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.
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...
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 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.
“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!
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.
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.
There was a letter circulating around on X recently, showing that the FAA asked the Fish and Wildlife Service to do their thing faster. Assuming that was real, things got moving after the pressure from Congress.
In August, they said the rocket was ready to fly .. but they were quite visibly still doing significant work to the catch mechanism on the launch tower.
SpaceX operates on a rapid iterative cycle where they will knowingly test with deficiencies to improve later. If they get delayed for a massive chunk of time, they are definitely going to use it to make all of the known improvements they can.
Take that with a BIG grain of salt. When SpaceX says they are ready and the FAA is holding them up, it is actually Elon saying they are ready. For example, take a look at the "Starships are meant to fly" post from September: https://www.spacex.com/updates/
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.
Every launch pad in the US is a de jure or de facto wildlife sanctuary. Launch pads need a large human keep-out zone. Keeping out humans is great for wildlife.
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...
> Every launch pad in the US is a de jure or de facto wildlife sanctuary. Launch pads need a large human keep-out zone. Keeping out humans is great for wildlife.
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.
Being so far South is quite nice, gives you quite the performance boost, do you have any analysis on what the dog legs cost compared to more Northern launch sites? Would be interesting to consider. Clearly Florida was the right place to do this for the US in the 1960s.
As recently as last week FAA was saying no launch license before late November, and even if you don't believe SpaceX was ready in August they are clearly ready today. That's what SpaceX complained about, and it got fixed. What more proof do you need that the FAA was the holdup here? https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1fupkny/the_f...
SpaceX already provided all the required information. FAA was not waiting for anything from SpaceX. They had inexplicably decided a new environmental review was required for trivial changes to the launch license, and today they reversed that decision in a "written re-evaluation" which as far as I can tell is not based on any new information.
- 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.
Stop willfully misinterpreting it. The new 60 day window was something newly added this time just to give other agencies time to complain if they wanted.
The FAA did their normal review like they’ve done for every other starship and falcon launch in a timely manner.
Boca Chica is not the Southernmost point in the US. One if the Florida Keys is.
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.
Regardless of how it was preserved it is still a valuable habitat for some vulnerable species. And a recreational amenity for people. Nor would the absence of a sanctuary make it automatically ok to kill wildlife or cause pollution.
Have you been to that "wildlife sanctuary." I have. People are driving cars up and down that beach all day. Best thing that could happen to the wildlife is if it were shut down permanently for rocket launches.
> They are basically completely dismissing government oversight as "unnecessary obstacles to progress".
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.
I understand the US and Europe work differently. Although I am European, I also have a strong dislike of bureaucracy and am sympathetic to advancing society through technological progress.
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.
> 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.
Having a 60 days consultation with the Fish and Wildlife Service whether a falling hot-stage ring (essentially dumb steel piece) causes danger to fish is just silly.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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 know it based on what in-the-know reporters (dedicated space industry reporters) have said, what I've read in some books on SpaceX's history and the (albeit very limited) contacts with people I have who work in the industry.
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.
Other way around - with foreknowledge of how fast the FAA was working, SpaceX scheduled the launch last week to be one day after the expected license issue.
https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-...
Edit: that's 12p.m. UTC, I think.