SpaceX’s conflict with the Federal Aviation Administration intensified this week, with Elon Musk calling for the resignation of the federal regulator as head of the agency after defending FAA oversight and fines against commercial launch companies.
The FAA said it would not decide whether to approve a launch license for SpaceX’s upcoming Starship test flight until late November, two months later than the agency had previously told Musk’s launch company. . Federal regulators are considering changes to the rocket trajectory SpaceX needs to return Starship’s giant reusable Super Heavy booster to its launch pad in South Texas. This will be Starship’s fifth full-scale test flight, but the first time SpaceX has attempted such a maneuver in its program.
This week, SpaceX assembled a complete Starship rocket on the launch pad at its Starbase facility near Brownsville, Texas. “Starship is stacked for flight 5 and ready for launch pending regulatory approval,” SpaceX posted on X.
Separate from Starship’s regulatory review, the FAA last week proposed fines of more than $633,000 to SpaceX for alleged launch license violations related to two flights of the company’s Falcon 9 rocket from Florida. Then he announced. It is unusual for the FAA’s Commercial Spaceflight Division to fine a launch company.
FAA Administrator Michael Whitaker discussed the agency’s ongoing environmental safety review of SpaceX’s Starship rocket during a Congressional subcommittee hearing in Washington on Tuesday. The hearing focused primarily on the FAA’s opinion. Oversight of Boeing’s commercial aircraft businessa lawmaker asked Whitaker about the FAA’s relationship with SpaceX.
public interest
In response to a question from Rep. Kevin Kiley, R-Calif., FAA Administrator Michael Whitaker said, “Safety is a public interest, and I think that’s our main focus.” “This is the only tool we have to ensure safety compliance,” he said, referring to FAA fines.
The stainless steel super heavy booster is larger than a Boeing 747 jumbo jet. SpaceX said the flight path to land the rocket’s first stage means “sonic booms may occur over a slightly larger area” and will be jettisoned from the top of the booster, called the hot stage ring. Said means stainless steel ring. , falling in another location in the Gulf of Mexico just offshore from the rocket’s launch and landing site.
The FAA is primarily responsible for ensuring that rocket launches do not pose a risk to the public, and is working with other agencies on these issues, along with the issue regarding SpaceX’s release of water into the environment around the Starship launch pad in Texas. We are discussing. The pad uses water to cool the steel flame deflectors beneath the 33 main engines of Starship’s superheavy boosters.
SpaceX has said that the fines that the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) imposed on the company this year related to the launch pad’s water system were “entirely related to disagreements over paperwork.” It is not related to the dumping of environmental pollutants. The environment around the Starship launch site.
After the engine-exhaust rocket’s first test flight dug a large hole in the ground, SpaceX installed a water-cooled flame deflector beneath Starship’s launch pad. Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer, outlined his views on the issue during a hearing with Texas lawmakers in Austin on Tuesday.
“To prevent something like this from happening again, we built an upside-down showerhead like this to cool the flames as the rocket launches,” she said. “It was licensed and permitted by TCEQ. Then the EPA came along and didn’t like the licenses and permits we had for it and wanted to turn it into a federal permit. We is currently working on it.”
“We work very closely with organizations like TCEQ,” Shotwell said. “You may have read a bit of nonsense in the paper about this recently, but we are working very well with them.”
