It's hard to say it's just a coincidence that the FAA has said no launch approval will be granted until the end of November. They didn't say, "we're going to allow the flight after you submit answers to our concerns, A-Z" (or our concerns, #1 to #400). They simply said, no launch approval until then. On top of that, it's not like they haven't messed with SpaceX and Elon Musk before (just one example).
Over the course of the last few weeks, I'd seen rumors of something like this many times. The problem was that it seemed that within the next few seconds, I'd see a reference to Integrated Flight Test 5 (IFT-5) launching before the end of the month. None of the news sources I regularly use had touched the story so I didn't know what to make of it. This afternoon, thanks to a tip from reader Chip, I went to ZeroHedge and found their coverage of it, referencing a post from SpaceX I hadn't seen:
According to a new SpaceX update:
We recently received a launch license date estimate of late November from the FAA, the government agency responsible for licensing Starship flight tests. This is a more than two-month delay to the previously communicated date of mid-September. This delay was not based on a new safety concern, but instead driven by superfluous environmental analysis. The four open environmental issues are illustrative of the difficulties launch companies face in the current regulatory environment for launch and reentry licensing.
That was time-tagged 2:20 PM and contained this tweet from Elon Musk time-tagged an hour earlier:
The document quoted by Peter Hague (white text on a black background) is the SpaceX Updates website.
My next stop was
Ars Technica and they had posted the story at 7:18PM. The Ars article is longer than Zero Hedge's post, but it's a well done
summary and very readable. Since everyone references it, that
SpaceX Updates
post is probably the best thing to read. ZeroHedge has a good collection of
response tweets that Ars doesn't. SpaceX addresses the environmentalist
attacks and dismantles each of them. Any one of them has more to say than I could quote here.
What a load of bullscattery that is being used against SpaceX.
ReplyDeleteAnd I wonder how much Blue Origin is behind this?
Seriously, fresh water is an issue amongst a brackish water swamp?
And if anything SpaceX did affected the wildlife, it would have been shown by now.
SpaceX is being punished because Musk supports Trump. That's it. And the bureaucracies that hate Trump are the very ones slowing SpaceX's roll.
Beans, your last paragraph nails it. A very successful ITF5 would bolster Musk and therefore Trump. If Elon would just fall in line with most of the rest of the richest people and support the tyranny of the far Left Democrats it would be clear sailing for him.
DeleteFAA is currently drafting rulemaking over space debris.
ReplyDeleteNo go to launch until FAA benediction of a debris remediation plan, per launch!, accepted by FAA.
This includes companies which leave no thing in space.
Already mentioned is the recent Chevron decision gumming up the works, uh, I mean, which presents a special consideration in the process of policymaking.
Not to be left behind, apparently the terrestrial agency also has authority into space. How high up is anyone's guess. No doubt the regulatory constraints of policy will be there waiting when the first space craft arrives. To boldly regulate where no regulation has gone before.
Last I read, they were working under an environmental assessment. Under law passed by Congress last year, EAs MUST be completed in less than a year; Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) MUST be completed in less than 2 years. These timelines are doable - I've personally seen it done and taken part in EA and EIS with way more issues than this has.
ReplyDeleteOf course, some agencies actually want to get projects through.. and most of them routinely do NEPA work, which the FAA doesn't.
Even if they wanted to delay Musk like this, they shouldn't put it like that, especially with no reason given. They're leaving themselves wide open to lawsuits - I'm surprised I haven't heard about them already.
Jonathan
Unless Trump wins, which I think is very unlikely, SpaceX will be shut down after the election, and Mr. Musk will be going to prison for Badthink. The Old Guard space companies hate his guts for actually doing things, rather than the Amtrak in Space boondoggle that has dominated our space program since the end of the space race.
ReplyDeleteI'm not even sure that a Trump win will keep SpaceX and Musk going.Trump is seen as a Luddite by a lot of people in the engineering community based on some of his actions.
why is the Biden regime (and the people behind it) trying so hard to move SpaceX to another country?
ReplyDeleteMusk himself was saying he needs to be more careful with traveling because of places like Brazil that would arrest him and throw away the keys. I don't know where he goes.
DeleteGee, the Europeans launch from French Guiana, maybe he could buy Suriname. Not some land for launch complexes, but the whole country.
SiG, reading some of the above comments, that is what leapt to my mind as well. If you launch from somewhere that the U.S. government has no authority, they have no say in these sorts of things.
DeleteSeems like a great door of opportunity for some country with land to accelerate their economy and technology base.
The gotcha is no national security launches, and probably no US launches whatsoever. Nothing else like Europa Clipper, the DART mission, the private lunar landers they've launched, and so on. There will be a backlog of US payloads, NASA will be tied to Vulcan, Blue, and SLS, so costs will skyrocket until the government collapses.
DeleteWhich is pretty much the case now with SLS/Artemis, it's just being held back a little by SpaceX.
Between ITAR and EAR, Musk probably cannot move Starship out of the U.S.
DeleteBillB
As bad as this country is and may be in less than 4 months, the US is still the safest place for Musk. He still has and will have some rights, unlike pretty much everywhere else.
DeleteAnd, yes, between ITAR and EAR, SpaceX cannot move Starship or Falcon/Dragon out of the US. At the most, the ability to land and launch specific missions to favored US allies like Australia, maybe. But that's it. No moving manufacturing, no moving support services out of US territorial lands and waters.
Musk would be an idiot if he were to move SpaceX to any Five Eyes/Nine Eyes/Fourteen Eyes country.
DeleteEvery one of them is every bit as foul as the US today.
And would actively sabotage anything he tried to do. Shame how they all hate on a TRUE African-American!
it is all scripted.
ReplyDeleteJerry Pournelle wrote a smashing story regarding how some sharp people worked around this problem. Using a large iceberg carved out internally for a manufacturing base, floated it in the south pacific, even had a full runway on it. They built 2 of these huge steel upside down frying pans, the flat section was extremely thick and water cooled, put cargo and people on top, built an injection system which used very clean small nukes as a rocket reaction mass, and launched to the moon, with enough supplies and materials to set up a self sustaining moon base, because they had quite enough of you know what, and understood that you know what, was never going to let any free humanity run free in outerspace, cause those you know whats understood as you know whats do, that once people got free of earth free to do whatever they whished, particularly with the means to remain free of the you know whats, the tou know whats would never be able to enslave people spread across space.
ReplyDeleteJerry's concept with the flying frying pans is physically possible, with the means at hand presently, that nukes as fuel is very predictable thru engineering and materials presently in common use, its just that like SpaceX's vision of large very large rockets/payloads is the only viable path if your gonna really reach the last frontier and live out there.
In that light it appears there are only a couple motives behind inhibiting super heavy and SpaceX itself too, from becoming a viable machine.
Give it a good think. Really. Be honest with yourself now. No BSing. How long has that which operates along the fringes of the shadows, from biblical times, inwards, controlled, ruled all of humanity.
Unfortunately He took Jerry from us way too soon.
DeleteNote the pattern: they target an individual, go after them personally from a myriad of angles. Eventually bringing them, or it if its an unapproved idea or product, down. The world is now controlled thusly. Remember, good folks do not do such things to other folks.
ReplyDelete