Update on SpaceX’s plans for Starship
According to FAA regulatory documents, SpaceX has updated its development plan for Starship, including changes in its overall plans for its Boca Chica facility.
The document also lays out a three-phase test program, which it says “would last around 2 to 3 years”:
Phase 1: Tests of ground systems and fueling, a handful of rocket engine test-firings, and several “small hops” of a few centimeters off the ground. The document also includes graphic layouts, like the one above, showing the placement of water tanks, liquid methane and oxygen storage tanks (Starship’s fuels), and other launch pad infrastructure.
Phase 2: Several more “small hops” of Starship, though up to 492 feet (150 meters) in altitude, and later “medium hops” to about 1.9 miles (3 kilometers). Construction of a “Phase 2 Pad” for Starship, shown below, is also described.
Phase 3: A few “large hops” that take Starship up to 62 miles (100 kilometers) above Earth — the unofficial edge of space — with high-altitude “flips,” reentries, and landings.
The first phase is now complete, with the company shifting into Phase 2.
Boca Chica meanwhile is no longer being considered a spaceport facility. Instead, its focus will now be a development site for building Starship and Super Heavy.
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According to FAA regulatory documents, SpaceX has updated its development plan for Starship, including changes in its overall plans for its Boca Chica facility.
The document also lays out a three-phase test program, which it says “would last around 2 to 3 years”:
Phase 1: Tests of ground systems and fueling, a handful of rocket engine test-firings, and several “small hops” of a few centimeters off the ground. The document also includes graphic layouts, like the one above, showing the placement of water tanks, liquid methane and oxygen storage tanks (Starship’s fuels), and other launch pad infrastructure.
Phase 2: Several more “small hops” of Starship, though up to 492 feet (150 meters) in altitude, and later “medium hops” to about 1.9 miles (3 kilometers). Construction of a “Phase 2 Pad” for Starship, shown below, is also described.
Phase 3: A few “large hops” that take Starship up to 62 miles (100 kilometers) above Earth — the unofficial edge of space — with high-altitude “flips,” reentries, and landings.
The first phase is now complete, with the company shifting into Phase 2.
Boca Chica meanwhile is no longer being considered a spaceport facility. Instead, its focus will now be a development site for building Starship and Super Heavy.
The support of my readers through the years has given 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. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in the past two weeks has the mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.
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. Even today NASA and Congress refuses to 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.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are five 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:
5. 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. And if you buy the books through the ebookit links, I get a larger cut and I get it sooner.
From the article: “‘Aiming for 20km flight in Oct & orbit attempt shortly thereafter,’ Musk tweeted on August 28.”
You may be expecting me to comment on rapid development being important, but I have surprised myself, too, because I am very excited that SpaceX is moving so fast on this rocket’s development. There appears to be no Super Heavy ready to take Starship Mk1 to orbit. With no payload to speak of (just a whole bunch of engineering instrumentation), perhaps it is not so difficult for Mk1 to be a single stage to orbit machine.
“Boca Chica meanwhile is no longer being consider a spaceport facility. Instead, its focus will now be a development site for building Starship and Super Heavy.”
After I retired from the Army, I worked for about a decade in the Corporate Treasurer’s office of a major tech company. Here are my thoughts as a finance professional.
1) I think SpaceX blew it and if I were an investor, I’d want to know why and how much has been sunk into Boca Chica. Shoot, tell me why SpaceX even needs Boca Chica (the work couldn’t be done at HQ and at a leased NASA facility?) If yiu tell me SpaceX just found out how unsuitable Boca Chica is, why wasn’t that discovered in the preliminary studies before the property was purchased? You have to question the quality of management.
2) Notice how nobody is commenting on this, the Musk fanboys in the media just want to shove it under the rug. If GM bought property for a factory and stated they were moving a significant portion of their manufacturing there and then came back and said, “We’ve changed our mind, we’re just gonna put up an office building and a test track”, it would be front page news in the financial sections and management would be excoriated.
3) Is Musk is going the way of Branson in terms of hype? I look at all the business of Boca Chica being the future heart of SpaceX and a major space port, the hoopla about starting to pick Mars landing sites when it is years away from even having a testable vehicle, etc and I am not happy.
Col Beausabre,
I disagree with much of what you wrote.
1) The quality of management may be questionable, but they do seem to get results at reasonable costs. Not everyone is perfect, and business conditions are always fluid. What they thought five years ago clearly changed by the end of last year, when it became clear that Boca Chica was going to be used for a time as a test facility. They certainly could not do this kind of testing at their HQ in Hawthorn, and why lease another facility when they already have their own facility now available?
2) The Musk fanboys in the media may not know what to make of it all yet. Your GM analogy may not work well. Since business conditions always change, it is conceivable that even GM might have already had to change plans for a property that they purchased. I’ve seen worse business disasters, and I even worked at a brand new “factory of the future” only to see the company declare, two decades later, that another facility that they were building in another state would be their “factory of the future,” because the first one did not work out (I blame ITAR for that).
3) Is Musk is going the way of Branson in terms of hype? Maybe, but eight months after their Starhopper was first noticed at Boca Chica it had finished its test series, and it is only three years since Musk first announced the Big Falcon Rocket (BFR) concept. Falcon Heavy may have taken twice as long to launch as first expected, but it performed fairly well on its maiden voyage. In fact, not only did Falcon Heavy become operational in less time than Branson’s StarShipTwo, so did Falcon 9 and Dragon.
I’m not quite sure why you are unhappy, because it is not your money being spent. The taxpayer is not footing this bill.
Not all of SpaceX’s ideas come to be, but then again, business conditions keep changing, sometimes making an idea too impractical. SpaceX may have some incredible hype, as going to Mars had seemed impractical to governments with much, much greater resources than little SpaceX, but the BFR proposal has not been criticized as being physically impossible. It turned out that Branson’s engine was not suitable to perform the job originally intended, and rather than start from scratch and find a suitable engine, Virgin Galactic is trying to kluge together a different mission using an older — yet still current — definition of “space.”
We can only wait to see whether SpaceX can make and operate BFR as it is intended and can actually get it to Mars and back, and if so, how long it takes to achieve. However that idea turns out, I suspect that BFR will greatly reduce the cost of getting into low Earth orbit.