Starbase GigaBay preparations underway

For the last few weeks, SpaceX has been clearing land for its next massive project in Starbase, Texas: GigaBay. In its way was the old Stargate facility and High Bay, both of which are in various stages of demolition. In its place will be Starbase’s largest structure, a processing facility that will be able to process as many as a dozen Starships at a time.

The first stages of GigaBay’s construction were the removal of SpaceX’s HighBay. This was one of the original buildings constructed at Starbase to facilitate stacking Starship‘s tank sections to its nose cone before test flights. It did this alongside the Mid Bay and Low Bay, which have also seen their time come to an end.

All three of these facilities became obsolete with the addition of the two MegaBays and the Starfactory, which produces more complete Starship segments than the old production tents did.

Clearing of the High Bay is still underway, initially delayed by the removal of the concrete top floor. It’s unlikely that demolition charges will be used to bring the rest of the structure down, as the High Bay sits in a rather busy corridor of Starbase’s production site.

What has mostly been cleared is the old Stargate facility that predated SpaceX’s time in South Texas. The building originally served as a radio frequency research center for the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley campus. SpaceX took over the building to use it as office space and its first mission control center for test flights.

SpaceX acquired the property last December. Its demolition was completed quickly after teams removed the contents of the building, which included Raptor and Merlin rocket engines that were on display.

In both these buildings, GigaBay will stand. As stated before, the building will house 24 working stations that can be used for either Starship or Super Heavy booster processing. This will more than double Starbase’s current work station capacity and will connect directly with Starfactory for ease of movement of sections into GigaBay.

This is the second GigaBay under construction, with another one in the works over in Florida. Florida’s GigaBay is ahead of Starbase’s and is being built at SpaceX’s Roberts Road facility at Kennedy Space Center. There, we’ll eventually see a duplicate of facilities that are already in place at Starbase, including a Starfactory building to produce Florida’s own Starship rockets.

Florida’s facility could be complete as early as late this year or early next year, with Starbase’s Gigabay likely completing construction in late 2026.