[yourapostasy]

Disaster is complete demolition of the launch site, setting their schedule back many months and costing them a rumored hundreds of millions to rebuild. They've run enough tests to support reasonable confidence that won't happen. The directionality towards mass manufacturing the rockets, instrumenting to observability scale data collection to feed engineering course corrections, and resilience to setbacks is promising.

[pfannkuchen]

The hundreds of millions figure doesn’t sound implausible either way necessarily, but I wonder if it includes the R&D costs? I.e. building number 2 would be incrementally much less expensive than building number 1.

[yourapostasy]

I wouldn't be surprised R&D numbers were included in the rumored figures, but considering their lessons learned today from the extensive concrete spalling incurred by the launch, there is even more R&D to perform with the next build-out. Especially when we take into account some observers are claiming SpaceX is installing a deluge system [1] for the next build.

I'd like to hear from some rocket nerds why launch pads don't sit on top of a giant, deep water body, as the deluge systems as I vaguely understand them seem primarily to manage the shock and secondarily the heat, and concrete is a difficult material to manage over a long period of frequent use as a shock absorber.

[1] https://fossbytes.com/nasas-water-jet-system-protect-rocket-...