SpaceX says regulators will keep Starship grounded until at least November

The Federal Aviation Administration has signaled to SpaceX that it won't approve a launch license for the next test flight of the Starship rocket until at least late November, the company said in a statement on Tuesday.

This is more than two months later than the mid-September timeframe the FAA previously targeted for determining whether to approve a launch license for the next Starship flight. SpaceX says the Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage for the next launch—the fifth full-scale test flight of the Starship program—have been ready to launch since the first week of August.

"The flight test will include our most ambitious objective yet: attempt to return the Super Heavy booster to the launch site and catch it in mid-air," SpaceX said in a statement.

"Environmental regulations and mitigations serve a noble purpose, stemming from common-sense safeguards to enable progress while preventing undue impact to the environment," SpaceX said. "However, with the licensing process being drawn out for Flight 5, we find ourselves delayed for unreasonable and exasperating reasons."

Hurry up and wait

In the last few weeks, technicians at the Starship launch site in South Texas have continued upgrading the structure of the launch pad to enable the catch. The Super Heavy booster, as long as and wider than a Boeing 747 jumbo jet, will descend vertically on the power of its Raptor engines and slow to a near-hover, allowing two mechanical catch arms to close and capture the stainless steel booster over the launch mount.

This will be the first time SpaceX has tried a mid-air catch of a rocket. Like the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket, the Super Heavy booster is designed for reusability. But SpaceX aims to recover the booster directly back at the launch pad, rather than on an offshore landing platform hundreds of miles away.

"It's understandable that such a unique operation would require additional time to analyze from a licensing perspective," SpaceX said. "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 the delays in regulatory approvals for the next Starship test flight have been driven by "false and misleading reporting, built on bad-faith hysterics from online detractors or special interest groups who have presented poorly constructed science as fact."

SpaceX has decried regulatory hurdles before. Last year, company officials called for the FAA to double its licensing staff for reviewing applications for commercial launch and reentry applications. Congress approved an increase in funding for the FAA's Office of Commercial Space Transportation to $42 million for fiscal year 2024. In the last year, the FAA's space office has added approximately 35 workers, bringing the total staffing level to 158 employees, said Kelvin Coleman, the FAA's associate administrator for space transportation, in a hearing Tuesday before the House Space and Aeronautics subcommittee.

"In the president's budget request for '25, we are looking for additional staffing that we will need to continue to keep pace with the demand for our products and services that we're seeing," Coleman said.

Tuesday's update from SpaceX was the most aggressive statement the company has released about the FAA's slow processing of launch license applications, and it touched on a deeper complaint than the FAA's lack of resources for oversight of commercial space activities. The company suggested the hold-up for launching Starship's next test flight isn't SpaceX's technical readiness or even that an understaffed FAA is overwhelmed with regulating a fast-growing commercial launch industry.

Instead, SpaceX wrote in a statement to the House subcommittee on space and aeronautics that licensing delays are caused by bureaucratic sluggishness, a lack of transparency, poor methodologies, and regulatory inefficiency and duplication. As an example, SpaceX cited roadblocks with its ongoing application for a launch license for the fifth Starship test flight.

"This delay was not based on a new safety concern, but instead driven by superfluous environmental analysis," SpaceX said. "The four open environmental issues are illustrative of the difficulties launch companies face in the current regulatory environment for launch and reentry licensing."

One of the environmental issues involves SpaceX's discharge of water into the environment around the Starship launch pad in Texas. The pad uses water to cool a steel flame deflector that sits under the 33 main engines of Starship's Super Heavy booster. SpaceX says fines levied against it this year by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and the Environmental Protection Agency were "entirely tied to disagreements over paperwork" and not any dumping of pollutants in water from the launch pad into the environment around the Starship launch site.

On the next flight, the Super Heavy booster will follow a different trajectory than it flew on the previous Starship mission in June. This means a stainless steel ring that jettisons from the top of the booster, called the hot-staging ring, will fall in a different location in the Gulf of Mexico just offshore from the rocket's launch and landing site. This change, which SpaceX calls "marginal," prompted the FAA to approve a 60-day consultation with the National Marine Fisheries Service to reassess the impact of the hot-staging ring on marine wildlife.

"This single issue, which was already exhaustively analyzed, could indefinitely delay launch without addressing any plausible impact to the environment," SpaceX said.

The trajectory of the Super Heavy booster returning to land back onshore in Texas, rather than off the coast in the Gulf of Mexico as it did in June, will expose a larger area to a sonic boom. This prompted the FAA to approve another 60-day consultation with the US Fish and Wildlife Service to look at the sonic boom's effect on animals.

"This will be a singularly novel operation in the history of rocketry," SpaceX wrote of the upcoming recovery attempt for the Super Heavy booster. "SpaceX engineers have spent years preparing and months testing for the booster catch attempt, with technicians pouring tens of thousands of hours into building the infrastructure to maximize our chances for success."

The role of the FAA in regulating commercial space launches and reentry operations is to ensure an errant rocket or spacecraft doesn't threaten public safety. The agency also requires launch companies to maintain insurance to protect against third-party claims for damages. SpaceX said it "accepts no compromises when it comes to ensuring public safety."

The FAA is also charged with ensuring commercial launch and reentry operations adhere with the US government's national security and foreign policy interests. SpaceX officials have raised concerns that delays in Starship test flights caused by regulatory reviews are detrimental to national goals, like returning astronauts to the Moon for NASA's Artemis program. NASA has selected SpaceX's Starship vehicle as the human-rated lander to ferry astronauts between lunar orbit and the Moon's south pole for the first two Artemis crew landings, expected some time later this decade.

The early-stage test flights of Starship are important for proving the rocket's reliability and testing more complex technologies, such as in-space refueling, required to make the Artemis lunar landings possible. China aims to land its astronauts on the Moon by 2030, and NASA Administrator Bill Nelson wants US astronauts to return to the lunar surface first.

"We certainly understand and appreciate the importance of beating China to the Moon," Coleman told lawmakers Tuesday. "We just had a conversation recently with NASA leadership where that was reemphasized. Our commitment, certainly, is to support this industry and our nation in getting to the Moon before China."

The FAA's workload for reviewing launch license applications has grown significantly in the past several years, primarily due to the increasing launch rate of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket. Since last October, the FAA has overseen 130 commercial launch and reentry operations, more than triple the number of licensed operations in 2020, Coleman said in his testimony to the House subcommittee Tuesday.

This has led some analysts to suggest the FAA prioritize license applications for nationally important programs like Artemis.

"Prioritization has only come into play as the amount of work that we are faced with is being challenged by the availability of resources that we have to do that work," Coleman said. "We certainly take a look at national security concerns. We take a look at our civil space exploration concerns."