Elon Musk's SpaceX tour — Cape Canaveral Launch Site (2010) November 11, 2010 Fifth part of the 2010 tour: at Cape Canaveral, Musk shows the former Titan IV pad SpaceX is rebuilding for Falcon 9 — lightning towers, the giant liquid-oxygen sphere, the flame duct — with launch site manager Brian Mosdell.
Fifth part of the 2010 tour: at Cape Canaveral, Musk shows the former Titan IV pad SpaceX is rebuilding for Falcon 9 — lightning towers, the giant liquid-oxygen sphere, the flame duct — with launch site manager Brian Mosdell.
Transcript Five, four, three, two, one. We have liftoff. Here we are on the coast of Florida at Cape Canaveral. This is where tremendous amount of history has been made, obviously in space. It's where Apollo launched from. The moon missions all came from Cape Canaveral. Over there we have the Space Shuttle and the Lockheed Atmosphere facility. There's the vehicle assembly building for shuttle is over there and then the Boeing Delta IV vehicle. The launch site we're using was formerly used by the Titan 4, which was the largest vehicle in the US fleet. And we've done a lot of work to change and adjust it for our vehicle and make improvements. Let me introduce you to Brian Mosel, who's managing the construction of the launch site here at Cape Canaveral and will manage the ongoing launch operation here.
I have a lot of experience out here at the Cape launching rockets. I started here my career in the space industry in 1991 and I'm thrilled to be part of the SpaceX team.
Okay, so behind me is where Falcon 9 would sit during launch. And the big transformation that's going to occur over the next few months is the construction of the launch mount. And we're going to have the hangar constructed behind us we see the giant lightning towers. There's a lot of lightning here at the cave and those things can pretty much protect us against Armageddon. Here we are on, on top of our giant ball of liquid oxygen. They say SpaceX has big balls, and it's true. It's capable of containing about a million pounds of liquid oxygen, more than enough for a Falcon 9 flight. Over there we have our flame duct. So you can see that big exit there is the flame duct. The rocket flames and a whole bunch of steam comes out of that pole right there. This wall is where they recorded the rockets that have launched here previously. The biggest rocket in the US fleet, the Titan 4, which is really gigantic vehicle, used this launch site. It's a great heritage to be launching from the former Titan IV launch pad. And then we have our control room, which is 12 miles away, which is actually just outside the gates at Cape Canaveral, which makes it easier for visitors or customers to be there and look at their, their payload and be there in the control room with us without having to go through all the security of coming onto Cape Canaveral, which is actually an air force base. We first broke ground on our launch site about a year ago. And we expect to be ready to launch by the middle of next year. Alright, so that mostly concludes the tour of our launch pad. We'll do another updated tour in a couple months, and you'll see how much this has transformed. It's going to be quite remarkable.