The FAA has indicated that it will grant SpaceX permission have 25 Starship launches in South Texas in 2025 versus the current limit of five launches. SpaceX will be allowed to continue increasing the size and power of the Super Heavy booster stage and Starship upper stage.
The approvals for SpaceX and Tesla seem to be going much better now that there is a new president elect versus the Biden administration.
The Revised Draft EA analyzes:
Up to 25 annual Starship/Super Heavy orbital launches, including:
Up to 25 annual landings of Starship (Second stage)
Up to 25 annual landings of Super Heavy (First stage)
The public comment period for the Revised Draft EA will close on January 17, 2025.
FAA has concluded that the modification of SpaceX’s existing vehicle operator license for Starship/Super Heavy operations conforms to the prior environmental documentation, consistent with the data contained in the 2022 PEA, that there are no significant environmental changes, and all pertinent conditions and requirements of the prior approval have been met or will be met in the current action.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
Think how much money Musk saves by being able to launch rapidly. He has a huge army of engineers and other people working on this that have to be paid, launch or not.
A hundred years or so ago, you’d probably have said, “this publication has veered towards a Tesla fanboy”.
The simply fact is that Musk is doing big things that are right in the site’s focus, it’s basically unavoidable that he comes off as a fan. Is he supposed to be covering Bezos’ orbital launches? There aren’t any to cover!
25 launches a year means SpaceX is expecting to speed up the turnaround time to two weeks. I’m curious how are they planning to achieve that without a complete disregard for safety.
The chance of a catastrophic blast has just gone up dramatically.
Multiple Starships in 2025. Ball park estimate about five to ten. Each will fly two to six times. After mastering the catches of both booster and Starship, then turnaround and relaunch will shrink to weeks, days and then hours.
They are approved for a launches every two weeks, but doesn’t mean they will. I’m sure they expect, set backs at times. This is a step in approval for more testing fights, before flights to the Moon again and then eventually to Mars.
Unlike most on here, I agree with Brian.
SpaceX would NOT have gotten this without Trump winning.
It’s now basically the pencil pushers hoping to keep their jobs under the watchful eye of the DOGEmaster.
On the one hand the determination of SpaceX would be allowed to launch 25 times in 2015 was most certainly started before the election result was known. On the other hand, we see different political signals and policy proposals internationally as an adaptation to the incoming president. So both interpretations are plausible.
“The approvals for SpaceX and Tesla seem to be going much better now that there is a new president elect versus the Biden administration.”
Come on. The election was 2 weeks ago. This is a ridiculous statement to make. Less fanboy, more objectivity and thoughtful analysis please.
No need to post this Comment. This is feedback
I have noticed several things about this site in the last year
First, it has become less and less critical or words spoken and actions taken by Musk, and in fact seems to be the unofficial biography and fan boy site
Second, it has become distinctly biased politically. See above
Perhaps the above drives site traffic
Third, percentage-wise, there seems to be fewer stories in the list of ‘Categories’ than before. Example – select the category “Energy” and of the 11 hits of returned articles on the first page, 7 are related to Musk, SpaceX, Tesla, etc., and the rest are AI and Generation Ships. Nothing about “Energy” which I suppose means that little of note is happening in the realm of fission reactors of every type and size, same for fusion, or the costs and benefits of migration to renewable energy sources plus nuclear, etc. The first article returned that is clearly about energy generation is “China – 11 Nukes Per Year and Six in Some Locations, October 21, 2024 ” on the second page of hits. Good article
Sad
It IS NOT your imagination … I expressed my concerns about Elon Musk in another post and it was taken down. All I said was that I had great respect for him as a businessman, but that he was acting odd and that I no longer trusted him … my post disappeared …
Some time ago, the news had a lot of China related ones. People complained and Brian kind of stopped.
Now the articles have a lot from Elon Musk companies, and people like it less.
Conclusion: people can’t satisfied because they want news catering to their particular personal and particular tastes.
SpaceX, Tesla and Musk’s companies deeds have future impact, regardless.
I get the impression that most of the dislike for Musk related posts comes from people who don’t like his politics. He was popular enough on the left until he bought Twitter to free it from the partisan censorship.
The joke, of course, is that when he found out how much of their traffic was bots, he tried to back out, and was forced to go ahead with the purchase. I wonder how different things would look today if he’d been permitted to drop the purchase offer?
“The approvals for SpaceX and Tesla seem to be going much better now that there is a new president elect versus the Biden administration.”
Lets not give the new administration credit yet. This is the current administration making this call. My expectation of the future administration is to have little to none limitations on SpaceX.
“The approvals for SpaceX and Tesla seem to be going much better now that there is a new president elect versus the Biden administration.”
Well technically the approvals happened during the Biden administration, Trump cannot decide anything until 20th january.
They must change the wording to twinlaunches, because refueling is mandertory
I wonder why Musk has decided to refuel in space instead of just attaching more boosters to Starship’s tall but too skinny lower stage, which would be so much simpler and less dangerous. Either way, those boosters have to be jettisoned near Earth to return to Earth, while the main rocket continues onto Mars, or the Moon. Mars might be too far to reach on a single rocket, but pursuing and refueling Starship with refueling Starships halfway won’t work either since the refuelers would need boosters themselves, and so on and on and on…
Werner Von Bruen actually designed a Mars rocket: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mars_Project, but it was much fatter than Starship and would have been easier to land on its base, which Von Bruen planned too. But it was never built in Von Bruen’s lifetime, and rockets became smaller after Saturn V, until Starship, but Starship is not really large enough. Musk would have to retrofit the lanchpad and tower to accommodate a wider rocket, however, which he doesn’t have to do as much if it’s just taller. The fact is, he miscalculated and the multi-refueling needs of Starship are going to keep it from reaching Mars anytime this decade, if ever. Atomic rockets may be ready by then, which need less food and water because their travel time is so much faster.
I think you’re ignoring that SpaceX has a lot of really good engineers on staff, to do simple optimization problems.
The height of the rocket is capped by the weight of the fuel column vs the amount of thrust that can be fit under the rocket. Make it taller at a given thrust, and you lose acceleration, so less of the thrust contributes delta V.
They’re more likely to make the booster larger in diameter if they want more fuel capacity for a given engine thrust. But that would require beefing up the tower.
It’s much cheaper to just fly more flights for now. Which gives them more test data and more of a flight record to pursue man rating.
I don’t believe in orbit refueling will actually prove that hard. And lifting the fuel to a depot allows that aspect of any mission to just be a routine background activity. Which again generates flight record to fuel continuous improvement and justify man rating.
Despite the obvious ISP advantages of nuclear rockets, there’s simply no point in Musk doing more than paper studies until the NRC has been reformed.
Musk never mentioned nuclear propulsion in his plans. He’s all in on methane engines and that’s that. That’s his and SpaceX’s limit. Better call it grift, though, because this thing is never, under any circumstances, going to Mars. Even the Moon is questionable given how mindbogglingly stupid the flight architecture with 20+ orbital refuelings is. Margin of error will have to be practically nil, and that’s impossible, regardless of how good the engineers at SpaceX are.
You do know that the ’20+’ comes from people who want to dismiss the idea as infeasible, and the SpaceX isn’t expecting the real number to be remotely that high, right? They’re projecting 4-8, not 20+.
They’ll establish an orbital fuel depot, have routine flights going up to it to stock it, and then craft that need a full tank will stop there and refuel once, not 20 times. The fuel tenders will be specialized Starships with expanded fuel tanks and otherwise no payload capacity. Probably the depot will just be a collection of those, too, perhaps with added cryocoolers.
SpaceX follows a strategy of conservation of engineering resources, they’d rather use one craft that gets all the design work, and can be mass produced, instead of a bunch of bespoke craft that consume a lot of engineering time that’s not transferable to the next.
This is so wrong there sre limitations as how much fuel one rocket can take according to the lift power .
Make it bigger or taller would need to increase the power so it would be a brand new rocket
Why make a new rocket when this one works perfectly he just have to increase the number of flights as they are reusable .
“…I wonder why Musk has decided to refuel in space instead of just attaching more boosters to Starship…”
A wild guess. Musk did this with the Falcon heavy and he said it was WAY harder than they thought it would be. May be one of those things that seems easy, but is not.
On regulation. It seems obvious that the new administration coming in has influenced the regulators to ease up. Consider this, previously they banned launches until he did studies on a launch site that used to be a cattle ranch before he bought it. I think it was some sort of beetle they used as an excuse. This is obviously an attempt to coerce Musk for some goal or another.