“Starship and Super Heavy vehicles for Flight 5 have been ready to launch since the first week of August. The flight test will include our most ambitious objective yet: attempt to return the Super Heavy booster to the launch site and catch it in mid-air.
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We recently received a launch license date estimate of late November from the FAA, the government agency responsible for licensing Starship flight tests. This is a more than two-month delay to the previously communicated date of mid-September. This delay was not based on a new safety concern, but instead driven by superfluous environmental analysis.”
Maybe they should have thought about that before building their launch site next to a wildlife refuge. Maybe they shouldn't have caused significant damage to that same reserve (requiring months of cleanup) when they ignored their own engineers and blew up their own launch pad. The fact that they repeatedly violated their permit isn't helping.
The reality is SpaceX can't be trusted when it comes to compliance with rules, laws, and permits. They've proven this repeatedly (even when their own engineers point out better ways). Of course that means oversight agencies have to provide more oversight.
Its almost funny how important environmentalism is to Musk when Tesla is the context, and how unimportant it is when SpaceX is the context. It's wild how his image has gone from forward thinking genius businessman to bipolar self-serving workaholic in less than four years.
> Every US launch site is next to a de facto or a de jure wildlife refuge.
Yes, this is difficult to avoid for various reasons, perhaps the most pertinent being that all the safest places to launch things from are along coastlines where it's easy to divert wayward rockets into the ocean and away from populated areas. Coastlines have plenty of water and thus plenty of wildlife. Launching from e.g. an inland desert is much more risky and the environmental impact isn't necessarily all that much better to boot.
To prevent ignoring other agencies/laws the FAA does not issue a launch permit unless the other agencies/laws are satisfied. Otherwise people would just do what the FAA directly regulates and ignore the rest and get a launch permit.
> prevent ignoring other agencies/laws the FAA does not issue a launch permit unless the other agencies/laws are satisfied
Which is wild. This isn’t how regulation, including with the FAA, works in other contexts. (If an airline mucks up a securities filing, that isn’t the FAA’s jurisdiction.)
The legislative fix may be in separating launch permits from environmental clearances.
Having a Lead Federal Agency (FAA's role here) during permitting is a very common and positive thing. It helps avoid the left hand not talking to the right hand when permits from multiple agencies are required for a single activity.
If they were separate SpaceX couldn't just ignore the lack of EPA permit and launch anyway just because they have an FAA permit, and by having them coordinated it decreases run-around from different agencies giving conflicting demands. SpaceX would likely face more delays not fewer if the FAA wasn't acting as a Lead Federal Agency here.
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We recently received a launch license date estimate of late November from the FAA, the government agency responsible for licensing Starship flight tests. This is a more than two-month delay to the previously communicated date of mid-September. This delay was not based on a new safety concern, but instead driven by superfluous environmental analysis.”