A SpaceX Adventure: What's not happening at Terminal Island

Despite having visited Houston Port Authority and taken a look around the port, the vast expanse of ships, containers, and the infrastructure that is Terminal Island in Los Angeles was eye catching. It is in this hub of trade that SpaceX decided to build its Big Falcon Rocket (BFR).

"SpaceX to build rocket on Terminal Island" Sunday, April 22, 2018 [1]

• The Board of Harbor Commissioners approved a 30-year lease with SpaceX
• BFR will stand 350 feet and weigh 4,400 tons, so large it must be moved by water
• SpaceX will construct an 80,000-square-foot hangar

Eight months later, there are two locations on Terminal Island identified as being BFR-purposed.

Here's what is found on Google from satellite imagery (date of images unknown).

And

These kinds of projects don't move fast, especially initially. For example, if we were to send humans to Mars, the first step would be to focus now on getting the Science-Technology-Engineering-Math workforce needed for the project to enter the education programs that will prepare them for the work 5 years in the future. (Mars is that difficult an objective.)

This past weekend, I happened to visit Terminal Island. So here are a couple of images of how things look now. The first image is of the factory site. What I couldn't capture because of the location of the Sun was a large structure holding up a net between the north-south oriented building and the water's edge.

The next two images are of the "Tent" where the description sounded like the parts for the factory are supposed to be assembled.

The things that I was wondering are:

(1) It's been 8 months and the property's change in use isn't obvious

(2) In the 30 year lease, who cleans up the property (and what needs to be cleaned up)

(3) What does the project management plan look like

(4) Would they like suggestions for how to handle the space geek crowd that's going to show up randomly to go and take a look

FYI: While the visit to SpaceX's facilities on Terminal Island were industrially interesting, there happens to be a Historical Monument right across the road from the "factory" location, the Historic Japanese Fishing Village Memorial [2]:

“Yet for all the barriers that were out there, there was this thriving cultural community, and all of you [the island's Japanese community's descendants at the memorial's anniversary ceremony] are evidence of this … Terminal Island suffered probably one of the worst experiences in terms of the Japanese Americans being forcibly removed from their homes. On Feb. 2, 1942, all Issei or Japanese immigrant fisherman were taken into custody and questioned, and most of them were sent off to faraway places … very cold areas very far from the sea.

“After that, in late February, every resident of Terminal Island was informed they had to leave the island. Just imagine — all the men, the patriarchs, are gone. There’s the women, the wives, the mothers responsible for multiple children and they had to find a place to go on the mainland to stay. [That same year] all Japanese Americans from the West Coast had to move into camps or into the interior of the U.S. …"

References

[1] https://abc7.com/business/spac...

[2] http://www.rafu.com/2018/04/15...