Tag: Gulf of Mexico

SpaceX Reveals its Starport Plans in South Texas

Article by Eric Berger                                           March 8, 2021                                             (arstechnica.com)

• The US Army Corps of Engineers has posted a public notice about the spaceport that Elon Musk’s SpaceX proposes to construct in Boca Chica, Texas, at the southern tip of the state along the Gulf of Mexico. The major hardware includes orbital and suborbital launch pads, landing pads, structural test stands, and a ground support “tank farm”.

• What is striking about this architectural drawing is the relatively limited amount of land that SpaceX has to work with, as a substantial portion must be devoted to stormwater flooding ponds. All of these facilities will be concentrated within a couple dozen acres, in stark contrast to the expansive launch sites in Florida at the Kennedy Space Center and the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

• Since acquiring the south Texas launch site in 2014, SpaceX’s planned scope of activities has grown from planning about 10 Falcon 9 launches a year to launches of the massive Starship vehicle. SpaceX has acquired two floating oil rigs, named Phobos and Deimos, that are being converted at shipyards along the Texas coast into massive floating launch pads (see video below). The plan is to launch Starships on suborbital hops from the ground launch pad in Texas to the floating platforms towed and anchored out in the gulf waters. The Starships can be launched from there into space without collateral damage.

• Musk has also proposed the incorporation of nearby Boca Chica Village into a new city, called Starbase, Texas. Such a city would need to have at least 201 residents and follow state rules for incorporation. Prior to SpaceX’s arrival, the small Boca Chica community consisted of several dozen homes. In recent years, the company has sought to buy out or otherwise remove residents so that it has more control over its nearby launch activities. SpaceX is also undergoing an environmental assessment in south Texas for evaluation by the Federal Aviation Administration.

 

                           Elon Musk

As part of a federal review process for its plans in South Texas, details of SpaceX’s

Starship rocket

proposed spaceport have been made public. They were posted late last week in a public notice from the US Army Corps of engineers, which is soliciting public comments on the changes.

Most notably, the new documents include a detailed architectural drawing of the multi-acre site at the southern tip of Texas, along the Gulf of Mexico. The major hardware that exists or will be built includes:
• Two orbital launch pads, one of which is already under constriction
• Two suborbital launch pads, one of which already exists
• Two landing pads, one of which already exists
• Two structural test stands for Starship and the Super Heavy booster
• A large “tank farm” to provide ground support equipment for orbital flights
• A permanent position for the totemic “Starhopper” vehicle at the site’s entrance

What is striking about this architectural drawing is its compact nature, largely because SpaceX has limited land to work with at the facility and must include stormwater ponds to mitigate against flooding. All of these facilities will be concentrated within a couple dozen acres, which is in stark contrast to more expansive launch sites in Florida at Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

However, SpaceX appears confident that it can control the launch and landing of its vehicles such that any mishaps will not severely damage nearby equipment. This is a non-traditional and possibly risky bet, but SpaceX has always been willing to take risks during development programs in order to move more quickly.

8:22 minute video on Starship Floating Launch Platform (‘Science of Space’ YouTube)

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The Mexican Roswell Where Hurricanes Don’t Hit

Article by Beatriz García                              July 20, 2020                            (aldianews.com)

• During the hurricane season, cities along the Gulf of Mexico coastline brace for the worst. But for the past 54 years, whenever a hurricane was heading straight for the Mexican coastal towns of Tampico, Altamira and Madero, the hurricane would suddenly shift to the north (to the chagrin of Texas and Louisiana). The director of Civil Protection in Madero, Romel Martínez, says that this phenomenon is known as “tampicazo.” “We take all the precautions, we do our job… We even have our temporary shelters ready. This is not the first time this has happened to us, it has happened many times before,” says Martínez.

• A group of ufologists from the Association of Scientific Research on UFOs in nearby Tamaulipas believe that the reason for the lack of hurricane activity in this section of the Mexican coastline is because an extraterrestrial base is located underneath the beach there. The associations’ president, Juan Carlos Ramón López Díaz, said he has visited the alien base, known as Amupac, during an astral trip. López Díaz thinks that the intergalactic visitors probably established the base in the mid-1960s, after Hurricane Inez devastated the area in 1966. Ever since then, the beach has been under extraterrestrial protection. Many locals claim to have seen flying saucers and even to have been abducted in the region.

• Some say that there is an unusual structure accompanied by a magnetic field buried at the bottom of the sea near the beach. This is the technology that “the visitors” use to deflect big storms. Tampico historian Marco Flores told The Guardian newspaper, “If science doesn’t give us any explanation, we’ll get it by magic.”

• The idea that the Tampico coastline has an alien base underneath it has caught on so well with the populace that local businesses have capitalized on the alien presence. In shops along the Miramar Beach boardwalk you can find all kinds of Martian-shaped figurines and UFO images for sale. A local television station even proclaimed the last Tuesday in October as the ‘Day of the Martian’, with a green Martian presiding over the beach. López Díaz attributes the overnight popularity of the UFO culture in Tampico to “the collective mind”.

• Rosario Romero of the National Autonomous University of Mexico blames the lack of hurricane activity along this part of the Mexican coastline on prevailing westerly winds or high pressure subtropical systems, which are driving the hurricanes towards the southern coast of the United States. Romero notes that in 2013, Hurricane Ingrid caused significant flooding in the region. “We now have advanced monitoring systems and numerical models that allow us to predict the intensity and trajectory of a storm,” said Romero, “but trajectories still vary widely depending on those wider weather conditions.”

 

               Aliens are big business

The hurricane season arrives in Mexico as the country barely sticks its head out from under the coronavirus pandemic. While many are preparing for the worst dystopia in recent times, in the cities of the Gulf Coast, some people claim to feel protected from tropical storms like Cristina — a storm meteorologists announced will arrive in Tamaulipas in the form of showers. The reason?

An extraterrestrial base located, residents say, under Miramar Beach, in the town of Ciudad Madero and also in Tampico, whose intergalactic owners have been diverting cyclones for more than half a century.

That is the opinion of a group of ufologists from the Association of Scientific Research on UFOs in Tamaulipas (Aicot), whose president, Juan Carlos Ramón López Díaz, said he visited the alien base, known as Amupac, during an astral trip. However, many in this region claim to have seen flying saucers and even to have been abducted by mysterious guardians of the climate.

        depiction of Amupac alien base

According to López and his collaborators, the Amupac base must have been established in the mid or late 1960s, shortly after Hurricane Inez caused countless damage in the Caribbean, Bahamas, Florida and also in Mexico, where 74 people died.

But what really protects this region are not the aliens themselves, but the faith of neighbors, who have

 Google map image of alien base markings

turned the shops on the Miramar Beach boardwalk into a sanctuary where you can buy all kinds of glass figurines and Martian-shaped murals. They even have their big day, the Day of the Martian, which is celebrated on the last Tuesday in October, even though it does not exist and, like the green Martian that presided over the beach in 2013, was the idea of a local television station.

“The collective mind is charged with this concept, so it generates a large force field of repulsion,” López told The Guardian.

There are also those who talk about magnetic fields and a structure with bars of different material buried at the bottom of the sea, near the beach, which deflects storms on the advice of “the visitors.” Or those that accept the inexplicable and blessed phenomenon without giving it too much thought, as Tampico historian Marco Flores does,

“If science doesn’t give us any explanation, we’ll get it by magic,” he told The Guardian. “Fantasy is always more attractive than reality.”

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