SpaceX update regarding Starship FAA flight approval

It's absurd how these licenses are not fast-tracked by the government. This is one of the greatest technological assets the US have over other nations. It boggles my mind how the US government is shooting itself in the foot here if you compare it against other national security projects run by the government itself.

> At times, these roadblocks have been driven by false and misleading reporting, built on bad-faith hysterics from online detractors or special interest groups who have presented poorly constructed science as fact.

People reading this should remember that Flight 1 was preceded by hysterics from online detractors who predicted, correctly, that the launch would make a giant mess. The FAA ignored them and allowed the launch anyway. The Wikipedia article would like to remind us that it wasn’t a toxic mess, but it was still a mess.

Given the lack of any acknowledgement of that incident in this PR piece, I’m a bit disinclined to fully trust it. And I can certainly see why regulators would like to give stakeholders 60 days to comment on what might go wrong, since SpaceX’s history of predicting what will go wrong with Starship launches is a bit tarnished.

Hilarious, we used to throw SRBs from the space shuttle in the ocean repeatedly.

I do agree, there seems to be a ton of extra scrutiny on SpaceX for no apparent reason. We can only speculate and I'm sure HNers have a ton of theories.

So the FAA approved two separate 60-day reviews. Do they always take the full 60 days or could a verdict come earlier?

I agree with the poster's assessment that this is pretty stupid regardless.

I listened to a podcast last year featuring a FAA employee saying that the best way to delay the FAA is to complain to congress, who will demand a review. Then they have to drop everything and work on the review for a month.

This spacex release and complaint is justifiable but I wish they didn’t use such strong language it just raises the rhetoric against itself

SpaceX seems a bit salty about it, justifiably so:

https://www.spacex.com/updates/#starships-fly

SpaceX works on the leading edge of today's aerospace capabilities, and it's reasonable to expect new problems during their work. So it could justifiably be terra incognita to regulating agencies, including environment protection organizations.

Yet it's unprofessional if they are showing up and demand delays at the last moment. It's the work of government agencies to watch companies like SpaceX closely and coordinate with them way ahead of large events.

Nobody's winning when the environment is ignored, or when the aspiring company has to stop and switch to something else while waiting for permissions for important actions in development. So far USA administrations demonstrated reasonable balance, hope they'll manage to improve the current situation.

I think it's part of the uniqueness of the United States that different states can try different experiments.

If states like Texas and Florida governance want to run fast and are ok with potentially breaking things environmentally by easing regulation - we should let them.

Perhaps they are right that commercial/industrial interests should be prioritized over the state's local population if the United State's space ambitions are to be achieved.

Perhaps there's plenty of available land so not much is really being sacrificed and if something really bad happens? Elon, the leadership and engineering teams can probably move (back) to California.

From the outside looking in, the behaviour of the FAA looks corrupt. They’re being influenced by someone (Boeing?) to slow down SpaceX because they’re too hard to compete with fairly on a technological merit alone.

Disagree?

Okay, then explain why the FAA just sits there passively seemingly giggling to themselves every time SpaceX makes a typo? Any excuse to press the multi-month pause button is mercilessly exploited.

If you think that the government is working with industry to achieve supremacy in space, is this what you would expect to see?

Can you imagine if right after signing the CHIPS act the Whitehouse just stood by while some tiny agency just held up a many-billion-dollar fab construction that’s vital to national security!?

Someone in power is out to get Elon Musk and/or SpaceX. They’re most likely a competitor or in the pocket of one.

Everything I’ve seen in the news fits that theory.

The opposite theory of “SpaceX is the world’s best space tech company but also crazy incompetent and deserving endless punishment from every agency” doesn’t hold water. If the agencies cared about the environment or the water or whatever they would be working with SpaceX instead of harming their progress in a way that appears entirely punitive.

Hasn’t anyone here been held up by a paperwork troll in your work? Haven’t any of you had this conversation?

Secops: “Firewall requests take two months to implement.”

Me: “I’m a consultant and this is a one week project. I’m finishing up Friday.”

Secops: “That’s your fault for not submitting the request ahead of time.”

Me: “It’s Monday morning! I just got here. I haven’t even finished my coffee that I got at the airport on the way here.”

Secops: “Your lack of planning is your own fault.”

Me: “Auditors prohibit me from working on any projects until the official start date, which is today. My guess though is that the rules will be: x, y, and z.”

Secops: “You need to use our form 832b and use the specific IP source and destination addresses.”

Me: “Can I have a list of your subnets and their IP ranges?”

Secops: “No, that’s a secret. For security!”

— this is how a one week project blows out to six months.

As I noted in previous threads this is brazen lying: they are not dumping tap water into the ground they are dumping (boiling hot) water that has been processed by blasting it with rocket fuel, which their own third-party analysis contains contaminants that are not present in "tap water".

By SpaceX's logic any factory would be able to dump toxic water into the ground as long as they sourced the input water from the city's drinking water distribution system.

This is probably the most basic environmental and health and safety law, namely to prevent businesses from dumping toxins into the water; trying to frame this as government overreach and knick-knack regulations is seriously depraved and it would be banana-republic-esque if he actually succeeds in ignoring or removing these rules.

The ecosystem that is business is so interesting. You have creatures like SpaceX that are watered by the government and grow into magnificent trees but the tree has parasites that want to extract some of the value for themselves.

It's like fertilizing the soil and finding that not only your crops but also weeds grow stronger.

Everyone wants their cut. Which is why for a certain sum of money, the desert iguana will turn out to not be a problem.

Great stuff. I understand how much fun it must be to be an agriculturist.

No doubt the FAA is under enormous pressure from Boeing, Blue Origin and ULA to slow things down for SpaceX.

What, if anything, prevents SpaceX from using offshore launch pads? What about launches from international waters?

It’s surprising to me that a company so important to the success of many American aspirations is getting sandbagged by environmental regulations. For a rocket whose outputs are carbon dioxide and water, no less. It’s hard to ignore the possibility that Democrats are purposely slow walking SpaceX approvals due to Elon’s politics.

How large an area of ocean has to be cleared for the impact?

This sounds very much like an incomplete story. Knowing nothing else, I'd guess that SpaceX pissed off somebody or somebodies, and it doesn't make a lot of sense to evaluate how reasonable or unreasonable their reaction is without knowing what triggered it. It looks like somebody is using whatever tool they have at their disposal, and the question is why.

It could be a result of repeated violations of regulatory action, and this is a smackdown to show that yes, the government can fuck you up if it wants to. But that's pure speculation on my part.

Of course, Musk will try to make this look as bad as possible. If his handy tool Trump wins this fall, Musk will use this to motivate his "let's streamline government by creating a new government oversight committee!" plan, which is probably largely intended to cripple any regulatory oversight that could possibly get in his way.

I bet this wouldn't be happening if Elon Musk wasn't shitposting on twitter, and particularly, doing it in a way that pisses off liberals/progressives.

On the plus side, every day the Biden administration delays SpaceX, IFT-5 becomes more likely to succeed, digging the pit of despair for EDS sufferers even deeper. Invest in salt futures.

The comments on the linked Twitter thread are entirely one-dimensional, and more than a little conspiratorial on average. Is there a neutral news source for this?

Musk's right wing shift and naked conservative bias do not serve Spacex well when the opposition is in power. Most commercial enterprises with operations that fall under federal control play both sides of the street.

I've wondered about the long-term implications for the Mars goal as Elon keeps burning bridges within politics. Not that he was treated well by the current White House with regard to electric vehicles, so it's understandable that he would be upset. But turning around and endorsing the other candidate all while going on the attack against the current administration probably isn't winning anyone over.

Overall, I just don't understand why Elon has allowed the Twitter political brainrot to take hold. If he's playing strategically, then it's happening at a level which isn't legible to me. I really don't see how engaging so much in divisive political issues is going to help him advance his claimed primary goal of extending human life to Mars.

“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.

…

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.”

Why must HN become a platform for unfiltered corporate propaganda? Brainwash somewhere else, please.

The linked post mentions 60 months instead of days.

I wonder if the idea was to delay it beyond the election in early November.

This press release seems very unprofessional. It's very negative and aggressive, both actively and passively.

I'm a huge fan of SpaceX, but this press release just screams "Musk ordered us to post a screed"

People incapable of doing (or even understanding) something, interfering with other people who can do it, with no consequences if they are found to be wrong (or biased) in their basis for objecting to the activity.

Fundamentally, this is loathing and envy encoded into law.