A Starship prototype is seen stacked on top of a Super Heavy rocket at the company’s launch facility near Brownsville, Texas.
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The Federal Aviation Administration has issued a license to launch Starship to by Elon Musk SpaceX’s final major regulatory step allows the company to attempt to launch a towering rocket into orbit for the first time.
“Following a comprehensive license review, the FAA has determined SpaceX meets all requirements for safety, environment, policy, payload, airspace integration, and financial responsibility. The license is effective. force for five years,” the FAA said in a statement.
SpaceX, with an existing FAA license in hand, aims to launch Starship as soon as Monday from its private facility in Texas along the Gulf Coast.
“SpaceX is targeting shortly after Monday, April 17 for the first test flight of a fully integrated Starship and Super Heavy rocket from Starbase in Texas. A 150-minute test window will open. at 7:00 a.m. CT,” SpaceX said in a statement. declare.
The company recently stacked the Starship 24 prototype onto the Super Heavy 7 enhanced prototype in preparation for launch. Together they stand nearly 400 feet tall. SpaceX in February completed a test shot of the Super Heavy booster, which has 33 Raptor engines at its base, is in one of the final technical steps before launch.
SpaceX has for years been preparing for the first test flight into orbit of a Starship rocket, with company management emphasizing the experimental nature of the launch. While SpaceX had hoped to conduct its first Starship orbital launch as early as the summer of 2021, delays in progress and regulatory approvals have pushed back that time.
The rocket is set to take off from SpaceX’s development facility near Brownsville, Texas, before heading east over the Gulf of Mexico, according to the 2021 filing. flight plan revealed. The mission’s ultimate goal is to achieve orbit, with the goal of the rocket traveling most of the way around Earth and crashing into the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Kauai, Hawaii.
Starship is designed to carry cargo and people beyond Earth and is crucial to NASA’s plan to return astronauts to the moon. SpaceX won a nearly $3 billion contract from the space agency in 2021 to use Starship as a manned lunar lander.
