SpaceX given big boost for Starship launches from Cape Canaveral
The spaceflight company wants to expand its Starship launches beyond Texas.
SpaceX
SpaceX has been given a major boost for its Starship operations at Cape Canaveral in Florida after the Department of the Air Force (DAF) gave the green light for the company to develop the Space Launch Complex-37 (SLC-37) launch facility.
Preparatory construction work at the site began earlier this year, but the nod from DAF means SpaceX can now move onto the serious work of building a launchpad for its mighty Starship rocket.
The green light comes after a thorough environmental review focusing on the impact of Starship launches on nearby wildlife that also included a safety analysis.
SpaceX is developing multiple Starship launch facilities on Florida’s Space Coast, including a pad at Launch Complex-39A (LC-39A), where building work has also started. The goal is to conduct as many as 76 Starship launches per year from SLC-37, and up to 44 launches annually from LC-39A, with the first full roster of launches starting next year or 2027, depending on regulatory approvals and infrastructure readiness.
SpaceX also wants to repurpose Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) for Starship flights. The site is currently used mainly for launches of the Falcon 9, SpaceX’s workhorse rocket.
“With three launch pads in Florida, Starship will be ready to support America’s national security and Artemis goals as the world’s premiere spaceport continues to evolve to enable airport-like operations,” SpaceX said in a post on X, referring to its ambition to have fast turnaround times for the reflight of its reusable rockets.
Up to now, SpaceX has conducted all 11 of its Starship launches from its Starbase facility in southern Texas. It’s currently building a new launchpad for its next-gen Starship rocket and will also rebuild the original pad, giving it five Starship launchpads across two states.
When fully operational, the Starship, which is the most powerful rocket ever to fly, will be used for crew and cargo missions to the moon, and possibly to Mars, too, though there’s still much work to be done to get the rocket ready.
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
SpaceX setback for Starship lunar landing mission, report claims
Internal documents suggest a new timeline for the much-anticipated mission.
NASA is aiming to launch its highly anticipated Artemis III mission in mid-2027 at the earliest, landing humans on the moon for the first time since the final Apollo mission in 1972.
But SpaceX, the company tasked with providing the mission’s lunar lander, estimates that the earliest it’ll be ready will be September 2028, according to information in internal SpaceX documents seen by Politico.
Four volunteers are a month into their ‘life on Mars’
Only 344 days left!
NASA’s Johnson Space Center reminded everyone on Monday that its four volunteers have been inside its Mars simulation habitat for a whole month now, though they still have 344 days to go before they emerge.
Johnson released a short video (below) showing the four-person CHAPEA (Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog) crew entering the Mars Dune Alpha habitat on October 19, where they’re now living “like Martian explorers” to assist NASA as it gets ready to send humans back to the moon, and later to Mars in the first-ever crewed mission to the distant planet.
SpaceX tears down Starship’s Pad 1 in prep for next-gen missions, video shows
Soon after SpaceX launched the 11th Starship test flight from Pad 1 at its Starbase site in southern Texas just over a month ago, engineers set to work dismantling the launchpad so that it can upgrade it with a more advanced design.
This week, news site NASASpaceflight shared footage of a SpaceX excavator getting on with the job, knocking down the first of four massive legs that were part of the pad’s Orbital Launch Mount (OLM), a heavy steel platform that supports and fuels the Starship at the launchpad. Look at the bottom center of the video and you’ll spot someone standing in the frame — a detail that adds striking scale to the scene.
