Tomorrow? It was issued only one day in advance?
The FAA forwarded the requests to the related agencies and had to wait (for example, what happens to the polluted water).
According to 50 CFR § 402.13, the other agencies have 60 days to give back their answers to the FAA.
15 August + 60 days = now.
The FAA mentioned they positively collaborate with SpaceX despite "upper stage failure in July and unsuccessful landing in August".
Quite exciting to see!
Close enough. Sixty days is October 14. Today is the twelfth. Tomorrow, 13 October, is the launch.
I wonder if the people in these agencies treat it like school projects where you use deadlines as a framework for how long you can screw around before it's absolutely necessary to get started. Where it's not treated as a worst case upper maximum.
Flight 4 was licensed on June 4th, was originally scheduled to launch on June 5th, and actually launched on the 6th.
Flight 3 received its license on March 13th and launched on March 14th.
Flight 2 received its license on November 15th 2023, and launched on November 18th.
Flight 1 received its license on April 14th; it launched on April 20th.
https://www.space.com/spacex-starship-flight-five-late-novem...
This might be a case where the FAA's PR department should link to a press release instead of repeatig it contemporaneously.
Officially, yes. Practically, I was hearing earlier this week that this was coming, as obviously was SpaceX given they're ready to attempt.
As someone who has been following these developments for a while, I can 100% detect Elon's fingerprints all over this post. They are basically completely dismissing government oversight as "unnecessary obstacles to progress". Keep in mind, the area where SpaceX operates Starship is a wildlife sanctuary and was only chosen because it is one of the few undeveloped, southernmost points of the US, which matters because the closer you are to the equator, the more advantage you can take of the Earth's rotational velocity.
The site was chosen because it was it could launch East over water. The rotation of the earth gives a boost to easterly launches. Boca Chica isn't a great launch location because there's a fairly narrow window of directions it can launch in without overflying land, requiring expensive dog legs to hit different inclinations. They might have been better off with a piece of coastline in Maine, but try and find a piece of Eastern coastline in the US without any development in a 4 mile radius around the site...
They're slow and unsurprising. You don't launch in a hurricane.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/10/european-mission-depar...
"Marooned" m.imdb.com/title/tt0064639/
Would note that ULA's Vulcan 4 October launch test at Cape Canaveral sprayed debris and presumably propellant around the same area [1]. Vulcan's GEM SRB burns a perchlorate fuel [2]. Perchlorates are toxic [3].
SpaceX isn't taking any crazy risks, particularly relative to the technology risk and potential pay-off, with its IFTs.
[1] https://spaceflightnow.com/2024/10/04/ula-launches-second-vu...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphite-Epoxy_Motor
[3] https://wwwn.cdc.gov/tsp/ToxFAQs/ToxFAQsDetails.aspx?faqid=8...
The main reason that area was a wildlife sanctuary was that nobody wanted it for anything else, so it was a cheap political move to make it "protected."
A launch site needs more than latitude. It needs possible launch trajectories that star by going over water to avoid possible debis falling in people or property.
Launch sites at higher altitude are better than those at lower altitude.
P.S.: I wish SpaceX succeeds in bringing down the cost of access to space.
The FAA did their normal review like they’ve done for every other starship and falcon launch in a timely manner.
My notes:
- SpaceX requested to amend its existing "Programmatic Environmental Assesment" of 2022 to support jettisoning the interstage heat shield and (importantly) using an updating sonic boom model based on flight data. In my opinion, this is the critical point of this assessment.
- The impact on endangered wildlife is reassessed based on a report submitted by SpaceX.
- There are other points like concerns about waterway closures, and the water discharged by the deluge system. I know there was some controversy about the deluge system and the cleanliness of that water, but according to this report, it's all good.
The new evaluation of the sonic boom using flight data shows that SpaceX's original assessment was way off and the intensity and area affected by these sonic booms is much larger in reality. The FAA then goes through a significant amount of rationalizations (with sources, to be fair) to justify that the predictions of the new sonic boom model are still acceptable.
The biological resources section also shows that SpaceX underestimated the effects of their launch operations on local wildlife, but some research and monitoring measures are proposed to counteract this.
All in all, my opinion is that the FAA is doing everything it can to not be an obstacle. But they do have to analyze this stuff much more rigorously than SpaceX does. That is quite literally their job after all.
SpaceX works quite well with the government and doesn't mind oversight with regards to safety at all. What they don't care for is frivolous oversight/bureaucratic rubber stamping without looking at the intention behind the rules. They also don't like being surprised last minute. All of which happened in the prelude to that update post you referenced. I know a lot of people on this site are from Europe or have European sentiments, but the two places really function quite differently normally. The job of regulators isn't to be obstructionist for the sake of it. It's to create rules that actually improve safety and overall move society forward.
But there should be some oversight. You cannot just let a private company do whatever industrial processes wherever they want in the name of progress.
We don't.
The question was why the FAA was enforcing rules that have nothing to do with its remit. There is protocol of regulatory agencies having each others' backs. But it was silly in this situation—it probably calls for reviewing the regime.
Then we're in agreement as is SpaceX and even Elon Musk. He's previously stated he's in favor of regulations in general. He just is against an overwhelming overbearing quantity of them that just exist because they've always been there.
It seems to me that fishing expeditions pose a significant threat to the welfare of fish.
How could you possibly know this? There's no way an outsider can be privy to all of the details of this situation to make an objective call.
Looking at it from the outside it's obvious to me that one party has a financial interest while the other doesn't, and the party that has a financial interest is run by a person who is more than willing to misrepresent situations to his financial benefit.
SpaceX could be right in this situation but you and I will never know.
I can also go with what Elon Musk has previously said about him being fine with regulations. His companies operate in some of the most highly regulated industries in the world and he doesn't complain about the vast majority of those regulations. People love to jump to the assumption that because Elon Musk complains about _one_ regulation in question he wants to remove them entirely.