Elon Musk’s spaceflight and astronautics company SpaceX is accelerating the Starship program in Florida as well.
SpaceX is building a huge Starship production area and a Gigabay at its Roberts Road facility, located at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This new Gigabay will be a similar megastructure to that being built at Starbase, Texas.
SpaceX is simultaneously building two Gigabays in Florida and Texas. In a recent flyover video of the Starship Florida facility, the NasaSpaceFlight.com team spotted some major developments at this site (see pictures and video below).
Recent permit filings by SpaceX to Brevard County, FL, provide a map of the Starship production area at Roberts Road and the adjacent Gigabay. This Starship factory is expected to be a similar facility as the Starfactory in Boca Chica, Texas.
However, the Roberts Road Starship production area (factory) is going to have a ~50% larger footprint than that of the current Starfactory in Texas. Apart from its initial area of construction, there is a huge amount of land available for future expansions of the SpaceX factory in Florida.
Gigabay Florida
The aerial pictures of the enormous construction area show the progress SpaceX has made with ground preparation work for the Starship Gigabay and improvements made to the existing operations center.
Both Gigabays at Florida and Starbase are scheduled to be completed by the end of 2026. The completion of these facilities will enable SpaceX engineers and staff to easily and efficiently perform development and maintenance tasks on the Super Heavy rocket boosters and Starship spacecraft.
SpaceX however, isn’t going to wait until the end of 2026 to start Starship launches from Florida. Elon Musk’s space company plans to ship Starship upper and lower stage parts from Starbase, Texas to Launch Complex 39-A, Florida using barges via the sea channel to start Starship launches from this location.
The scale of the Gigabay can be understood by the following SpaceX statement shared by the company in its February update on Starship:
The Gigabay in Florida will stand 380 feet tall and provide approximately 46.5 million cubic feet of interior processing space with 815,000 square feet of workspace, including ground level, elevated platform work areas, and a work and meeting space on the top floor. Gigabay will be able to support Starship and Super Heavy vehicles up to 81 meters (266 feet) tall and will provide 24 work cells for integration and refurbishment work, along with cranes capable of lifting up to 400 US tons. Compared to the Megabay facilities in Starbase, currently SpaceX’s largest stacking and integration buildings, Gigabay provides more than 11 times the square footage for workspace, 19 additional work cells, and more than twice the crane lifting capacity.
Starship OLM and Flame Trench Spotted
The construction of a brand new orbital launch mount (OLM) has made significant progress at SpaceX Roberts Road, Florida. This OLM is identical to the 2nd OLM (Pad B) being constructed at Starbase, Texas.
Through rigorous testing and eight Starship flight tests on its portfolio, SpaceX is now unifying flight-proven hardware like Starship OLMs, launch towers & Chopsticks, QD arms, and more across its launch sites.
During the flyover observation of the Starship Roberts Road facility in Florida, the NasaSpaceFlight.com team spotted the new OLM. Compared to the last time around 2.5 months ago, the Starship OLM construction has made significant progress at this launch site. The OLM has started taking shape.
If the OLM at Florida is completed around August or September, there is a chance that we can see the first Starship orbital flight test from this site before the end of this year.
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Related SpaceX / Starship News
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- Starship Flight 10: Live updates, watch live stream recordings (mission successful) [archived]
- SpaceX called off Monday’s Starship Flight 10 test due to Starbase weather conditions
- Starship Flight 10: Live updates, watch the live streams (scrubbed: Monday, 25th August)
- SpaceX postpones Starship’s 10th launch due to technical issues (scrubbed)
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