| From the article: That makes Starship, which conducted a successful flight to the edge of space last year, especially threatening to the contractors and their allies in Congress. So far Starship has flown to 12.5 km [1], which seems to be a stretch to describe as "the edge of space" [2]. It seems like the FAA Environmental Assessment for the "SpacePort" at Boca Chica has been delayed again from Feb 28th, by a month to March 28th [3]. If they recommend a full Environmental review that will delay progress even further. I believe Elon mentioned in the recent Starship update that they will move Starship testing to Cape Canaveral which already has permissions to launch Starship there if this is required [4] [5], but that will require building out an orbital pad for Starship. It will certainly be interesting to see how long it takes Starship to get to orbit. I would guess that the raptor 2 performance/reliability and also the heatshield performance will be significant challenges to overcome. When/if SpaceX do overcome them, the incumbents will be justified in "shitting the bed", as per the article. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_SpaceX_Starship_flight... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n_line#Interpre... [3] https://www.faa.gov/space/stakeholder_engagement/spacex_star... [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3N7L8Xhkzqo (SpaceX Starship update) [5] https://futurism.com/the-byte/spacex-starship-orbital-cape-c... |