Space News by Jeff Foust — February 11, 2022
SpaceX is prepared to shift testing of its Starship next-generation launch vehicle from Texas to Florida if there are extended delays in an ongoing environmental review, company founder and chief executive Elon Musk said Feb. 10.
In a long-awaited, and long-delayed, update about development of Starship at the company’s Boca Chica, Texas, test site, Musk said he thought the Federal Aviation Administration would complete an environmental review and award SpaceX a launch license for Starship launches as soon as March.
“We don’t have a ton of insight into where things stand with the FAA,” he said. “We have gotten sort of a rough indication that there may be an approval in March, but that’s all we know.”
The FAA said last fall that it expected to complete an environmental assessment of orbital launches of Starship from Boca Chica by the end of 2021. However, in late December the agency pushed back that deadline to Feb. 28, citing the large number of public comments and ongoing discussions with other federal agencies.
One potential outcome of that review, though, is to perform a more rigorous environmental impact statement (EIS), something that some individuals and organizations called for during the public comment period on the draft environmental assessment (EA) last fall. An EIS would take months, and potentially more than a year, to complete, putting any launch activity from Boca Chica on hold during that process.
“It would obviously set us back for quite some time because an EIS takes a lot longer than an EA, so we would have to shift our priorities to Cape Kennedy,” he said, a reference to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida.
SpaceX previously obtained environmental approvals for Starship launches from KSC, and the company has restarted work on a launch site for Starship at Launch Complex 39A, adjacent to the existing pad now used by Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy.
More:
https://spacenews.com/spacex-considers-shifting-starship-testing-to-florida/
