It's pretty amusing that they assembled it with a boring old construction crane. No fancy VAB or custom scaffolding. No different than the latest cookie cutter "luxury apartment building".
> It's pretty amusing that they assembled it with a boring old construction crane.
This crane is neither boring, nor old. It's an engineering marvel itself. It's a Liebherr LR 11350 [1], one of the most powerful mobile cranes available worldwide, modified by SpaceX for their own use case [2].
Right, but to SpaceX it's just a commercially available off the shelf component. I'm sure they payed a pretty penny for it, but compared to the cost of building a custom building for integration, a penny is probably a pretty accurate estimate of the cost.
If you deal in Javascript all day a tube frame and keeping your bearings from corroding sounds hard but all this stuff is trivially solve-able. Big complex machines like this are the equivalent of a tall stack of software. No one part is complex. It's basically a given that it will work. Whether it scales is somewhat up in the air.
The most impressive thing about it is that it can be economically viable to operate while complying with the litany of relevant regulations across multiple jurisdictions. If you just need to stack rockets it's not hard to come up with a cheaper and better one trick pony that only lifts rockets. You see examples of such one trick ponies in every shipyard.
But SpaceX is constrained to some degree by engineering man hours so they were glad to just write a check for an expensive generalist piece of equipment. Cranes like this didn't exist in the 1960s so NASA built a bunch of traditional gantry cranes into a building. SpaceX can skip that sort of fiddling around and just write a check, so they do.
What you're saying doesn't really jive with reality though. SpaceX needs a specialist crane because they need to stabilize the rocket from the side, not the top, during launch. If it got hit by too much wind it would fall over otherwise.
That’s core to their strategy. They also assembled a lot of the rocket in tents on a beach in Texas.
Originally they hired a company that normally builds water towers to construct it. The idea is that the rocket needs to be a commodity, not something built in a clean room by specialists.
I almost wonder if this is one of the key differences related to development speed between SpaceX and their competitors (Blue Origin, etc.) Most big space rockets are built in relatively low unit counts as ordered (unless I'm mistaken), whereas Musk's other large concern focuses on mass-production and solves problems for mass production. Hearing Musk speak about manufacturing challenges in the Everyday Astronaut interview, much of what he was talking about in terms of manufacturing challenge was about lessons learned from Tesla. Seems like focusing on the production problems this way may be a reason he's pulling of launch vehicles at the price points SpaceX is achieving.
For sure, it also has to do with vertical integration. If you don't have that, then you need to ask every one of your suppliers to take the approach you do.
In a risky venture this is very hard to achieve.
SpaceX can just say 'we are gone do it this way' and they have almost everything required in house and can plan for mass manufacture from the beginning.
