Latest at Starbase with LabPadre: August 7

STARBASE, Texas (ValleyCentral) — Wrapping up the rest of this week's update, block three ships are coming along in the star factory. Foundation work continues for the new gigabase site, and the Massey test site is active again.

On Thursday afternoon, the hot staging adapter for flight 10 was removed from Star Factory and over to Mega Bay One for installation on top of booster 16.

With block two starship construction winding down, now multiple block three nose cones were visible through the star factory Windows this week in various stages of construction.

Moving on to the construction at the launch complex, a section of deluge piping was spotted being driven away from the site on Friday.

A new vertical tank was also brought to the launch complex through the D3 gate on Saturday.

In short order, the tank was offloaded and moved into the new position in the tank farm.

Moving up the road to the build site, we could see that the excavators were working to expose the tops of the newly poured piles for the new Giga Bay.

A few days later, equipment arrived that will be used to cleanly cut the tops of these piles at the desired elevation in preparation for the pile caps that will be added.

On Saturday, the ship crowd proofing stand was brought to the ring yard and eventually taken into Mega Bay two.

The Ship 38 was rolled out of the building on the same stand and taken up the highway to the Massey outpost for its initial cryogenic proof test overnight.

Starting in the early hours of Monday morning and continuing into Tuesday, SpaceX performed several tests with the ship 38 payload bay door.

The door was open and closed multiple times, with workers in the lifts going up and performing inspections and possibly other work in between.

On Wednesday, the tank farm at the outpost was spooled up and cryogenics loaded into the final block of the two starships.

Throughout the day, the ship underwent multiple rounds of testing, with its tanks being filled and detanked.

This testing also marked the first round of cryo testing at the site since the untimely demise of ship 36.

Late on Thursday night, the initial round of testing was completed. The ship 38 was rolled back onto Highway four and returned to the build site.

SpaceX may work quickly to install engines on ship 38 and put it through its static fire campaign before flight 10 to avoid having to uninstall and reinstall the ship adapter on the launch mount.

Stay tuned to LabPadre for continued live coverage and other detailed Starbase content. Visit the LabPadre YouTube channel or LabPadre.com.