SPACEX is openly criticising what it sees as unacceptable delays in the licensing process for the next launch of its Starship rocket, saying US government approval is going to take months longer than it originally expected.
In a lengthy update posted on its website on Tuesday (Sep 10), SpaceX said it expects to receive a license from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in late November to launch the fifth test flight of its Starship rocket. The FAA previously communicated a mid-September approval time frame, SpaceX said.
An FAA representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
SpaceX released its update as Kelvin Coleman, the head of the FAA’s Commercial Space Transportation office, testified at a House hearing on how to better streamline the rocket launch licensing process. In response to a question about the pace of approval, Coleman addressed Starship specifically.
“Missions change. Technologies on the vehicles change, which require a modification to the license,” Coleman said, later adding: “It is the company that is pushing mission-by-mission approvals. That’s what the pace is about.”
SpaceX has said that the vehicles it needs for its fifth Starship launch have been ready since August. The upcoming test launch will see Starship’s main booster attempt to come back to the launch site after taking off, where it will be caught by SpaceX’s launch tower.
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The Elon Musk-led company said the reason for the delay was not due to a new safety concern but is “driven by superfluous environmental analysis”.
“Unfortunately, instead of focusing resources on critical safety analysis and collaborating on rational safeguards to protect both the public and the environment, the licensing process has been repeatedly derailed by issues ranging from the frivolous to the patently absurd,” SpaceX said.
In August, CNBC reported that the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) had sent a notice of violation to SpaceX, warning that the company had violated environmental regulations by repeatedly releasing pollutants.
The warning was in regards to SpaceX’s water deluge system, a massive fountain underneath Starship’s launch mount that releases water to mitigate damage from the powerful blast during liftoff.
CNBC also reported that an investigation by TCEQ found that SpaceX had operated the water deluge system multiple times without permitting for wastewater discharge.
In its post, SpaceX criticised the CNBC story and pushed back on the notion that its water deluge system releases pollutants.
“It uses literal drinking water,” SpaceX wrote. “Outflow water has been sampled after every use of the system and consistently shows negligible traces of any contaminants, and specifically, that all levels have remained below standards for all state permits that would authorise discharge.”
SpaceX also argued that it always operated the water deluge system with a permit.
However, the company had been operating under a more general permit for much of the last year. The company applied for a more specific wastewater discharge permit in July, months after the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sent SpaceX a separate notice of violation, CNBC reported.
“When the EPA issued its Administrative Order in March 2024, it was done before seeking a basic understanding of the facts of the water-cooled steel flame deflector’s operation or acknowledgement that we were operating under the Texas Multi-Sector General Permit,” SpaceX wrote. BLOOMBERG
