Musk spoke on Thursday night at the company’s Boca Chica, Texas, facility called Starbase to a crowd of hundreds with a fully stacked 394-foot-tall Starship and Heavy Booster in the background. He detailed the progress for SpaceX’s next-generation rocket that looks to make its first suborbital flight once it receives approval from the Federal Aviation Administration.
“We need to make it work, so it doesn’t work yet. It will work — might be a few bumps along the road but it will work,” Musk said. “At this point, I feel highly confident well get to orbit this year.”
To date, the company has flown prototype versions to about 6 miles, and attempted landings back in Texas, sometimes with fiery results. Those used only three or fewer of the new, powerful Raptor engines. The fully working orbital version will be coupled with a Super Heavy booster with 39 Raptor engines, 33 on the booster and six on Starship.
The next test flight seeks to launch the stacked version, have them separate, return the booster to land on a SpaceX ship 20 miles offshore in the Gulf of Mexico while Starship achieves orbit for least one trip around the Earth and then lands in the Pacific Ocean.
The FAA, though, is releasing the results of an environmental assessment on Feb. 28, and it could potentially require a much more in-depth environmental impact statement that would delay SpaceX’s plans for Texas launches, even though that launchpad is the company’s preference.
“Because we have a lot of launches going out of the Cape we didn’t want to disrupt the Cape activity — the operational launches — with the advance R&D of Starship,” Musk said. “So it was important to decouple the operational launches from the R&D launches. That’s why we’re at this location.”
Musk said he wasn’t sure how the FAA report would swing.
“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.”
That could lead to a launch attempt soon after, Musk said, adding he was optimistic that SpaceX will get approval.
“I think objectively this is not something that will be harmful to the environment. We’ve obviously flown the ship several times, and done multiple landings, takeoffs and landings, we fired the engines a lot,” Musk said. “I think the reality is it would not have a significant impact.”
When it does launch, the rocket would become the most powerful ever to lift off from Earth generating more than 16 million pounds of thrust. That nearly doubles the power of NASA’s planned Artemis flights and more than doubles those of the Apollo missions.
If the FAA opts for the EIS for Boca Chica, Musk said the company’s efforts would shift to Florida, referring to it often as “Cape Kennedy.”
“That doesn’t mean things don’t get delayed from a regulatory standpoint,” Musk said. “We do have the alternative of the Cape and we actually applied for environmental approval from launching from the Cape a few years ago and received it. So we actually are approved from an environmental standpoint to launch from 39-A. So I guess our worst-case scenario is that we would be delayed for six to eight months to build up the Cape launch tower and launch from there.”
SpaceX last year announced it was building out a second set of apparatus for the KSC launch complex it currently uses for Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy flights. Musk said he expects it to be ready by the year’s end, whether it becomes the primary Starship launch site or not.
“We are building a launch site and Starship launch tower at 39-A at Cape Kennedy. We’re also building a Starship production facility at the Cape,” Musk said. “So we’ll have a production facility and launch site here and production facility and launch site at the Cape as well. It’s important to have redundancy.”
Even if an EIS delayed Texas efforts, Musk said it remains a solid part of SpaceX’s future Starship plans.
“I think it’s well suited to be kind of our advanced R&D location, where we would try out new designs and new versions of the rocket and I think probably Cape Kennedy would sort of be our operational launch site,” he said.
Immediate plans for Starship are for Starlink satellite delivery to add to the company’s growing constellation of Internet satellites, as well as to develop a version to assist NASA in getting humans back on the moon by 2025. Also upcoming is a tourist flight to orbit the moon funded by a Japanese fashion tycoon who’s taking along several artists.
“There are a lot of additional customers that would use Starship. I don’t want to steal their thunder,” Musk said.
The main purpose for its development though is to help create a self-sustaining colony on Mars.
“There will probably be a few bumps in the road but we’ll want to iron those out with satellite missions and test missions, and get to a high flight rate and then have something that’s extremely reliable for human spaceflight,” Musk said.
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