Naw SpaceX at least at one time were going to launch from floating oil
platforms but I recently heard that they sold the oil rig.
Did they have a change of plans? Launching at sea over the sea solves the
deflector problem, mostly.
Ken
On Sat, Apr 22, 2023 at 3:47 PM Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Sat, 22 Apr 2023, roxanna Mason wrote:
...Regardless, a concrete pad makes for a poor flame deflector and if I
were to be a gambling man I'd bet SpaceX employs some kind of flame
deflector in their next launch or, if they stay with a flat pad, it will
be the largest ablative heat shield in history. Even the Germans used a
4 lobed deflector on the V-2 launch stand...
Of course, they had a requirement for the whole launch setup to be
*mobile*, so they couldn't rely on specially-prepared pad surfaces.
(Good call, too -- as soon as the V-1 campaign got going, with its fixed
launch sites, the RAF and USAAF started vigorously bombing anything that
even looked like it *might* be a V-1 site, but they couldn't find the
truck-convoy V-2 launch teams.)
The reason the Saturns used 2-sided deflectors instead of 4-sided ones,
incidentally, was that having the pad surrounded by exhaust plumes made it
difficult to get good camera coverage of the start of the launch. Better
to have the exhaust coming out (say) north and south, so that the east and
west sides were clear for imaging.
Henry