Global Courant 2023-04-15 03:28:00
A Starship prototype is stacked atop a Super Heavy booster at the company’s launch facility near Brownsville, Texas.
SpaceX
The Federal Aviation Administration has issued a Starship launch license to Elon Musk’s SpaceX, a crucial final regulatory move that gives the company permission to attempt an orbital launch of its towering rocket for the first time.
“After an extensive licensing review process, the FAA determined that SpaceX met all safety, environmental, policy, payload, airspace integration and financial responsibility requirements. The license is valid for five years,” the FAA said in a statement.
SpaceX, with the FAA license now in hand, is aiming to launch Starship as soon as possible Monday from its private Texas facility along the Gulf Coast.
“SpaceX is targeting Monday, April 17 for the first flight test of a fully integrated Starship and Super Heavy rocket from Starbase in Texas. The 150-minute test window opens at 7 a.m. CT,” SpaceX said in a statement.
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The company recently stacked Starship prototype 24 on top of Super Heavy booster prototype 7 in preparation for launch. Together they stand almost 120 meters high. SpaceX completed a test firing of the Super Heavy booster, which has 33 Raptor engines at its base, in February in one of the final engineering steps on the way to launch.
SpaceX has been building up the first orbital flight test of its Starship rocket for several years, with the company’s leadership emphasizing the experimental nature of the launch. While SpaceX had hoped to conduct the first orbital Starship launch as early as summer 2021, delays in progress and regulatory approval have delayed that timeline.
The rocket will lift off from SpaceX’s development facility near Brownsville, Texas, before heading east over the Gulf of Mexico, according to 2021 documents that revealed the flight plan. The ultimate goal of the mission is to reach orbit, where the rocket must travel most of the way around the Earth and splash into the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Kauai, Hawaii.
Designed to carry cargo and people beyond Earth, Starship is critical to NASA’s plan to return astronauts to the moon. SpaceX won a nearly $3 billion contract from the space agency in 2021 to use Starship as a manned lunar lander.
