Before the first launch of its Starship rocket, the most powerful rocket ever built, SpaceX has cleared the final regulatory hurdle.
Friday’s announcement came from the Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates commercial rocket launches and granted SpaceX’s request for an uncrewed flight test of the rocket from its South Texas facilities. The vehicle, which has already gone through ground testing before taking off, is set to take off on Monday.
“After a comprehensive license evaluation process, the FAA determined SpaceX met all safety, environmental, policy, payload, airspace integration and financial responsibility requirements,” the agency said in a statement.
The FAA imposed an air traffic restriction earlier on Friday for the launch area. On Monday, between 7 a.m. and 10:05 a.m. CT (or 8 a.m. and 11:05 a.m. ET), planes and other air traffic are instructed to avoid the launch area, which is located due east of Brownsville, Texas.
After years of testing to refine the rocket’s design, this will be SpaceX’s first attempt to launch Starship into orbit.
Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, has been discussing Starship for approximately a decade, giving elaborate presentations about its design and describing it as the vehicle that supports SpaceX’s founding purpose: sending people for the first time to Mars.
Additionally, as part of its Artemis program, NASA has already granted SpaceX contracts and options worth more than $3 billion to use Starship to transport government astronauts to the moon’s surface.
The debut flight test won’t finish a full circle around Earth. If effective, notwithstanding, it will arrive at orbital velocities and travel around 150 miles over Earth’s surface, well into elevations considered to be space.
There are two parts to the starship: the massive Super Heavy booster, which houses 33 engines, and the Starship spacecraft, which is designed to break away from the booster when it runs out of fuel to complete the mission.
The rocket booster will be thrown into the ocean shortly after liftoff on this flight. However, SpaceX intends to recover the vehicle by guiding it to an upright landing back at the launch site on subsequent flights. The Starship spacecraft will complete nearly one full planet turn before splashing down off Hawaii at the end of its journey.
How to get there:
Starship’s development has been based at SpaceX’s privately held spaceport, about 40 minutes from Brownsville, Texas, on the border between the United States and Mexico. Testing started a long time back with brief “bounce tests” of early space apparatus models. The company started out with short flights that were only a few feet or so above the ground before moving on to high-altitude flights, the majority of which ended in dramatic explosions as the company tried to land them upright.
One suborbital flight test in May 2021, nonetheless, finished in progress.
SpaceX has also been preparing its Super Heavy booster for flight ever since. The enormous, 230-foot-tall (69-meter-tall) chamber is loaded with 33 of the organization’s Raptor motors.
Starship and Super Heavy are about 400 feet (120 meters) tall when stacked.
SpaceX has been trying to launch into orbit for more than a year without receiving FAA approval.
The community, including environmental groups, has strongly objected to the company and federal regulators tasked with ensuring that SpaceX launches do not pose risks to people or property in the vicinity of the launch site.
In June, the FAA conceded SpaceX one critical endorsement for sending off Starship, however it spread out a rundown of “mitigating actions” the organization would have to make before the primary send off.
An FAA official who declined to be identified for publication spoke with reporters this week and stated that the agency has been monitoring SpaceX’s compliance with the mitigating actions, some of which are still in the process, even as the launch license is issued.
During the test launch, an FAA official stated that government personnel will be on the ground to ensure that SpaceX adheres to its license.