SpaceX (SPCX) moved Flight 13 upper stage Starship 40 to Megabay 2 at Starbase, Texas. Ship 40 joined three other Starships already parked inside this huge rocket hangar.
Starship 40 arrived at the Port of Brownsville, Texas, from the Indian Ocean on October 7 aboard a humongous sea transport vessel named Forte. The port is very close to SpaceX’s Starbase launch site, only about 4-5 nautical miles away.
SpaceX shared footage of Ship 40 being transported on its official X account yesterday. However, SpaceX vertically stacked Starship 40 inside Megabay 2 on Monday, October 12.
Elon Musk’s space launch company stated on X:
The first Starship to return to its launch site, Ship 40’s journey took it across air, space, and sea. Now that it is vertical alongside three other Starships in a Megabay at Starbase, it will provide first-of-its-kind data on a flown Starship heatshield, Raptor engines, avionics, and more.
Starship 40 Study, Data Collection, Possible Re-Flight
SpaceX engineers began studying Starship 40 soon after it landed in the Indian Ocean in the Flight 13 test (IFT-13). Since Ship 40 landed mostly intact, it offered a great opportunity for a deeper study and data collection.
It’s just been a couple of days since Starship 40 reached the Megabay. It’s too early to say this specific ship is capable of a reflight. If SpaceX can fix it completely, we might see a Ship 40 reflight on a future Starship mission.
As the official statement confirms, SpaceX is mainly going to study Ship 40 for future flight and landing data in the following three areas:
- Thermal protection system (TPS) heat shield tiles (the black hexagonal blocks)
- Raptor 3 engines
- Avionics hardware
Inside Megabay 2
SpaceX released the following picture of Starship 40 housed inside Megabay 2 at Starbase. It gives us a rare look inside the humongous rocket and spaceship hangar and production facility.
In this photo, Megabay 2 houses four Starship upper stage spacecraft at once. Interestingly, we can observe two empty cells, as four are already occupied.
However, Megabay 2 is at full capacity here. The extra two cells/housings are for redundancy. This also reveals that Megabay 2 has a total of six working cells, not 5.
SpaceX is currently building even more massive Gigabays. One is located at Starbase, Texas, while the other is being built at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Reportedly, each Gigabay will have 20-24 working cells or housings for Starship and Super Heavy.
According to Elon Musk, each Gigabay will produce ~10,000 Starships (upper and lower stages combined) per year.
Interesting Starship Facts
The crane that parked Starship 40 vertically inside Megabay 2 is named ‘420 T’ (pic below), a reference to Elon Musk and his 2018 Tesla fiasco.
In a recent interview, SpaceX Chief Engineer and CEO revealed that Starship’s propellant is 78% oxygen and 22% fuel (methane). This fuel mixture ratio allows Starship to be a truly rapidly reusable spacecraft and makes the journey to and from Mars possible.
Musk explained (video below):
Yes, and actually it’s mostly going to be an oxygen plant, but it’s because it’s 78% oxygen, 22% fuel. But the fuel is a simple fuel that is easy to create on Mars and many other parts of the solar system.
So basically, and it’s all propulsive landing, no parachutes, nothing thrown away, it has a heat shield that’s capable of entering on Earth or Mars.
We could even potentially go to Venus, but you don’t want to go there. Venus is hell, almost literally.
But you could. It’s a generalized method of transport to anywhere in the solar system, because, the point at which you have a propellant depot on Mars, you can then travel to the asteroid belt and to the moons of Jupiter and then to Saturn and ultimately anywhere in the solar system.
Stay tuned for future updates on Starship and SpaceX. Follow us on:
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Related SpaceX Starship News
- Starship 40 joins three other ships inside SpaceX’s Megabay at Starbase, it’s time for some serious data collection
- Flight 13 Starship 40 returns home to Starbase, Texas, after months at sea
- SpaceX deployed 26 terabits per second of Starlink V3 bandwidth in a single Starship launch (Flight 14)
- Watch Flight 14 Starship launch live stream recordings and read the live updates archive
- SpaceX completes Starship Flight 14 launch rehearsal, gets final FAA approval for launch on Monday, more
- SpaceX (SPCX) President Gwynne Shotwell files to sell $52M worth of the company’s shares
 transports Starship 40 to Megabay 2 at Starbase. Look at it parked inside Megabay 2 with three other Starships, more interesting info.){kind=link}