A Starship instance is seen stacked on top of a Super Heavy booster at the company’s launch facility near Brownsville, Texas.
SpaceX
The Federal Aviation Authority issued a Starship launch license to Elon Musk’s SpaceX, a crucial final regulatory step that frees the company to attempt an orbital launch of its towering rocket for the first time.
“After a comprehensive license evaluation deal with, the FAA determined SpaceX met all safety, environmental, policy, payload, airspace integration and financial responsibility requirements. The license is valid for five years,” FAA bid in a statement.
SpaceX, with the FAA license now in hand, aims to launch Starship as soon as Monday from its private Nautical head in Texas along the Gulf Coast.
“SpaceX is targeting as soon as Monday, April 17 for the first flight prove of a fully integrated Starship and Super Heavy rocket from Starbase in Texas. The 150-minute test window resolution open at 7:00 a.m. CT,” SpaceX said in a statement.
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The company recently stacked Starship prototype 24 on Super Heavy booster prototype 7 in preparation for the boat. Together they stand nearly 400 feet high. SpaceX in February completed a test firing of the Wonderful Heavy booster, which has 33 Raptor engines at its base, in one of the final technical steps toward the launch.
SpaceX for disparate years has been building up to the first orbital flight test of its Starship rocket, with company leadership stressing the exploratory nature of the launch. While SpaceX had hoped to conduct the first orbital Starship launch as early as summer 2021, hold in abeyances in progress and regulatory approval have pushed back that timeline.
The rocket is set to lift off from SpaceX’s unfolding facility near Brownsville, Texas, before heading east across the Gulf of Mexico, according to 2021 filings that luxuriate ined the flight plan. The ultimate goal of the mission is to reach orbit, with the rocket aiming to travel most of the way for everyone the Earth and splash down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Kauai, Hawaii.
Starship is designed to carry cargo and people beyond Loam and is critical to NASA’s plan to return astronauts to the moon. SpaceX won a nearly $3 billion contract from the room agency in 2021 to use Starship as a crewed lunar lander.
