Musk says Starship will be ready for first orbital launch in May
Capitalism in space: In a tweet yesterday Elon Musk said that Starship will be ready for first orbital launch in May, a delay of two months from his previous announcements.
“We’ll have 39 flightworthy engines built by next month, then another month to integrate, so hopefully May for orbital flight test,” Musk tweeted in response to CNBC.
While the delay could certainly be because the company needed to prepare enough Superheavy engines, I also suspect it is also because Musk now expects the FAA to not approve the environmental reassessment of Starship’s Boca Chica launch site by the end of March, as has been promised. I predict that sometime in the next few days the FAA will announce another one-month delay in that process, the fourth such delay by that federal agency.
In late-December, when the FAA announced the first delay, I predicted that the first orbital launch of Starship would not happen until the latter half of ’22. I now think that prediction was optimistic. I firmly believe the federal government, controlled by Democrats, will delay that launch until after the mid-term elections in November. It appears to me that the Biden administration wants to reject the environmental reassessment, which would block Starship flights from Boca Chica for years. It just doesn’t want to do it before November, because of the negative election consequences.
I truly hope my cynical and pessimistic analysis is utterly wrong. So far, however, my prediction has proven to be more right than wrong.
Capitalism in space: In a tweet yesterday Elon Musk said that Starship will be ready for first orbital launch in May, a delay of two months from his previous announcements.
“We’ll have 39 flightworthy engines built by next month, then another month to integrate, so hopefully May for orbital flight test,” Musk tweeted in response to CNBC.
While the delay could certainly be because the company needed to prepare enough Superheavy engines, I also suspect it is also because Musk now expects the FAA to not approve the environmental reassessment of Starship’s Boca Chica launch site by the end of March, as has been promised. I predict that sometime in the next few days the FAA will announce another one-month delay in that process, the fourth such delay by that federal agency.
In late-December, when the FAA announced the first delay, I predicted that the first orbital launch of Starship would not happen until the latter half of ’22. I now think that prediction was optimistic. I firmly believe the federal government, controlled by Democrats, will delay that launch until after the mid-term elections in November. It appears to me that the Biden administration wants to reject the environmental reassessment, which would block Starship flights from Boca Chica for years. It just doesn’t want to do it before November, because of the negative election consequences.
I truly hope my cynical and pessimistic analysis is utterly wrong. So far, however, my prediction has proven to be more right than wrong.