SpaceX has secured environmental approval from the FAA and relevant federal, state, and local stakeholders to conduct orbital Starship launches on the South Texas coast. After a relatively normal 12 months of work and half a dozen poorly communicated delays, the FAA has ultimately issued SpaceX an extremely favorable “Mitigated Finding of No Significant Impact”…
A SpaceX Starship prototype that could become the first to launch into space has returned to the company’s Starbase rocket factory after completing a series of thorough proof tests. Starship S24’s test campaign got off to a rough start when the roughly nine-meter (30 ft) wide, 50-meter (~165 ft) tall rocket blew a high-pressure pipe…
Several months after the first prototype was spotted floating around Starbase, SpaceX has finished assembling a tank designed to put upgraded Starship domes to the test. Known only as “EDOME” per a tracking label taped to its side, the prototype looks fairly ordinary from the outside and could easily be mistaken for just the latest…
SpaceX has begun staging and assembling parts of a giant crane it will soon need to stack Starship’s first East Coast launch tower and install other major launch pad components. The presence of the base of that crane at SpaceX’s NASA Kennedy Space Center (KSC) Launch Complex 39A was visually confirmed by NASASpaceflight.com photographers during…
Starlink may already be expanding its reach to several countries across the globe, but SpaceX CEO Elon Musk believes that it will still take some time before the satellite internet service is ready to go public. This was according to Musk during a recent all-hands meeting with SpaceX employees. During the meeting, Musk reportedly highlighted…
NASA says it will soon award SpaceX another five Crew Dragon astronaut transport contracts after purchasing three extra missions from the company on February 28th. That June 1st announcement means that NASA has more than doubled the number of operational Crew Dragon astronaut launches planned between 2020 to the end of 2030 in the last…
Last week, Arcep—France’s telecoms regulator—granted SpaceX’s Starlink Internet Services Limited authorization to use radio frequencies for a network open to the public so it can provide fixed internet access via satellite. Starlink also requested authorization to use frequencies linked to Gateway Earth Station (GES), which contributes to its network’s operations. The frequencies linked to GES…
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says an upgraded Starship prototype has passed its first cryogenic proof or ‘cryoproof’ test after undergoing a week of repairs. Around noon, local sheriffs closed the road to Starbase’s orbital launch site (OLS) and SpaceX cleared the pad of all personnel, freeing up Starship S24 for the next stage of testing.…
SpaceX appears to be making great progress towards the start of its first full Super Heavy static fire campaign, building upon extensive Starship testing and a single booster static fire completed in July 2021. On May 14th, upgraded Super Heavy booster B7 was moved back to SpaceX’s South Texas Starbase Starship factory after completing a…
SpaceX could begin launching the fourth of five orbital ‘shells’ of its first Starlink constellation as early as July, according to a report from a reliable source of SpaceX information. The initial report tweeted on May 20th by reporter Alejandro Alcantarilla claimed that SpaceX was preparing to start launching “Group 3” of its first 4408-satellite Starlink constellation…