Elon Musk's SpaceX Plans Gigabay Facility In Florida For Starship Assembly

Elon Musk‘s rocket manufacturing company SpaceX intends to put up a SpaceX Gigabay at Cape Canaveral in Florida by Aug. 2026, according to a new filing with the Federal Aviation Administration.

What Happened: According to the filing, construction is planned to start in April this year and the vertical integration facility will be 380 feet tall and expected to handle the assembly and integration of SpaceX’s Starship launch vehicle.

All development and manufacturing of the Starship currently takes place at Starbase in Texas. All of the Starship's past test flights were launched from the commercial spaceport in Cameron County near the Gulf of Mexico.

However, in May, Musk took to social media and said the company aims to build two Starship towers at Cape Canaveral in Florida, hinting at plans to launch Starships from the state. While one of the two towers is expected to be at Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39A, the location for the second is still under consideration, the CEO said.

"We’re aiming to build two towers at the Cape for Starship, one at 39A and another tbd (we don’t have final approval yet)," Musk wrote.

Why It Matters: The Starship vehicle is part of big dreams. While NASA is looking forward to landing humans back on the surface of the Moon after a gap of over 50 years with the help of a custom version of Starship, Musk is dreaming of taking humans to the planet Mars aboard Starship.

“…I would not be surprised if we fly 400 Starship launches in the next four years," SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell said at the Baron Investment Conference in New York in November.

Starship is currently in the testing and development phase. The company has conducted seven test flights of the vehicle thus far starting in April 2023. The last flight test took place earlier this month.

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