The second section of the Florida launch tower for SpaceX’s massive Super Heavy and Starship rockets was raised to the first tower segment on Thursday

The sec­ond part of the Flori­da launch tow­er for SpaceX’s mas­sive Super Heavy and Star­ship rock­ets was raised to the first tow­er seg­ment Thurs­day at the Kennedy Space Cen­ter, rais­ing the struc­ture to more than 400 feet (400 ft) tall.

SpaceX moved the sec­ond met­al tow­er com­po­nent, which is as tall as a five-sto­ry build­ing, from a stag­ing and con­struc­tion site on Roberts Road at Kennedy Space Cen­ter to Launch Com­plex 39A on Wednes­day evening. On Thurs­day morn­ing, a mas­sive crane on Pad 39A low­ered the sec­ond tow­er sec­tion onto the low­er section.

The first sec­tion of the orbital launch tow­er rolled out on Pad 39A on Jun 15 and was posi­tioned on the tow­er’s foun­da­tions on Mon­day. Four oth­er tow­er seg­ments are vis­i­ble on the Roberts Road prop­er­ty, where SpaceX is con­struct­ing indi­vid­ual sec­tions of the Star­ship pad before mov­ing them to Pad 39A.

The Star­ship launch pad in Flori­da is expect­ed to be sim­i­lar to the tow­er SpaceX built at Boca Chi­ca Beach in Texas last year, where the com­pa­ny plans to launch the Super Heavy Boost­er and Star­ship rock­et on its first orbital test flight. Accord­ing to SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk, oper­a­tional Super Heavy and Star­ship mis­sions will like­ly launch from Florida.

The fol­low­ing time-lapse video shows the stack­ing of the first tow­er seg­ment next to the Star­ship launch pad on Pad 39A on Monday.

The launch pad tow­er under con­struc­tion at Pad 39A is about 1,000 feet or 300 meters east of where SpaceX will launch Fal­con 9 and Fal­con Heavy rock­ets, which will launch satel­lites and astro­nauts into orbit.

Like the Texas launch site, SpaceX has no plans to dig a flame trench for the Kennedy star­base. The Super Heavy Boost­er, with some 33 methane-fueled Rap­tor engines, will lift off the launch pad with around 17 mil­lion pounds of thrust, almost dou­ble that of NASA’s most pow­er­ful rock­et, the Space Launch Sys­tem, a ful­ly expend­able vehicle.

The Super Heavy and Star­ship stack — con­sist­ing of the first and sec­ond stages of the rock­et — will be ful­ly reusable. The entire rock­et is almost 120 meters high and is made of stain­less steel.

NASA’s SLS rock­et is about 98 meters tall in its cur­rent con­fig­u­ra­tion. The first flight-ready Space Launch Sys­tem is now at Pad 39B, less than 1.7 miles (2.7 kilo­me­ters) north of Pad 39A. Both pads at Launch Com­plex 39 were orig­i­nal­ly built for NASA’s Apol­lo lunar pro­gram. Four oth­er tow­er seg­ments of the launch pad are cur­rent­ly on view out­side of SpaceX’s Roberts Road cam­pus, where the com­pa­ny is also build­ing a Star­ship fac­to­ry, along­side a hangar used for refur­bish­ing Fal­con 9 rock­et boost­ers and fair­ings. The Star­ship pad in Texas was stacked with nine tow­er segments.

SpaceX is expect­ed to peri­od­i­cal­ly move addi­tion­al tow­er seg­ments to Pad 39A over the com­ing weeks to com­plete the struc­tur­al build-up of the Star­ship pad, where teams have also moved in fuel tanks and oth­er sup­port equip­ment. Once the tow­er’s struc­ture is ful­ly assem­bled, con­struc­tion crews will add arms that will be used to stack the space­ship onto the Super Heavy Boost­er. The com­pa­ny says the arms are also used to catch the 30-foot-wide (9‑meter) Super Heavy Boost­er as it returns to Earth for a landing.

Arm hard­ware, or “chop­sticks,” was observed arriv­ing at Kennedy Space Cen­ter last week. The start of stack­ing for the Star­ship pad in Flori­da came days after SpaceX approved a key Fed­er­al Avi­a­tion Admin­is­tra­tion envi­ron­men­tal assess­ment to con­duct Star­ship launch­es in Texas. SpaceX secured envi­ron­men­tal approval for Star­ship launch­es from Kennedy’s Pad 39A back in 2019.

SpaceX is also con­sid­er­ing build­ing a sec­ond Star­ship launch pad in Flori­da on a vacant lot in the north por­tion of Kennedy Space Cen­ter. The space­craft launch vehi­cle will be capa­ble of car­ry­ing more than 100 tons of car­go to low Earth orbit, a region a few hun­dred miles above the plan­et, accord­ing to SpaceX.

SpaceX plans to use the Star­ship vehi­cle to launch the com­pa­ny’s Star­link inter­net satel­lites, which will fly heav­ier ver­sions of the next-gen­er­a­tion broad­band relay sta­tions than the space­craft now being launched by the small­er Fal­con 9 rock­et. A recent ani­ma­tion released by SpaceX showed the com­pa­ny’s con­cept of deploy­ing Star­link satel­lites from an orbit­ing space­craft, using a mech­a­nism that func­tions like a giant Pez dis­penser. SpaceX has also land­ed a $2.9 bil­lion con­tract with NASA to devel­op the space­craft into a human-ready lan­der for the agen­cy’s Artemis lunar mis­sions. A lunar descen­dant of the space­craft, sup­port­ed by Star­ship tankers, will be used for a moon land­ing with astro­nauts, an event that NASA says could hap­pen as ear­ly as 2025.

Ulti­mate­ly, SpaceX plans to use the space­craft for oth­er mis­sions, includ­ing car­ry­ing car­go and peo­ple to Mars.

Sum­ma­ry of the news:

• Kennedy Space Cen­ter’s Star­ship launch tow­er now has a sec­ond segment