It’s not a joke when I say that the new space race is between Elon Musk and the rest of the world. And it’s also not a joke when I say that the Biden-Harris FAA is his company’s biggest rival, not China or Russia.
SpaceX’s Starship is supposed to change the way people travel in space by lowering launch costs by two orders of magnitude, which is 99%. It will also make it possible to lift much bigger and heavier things into orbit and deep space.
This is IF SpaceX can get permission from the FAA to do the necessary flying tests, which is taking a long time.
The company told the Biden administration in a long statement released this week that “starships are meant to fly. The FAA, which is in charge of approving Starship flight tests, just told us that the launch license date is likely to be in late November. There has been a delay of more than two months since the original date of mid-September. We didn’t have to wait because of a new safety issue; we had to because of pointless environmental research.”
The next Starship test is meant to show important tasks like landing both stages so they can be used again, as well as the huge “chopsticks” on the launch tower that will guide the first stage right back to the launch pad instead of a barge out at sea. For weeks, the Starship has been ready. The White House is always coming up with new reasons to stall.
“Each flight of Starship has made a lot of progress and met test goals that got harder, which has made the whole system more powerful and reliable. Putting flight gear into the flight world as often as possible speeds up the rate at which we can learn by doing and get the system up and running. This is the same method that let us reuse our Falcon rocket fleet and made SpaceX the world’s top launch company today.”
“Starships need to be able to fly in order to do this quickly enough to meet plans for national goals like NASA’s Artemis program. The more safely we fly, the faster we learn, and the faster we learn, the sooner we can use the rocket again and again. Unfortunately, we are still living in a world where getting a rocket launch license from the government takes longer than designing and building the rocket itself. This should never happen, and it immediately risks the United States’ role as the world’s space leader.”
“We depend on SpaceX, but what good is our huge military-industrial-intelligence complex if they cannot even tell the Fisheries Service to shut up?” Robert Shibley asked the question directly at Instapundit today.
Author: Blake Ambrose
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