Elon Musk‘s spacecraft manufacturing company SpaceX on Tuesday pinned regulatory red tape as the cause for delays in the development of its ambitious Starship launch vehicle whose fifth flight test is now expected in late November.
What Happened: Starship has been ready for its fifth flight test since the first week of August but has been put off owing to “frivolous” and “patently absurd” licensing issues, the company said in a blog post on Tuesday.
“Unfortunately, we continue to be stuck in a reality where it takes longer to do the government paperwork to license a rocket launch than it does to design and build the actual hardware,” SpaceX said.
The company said that it recently received a launch license date estimate of late November from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), marking a two-month delay from the previously communicated date of mid-September. The delay, the company said, was not based on a new safety concern but on “superfluous” environmental analysis.
Environmental Concerns Around Starship Launches: Concerns have been flagged about the Starship's water-cooled steel flame deflector spraying pollutants into the surroundings and the company’s Starbase facility having a negative impact on local flora and fauna, among others.
SpaceX has previously disputed these claims.
“At Starbase, we implement an extensive list of mitigations developed with federal and state agencies, many of which require year-round monitoring and frequent updates to regulators and consultation with independent biological experts,” SpaceX said on Tuesday. “The narrative that we operate free of, or in defiance of, environmental regulation is demonstrably false.”
Past Flight Tests: SpaceX has conducted four flight tests with the Starship thus far.
SpaceX last launched Starship in the first half of June. During the test, the two stages of the vehicle – the Starship spacecraft and the Super Heavy booster – separated, and the booster subsequently had a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. The spacecraft ignited its engines and went into space, made a controlled re-entry to Earth, and had a soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean.
The entire flight lasted one hour and six minutes from launch. The key object of the flight was to re-enter Earth and the mission achieved it while withstanding damage to the vehicle.
The flights before accomplished less. While the spacecraft failed to reach space in the first flight, it reached space and exploded in the second test flight. During the third flight test, the spacecraft broke apart when re-entering Earth’s atmosphere from space.
Upcoming Flight: The two-stage Starship is touted as the world's most powerful launch vehicle, standing 121 meters tall and weighing approximately 5,000 tonnes. For the upcoming flight, SpaceX’s goal is to catch Starship’s booster stage back at Starbase using the launch tower's mechanical arms, marking a significant demonstration of Starship’s reusability.
The company is relying on frequent test flights to test and enhance the capability of the vehicle. Musk said in March that Starship is expected to have at least six test flights this year. However, only two test flights have been completed to date in 2024.
Starship is key to NASA’s dreams of taking humans back to the surface of the Moon.
NASA’s Artemis 3 mission slated to launch no earlier than September 2026 is expected to enable humans to land back on the surface of the moon with the help of a lunar lander variant of SpaceX's Starship spacecraft. The last time humans set foot on the Moon was in 1972 with Apollo 17. Since then, no crew has traveled beyond low-Earth orbit.
Musk, meanwhile, is eyeing taking humans to Earth’s neighboring planet Mars aboard the Starship.
“We will never get humanity to Mars if this continues,” Musk said about the regulatory hurdles Starship is faced with on Tuesday.
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