TESMANIAN by Evelyn Arevalo June 19, 2021
SpaceX is building spaceport in South Texas where it is developing its Starship launch vehicle at its Starbase facility. “SpaceX is committed to developing revolutionary space technology, with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets. Boca Chica Village is our latest launch site dedicated to Starship, our next-generation launch vehicle. SpaceX is committed to developing this town into a 21st-century Spaceport,” the company said. In 2019, SpaceX was also developing Starship at Cocoa beach, south of Cape Canaveral, Florida, then the company paused Starship manufacturing in Florida in December 2019 to focus on Starship’s development in Texas. Ever since, the company has made significant progress towards the spacecraft’s development. It has flown eight stainless-steel Starship prototypes to date, these test flights were launched into an altitude of less than 20-kilometers above Boca Chica. SpaceX is now focused on preparing to launch the first vehicle to orbit this year.
This week, SpaceX founder Elon Musk mentioned future plans to launch Starship from Florida’s Space Coast during an interaction with a Twitter user who asked if SpaceX would launch Starlink satellites atop Starship from Launch Complex-39A (LC-39A) at the Kennedy Space Center. –“After several successful launches, land overflight earlier in trajectory passes E-sub-c safety threshold. That said, Starship will also launch from Cape [Canaveral] long-term,” Musk said in response, in reference to certain missions that would require Starship to fly above land. The ‘E-sub-c safety threshold’ is the 'Expected Casualty Analysis’, the launch industry's fundamental method for assessing risk. According to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the safety threshold states that in order for a vehicle to fly above populated land it should have ‘a no greater than 30-in-a-million probability of casualty among the uninvolved public on the ground.’
Long-term, SpaceX plans to build a Starship launch tower in Florida to support Starship flights. Not only will Starship help with making life multiplanetary, the company also envisions using the spacecraft to transport passengers and cargo to point-to-point destinations on Earth. For now, SpaceX teams are focused on completing its first Super Heavy-class launch tower at Boca Chica Beach. The launch tower will be 143-meters tall (469 feet) to support Super Heavy rocket launches. Boca Chica photographers have shared photos of SpaceX’s tower construction progress, shown below. The company targets to complete the launch tower this summer. If approved by the FAA, SpaceX plans to conduct the first orbital Starship flight test from South Texas, the vehicle would liftoff to orbit then reenter Earth’s atmosphere to land in the ocean approximately 100-kilometers off the northwest coast of Kauai, Hawaii. This flight path would only cross above the ocean over the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic, along the Florida Straits.
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