Twitter Explodes as SpaceX Doesn’t Get License to Launch Starship SN9
by Douglas Messier
Managing Editor
SpaceX was not able to conduct a planned flight test of its SN9 Starship vehicle at Boca Chica in Texas this week because it didn’t have a launch license from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
This time, instead of a rocket exploding, Twitter did.
Information about the cause of the delay was sparse, but that didn’t stop people from speculating and attacking the FAA for dragging its feet, even sabotaging the company’s efforts. Some darkly pointed the finger at the new Biden Administration without any actual evidence to back up their theory.
On Thursday, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk weighed in on Twitter to blame the agency’s bureaucracy.
Unlike its aircraft division, which is fine, the FAA space division has a fundamentally broken regulatory structure. Their rules are meant for a handful of expendable launches per year from a few government facilities. Under those rules, humanity will never get to Mars.
Oh, my. Humanity, doomed to remain a single-planet species until the inevitable apocalypse that Musk regularly mentions wipes out all life on Earth. Humanity extinguished, all due to the FAA. That’s a hell of a burden to carry. I don’t know how FAA employees can sleep at night knowing they’re dooming humanity with their paperwork.
It’s not entirely clear why Musk meant when he claimed the FAA’s aviation division is fine. If he’s talking about the same division that certified the 737 Max, he has a strange definition of fine. It’s hard to think about flying on an airplane without wondering about what else the FAA missed on other planes.
Musk is basically right about FAA’s regulations making multiple launches more difficult. New rules have been approved to streamline the licensing process, but they haven’t gone into effect yet.
For its part, the FAA issued the following statement.
The FAA will continue to work with SpaceX to evaluate additional information provided by the company as part of its application to modify its launch license. While we recognize the importance of moving quickly to foster growth and innovation in commercial space, the FAA will not compromise its responsibility to protect public safety. We will approve the modification only after we are satisfied that SpaceX has taken the necessary steps to comply with regulatory requirements.
It’s a sufficiently vague statement that raises more questions than it answers. What modification did SpaceX make in its application? What information does the FAA need? What safety and regulatory requirements does the agency have concerns about?
Citing unidentified sources, The Verge reports that the flight of the SN8 Starship vehicle in December violated the terms of the license the FAA issued for that test. The vehicle crashed and exploded into a fireball while attempting to land.
Both the landing explosion and license violation prompted a formal investigation by the FAA, driving regulators to put extra scrutiny on Elon Musk’s hasty Mars rocket test campaign….
The so-called mishap investigation was opened that week, focusing not only on the explosive landing but on SpaceX’s refusal to stick to the terms of what the FAA authorized, the two people said. It was unclear what part of the test flight violated the FAA license, and an FAA spokesman declined to specify in a statement to The Verge.
If the report is true, then there’s more here than just ponderous FAA bureaucracy. Perhaps in time we’ll learn more specifics about what is holding up the launch license.
SpaceX has rescheduled the flight test for Monday, Feb. 1, weather and license permitting.
42 responses to “Twitter Explodes as SpaceX Doesn’t Get License to Launch Starship SN9”
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The real question is whether the Regulator will end up forcing SpaceX to relocate their Starship operation elsewhere, say, even off-shore from a converted oil rig located in international waters? Time will tell. PS Ramp up those donations, because NASA Spaceflight/BC Girl are going to possibly need their own ship(s). 🙂
I can attest to the FAA being incredibly frustrating to deal with. They have their function of course, but they can be heavy handed where a light touch would be appropriate and then elsewhere basically rubber stamp stuff that they should be looking at very carefully.
Don’t get me wrong; the FAA isn’t all bad, not even close (aviation safety has greatly benefited from the FAA’s regulation while air commerce has simultaneously been able to expand and thrive). But, they can be incredibly frustrating to deal with.
About humanity will “never get to Mars this way”, the word “never” may perhaps be melodramatic, but let’s put it this way — I’ve been waiting about half a century so far, and I personally don’t have many half centuries left.
The other aspect of never is that this may indeed be a window where humanity is at a technological peak and has the urge to expand, explore and test boundaries but hasn’t yet destroyed itself through that same advancing technology or regressed into bloody chaos (Capitol riots, anyone), or, to avoid those kinds of outcomes, retreated and embraced stasis.
I also think that there is a real danger that we’ll bind ourselves with ropes of our own creation, for example, that’ll we’ll prohibit exploration and settlement of habitable worlds for fear of killing microbes that are doomed to at best a limited evolutionary path (if they even exist), or that, nation by nation, we’ll siphon off national energy and treasure into unproductive activities that enrich the few who are in a position to benefit themselves thereby (look how far Russia has gotten, for just one example without even looking in the mirror).
Nevertheless, this present issue will just be a matter of some days, weeks or months delay and a slowed down and perhaps more cautious testing program. Hopefully not to the extent that we slow things down until less innovative competitors catch up and/or establish themselves in a government funded gravy train. It’s probably just a minor bump in the road, soon to be forgotten. But I absolutely consider that this whole manned space flight endeavor could benefit from a more widespread sense of urgency to move technical capabilities forward and actively apply them to both literally and figuratively reaching for the stars
the FAA is not that difficult to deal with as long as you follow the rules and procedures. Musk did something wrong. when that happens the FAA slows down
Or someone who doesn’t like NewSpace wants one more bite at the apple before the FAA/AST rules liberalize in a few weeks. The revolving door awaits their retirement.
From NSF forum discussions. Apparently could be either the flight termination system wouldn’t work with intact header tanks on SN8 or FAA have issues with the 2 new Raptor engines that replaced the ones damaged in the triple static fire with SN9.
Of course the above 2 issues are educated guesses by NSF forum members.
one rumor was altitude limitation violation but its rumors
Another possible cause that’s been mentioned/rumored was that a truck with a kayak on top was found travelling up the road by the launch site during a recent ground test when the area had supposedly been evacuated.
Apparently he’d been parked in the sand over some dunes and decided to call it a day and drive home — going right by a fueled or fueling vehicle.
I’m not saying that’s official info, but I read a few people mentioning the incident on Thursday and Friday
That is, of course, your default story. Perish forbid that a government agency should ever act stupidly or maliciously.
They also seem to be inconsistent, allowing Spaceport Georgia to keep moving forward despite the clear safety issues, and of course their allowing SpaceshipTwo to be flight tested over a populated area. Neither makes sense with their responsibility to protect third parties from harm, but the FAA lawyers checked off the right boxes so they were allowed to move forward.
Lots of questions. No answers. The Verge’s article was pretty much an information-free zone. Loren Grush must be on vacation or otherwise unavailable and the fill-in person really isn’t up to doing the job. Matters were not helped by some clueless editor, or perhaps the writer him or herself picking a now-ancient photo of Starship Mk1 to illustrate the piece rather than an easily available photo of the actual Starships SN8 and/or SN9 which the article was ostensibly about. Amateur night at the Bijou from top to bottom.
Okay, so let’s list what we do know. SN9 suffered a incident inside the hanger. SN9 had a lot of static tests. They swapped the engines a few times. Musk blames the FAA for this newest delay. The FAA has officially invoked a design change as an issue. It looks as if SN9 is being swapped for SN10. Read into that what you want, the obvious is probably true or is a major issue.
Does FAA refund and airliners cert because of an engine swap or repair?
Starship is not certificated, nor is it airworthy that’s why each launch is permitted. Even certificated and airworthy aircraft are grounded if an engine fails in runup, and it takes a rated mechanic to make it airworthy again.
The FAA has no equivalent of airframe and powerplant certifications for the mechanics who work on rockets so that would be a problem. But I suppose it’s not entirely outside the bounds of possibility that the FAA has suddenly decided to treat endoatmospheric suborbital flights of rockets as aircraft operations. The whinging by NOAA over SpaceX not having secured licenses to photograph Earth from space for its Falcon Heavy test mission with Tesla Roadster, Starman and cameras aboard offers at least one comparably stupid example of impacted bureaucratic didacticism.
I was making the point that certified and airworthy are terms that imply an aircraft has completed it R&D cycle and is so well understood that known processes can executed to make a craft capable of safe flight again. Starship is nowhere near that level of completed development. Every flight is an experiment and will be for years to come.
Well, perhaps not years. The point is that the FAA has no authority except to control airspace and risk to uninvolved 3rd parties. As the only even approximately specific info about the FAA’s alleged beef with SpaceX implicates “far field blast overpressure,” any disagreement would seem to hinge on differing opinions as to how big a bang Starship prototypes are capable of making at various points in their flight profiles and how that would affect people at considerable distances. That sort of calculation is inherently fuzzy and certainly allows at least some latitude for unreasonableness on the part of a government agency that has, for whatever reason, decided to throw its weight around.
Except there have been a constant stream of design changes as testing shows how to improve it. Also where do you read it was a design change issue?
Neither you nor any of us has any idea what the FAA has “invoked.” Your galloping statism simply impels you to reflexively side with any government agency even if you have to invent grounds for doing so out of whole cloth.
It doesn’t look to me like SN10 is being “swapped” for SN9. It looks to me like SpaceX is trying to save time anent SN10’s own test flight campaign by trotting it out to the pad and getting its preliminaries out of the way as who knows how long the FAA is going to make SN9 sit there before letting it fly. If the FAA objection to SN9 flying has anything to do with alleged danger to surroundings, the SN10 move is also quite likely a demonstration that SpaceX doesn’t regard SN9 as particularly dangerous and is willing to bet an entire additional prototype to underscore that opinion.
I’m sorry those engine swaps can’t be ignored. I highly doubt the FAA told them to swap the engines. Note they were preceded by static fires. Multiple static fires. Do I believe the government before I’d believe Space X? Yes. Just as you would believe Space X before you’d believe the government. We’re biased. I think my bias wins more than your bias. Esp in issues of flight operations. On issues of systems architecture and program planning, I’ll give my bias to Space X.
And again, your fixation on property vs people shows itself. Because SpaceX will hold an expendable Starship prototype you have the emotional reaction that there’s no threat to 3rd parties in the area.
Of course you think your bias beats my bias. You’re a dyed-in-the-wool statist who would probably, to paraphrase the late Bob Heinlein, vote for your own hanging if it was on the party platform.
The FAA, like every other government agency, doesn’t like the public appearance of looking bad and will go to considerable lengths – including outright lying – in seeking to counter that. Consider the FBI’s initial claims about Ruby Ridge and Waco, for example. Or consider the USN’s initial claims about the etiology of the explosion in turret B of the Iowa. Hell, consider all the utter tripe that’s been peddled about the “insurrection” on Jan. 6.
Starship prototypes are not airliners. The FAA has no jurisdiction over how or whether SpaceX swaps engines on its test articles. These are not “flight operations” they are flight tests. As with, say, Edwards AFB, the FAA has control of airspace, but it has no basis for messing with ground activities related to test campaigns.
My “emotional reaction” pales in comparison to your irrational and completely unsupported insistence that there is some sort of significant threat to 3rd parties involved in SpaceX’s Boca Chica testing. There isn’t.
It’s really pretty simple. SpaceX was approved for F9 and FH launches. At that time the greatest inconvenience described in the Record of Decision was that Boca Chica residents would have to wear SpaceX-supplied hearing protection. Then, if they wouldn’t sell their homes to SpaceX, they were told SpaceX would use eminent domain to take their home. Next, residents were warned by the Sheriff to stand outside with your pets so broken glass wouldn’t harm you or them. Now, they have to evacuate. The specifics about the SpaceX violations are not as important as the fact that the FAA gave SpaceX an inch and they feel entitled to ‘whatever.’ It’s called mission creep. SpaceX now feels entitled to extend the hazard beyond the property they own at Boca Chica.
Does the FAA worry about industry and residential on South Padre Island? Or has the US Fish and Wildlife Service realized that SN8 debris landing on their sensitive tidal flats and Wildlife Management area was just a tiny fraction of the damage that could result from SN9-10-11? Or have the evacuations resulted in Constitutional violations?
Spaceport Camden is far riskier, yet the FAA has “played along” with the space industry and has accommodated loophole after loophole. When the industry flaunts public safety issues, then the FAA must stop them, or the FAA has learned nothing from their 737MAX failures. The FAA is learning to put on their “Big Boy” pants and the space industry will be better off for it. We hope that is where General Monteith is focused.
Like most libertarians Musk want’s the dictatorial government out of the way so he can be the dictator. It’s human nature, and this type of human just has to be dealt with knowing what he is. They do have some utility.
Yes, government regulation does have utility, but it also needs to be rational. Railroads were forced by government regulation to carry cabooses at the end of trains for decades after advances in technology made the caboose obsolete.
Time will tell when the details come out if the FAA is being rational in its application of regulations in this case or not.
I smell “letter of the law” pig-headedness of some kind here.
Which was exactly why the Federal government started limiting the power of the ICC in the seventies and abolished it in 1996. The railroad industry immediately started to recover financially as soon as the burden of over regulation was lifted from it, but sadly too late to save the passenger train service which the government is driving into the ground.
Wut? Where did you get this idea? We just want to him to do his thing which is getting humanity to Mars, how does this have anything whatsoever to do with being a dictator?
Hhahah, you probably would not last 4 days working for him. It’s a show to you. All one has to do is extrapolate his labor practices at Space X and Tesla to see what Space X ships will be like in cruise and what any colonial government they found will be.
For leftists who imagine everyone’s highest aspiration to be a labor-free government sinecure I suppose the long hours of Tesla’s and SpaceX’s engineering cadres must seem indistinguishable from the rowing benches in Ben Hur or the “dark satanic mills” of early Industrial Revolution England. And yet every job posted by either company is quickly filled. I suspect the stock vesting programs have more than a little to do with that. Not too much like being an antebellum Alabama field hand.
Ah!!!! Nice try. I work more hours than, and harder most people. It’s you who is lazy. In the time frame of a week, I’m mathematically modeling a current or upcoming project on pen and paper, the old fashioned way. I’ll spend hours in front of a lathe or a mill, I’ll write code to support any number of controls projects, observing scripting, or working on my orbital mechanics package project. And then end the week with multiple flights at El Tiro Gliderport where I manage flight operations. Don’t call me lazy, you could not keep up with me. However, that said, both sides have their failure modes fixed in the prospect of having others execute their political ideas for them. That’s a failure on either side. You don’t see either side say what they could be doing more themselves to improve things. You don’t see the left research, and experiment with business practices that demonstrate business practice as they’d like to see it and still have a enterprise that survives. You never see the right actively of their own effort reach out to poorer communities that lack the life skills needed to function in a more private libertarian economy. Neither side really want’s to do the dirty work of making their political ideas work.
I hope you work more hours a week than I do, though you seem to be working at least some of your recreational hours into the total. But you’re employed and I’m retired so there is a certain inherent lack of comparability in play here.
Some leftists actually do try starting businesses that embody leftist ideas. Then they abandon the leftist ideas because they don’t work.
Far more common, of course, are leftists starting businesses that never embody leftist ideas and working overtime to see that such notions stay outside their doors. Bezos’s union-busting at Amazon comes to mind. The efforts of some activist political action organizations to try paying their staffers less than the minimum wage also come to mind. Back when I was in school I recall the HQ of one of the then-big AFL-CIO unions – I think it was either the Teamsters or the UAW – trying to keep its own clerical employees from unionizing.
You would likely be surprised at just how many businesses run by conservatives, especially Christian conservatives, have active outreaches to the disadvantaged. Such people are also far more likely to contribute time and money to charities than are leftists – that is a matter than has been repeatedly demonstrated in surveys and analyses of tax data.
As for “dirty work,” that’s mainly required when one’s political ideas don’t work.
Musk is not now and never has been a libertarian. And he’s not trying to be a dictator either. That particular billionaire proclivity seems limited to left-progressives who live in CA and WA.
But one doesn’t have to be either a libertarian or a billionaire to chafe at opaque and arbitrary government regulation.
The Boca Chica Village, population: 2 permanent homes + a few winter snowbirds, evacuation plans were set by the Feds and local governments.
“It’s really pretty simple. SpaceX was approved for F9 and FH launches.”
No. SpaceX’s EA, updated in 2020, also includes experimental RLV tests
“Experimental Permit — “authorizes launch and reentry of a reusable suborbital rocket” (14 CFR §437.7). An experimental permit lasts for one year from the date it is issued.”
https://www.faa.gov/about/o…
The changes in the required MPL insurance for third-party losses caused by SpaceX launch activity from $3 million, to $100 million, to the current $198,000,000 says everything one needs to know about the problems with what SpaceX is doing. No other rocket from any other spaceport requires anything close to the insurance coverage for little old Boca Chica.
That’s nothing special, they needed $160M to $180M insurance for Falcon 9 RTLS mission from the Cape, plus $100M insurance for government property, see latest F9 license for Florida.
Yes, Boca Chica is not the best place for this type of work. The old airbase on Matagorda Island or Spaceport/America-WSMR would have been better suited to flight testing Starship, Super Heavy.
We’ve had this discussion before. Matagorda actually has more consequential habitation closer by than does Boca Chica.
You are confusing the town with the island. Matagorda Island is a state park with no inhabitants and visitors need to travel there by boat. The former Matagorda Island AFB is on the island, not by the town of Matagorda or on the Matagorda Pennisula, where the first commercial rocket launch took place in 1982. It is completely abandoned and was only attached to the state park because Texas didn’t know what else to do with it, the perfect place for a spaceport.
Matagorda is a long, skinny island. The island may no longer be inhabited, but there are mainland habitations a lot closer to Matagorda Island than Boca Chica is to, say, South Padre Island.
No, it’s called agile development, plans change, and government needs to keep up. The pandemic has shown the US government at all levels have serious problem with agility and urgency, it’s a problem goes way beyond FAA.
The whole complaint about residents have very little to do with FAA anyway, that’s the purview of the local government, who welcomed SpaceX with open arms, because they brought large amount of investment and job opportunity to the region. One of the government official said it plainly: “the need of the many outweigh the needs of the few”.
You’re kidding me right? The hazard area will ALWAYS go beyond their property, that’s the nature of space launch, you do know rocket doesn’t fly directly up right? It flew horizontally, and will eventually leave the launch area, so the hazard area MUST go beyond the launch pad, that’s like basic launch 101.
Yes, the FAA needs to learn how to work with reusable vehicle that has high flight rate and is being rapidly developed in an agile process, after all that’s one of FAA AST’s goals: “Encourage, facilitate, and promote commercial space launches and reentries by the private sector.”
And they are learning it, there is already a new streamlined launch regulation which will take effect in a few months: https://www.faa.gov/news/fa…
Actually, the latest FAA launch license issued November 20, 2020 shows F9 KSC launches to LEO require $86 million. And those include insurance for passage thru the Africa gate with far-downrange 2nd stage reentry. Only the SAOCOM-B mission requires $180 million which is less than the amount required for Starship Boca Chica. You have to ask yourself, “What could possibly be worth $198,000,000 off Boca Chica when the FAA only values a human life at $3,000,000, launch-related personnel are not ‘third-parties’, and the rocket max altitude is only 10 miles?” There’s only 1 producing gas well in Cameron County, but South Padre Island is just 5 miles north. Starship is very risky and in the wrong place. And we haven’t seen the booster tests yet.
Starship is not very risky. And if Boca Chica is the wrong place, where would you suggest the right place might be?
Elon Musk is hardly the first space executive who has problem with FAA, see the following complaint from David Masten of Masten Space Systems:
https://twitter.com/dmasten…