SpaceX: Ready to launch Starship/Superheavy by end of January but it won’t
Surprise! During the NASA press update yesterday making official the new delays in its entire Artemis lunar program, a SpaceX official revealed that the company will be ready to launch the third orbital test flight of its Starship/Superheavy rocket by end of January, but it also does not expect to get a launch approval from the FAA for at least another month.
Speaking during the press conference, SpaceX Vice President of Customer Operations & Integration Jensen said Starship hopes to be ready to test Starship once more by the end of January and to receive the necessary license from federal authorities to do so by the end of February.
During the conference Jensen made it repeatedly clear that it will require numerous further launch tests to get ready ready for its lunar landing mission for NASA — about ten — and that the company hopes to have this task completed by 2025 so that the agency’s new delayed schedule can go forward as now planned.
Yet how will SpaceX do this if the FAA is going to delay each launch because of red-tape by at least one month? SpaceX might be confident the FAA will give the okay for a launch in late February, but no one should be sanguine about this belief. Bureaucrats when required to dot every “i” and cross every “t”, as it appears the Biden administration is demanding, can be infuriatingly slow in doing so, even if they wish to hurry.
This news confirms my prediction from November that the launch will happen in the February to April time frame. It also leaves me entirely confident that my refined December prediction of a launch no earlier than March will be right.
SpaceX wants to do about six test launches per year. I don’t know how it can do so with the FAA holding it back.
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In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
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Surprise! During the NASA press update yesterday making official the new delays in its entire Artemis lunar program, a SpaceX official revealed that the company will be ready to launch the third orbital test flight of its Starship/Superheavy rocket by end of January, but it also does not expect to get a launch approval from the FAA for at least another month.
Speaking during the press conference, SpaceX Vice President of Customer Operations & Integration Jensen said Starship hopes to be ready to test Starship once more by the end of January and to receive the necessary license from federal authorities to do so by the end of February.
During the conference Jensen made it repeatedly clear that it will require numerous further launch tests to get ready ready for its lunar landing mission for NASA — about ten — and that the company hopes to have this task completed by 2025 so that the agency’s new delayed schedule can go forward as now planned.
Yet how will SpaceX do this if the FAA is going to delay each launch because of red-tape by at least one month? SpaceX might be confident the FAA will give the okay for a launch in late February, but no one should be sanguine about this belief. Bureaucrats when required to dot every “i” and cross every “t”, as it appears the Biden administration is demanding, can be infuriatingly slow in doing so, even if they wish to hurry.
This news confirms my prediction from November that the launch will happen in the February to April time frame. It also leaves me entirely confident that my refined December prediction of a launch no earlier than March will be right.
SpaceX wants to do about six test launches per year. I don’t know how it can do so with the FAA holding it back.
Readers!
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your support allows me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
“One small step for man . . . One giant leap for bureaucracy and politically motivated attacks on free enterprise!”
One of the problems that I see is that the FAA is looking at the flight plan as the mission, whereas the actual mission is incremental testing of the whole system. The first launch was just to get off the pad far enough that an explosion would not damage the ground support equipment. That was successful, and SpaceX learned a lot from that test, making many changes and a few significant changes due to those lessons learned. However, the FAA determined that because the booster and Starship had to be terminated, the whole test was a failure and corrective actions had to be approved. The people at the FAA are not as smart as they think they are. They were much smarter when the Starship landing tests were taking place, but stupidity has crept into the agency, which would explain the alarming increase in significant airline safety incidents in the past three years.
The second test was to reach stage separation, however, SpaceX once again registered a complete flight plan, and once again the company learned more than it had intended. The FAA is again treating it as a failed commercial flight rather than a successful test.
I’m now thinking that the company should register flight plans that include flight termination after the major test goals are achieved. Then they would be successful flight tests in the eyes of the FAA. They would have to be. The problem, though, is that this method would create a slower learning curve, because bonus flight times would not be flown and the lessons being learned from them would be missed until later flights, thus still slowing development.
Thus, stupid governments result in slowed developments. It happens in Britain, too.
Edward: The worst approach here would be to bow in any way to the government. We have been doing it for too long, and that approach has gotten us to where we are today, no longer free to do anything without its permission (always given reluctantly and also requiring major payoffs, including bribery).
SpaceX has successfully proven you can push back and succeed, though this has gotten more difficult under Biden. So far it seems it is continuing to do so, as indicated by how that SpaceX official worded things at the conference: “We’ll be ready in January, but expect the FAA to delay us until February.”
She was throwing the ball into the media’s hands, but sadly so far it appears I am the only one willing to run with it. As far as I can tell, all other outlets treated that extra month delay as perfectly okay.
“The worst approach here would be to bow in any way to the government.”
Yes. As I noted, it would not help much, either. It isn’t just bowing to government, it is capitulating to stupid. We really, really don’t want stupid to be driving our innovations. That is what happened to Boeing when McDonnell Douglas, after being stupid with their own company, took over Boeing.