Back in September, there was a lot of fuss over fining SpaceX for operating a water deluge without the right permit.

Instead of a deluge, surely they can get 2 birds with 1 stone by using a flame tunnel with a water jacket?

The water would be in a closed system so the people complaining about them spraying it all over the nature reserve would quieten.

Meanwhile, the water jacket could exchange the exhaust heat for steam which drives turbines, generating electricity which could be sold to the grid. It's an all-round win for everybody!

• they already have knowledge of the logistics around the site
• the area is remote enough, and under US jurisdiction, so no issues with foreign countries having access to the tech
• only requires SN11 legs

I will trade Spacex 2 gold for each one.

This will save NASA a lot of money.

Wait, they just did that. Would anyone think that would be a legitimate approach otherwise?

Don't forget the restaurant/bar, and the museum and the pool. And the skydiving wind tunnel.

Oh and they can run a Teslabus service from Brownsville, and a loop, as well as have a Super Charger in the parking lot.

Think about it: the main advantages to stainless steel for Super Heavy structures (it's good enough, it's easier to work with so Starship can launch faster, it's easier to make changes to, it's the same as the Starship upper stage so you only need one set of tooling) would mostly go away by Starship versions 5 or 6, and that should be around when Rocket Lab has been demonstrating first-stage recovery of a large carbon fiber first stage with Neutron. Around that time, Rocket Lab will have enough Neutron first stages to have spare production capacity, and they've explicitly said they want to build structures for external customers when that happens. And Starship's specs should have settled down enough that Super Heavy at least can be outsourced.

Musk is so good at digging himself deeper and deeper holes at this point Boring seems almost redundant. They could even start a geothermal power generation company with the holes.

If he could find a way to harness power from haters, he could probably end American reliance on coal entirely.

I heard those trusses are weak - this should definitely fulfill the contract.

SS is made from steel, that's magnetic. It uses a load of fuel just to get off the ground. Fully stacked it weighs 5000 tons. A Maglev coil can use 1kW to levitate a ton, so a 5MW maglev coil under the tower would make the whole rocket float so launching it off the pad and getting that initial lift would be easier and save fuel. If they upped that coil to 10MW or something they could just ping the thing into the sky without lighting the engines!

The best part is no part!

It could be used as a bigger dragon or up and down ship. And like a fast reuse cargo up and down taker

I hope I got your attention with that sentence. A bit like curling players doing their sweeping thing but a bit more life-or-death.

I suggest spacex dump its full size starship lander for just the nose cone (I'm no expert, just visualize with me). To get this thing to the moon, I suggest full expendable booster and second stage to get a lunar transfer orbit. Then detach the nose cone (just forward of forward pressure bulkhead) with landing legs and modified Draco thrusters. Yeah, I want to use hypergolic thrusters. That way the lander can take its time to get to lunar obit and wait.

You just have to quickly dock to the ISS before the oxygen runs out. This is a nice way to reduce the cost/seat in half and match performance with the (former) Space Shuttle. The extra people can sit on other people's laps, or on the floor for a discount.

Instead of a separate tower for each catcharms and launch ring mount, use a single launch tower a with 2 sets of catcharms, on opposite corners or perhaps on the same side. And have two launch mount rings, each served by it's own set of arms.

Nasa spacesuits are very bulky and expensive, plus need complicated ball bearing joints and life support systems. All these problems can easily be solve by just filling space with 1 atmosphere pressure of air. Then astronauts can do space walks with no suit. I can see no down side to this solution.

Safer, cheaper, and faster than Artemis 2.

Each starship can lift 100 tons to LEO.

Each B83 nuclear bomb weighs 1100 kg.

Result is you have 90 B83 bombs per Starship. What you do is simply rob 90 of the richest cities in the world for Mars base funding. After they pay up, construct human, non-nuclear warhead carrying starships and make a clean getaway to Mars. Use leftover cash for future bartering and trade within the solar system to laundry it.