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SpaceX Facilities and Fleets / Re: SpaceX Cape 39A Starship launch/landing facilities
« Last post by edzieba on Today at 10:33 am »I really suspect that they have had enough information from the first few launches (as well as the amount of modification they have had to do to the original design) that they have had a bit of a rethink on the table design.During one of Tim Dodd's early Starbase tours, the OLM ring had just been lifted onto the legs that night. During the interview standing next to the OLM, the team were already describing how the ring was overbuilt and the design changes for the next version, years before the first flight. Actual hardware fabrication usually lags design changes by quite some time.
SpaceX tend to not wait for those future design changes and continue building 'suboptimal' versions anyway in order to gain extra data and experience, whereas the aerospace norm is to continue that design and simulation iteration for much longer before actually producing any hardware, and then do little to no iteration on that hardware (because usually there is no budget allocated for that).