South Texas, an agglomeration of border towns with an economy primarily based on agriculture, tourism and maritime services.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you think about this project and what it means for the state of Texas, for the nation, and frankly for the world, then we start to see just how important Texas and the Rio Grande Valley is in that makeup,\u201d Perry said.<\/p>\n

The first launch from South Texas could occur as soon as late 2016, according to Musk, who added SpaceX wants to base commercial communications satellite launches into geostationary transfer orbit from the Boca Chica facility.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur preference is to try to move particularly the commercial GTO (geostationary transfer orbit) missions to the Boca Chica launch site as soon as we can because there\u2019s a significant benefit by being south,\u201d Musk said.<\/p>\n

Geostationary transfer orbit \u2014 an elliptical orbit with a high point typically about 22,300 miles above Earth \u2014 is a common drop-off point for large communications satellites.<\/p>\n

Communications satellites use on-board thrusters to circularize their orbits at geostationary altitude \u2014 22,300 miles \u2014 and move over the equator, where their orbital velocity matches the speed of Earth\u2019s rotation, causing the spacecraft to hover over a fixed location on the planet.<\/p>\n

Rockets launching into such orbits receive a performance boost from launch pads at lower latitudes because of the faster spin of Earth closer to the equator. Launching closer to the equator allows rockets to use less fuel to put satellites in orbit.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re two-and-a-half degrees south of Cape Canaveral, and those two-and-a-half degrees are actually helpful for GTO missions,\u201d Musk said. \u201cWe have a strong incentive to try to get Boca Chica active as soon as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Boca Chica launch site lies at about 26 degrees north latitude, while Cape Canaveral sits at approximately 28.5 degrees.<\/p>\n

SpaceX\u2019s rockets will launch to the east from Boca Chica Beach, flying over the Gulf of Mexico and the Florida Straits between the Florida Keys and Cuba to avoid flying over land en route to geostationary transfer orbit with commercial satellites.<\/p>\n

Musk said SpaceX will continue using its launch pads at Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg Air Force Base in California primarily for U.S. government missions.<\/p>\n

Artist\u2019s concept of the SpaceX launch pad in South Texas. Credit: SpaceX<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cI think this is really going to be a new kind of spaceport that\u2019s optimized for commercial operations,\u201d Musk said. \u201cCape Canaveral and Vandenberg are great launch sites, but they are military launch sites, so they\u2019re optmized more for defense of the country and that kind of thing.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s important for the future of space exploration is to have a truly commercial launch site, just as we have commercial airports,\u201d Musk said. \u201cWhen you travel somewhere, from Dallas to New York or London, you\u2019re always landing at a commercial airport.\u201d<\/p>\n

Musk said commercial astronaut crews could blast off from South Texas in the future, too. But NASA astronauts, such as crews heading for the International Space Station, will fly from SpaceX\u2019s facility at the Kennedy Space Center, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is not in any way a knock on Cape Canaveral or [Kennedy Space Center]. That\u2019s a great spaceport that they\u2019ve got there,\u201d Musk said. \u201cIt will continue to be used heavily as far into the future as one can imagine, but what we see is a level of demand in terms of launches that even Cape Canaveral could not support, so we needed another great launch site in order to support the flight rate that we expect.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIn terms of SpaceX, in the three-to-four year timeframe, we expect to spend on the order of about $100 million,\u201d Musk said. \u201cBut in the long term, say in 10 or 20 years, it\u2019s probably in the several hundred million dollar range because we\u2019ll be expanding the facility, and there will be other companies that will locate here to support SpaceX. There will be an ecosystem of companies that will move in to support the anchor tenant \u2014 in this case, a commercial launch pad for commercial satellites.\u201d<\/p>\n

The FAA approved up to 12 launches from the South Texas spaceport annually, including two flights of SpaceX\u2019s larger Falcon Heavy rocket. Most of the launches must occur in daylight, according to the FAA, with a possibility of one night launch per year.<\/p>\n

While the FAA reviewed environmental concerns and state officials put together an incentive package, legislators rewrote laws to bring SpaceX to Texas.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe issue that we would close Texas beaches for any private venture was against the laws of the state of Texas,\u201d said Rene Oliveira, who represents Brownsville in the Texas House of Representatives. \u201cWe have an Open Beaches Act, and that had to be modified.<\/p>\n

The new law prohibits beach closures \u2014 and launches \u2014 on holidays and weekends in the summer.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we did is we\u2019ll close the beaches for hopefully one time a month,\u201d Oliveira said. \u201cIt did not allow that our friends at SpaceX could launch on holidays, which was very important, particularly to our culture. They like their beach and they\u2019re going to have their beach on Memorial Day, the Fourth of July and Labor Day. But it will be closed for one launch per month for 15 hours.\u201d<\/p>\n

SpaceX plans to build a launch pad, a rocket integration hangar, propellant tanks, a launch control center, and a satellite processing clean room at the Boca Chica site.<\/p>\n

Musk said preliminary work will begin soon, but major construction will not start until the second half of 2015, once SpaceX\u2019s launch site development team finishes modifications to Kennedy Space Center\u2019s launch pad 39A, which the company leased from NASA in April.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re expecting the Cape site to be done in approximately nine months, and we\u2019ll do some advanced preparation work here at Boca Chica, but we\u2019ll probably start with more significant activity in the third quarter of next year,\u201d Musk said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

SpaceX broke ground on a new commercial spaceport Sept. 22 on the shores of South Texas, committing to the construction of the world\u2019s first privately-owned satellite launch pad scheduled to be operational as soon as late 2016. Rep. Filemon Vela, D-Texas, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Texas Gov. Rick Perry break ground on the South […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[291,1045,479,316,1898],"class_list":["post-16941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-commercial-space","tag-elon-musk","tag-falcon-9","tag-spacex","tag-texas"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16941"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16941"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16941\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}