11
votes
South Padre Island, Texas resident Louis Balderas’s monitoring of one of SpaceX's launch facilities has attracted a worldwide following
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- When SpaceX Rockets Take Flight (Or Blow Up), LabPadre Is Watching
- Authors
- Alex Macon
- Published
- Dec 16 2020
- Word count
- 1792 words
LabPadre had a much better view of the build site back when he had a camera mounted at Maria Pointer's house, right next to the build site. (SpaceX since bought the house and it now serves as their safety operations center.) The new camera tower is about halfway between the build site and the launch site. So launch site views are a lot better than they used to be, but the build site view isn't as good.
If you want to follow the nitty gritty details of the build process the coverage from locals BocaChicaGal and Nomadd is the best. They're out there on a daily basis traipsing around outside SpaceX's property to get close up pictures and videos of everything visible from whatever angle they can.
RGVAerialPhotography has pretty good views from regular flyovers, too: https://twitter.com/RGVaerialphotos
SpaceX seems to have a pretty good relationship with their paparazzi. BocaChicaGal and Nomadd have talked about being on friendly terms with the SpaceX employees. Elon Musk loves all the attention. There have only been a couple times I've heard of there being a problem. Someone flew a drone directly over the launch site once, and signs prohibiting all drone flight in the area promptly popped up. And there was the guy that walked right on to the launch site and took pictures. The fence was down at the time. It was after Starhopper's last hop and they had removed the engine, so there wasn't much there that was sensitive.