@Darisiabgal7573

10 months ago

The problem with boca chica site is its built on the rio grande flood plain. The sand is essentially delivered down the rio grande during historic floods that occurred before the two upsteam dams were built, falcon lake and lake amistad. Within the sand laid down since the last ice age when sea levels were lower is a spongey like material with organic material and bacteria trapped in an anoxic environment. While the surface may look firm, putting pressure on the surface can cause the sand to become more maleable. Now imagine, you have a set of rocket engines with their thrust vector pointing down at a sheet like structure laying over something that is hard agregate on top and spongey below. The ISP of the engine is in the 350 range which we multiply a 9.8 m/s for and exhaust velocity of Mach10. This does not reach the launch pad, but the rocket engines resonate and their wave functions create pulse waves that travel at hypersonic speed to the sheet of concrete. This is much like a sonicator used to clean off surface debris but a million times more powerful. The sheet itself begins to vibrate and the substrate below begins to undergo liquifaction. The pad is now free to vibrate, and because concrete is fairly weak under stretching it just breaks up. Because of the nature of the sand below this causes the substrate to give and the action of the Ve on the concrete itself scours it away. I am been to boca chica, i had the fortunate exoerience of sinking a car in that sand, Its not like other soils with tightening layers as you go down, its just goopy sand, often pitch black layers of bacteria laden sand. When they chose the site I pondered how they were going to stabilize the soil, just to build the equipment. They had problems with the soil in the begining because it was so wet and soft. They demonstrate some magical technique they use to dry things out. But look at boca chica, on any given day it looks dry and sand, until you get below the surface. The region has suffered from storm after storm, flood after flood. After hurricane allen, the main road up S. padre island was chopped into a dozen pieces, 8x8x8 blocks of granite were torn out nowhere to be found. There were tropical fish from the offshore island living in the large ponds that Allen created were the road used to be. This is the nature of boca chica, its not stable, over thousands of years it gets torn up and completely rebuilt, what looks like dry land today is just an illusion.

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