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Comment by rvnx | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX provided information about the flight profile and its impact only in mid-August to FAA.

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!

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Interesting how it took exactly the maximum limit they are alloted.

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.

Alternatively, one or more agency may not have responded at all and so the FAA was obligated to wait the 60 days. Just speculation.

Sounds like a great way to get politicians to give the agency 3 days next time, under the guise of optimization but with the actual intent and effect to completely neuter the agency...

Sounds like a great way to make sure we don’t learn the lessons from the FAA’s lax oversight of Boeing.

The lesson being that the FAA should use more resources on airplanes that carry millions of passengers a day vs worrying about unmanned rockets crashing into the ocean?

They do, hence it takes so long to approve a starship flight, because resources are prioritised elsewhere.

They absolutely do. It's a bureaucracy. Budget is on a use it or lose it basis. FAA is requesting a 36% budget increase next year. Wouldn't be able to justify that if they stopped wasting resources nitpicking every piece of the launch plan.

Dismissing a review as “wasting” is like listening to a junior engineer tell everyone it’s pointless to waste time testing invalid user input because an enduser would have no chance at even innocently sending bad data to a system.

Every months (or weeks) long review of a minor decision has been a complete waste at every company I have ever been at. It's also a complete waste at the government.

Conspiracy thinking: Musk may have made some personal enemies by stealing Twitter from the left and siding with Trump's camp in the upcoming US presidential election.

It will be interesting to see if the FAA reaction time is markedly different if/when Bezos' Blue Origin ever gets something bigger than that phallic tourist attraction called New Shepard up and running. Bezos thus far has outwardly given the impression to align with 'the left' and his WaPo (also dubbed 'Pravda on the Potomac') certainly acts as the loyal flag carrier for the desired narrative. If there is any truth to this conspiracy thinking I'd expect the FAA to jump to the occasion to enable SpaceX' competitor to get up and running.

New Glenn is pretty close to being ready, although last I heard they hadn't gotten the necessary permits yet.

The more the merrier, hope they succeed and hope politics won't play a role in which company gets chosen for future missions. Given the successful launch and capture of Starship/Superheavy today it looks like SpaceX will still be ahead for the foreseeable future, New Glenn lies between Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy in capacity.

“Malicious compliance”, sort of like CA is now refusing to allow more launches because they don’t like Elon’s support of the candidate they don’t approve of. Democracy!

> 15 August + 60 days = now

Close enough. Sixty days is October 14. Today is the twelfth. Tomorrow, 13 October, is the launch.

"End of day" shenanigans?

“Wouldn’t want it to take the maximum amount of time now would we”

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