Elon Musk's SpaceX is building a massive Starship rocket factory at their Starbase Texas facility. The aim is to mass-produce the Starship and Super Heavy rockets at a rate unprecedented in the aerospace industry. SpaceX president Gwen Shotwell has set an ambitious goal of building one rocket every day.
This mass production plan will require highly efficient advanced manufacturing techniques, similar to those developed at Tesla over the past three years with their gigafactories. The Starbase Texas facility is expected to see a lot of crossover between the two Musk-owned companies.
The ambition to build one Starship rocket every day is extreme and unprecedented, but it's a goal that SpaceX is focused on. Shotwell has stated that they are attacking every part of the production process to be able to build lots of these machines.
This is a departure from traditional aerospace practices. The closest comparable rocket to Starship is NASA's Space Launch System, which can only build one rocket per year.
The process of designing and building prototypes is relatively easy compared to mass-producing a final product. Tesla's Cybertruck is a perfect example of this. It took Tesla four years to figure out how to mass-produce the Cybertruck at an acceptable cost and high volume.
SpaceX is currently in a similar place with the Starship. They've built several prototypes, most of which have either exploded or been scrapped before they got the chance to launch. This is part of an iterative design process where every Starship or Super Heavy booster is either an evolution or an experiment.
SpaceX is currently making their Starships by hand for the most part, using makeshift tents and doing a lot of their work out in the open. They are just now beginning to work on their first real Starship Factory and production line.
The construction process for the Starship Factory involves SpaceX constructing a series of vertical assembly buildings at Starbase. These structures are used to assemble the rocket stages by stacking prefabricated ring sections and welding them together.
The manufacturing process for the Starship begins when SpaceX receives their raw materials. They receive giant rolls of 304 L stainless steel that are then cut to length, formed into rings, and welded. These become the straight sides of the ship and booster for the curved bits like the nose cone and the interior domes that form the tops and bottoms of fuel tanks.
The Starship Factory began to take shape a few months ago as SpaceX laid the foundation for a permanent structure in line with their three primary tents. The final Starship Factory layout will expand to be more or less Square in shape so around 800 ft by 800 ft, providing SpaceX with significantly more covered floor space and vertical space.
The massive production volume is what SpaceX will need for Starship to live up to Elon's Grand Vision. Starship is not only set to replace all of the existing SpaceX Fleet but also become the primary muscle of NASA's Artemis moonlanding program. Starship is also the backbone of Elon's Mission to establish a self-sustaining City on the planet Mars. The Star Factory is critical to making all of that become a reality.
1. Elon Musk is constructing a massive Starship rocket factory at SpaceX's Starbase Texas facility, aiming to mass-produce the Starship and Super Heavy rockets at an unprecedented pace .
2. SpaceX president Gwen Shotwell has set an ambitious goal to build one rocket every day .
3. SpaceX is expected to leverage advanced manufacturing techniques similar to those developed by Tesla over the past three years .
4. The Starship factory will likely have a significant crossover with Tesla's gigafactories .
5. The Starship factory will be larger and more efficient than previous aerospace factories, allowing for the production of one Starship rocket every day .
6. The Starship factory will be designed to assemble rocket stages by stacking prefabricated ring sections and welding them together .
7. The factory will include vertical assembly buildings - the low bay, mid bay, high bay, and mega bay - which are used to assemble the rocket stages .
8. The factory's production process will involve the use of robotic arms and giant turntable machines to allow workers or machines to spin the rocket around while work is being done .
9. The factory will have a continuous production floor, replacing the previous separate tents, allowing SpaceX to have between two and three times more covered floor space .
10. The final Star Factory layout will expand to be more or less square in shape, around 800 ft by 800 ft, providing around five times more total production space than what the company had available when they first started building Starships .
11. The Star Factory will allow SpaceX to produce one Starship every day by working on several new rockets simultaneously, building out prefabricated segments, and then stacking them up for final assembly .
12. The Star Factory is critical to SpaceX's grand vision of replacing all existing SpaceX fleet, becoming the primary muscle of NASA's Artemis moon landing program, and establishing a self-sustaining city on Mars .