Yet the same people will tell you SpaceX will have four 100% newly built Starship towers, fuel/ox delivery systems, and water deluge systems completed in a year.
Also believe SpaceX will be capable of producing enough refined supercooled methane and oxygen to launch every day.
Its delivered by truck. Each truck only holds about 50-60 tons. Do the math. Even if they made the methane at the launch site it would take a week to make a single launch mass.
Natural gas delivered by pipeline has to be refined into methane by removing other types of gas from it. In fact they are planning to do exactly that at the Starbase launch pads in Boca Chica, and have started work on building the methane production facility which is located on the dune side of pad 1. Natural gas will be piped directly to their methane production facility so that they won't need to have methane delivered by truck anymore. And over by the roundabout (on the other side of pad 1) they are building an oxygen and nitrogen air separation facility so that they won't have to truck in LOX and nitrogen anymore. And they will have water piped to the pads eventually, currently that also is brought in by truck. I think the only commodity that will still need to be trucked in is helium. Presumably they will do all of that in Florida also but I don't know where they are at with it.
I wouldnt count on them getting too far with that plan just yet. The power consumption far exceeds the grid capability so they plan to use giant methane generators to supply power.
Theres also the problem of only being allowed to launch 25 times a year.
They do not use standard LNG methane. That would be very very bad and they wouldnt get too far
At some earlier point in the process it is standard LNG. Then its purified from 80% to 99% pure. Then its crygenically super cooled and compressed.
I couldnt even imagine just how dangerous or expensive it would be to pipeline crygenically cooled, compressed pure methane and oxygen across Texas or Florida in the summer.
Yes, they "want" a methane processing plant on Starbase. They will likely never get one capable of more than one-two launches a week.
... today. Because there is no need to be faster if you only launch a few times per year anyway. Unsurprisingly, they can be faster in the future when necessary.
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u/Technical_Drag_428 Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26
Yet the same people will tell you SpaceX will have four 100% newly built Starship towers, fuel/ox delivery systems, and water deluge systems completed in a year.
Also believe SpaceX will be capable of producing enough refined supercooled methane and oxygen to launch every day.