46 thoughts on “When Will Starship Launch?”

  1. I’ve worked as a defense contractor for almost 30 years. If you need action from the government, the timeliness of the response depends on the time of the year.

    January – people are digging out from the holidays, so response will be slow. MLK holiday just 2 weeks into the year.

    February – usually not to bad. Government gets Presidents Day off.

    March – kids will be taking spring break at different times during the month, so response will be slow.

    April & May – usually not too bad. No holidays until Memorial Day, which leads to…

    June, July, and August – people will be taking vacations. Response will be slow to non-existent.

    September – last month of the fiscal year. People are busy jumping through hoops. Labor day holiday. Response will be slow.

    October – first month of the new fiscal year. Response will be slow. Plus some schools have Fall break. Plus government employees take off for Columbus Day.

    November – before Thanksgiving, usually not too bad. Thanksgiving week, forget about it.

    December – people will be taking left over leave before it expires, and then there are the holidays. You’ll be better off waiting until January, which in practice means February.

    No, I’m not kidding or being sarcastic.

      1. I worked in the federal government for the last 10 years of my career, and Larry J has it nailed, exactly.

  2. What I don’t quite follow here is the scale of FAA requirements and inspection. Seems like Starship is running into a lot more regulatory roadblocks than Falcon 9 did during its development phase. It is just because the scale of the rocket is so much bigger?

    I consider Starship very much still in the experimental stage. As such I would expect rapid launches AND failures, followed by rapid engineering changes, followed by more launches. But if FAA takes 1/2 year or more to approve every engineering change, how can one possibly get rapid turnaround necessary to prove out those changes? Falcon 9 went through many, many iterations before it got to where it is today. Does anyone remember the original 3×3 engine configuration before octaweb? Remember the Amos 6 pad explosion? I mean rapid turnaround is key to getting to a successful launch system. What is so fundamentally different about Starship that we have to go through these enormous regulatory delays? Why don’t I remember this for Falcon 9 development, ESPECIALLY Starhopper! Want to talk about a dangerous rocket launching from the middle of Texas as opposed to out over the middle of the Gulf Of Mexico! Am I just mis-remembering history here? Why does it feel as those these delays are different this time?

    1. I’ve read Zimmerman’s article and yes I do know all about the F&WS involvement/interference. So it’s not the FAA.

      At this point I would strongly recommend two options for Musk.

      1) Finish the Starship launch infrastructure at the Cape ASAP. It will be very difficult for politics to interfere with operations at the Cape without interfering with the entirety of the US space operations. This is his best option. Depending upon the political climate he can move from one to the other easily. Frankly I wish Elon had left the little Mussolinis over at Twitter alone. I don’t use Twitter, never plan to and basically SpaceX doesn’t need the bad PR with the fascists trying to even the score.

      2) Build a second Starbase after cutting a deal with an independent country in the South Pacific. Yes SpaceX will still have to abide by US oversight vis Space Treaty obligations, but it will prevent nit-picky politics from interfering with launch cadence. You only have to worry about China storming the island to gain a Starbase.

      1. Have an ocean settlement- with satellites you will see China move, and you can then move the ocean settlement.

        1. Well sea-based launch platforms for Starship have been in and out of the works for a few years. Eventually, I suspect they will be back “in” at some point.

          But Starbase is one heck of a lot more than the orbital launch platform. You’d need an entire ocean based city or movable island. That seems somewhat impractical in the short term, even with Elon’s Mars settlement ambitions which is hard to top!

          1. Starbase is making rockets, with ocean settlement I wouldn’t start making rockets, rather make them in Texas and ship them to ocean settlement.
            So I would enclose oceanic launching platform within floating breakwaters and also enclose the rest of launch site within breakwaters. So one could have floating roads within breakwater and an enclosed harbor for shipping rocket fuel and rockets to- and probably far enough away so ships could be docked while rockets can be launched.
            Though one could go all out, and start with making rockets and making rocket fuel in the ocean settlements.

          2. The biggest floating breakwater would 20 meter diameter balloon tank with thin titanium walls, filled with freshwater at 10 psig, and difference in freshwater vs seawater make it float.
            But 9 meter diameter stainless steel balloon tank like the Starship hull, filled with freshwater and a bit of air at 10 psig should work, pretty good as breakwater..

      2. How about Australia? You could even launch from Woomera as it is a long way west of anything significant (about 1200km). It has a history of rocket launches, an airport and an underutilized town. Your orbital rocket will be in orbit or crashed in the miles of howling nothing for which Australia is known.
        Also a problem for the Chinses to storm.
        Fun fact – Woomera is in aviation weather forecast Area 51 :-).

        1. I was going to suggest Oz, but seriously, with Elon being hated by the Left as much as he is now internationally, you seriously think he would get a better shake there?

          1. Well our Trotskyite Prime Minister just signed an agreement with the US which means US companies can easily use Australia for launches and recoveries. Our government is also desperate for anything that might mean jobs and are pushing electric (coal powered in Oz) cars.
            I think Elon might get a fair shake here and an even better one in a couple of years when the present clown circus gets voted out.

    2. You didn’t see the delays during Amos 6 or Grasshopper, but they were there. The regulations weren’t written for the rapid, iterative development approach. If you step back from them and consider what context they imply, they are written for operational launch vehicles where failures are the exception, and where damage to ground facilities includes damage to the rocket company’s facilities. That pretty much excludes the iterative development approach, because it requires a stand-down and full-blown failure investigation and corrective action report before flights can resume.

      Experimental permits – as opposed to licenses – were supposed to be “streamlined” in order to facilitate development. Instead, they contain the poison pill of requiring a “system safety study,” a requirement with which no one can comply – and AST couldn’t tell whether they did or not, because they don’t know what one is.

      George Nield kept things going by applying reasonableness to the sanctions of development test failures, but there was only so much he could do within the letter of the law. I suspect Kelvin Coleman wouldn’t take the risks George sometimes did, and I also couldn’t fault him for that.

      In truth, I think it’s more a matter of AST being terribly understaffed for a workload that is many times larger than it was when I was there.

      1. I’m hoping if and when we get a new administration, they will take a look at administrative space law from top to bottom and make recommendation to Congress. Not that in this hyper partisan era we’re in that’d make a difference, but I can hope.

        In this particular case I’m not blaming the FAA. They seem to have wrapped up their end of it on Sept. 8th. Which I don’t think is unreasonable given the scope and scale of things that have changed since the first launch attempt.

        But letting the ID/FWS stick its nose under the tent. That is more than problematical. Esp. for experimental programs that need the rapid turn-around. We can’t go through a 135 day (two and a half months) delay for every pad change. Or manufacturing facility change. This is just sheer admini-hokum arranged esp. for Musk. Where’s the equivalent at Van Horn?

        You think FAA is short staffed for this, what about FWS?

        More to Zimmerman’s point, why wait until AFTER FAA review to start the FWS review? Is this malevolence, incompetence or lack of political clout? (Pick three).

  3. @DavidSpain Yes, a much larger rocket with a much bigger risk of damage at a newly sited launch site in a newly impacted wildlife preserve not previously assessed for a rocket this big. The first launch had several anomalies which didn’t but could have affected the wildlife in the preserve.

    F9s were launched at established locations which had safely flown much larger rockets.

    The section that Zimmerman quotes from the FAA doesn’t use the word “approval” referring to the FWS but rather “consult”. It seems advisory.

    If SpaceX can make it through this review quickly, then it is probably home free meaning future reviews will be shorter unless Starship goes kaboom shortly after liftoff.

    1. Doug I wish I was as optimistic as you. I fully expect a Starship to go boom, potentially many times. Just like Falcon 9 did at least a few times in flight and once on the pad. The question remains, how will our government respond to such mishaps? Esp. assuming “normal” abort procedures with rocket exploding over the Gulf Of Mexico and no one on the ground or at sea is injured. Obviously a worse situation would be a pad explosion. Worst case, the thing tips over and crashes into South Padre Island. That might end Starbase.

      1. When I say in-flight, I’m thinking of one of the test launches to high altitude. Maybe that was Starhopper instead of F9 I’m thinking of. Not counting the F1 mishaps from Kwaj.

      2. The Corona/Discoverer spy satellite program had failure after failure after failure until they got this right. Story goes that the when the engineers and program managers became discouraged, no less an important person than President Eisenhower told them, “Keep at it. Trust me, it’s that important.”

        The Saturn V didn’t have any loss-of-vehicle failures? There was that one unmanned test launch beset from everything from pogo to inflight engine shutdowns, but it didn’t blow up, and the next flight was Apollo 8 that entered lunar orbit with a crew?

        There must have been many lessons learned from earlier rocket progams as well as the test stands for test firing the rocket engines and other quality assurance processes. So not having the rocket blow up in the development of an ultra-large launch vehicle as been done before?

        1. So not having the rocket blow up in the development of an ultra-large launch vehicle as been done before?
          You mean like the Russian N1? 🙂 If we had stuck with the Moon direct approach even the Saturn V wouldn’t have been big enough to haul the whole fueled upper stage to the moon and back. No the original plan called for an even bigger rocket called Nova that would have made Saturn V look like a Roman candle. So big that the acoustic footprint at launch might have required a sea-launch platform as you needed to be literally miles from the launch site to survive the sound waves.

          President Eisenhower told them, “Keep at it. Trust me, it’s that important.”

          President Biden’s puppeteer told them, “Find me a snail darter at Boca Chica that I can shove up Musk’s ass. Trust me, no one gives a damn about space.”

    2. The section that Zimmerman quotes from the FAA doesn’t use the word “approval” referring to the FWS but rather “consult”. It seems advisory.

      And what if they “advise” that the excess deluge water is now considered toxic after coming into contact with rocket exhaust? (Should FWS determine this, your argument against this is against FWS not me!). And will require a decontamination process they “advise” which is not yet extant? Will the FAA have the guts to say no? This slippery slope goes all the way down to the bottom sea turtle, or elephant, or sea turtle, or…

      1. I suppose they could bite the cost of building more launch tower and then just keep adding dummy stages to the stack until high enough they could hot stage the first stage and then they don’t need deluge water….

        Yeah, that’s a joke folks…

        1. The next SuperHeavy will have the engines firing downward from a ring around the top of the booster.

          They want to do this for the Artemis Starship anyway….

      2. When you declare something toxic, you have to make a determination the substance is toxic. By doing an analysis.
        TSCA does not cover water, water vapor and CO2. That’s all that is involved in launch.

        1. I don’t disagree with you, but you are thinking like an engineer or chemist, not as an enviro-loon. Does that deluge system use fresh water? Mix too much fresh water into the Boca Chica watershed and now you have a toxic contaminant. But let’s discuss what’s hanging around on the surface under the OLM in the mix of sand, dirt, etc. and whatever construction chemicals left in that, that gets mixed into the deluge water. Why else would you need a retention pond to hold the used deluge water?

          Hello worms? Meet the new opened can….

          I sure hope I’m wrong…

          1. I am actually thinking like a regulator.

            Toxic has a specific meaning under the law. A substance has to be declared by law to be a toxic substance.

            It has to fall under TSCA or a similar state law to be considered a toxic substance.

            Just because you can do bad things with too much water does not make it a toxic substance.

            https://www.epa.gov/chemicals-under-tsca

            If you look up an SDS for H2O, it won’t be listed as a toxic substance.

            Just because you can drink too much water and piss out your electrolytes till you go into afib, can drown in it or get scalded by steam doesn’t make it a toxic substance.

            https://www.labchem.com/tools/msds/msds/LC26750.pdf

          2. So nothing unusual gets mixed in from underneath the OLM? From industrial lubricants, welding spall (and all the lovely heavy metals contained therein), to oil leaks from those basket lifts I see all over the site?

            How about the fact that excessive amounts of even 100% pure fresh water introduced into a salt marsh might have deleterious effect on the salt water life? Etc. Etc. Etc.

            Just because you can do bad things with too much water does not make it a toxic substance.

            You are placing a restriction on FWS finding toxicity in order to come up with a negative advisory that I don’t think is a requirement. Seems to me finding a adverse effect they deem “serious enough” is enough.

            My point being, if a regulator *wants* to find something they almost invariably can. FWS has no responsibility to make sure things get to Mars or even LEO.

          3. You are placing a restriction on FWS finding toxicity in order to come up with a negative advisory that I don’t think is a requirement. Seems to me finding a adverse effect they deem “serious enough” is enough.

            Actually I shouldn’t put words in your mouth. You are only saying that there are actual standards for determining toxicity that are not arbitrary and I appreciate that nor do I disagree with you.

            What I’d like to know is what regulatory guidance the FWS is following here to make an “advisory” determination. Does anyone know? Does it involve a dart board?

          4. Welding spall? Meh! I doubt any significant thing is leaching from welding spall. The hydraulic fluid you may have a point but I would argue it’s de minimus.

            “How about the fact that excessive amounts of even 100% pure fresh water introduced into a salt marsh might have deleterious effect on the salt water life? Etc. Etc. Etc.”

            That still doesn’t make it a toxic substance, it makes it a candidate for a Texas industrial stormwater permit.

            And as far as introducing fresh water, how much? That makes all the difference.

            If it mattered, the consultants for SpaceX would have them construct a collection trough/pond/pool system.

            At worst, you collect it, minimally treat it, pump it back into a holding tank and re-use it for the next time.

            I can think of several ways to manage that site, if it’s necessary.

  5. I’ve been at ASCEND in Vegas for the past three days, and tonight I have a red eye to DC to do final prep for the trial on Monday, …

    Rand, as a conservative, you had better odds in Vegas than DC. With that said, I wish you the best at your Halloween Eve trial.

  6. Keep it up Feds and our grandchildren will be paying Russia/China for rides to the Moon and Mars. Just like we were Russia for nearly a decade for rides to the ISS. Maybe the Chinese will be kind enough to sublet some of their moon-base to the USA, in exchange for Taiwan and a “fair” annual fee to leave the Apollo landing sites intact…

  7. Does anyone seriously think SLS has a future after it launches the Lunar Toll-Booth? Do we think the Toll-Booth will actually be built?

    1. Well that staunch rock of dependable facts Wikipedia says that the propulsion (PPE) and Habitation and Logistics Modules (HALO) are supposed to be launched on a Falcon Heavy in November of ’25. With future deliveries of hardware to take place by crewed Orior/SLS launches identified as Artemis 3 (Dec ’25), 4 (Sep ’28) using SLS/Block-1B and 5 (Sep ’29) also using SLS/Block-1B.

      I guess this means metal is already being bent for PPE and HALO now. Wikipedia says contracts were let in 2020.

      /sarc Obviously we need such a huge expendable rocket to launch a 7 person capsule because of its awesome launch cadence. \sarc

  8. Thoughts and prayers and good wishes for your trial Monday.

    I wish the media were covering the preliminaries: motions, complaints about disclosures, jury selection, even just “body language” of those attending. Instead, mostly, radio silence.

  9. “The problem with speculation is that it makes a spec out of you and some guy named Lation.”

    – Dr. Gregory House

  10. We can see the water tanks for the deluge. Anyone know how much water is in them? Spread that over a few acres and how much rainfall is that?

  11. There is also the outstanding lawsuit trying to force the FAA into a full EIS and set aside the FONSI.

    A link to the NIMBY crowd’s legal complaint.

    It appears there is the “hard look” standard. Whatever that means.
    Some more links here and here.

    According to 2nd link:

    According to the most recent court filing on July 25, a joint status report is due to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia by Oct. 27, 2023.

    That’s today…

    1. Zimmerman says:
      SpaceX should waste as little energy now in trying to fly from Boca Chica. Don’t pour good money after bad. Better to quickly shift gears to Florida, and therefore waste as little time or capital as possible.

      I don’t disagree. Cornyn and Cruz need to elevate the issue to the RNC’s platform for next year if they want Texas to retain any influence in the space breakout. This is a Democrat knife in the back for the folks in Brownsville.

      1. This is a Democrat knife in the back for the folks in Brownsville.

        The Texas 34th US Congressional District is represented by Representative Vincente Gonzales, a Democrat. Voters in the greater Brownsville area, including McAllen and South Padre Island, which are parts of Cameron and Hidalgo counties, that actually enjoy having a spaceport (supposedly about 80% of its residents) should take note and make sure he’s acting on YOUR behalf.

  13. One point that no one here seem to have touched on. I know that Musk’s stated desire is to use the superheavy/starship to further his Mars colonization ambitions. But there is another major player who presumably has more clout than EPA/FAA (to say nothing of “Fish and wildlife”), obviously DOD. Would think the pentagon/CIA/NSA etc. would be salivating at having a new toy like this to play with. If it works it would be like the old Saturn V moon rocket only reusable with a greater effective payload to orbit. (Very) large spysats, large heavy mass components of “Star-wars” type missile defense; like powerful laser or particle beam weapons in orbit etc. Would think the relatively new “Space-Force” would be a player as well. Can’t understand how DOD would allow these relatively 2nd tier government agencies to stand in their way basically road-blocking them getting what they would obviously want. Unless of course DOD/CIA/Black Budget already has some kind of secret tech (UAP derived maybe) that dwarfs what Must is working on.

    1. …But there is another major player who presumably has more clout than EPA/FAA (to say nothing of “Fish and wildlife”), obviously DOD…

      …Unless of course DOD/CIA/Black Budget already has some kind of secret tech (UAP derived maybe) that dwarfs what Must is working on….

      Seriously? Have you seen the totals for the FWS’s black budget?
      /sarc

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