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this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
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Did they annihilate the launchpad again?
They made a bunch of really cool changes to address the issues from last time, and they seem to have worked almost perfectly. For one, they built a giant water cooled steel plate under the launch mount (affectionately called the Booster Bidet), and the engineering behind it is pretty neat.
I think they use a similar fluid absorber for rocket and space shuttle launches, and have for a long time. So they're just catching up to NASA.
The space shuttle one uses a giant flame diverter trench. They aren't high enough above the water table at starbase to dig one, and they didn't want to make a giant 50ft tall hill (like at Kennedy) and wait for it to settle before building their tower. So they have a giant shower head instead that is much more aggressive with it's vibration and sound suppression so that the footprint is much smaller. One solution isn't necessarily better than the other, they have tradeoffs, but they are pretty different systems.
Just like the SpaceX engineers told musk they should do the first time.