The Underground Ring Powering SpaceX & Tesla’s Massive Chip Factory

Kind: captions Language: en In this week's avid space industry update, NASA releases a moon base update. SpaceX gives its first ever quarterly financial report and new details have come out about the joint SpaceX Tesla terraab venture. So, what does the future hold? Well, let's dig in and take a closer look. And what may be a sign of the slowing demand for Starlink launches on Falcon 9. This week's only Starlink launch took place on August 4th with Falcon 9 booster 1063 lifting off from Space Launch Complex 4E on its 34th flight carrying 24 Starlink satellites on their way to orbit. Doug brought a shortfall of Gravitas out to sea for the second Falcon 9 launch of the week, the Bluebird 11 to13 mission for asked Space Mobile, carrying three of their second generation cellular service satellites into space. The mission lifted off from space launch complex 40 on the 5th, flying on booster 1077 for its 30th mission. The booster successfully landed downrange on a shortfall of gravitas while only half of the fairing shell number 200 was recovered after the flight. The fairing half and booster were both successfully returned to Port Canaveral. In other space news, Intuitive Machines has completed its acquisitions of Goon Hilly, one of the largest satellite Earth stations in the world and the Communication Satellite Corporation or COMSAT, bringing more capabilities inhouse for lunar landers and improving communication capabilities in satellite operations and space-to- Earth communications. Vast Space's subsidiary launcher is continuing to test its E2 block 1 engine. The engine has now surpassed twice its design service life on the test stand and testing will continue ahead of its official qualification effort. Toy Bruno posted an update on Blue Origin's Blue Ring 1 spacecraft assembly. The spacecraft's power systems are now in and more components are being integrated into the spacecraft, including its roll out of solar arrays. Images and videos of the arrays manufactured by Redwire were also shown during deployment testing. Dave Limp gave an update on the investigation of the hot fire anomaly that destroyed the new Glenn booster named No, it's Necessary and its attached second stage and caused severe damage to launch complex 36. The problem was traced back to a liquid oxygen control valve in one of the BE4 engines, which appears to have gotten stuck when the fuel and oxygen valves were commanded open. When a liquid oxygen valve gets stuck while the fuel is still flowing, the combustion chamber becomes fuelrich and the introduction of oxygen can easily cause an explosion, often referred to as a hard start that destroys the engine and in the worst case scenario causes a chain reaction that destroys the rocket. NASA has just released a moon base update for August. The agency is busy designing a moon base with more than 20 landings planned in the first phase and developing the technologies to make it possible. This update highlights the efforts of five of the company's building lunar landers. Firefly is building its second blue ghost lander, which is nearing readiness for electronics and payload installation. The lander will be going to the far side of the moon and will carry a radio telescope for dark sky observations as well as a rover. Firefly is also developing the lunar pathfinder which will remain in orbit around the moon. JPL is testing Voyager Lunar Systems Griffin 1, which is an infrastructure class lander that can carry more than just experiments to the lunar surface. The spacecraft will be going to the south pole of the moon with more demand on its guidance, navigation, and control. The first mission will carry a large rover to the south pole and is expected to launch soon. Blue Origin's Blue Moon Mark1 serial number one, which will prove the technology needed for human landing systems, completed thermal vacuum testing back in February, and has verified RF compatibility with NASA's space networks, performed acoustic environmental tests, completed engine fit checks ahead of cryo testing, and is expected to launch in 2027. Intuitive Machines's third Nova Sea lander will be performing hotfire testing within the next month, followed by payload integration to the spacecraft's outer panels. After performing vibration testing, the lander will be shipped to the Cape and launched to the moon. Previous missions tipped over when they landed and Intuitive Machines is working hard to make sure the future landers do not. Finally, Northre Grumman has been hired to perform tech demonstrations at the lunar south pole. The thermal environment is brutal, and the missions will be making use of hardware developed for the lunar gateway to explore new ways to build equipment that can survive the over 460° temperature differences at the South Pole. On Tuesday, NASA announced that the Crew 13 missions astronauts have completed their training in California and are ready to fly to the International Space Station in September for a scheduled six-month rotation. Loheed Martin has made it the Orion capsule and service module ahead of delivery to Cape Canaveral where they'll be joined to the Artemis 3 SLS mission stack and be ready to launch at the earliest opportunity. SpaceX made several announcements this week for its AI and compute infrastructure projects. The company has partnered with Nvidia to develop the compute payload for its Star Mind A1 satellites. AI1 is a 175 kilowatt average power satellite carrying large radiators and solar panels to power and cool payloads operating at up to 250 kows peak power. The satellites will operate in a sun-synchronous orbit with nearly constant sunlight and will send back their computed data with their onboard laser links. The company also released its first ever quarterly financial report. SpaceX reports 92% year-on-year revenue growth with almost double the number of Starlink subscribers, several billion dollars in new data center service contracts, and an almost equal growth in capital expenditures to match. The company reported a quarterly loss of about $541 million, which is an improvement over last year's quarterly loss of approximately $1 billion. The company has $100 billion of cash on hand and appears to be well positioned to cover its debts and obligations from its ongoing spacecraft launch vehicle and AI production development efforts. SpaceX's biggest announcement this week was the location, design, and scale of their Terraab facility, a joint venture with Tesla and other companies to build what will become the world's largest semiconductor fab. confirming earlier speculation, Terrafab will be built at the Gibbons Creek Reservoir in Grimes County, Texas on the outskirts of Houston near Texas A&M University. With SpaceX and Tesla's expected demand for silicon set to outpace the global supply of new capacity by a wide margin, Elon's companies have taken it upon themselves to build their own foundry to meet their in-house needs for Optimus robots, self-driving cars, AI satellites, and data center processors. The scale of the FAB has been known for a while now, estimated at approximately 100 million square ft, and the renders released with the announcement show what this means in practice. Dozens of individual foundaries spanning a miles long concourse with massive buildings making up a complex. Each of those buildings on their own would be among the largest in the world. And once completed, the whole facility will have a combined square footage 50 times the size of the Pentagon. Together, they form a semiconductor fab of unprecedented scope with capacity for a million or more wafer starts each month. A long-standing question for the foundry, how to acquire, build, and produce ultraviolet light sources for so many wafers, was answered in the renders. A large underground ring runs through the center of the complex, similarly sized to the accelerator tunnel that housed a Devatron particle accelerator at Fermal Lab. This massive ring is an electron beam storage ring that will accelerate electrons close to the speed of light before sending them off to various free electron lasers throughout the complex. Speculation about the ring was confirmed with a cheeky feftw comment by Elon meaning free electron laser for the wind. A free electron laser works by passing electron bunches through undulators to generate tuned highly coherent laser light. Ultraviolet, extreme ultraviolet, or any spectrum they need can be produced with greater exposure energy than their EUV machines that are only available from ASML. A coherent laser light source gives the foundry enormous capacity for producing silicon wafers without needing to buy or build dozens and dozens of machines that cost around $400 million each and won't be available to new customers for several years. In the years ahead, SpaceX intends to use the moon as the launch pad for future AI satellites, which will be built and assembled from materials mined on the moon with silicon shipped from Earth. But before this incredibly ambitious multi-deade goal can be realized, Terraab will start as a much smaller and more modest project with the first of its 10 planned project phases estimated at $16.8 billion in startup costs. Rocket Lab has been awarded a $397 million contract by the United States Space Force to build the flatalite spacecraft for the Pentagon Spacebased Airborne Moving Target Indicator Program, which are expected to fly on the upcoming Neutron rocket. The SB AMTI program is designed to acquire and track airborne threats worldwide. Rocket Labs previously delayed the grain goddess provides mission successfully lifted off on the 6th of August carrying the QPS SR13 synthetic aperture radar imaging satellite nicknamed the Mccura 1 for IQPS. Astra released new video of their rocket 4 first stage engine performing a hot fire test which successfully completed its burn amid Astra's ongoing effort to return to flight. United Launch Alliance is preparing for their first launch to low Earth orbit for the Vulcan rocket and pre-flight testing is going well. After completing pad side function checkouts, a wet dress rehearsal was performed, proving the flight readiness of the shorter LEO optimized Vulcan Centaur upper stage. Stage two testing is now underway at the newly updated A2 test stand at Stennis Space Center for the Relativities Terran Ret. The stage was subjected to a cryoproof test beyond expected flight loads followed by a COPV manifold testing. Engine integration has begun on Tan R with the first group of the 13 planned engines now integrated to the first stage. Each engine successfully completed acceptance testing prior to being installed. And finally for this week, Stoke Space announced that the payload module, second stage tanks, and Andromeda engine have been joined together for the first time as the company performs fit checks to make sure the Nova rocket second stage is ready to move forward into the next phase of production. Well, that about wraps it up for this week's Avid Spaceflight Industry Update. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next week.