Latest at Starbase with LabPadre: July 21

STARBASE, Texas (ValleyCentral) — This Week at Starbase, construction continues at Pad B, and work progresses toward making Pad A capable of supporting ship static fires.

Will everything be ready to meet Elon's anticipated launch date for flight 10th next month?

Let's dive into this week's update and take a closer look.

Starting this week, with our vehicle fabrication updates in the early hours of Friday morning, a vacuum raptor was spotted being taken into Mega Bay Two for installation on ship 37.

As this is the fourth vacuum engine to make the transit recently, it seems that one of the previous engines may have had an issue and needed to be replaced.

On Tuesday, a four-ring barrel section was brought out of Star Factory.

This article was likely a development piece SpaceX built as they continued to fine-tune their fabrication hardware inside the building.

This section was eventually taken to the Sanchez site for scrapping.

On Wednesday night, the rover camera panned over to the Star Factory building, giving us a peek at some new Block three booster hardware.

This new super-heavy forward dome section has an integrated and redesigned hot staging section.

Unlike the expendable hot stage adapter of the current boosters, this will be a permanent part of the rocket. It has diagonal bracing constructed of milled steel, as opposed to the reinforced cut-out vents we have seen before.

Moving on to the construction at the launch complex, the top plate for the super heavy liquid oxygen quick disconnect was lifted for installation on the gantry at Pad B on Friday morning.

Over the weekend through Monday, concrete work was underway at the site's new pad.

The work focused on the southern end of the flame trench and utilized multiple pump trucks to accommodate a neighborhood of 200 concrete trucks.

Late on Wednesday, at pad A, the ship's quick disconnect arm was swung out, allowing the chopsticks to be raised to the tower before the arm was then swung back in.

This was likely done to move the arms out of the way for the work on the launch mount.

The next afternoon, the launch site's large crawler crane began moving across the site, over towards Pad A as SpaceX prepared for the installation of the newly modified ship transport stand onto the launch mount, ahead of the static fire of ship 37.

On Friday morning, with all preparations complete now, the lift began.

The crawler crane raised the modified ship stand above the Pad A launch mount and slowly lowered it inside, bringing SpaceX one big step closer to the next launch.

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