What’s the over/under on insurance claims from a badly planned launch pad this time?
I’m torn, I want to believe that the water cooled plate will work because I want starship to succeed, but at the same time I don’t know why they haven’t started digging a trench at cape Canaveral since that is where Artemis 3 will take off from.
They can’t dig a trench. The water table is often above the natural ground level, and their pads are only a few feet above that. When starship dug that hole, water seeped in and partially filled it!
But it is the same thing at the cape - but there they brought in soil and built up the land by something like 10 meters, and built their pads and trenches in that. Moving in that much dirt would take years.
I probably should have asked where they’re launching from, whether it’s one of their own built launch sites like Brownsville area or from a launch site like Canaveral.
I just remember that the last launch from Brownsville sent debris in all directions for a couple miles and damaged a lot of non SpaceX personal property like cars.