Elon Musk shows off Raptor stockpile at SpaceX’s Starbase facility with Everyday Astronaut [Part 2 of 3]

Seth Kurkowski | Aug 9 2021 - 9:04 am PT

Earlier this week Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, released the first part of his interview/tour with Elon Musk at SpaceX’s Starship facility. Saturday, Dodd released his second part featuring a stockpile of Raptor engines for Starship and Super Heavy.

This part of the tour focuses primarily on the three large tents that SpaceX has built to manufacture the different parts of Starship. While they currently focus on specific parts of production right now, their purpose has been fluid, changing use cases as they are needed.

Tour of Starbase production tents

The first tent showed off a large supply of Raptor engines, remember this was recorded on July 30th so most of these were probably installed on Booster 4 or Starship 20. It’s crazy to see how far SpaceX has come with their Raptor production. From barely having enough for their first few flights to being able to fill an entire booster with them. Musk mentioned again Raptor 2, in the first part he shut down any rumors of Raptor 2 being built, he told us that the new version of Raptor will look nothing like the current version.

The Starbase tour then moved to the second tent, which is currently focused on two things, the production of Starship’s header tanks and the aft domes that hold the Raptor engine mounting points. The third and final tent Dodd and Musk walked through was being used for nose cone production. In this tent, we got a preview of the new style of nose cone SpaceX is working on. This design is much cleaner and was being experimented on for the first nose cone with an opening for deploying payloads. Musk said work on an opening nose cone has halted to focus on the first orbital launch.

Plenty of nitty-gritty details on why the grid fins are the way they are and the heat shield tiles were discussed in this section. If you’re into those kinds of details it’s 100% worth the watch. Part 3 will be at the launch site and will have a tour of the launch and ground support facilities. Hopefully, that will come out sometime this week.

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