JAKARTA - NASA wants Elon Musk's SpaceX to confirm its plans to safely launch its next-generation Starship rocket from Florida. A senior space agency official told Reuters, they wanted to ensure the program would not jeopardize the nearby critical launch infrastructure for the International Space Station.
The new hurdle further complicates and potentially delays the planned launch of the rocket, which is facing a protracted regulatory review from its main launch site in Texas.
Meanwhile Musk wants to show customers that the Starship, which he sees as humanity's path to Mars, has made it into orbit. This became a long overdue milestone in rocket development.
SpaceX's proposal to address NASA's concerns, which includes plans to be able to launch US astronauts from a different launch pad in Florida, could take months to gain agency approval.
SpaceX last year accelerated construction of the Starship orbital launch pad at its facility in Cape Canaveral, Florida, as an alternative to the main test launch and development site in Boca Chica, Texas, which is already subject to a lengthy regulatory review to be completed next.
But one of SpaceX's existing Florida facilities, called Launch Complex 39A, at NASA's Kennedy Space Center on the Cape Canaveral coast, is the only approved runway to launch their Crew Dragon capsule. Meanwhile, NASA now relies on the spacecraft to transport its astronauts to the International Space Station.
NASA officials in recent months have told SpaceX that a Starship explosion at Launch Complex 39A could effectively bypass the space agency's only means of launching US astronauts to the International Space Station.
"We all recognize that if you had an early failure like we did on one of SpaceX's early flights, it would seriously destroy 39A," Kathy Lueders, NASA's head of space operations, said in an agency discussion interview with SpaceX.
SpaceX has invested heavily in building the Starship runway a few hundred feet from the launch tower of pad 39A. They have responded by submitting to NASA plans to equip another Florida pad - Launch Complex 40, five miles away on Space Force property - with the means to launch US astronauts.
The company is also studying ways to "strengthen" the 39A, or make the launch pad more resistant to the Starship's explosive crash and the massive force emitted from a successful Starship launch, Lueders said.
While reinforcing pad 39A and launching humans from pad 40 will require agency approval.
"SpaceX is working with us on that," Lueders said, citing Reuters. "It's therefore also in their best interest not to have a stable enough source of income for them to be distracted."
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Part of SpaceX's challenge is demonstrating that 39A will not be damaged by Starship's new liquid oxygen and methane fuel, a propellant combination unknown to NASA and US regulators.
"The problem is the explosive potential for that combination is not well known," said Randy Repcheck, deputy manager at the Federal Aviation Administration's Office of Commercial Space Transport (FAA), which oversees launch pad safety.
Starship is a reusable two-stage rocket system designed to launch commercial satellites into Earth and human orbits to the moon and Mars. NASA last year selected SpaceX to use Starship for the first launch of US astronauts to the lunar surface since the days of the Apollo program.
The rocket's next major test, the complex task of launching into orbit for the first time, has been delayed in part by a review of the Texas compound environmental impact regulations, which have prevented the FAA from granting SpaceX its orbital launch license.
Set to conclude Monday, the review is expected to put conditions at SpaceX that could add delays to its Starship program. That prospect saw Musk double down on construction of the Starship launch pad at 39A in Florida at Cape Canaveral, last year.
“We did have a Cape alternative, and we actually applied for environmental approval for a launch from the Cape a few years ago and accepted it,” Musk said at the “Starship Update” event in February. He estimates it will take "six to eight months to build the Cape launch tower and launch it from there."
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