SpaceX Starship Gigabay at Kennedy Space Center on Track for 2026

HAWTHORNE, Calif. — SpaceX is pushing hard on one of the most ambitious construction projects in the history of American rocketry. At the Roberts Road complex inside Kennedy Space Center in Florida, a 380-foot-tall Gigabay is rising — a purpose-built Starship integration and assembly facility that will give SpaceX a second major launch corridor and more than eleven times the workspace of its existing Texas operations.

What the Florida Gigabay Is

The facility is a direct parallel to the Gigabay structure being built at Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas — but larger. Once complete, the Florida complex will cover approximately 50 percent more ground than the Starfactory in Texas, with ample surrounding land for future expansion as Starship production scales up.

The Gigabay is designed to support the full vertical integration workflow for Starship and Super Heavy. Inside, 24 dedicated work cells will allow SpaceX to integrate, inspect, and refurbish vehicles in parallel — a marked improvement over the current Texas setup. Cranes rated to lift up to 400 U.S. tons will handle the enormous mass of both stages. At 380 feet tall, the building will be clearly visible from the Cape Canaveral area, standing as a permanent landmark of SpaceX's ambitions.

Why Florida Matters

Boca Chica has been SpaceX's primary Starship test and launch site since the program's earliest days. But scaling to a high launch cadence — the kind required to support Starlink expansion, defense contracts, NASA's Artemis program, and eventually Mars missions — requires redundancy and volume that a single remote Texas site cannot deliver.

Kennedy Space Center's Launch Complex 39-A, where SpaceX already operates Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy missions, will serve as Starship's East Coast launch pad. The proximity of a full-scale integration facility adjacent to the launch site removes the need to transport fully assembled Starship vehicles across the country — a logistical challenge that was always going to limit cadence.

The dual-site approach effectively doubles SpaceX's Starship manufacturing and launch infrastructure, creating the throughput needed to support the ambitious schedules Elon Musk has outlined for Starship's commercial and exploration roles.

Construction Progress and Timeline

Aerial imagery of the Roberts Road site shows substantial groundwork already completed. Foundations are in place, and the early structural work on the Gigabay itself is visible. SpaceX is targeting the end of 2026 to have both the Florida and Texas Gigabay structures fully operational.

Critically, launches from Florida are not waiting for construction to finish. SpaceX plans to begin East Coast Starship operations before the Gigabay is complete by shipping upper and lower stage components from Boca Chica to Florida via sea barge. This approach lets SpaceX build operational experience and launch infrastructure readiness in Florida while the permanent integration facility catches up.

The Bigger Picture

The Gigabay's scale can be understood by comparison. NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building — the iconic structure that assembled Saturn V rockets and Space Shuttle stacks — stands 525 feet tall. SpaceX's 380-foot Gigabay is shorter, but with a workspace design optimized for the rapid turnaround and parallel processing that reusable rocketry demands, rather than the single-stack sequential assembly the VAB was built for.

SpaceX's February 2026 Starship program update highlighted the scale of the infrastructure buildout explicitly. The company described the Florida Gigabay as a key element in achieving the high annual launch rates that Starship's business case depends on — and that Musk has called essential to making humanity multi-planetary.

With Starship Flight 13 targeting a late June launch and the IPO roadshow underway, SpaceX is building infrastructure for a future that is arriving faster than most observers anticipated. The Kennedy Space Center Gigabay is the physical proof of that conviction.