A week after rolling a different ‘test tank’ from its South Texas Starship factory to nearby launch and test facilities, SpaceX has moved a second test tank to the pad. Hearkening back to a period in 2020 where SpaceX built and tested six different Starship test tanks in a period of six months, the company…
Reuters reports that SpaceX has proposed modifying a second Florida launch pad to support Crew Dragon missions after NASA raised concerns about the threat posed by plans to launch Starship out of the only pad currently certified for Dragon. After more than a year of downtime, SpaceX restarted the construction of an orbital Starship launch site at NASA’s…
CEO Elon Musk claims that SpaceX could be ready to attempt Starship’s first orbital launch as early as July. While SpaceX has been making slow and steady progress preparing the Starship upper stage and Super Heavy booster nominally assigned to that launch debut, the odds that even just one of those two stages will be…
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…
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.…
CNBC reports that SpaceX is seeking to raise at least $1.725 billion in its first funding round of 2022, potentially boosting the private company’s valuation as high as $127 billion. The report signals just the latest in a long line of high-profile rounds of funding SpaceX has secured over the last seven years, gradually boosting…
SpaceX’s upgraded Starship booster has completed a second and third cryogenic proof test in rapid succession after undergoing repairs to fix damage suffered during the first round of testing. Testing began almost immediately after SpaceX rolled the repaired Super Heavy booster back to the orbital launch site (OLS) on May 6th. After a quick installation on the…