This video is supported by Curiosity Stream. If you’re a SpaceX fan, you will be very
familiar with this place, Boca Chica. For 24 hours every day, this small town in
Texas is under constant surveillance from YouTube live streams, space photographers
and curious people from all over the world, looking to experience Starship. This incredible and sometimes creepy level
of attention has been with Boca Chica ever since the first piece of stainless steel turned
up. And rightly so, SpaceX is literally building
the largest rocket ever made outside in a dirt field! But for a short period of time, SpaceX took
over another location, which could have become the Boca Chica we know and love today. But what happened to this place? 1,000 miles away in Florida lies a SpaceX
site located near the Kennedy Space Center. This small construction yard in the city of
Cocoa was set up when SpaceX first started building Starship back in 2019. Although both sites were set up for the same
reason, Cocoa’s facility was extremely small - so small that you could fit almost seven
of them into Boca Chica’s site. Nevertheless, SpaceX knew that it was about
to begin a very long journey with Starship. So in order to get started, a competition
was set up within the company. The teams in Boca Chica and Florida were tasked
with figuring out the best ways to actually make Starship. The rules were simple, any important breakthroughs
discovered by one team had to be shared with the other team and whoever came up with the
best solutions won the competition. But what was the prize? Well, there was no prize. But for the workers in the winning team, it
meant that they didn’t have to move a thousand miles across the country. This method of healthy competition turned
out to be a great idea, perhaps even greater than SpaceX initially expected. But how did Boca Chica end up winning this
competition? One of the first problems Florida had was
with their barrel machine. This is the machine that takes the rolls of
stainless steel and transforms them into the 9 meter wide rings that make up Starship. The machine kept producing rings with slightly
different diameters. So when it came time to stack them, the rings
wouldn’t line up and the rings had to be scrapped. Another major challenge with Starship was
the welding, particularly on the bulkhead. These welds need to endure extremely cold
temperatures and hold back the insane pressure going on inside the tanks. Evidently, the first attempts were not strong
enough. But Boca Chica kept experimenting with different
welding techniques, eventually automating a large chunk of the process, and it showed. The welds on future Starships started to become
cleaner and the vehicle itself started to look more sophisticated. But this was only a small part of what made
Boca Chica great. Despite making good progress on Starship itself,
it was the entire package of Boca Chica that won them the competition (building a restaurant
out of old Starship parts also helped). The competition wasn’t all about building
the best Starship. You see, Starship is a rocket like no other,
and because of that, it’s being built like no other rocket. Hence the dirt fields and factories made out
of tents. But if SpaceX wants to send thousands of people
to Mars, it will need to start mass producing Starships at a rate that the spaceflight world
has never seen before. And so, building the factories that actually
make Starship turns out to be more difficult than making the rocket itself. This was where Boca Chica excelled. Having a massive expanse of land far away
from most of civilization gave them the freedom to quickly set up buildings and experiment
with many different manufacturing methods. Florida on the other hand, was so space limited
that the unusable steel rings would take up a huge portion of the land, or roughly the
area of one Boca Chica restaurant. But how far did Florida actually get with
their Starship? This was only the second ever full-scale Starship
prototype, with Mark 1 being built around the same time in Boca Chica. This prototype had already been destroyed
during a test, so Mark 2 was Florida’s opportunity to show off their superior building skills. In many ways, Mark 2 looked like the better
Starship, with much cleaner metal work and more sophisticated welds. But how did the Florida team plan to actually
test Starship? In Boca Chica, they already had a very basic
testing facility and a road where Starship could be easily transported. In Florida, the plan to transport Starship
was much more elaborate. SpaceX wanted to test Starship at the famous
launch pad 39A, the same one that sent humans to the Moon. This plan sounds great, but actually getting it to the launch site was a huge challenge. Simply leaving the construction yard would
involve cutting down trees and forming a brand new road through a field. From there, Starship would be towed down Grissom
parkway and onto the main highway, all of which would need to be completely shut down
by the police. Starship would then travel on the wrong side
of the road in order to get to a small island on the Indian river. From there, Starship would be loaded onto
a barge and towed all the way to the Turn basin, where it would be unloaded and moved
up to the launch pad. This elaborate plan was just weeks away from
happening and utility workers had started raising power lines in order for Starship
to pass through. Unsurprisingly, Florida’s Starship never
left the construction site and the work there came to a grinding halt. But what ever happened to this place and the
Starship that was being built? After thoroughly winning the competition,
SpaceX started throwing everything into Boca Chica. At the start of 2020, SpaceX held a career
day, where hundreds of young hopeful engineers turned up to apply for a job. After this, Boca Chica’s workforce doubled
to around 500 employees and SpaceX began operating 4 shifts a day, creating a constant 24 hour
work cycle. Since then, Boca Chica has been completely
taken over by SpaceX and turned into its own city. The workers at the Florida site were either
offered a job in Boca Chica or at other SpaceX facilities in Florida. SpaceX now uses the Cocoa site to manufacture
Starship’s heat shield tiles. The remains of Starship Mark 2 were slowly
demolished with some equipment being shipped over to Boca Chica. But this isn’t the last we’ll see of Starship
in Florida. 20km away from their old Starship site lies
a much larger area of land which SpaceX has taken over. Home to one of their Falcon 9 refurbishment
hangars, this site will soon feature an enormous state of the art factory, purpose-built to
make Starships. This factory will be larger than all of Boca
Chica’s tents combined, and the crazy thing is, this is only part of the factory. Future plans show that the factory will be
extended and almost doubled in size. But how will these Starships be launched and
tested? Luckily, this new facility is located right
next to the Kennedy Space Center, where Starship and Super Heavy could easily be transported
all the way up to the launch pad. To add to the excitement, SpaceX has already
begun constructing the enormous tower that will launch and catch future Starships. These giant tower sections will be built at
the new facility and driven out to the launch pad at 39A to be stacked, exactly like they
were in Boca Chica. And so, we now have a completely new Starship
facility to be curious about. Another thing to be curious about is Curiosity
Stream. CuriosityStream is a streaming service like
Netflix but designed for nerds like us who are interested in things like: science, nature,
history and technology. This month, I highly recommend the show “Trajectory”,
where each episode looks at our finest space achievements like the Hubble telescope, the
Space Shuttle and SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. CuriosityStream is available on any device
at any time and features thousands of award winning exclusive documentaries that would
be perfect for you. To check out CuriosityStream, go to curiositystream.com/primalspace
to get an entire year’s worth of access for just $14.99. That’s just over one dollar per month. If you’d like to support the channel even
more, consider becoming a Patron where you can give your input on each video and get
exclusive access to our Discord server. Thank you very much for watching and I’ll
see you in the next video.
