WASHINGTON — As SpaceX prepares for its next Starship test flight, the company is also working to expand facilities in Texas to build and launch these vehicles.
SpaceX completed a wet dress rehearsal on May 20 for the vehicle, which will conduct its fourth integrated test flight. The vehicle is filled with fuel and a practice countdown is run. This rehearsal was one of the final milestones before SpaceX’s launch attempt.
“Starship Flight 4 in about 2 weeks,” said SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. stated on social media after the test. “The main goal is to survive maximum reentry heating.” The spacecraft’s upper stage, or vessel, broke apart during reentry on the previous test flight on March 14.
SpaceX will also need an updated launch license from the Federal Aviation Administration.Th At the space symposium in April, Kelvin Coleman, the FAA’s deputy administrator for commercial space transportation, said it was possible to complete a license change in May, but could not confirm it would be ready by the end of the month.
Another SpaceX official recently said they expect Starship to be ready to launch once the FAA issues the updated license. “We’re still working through licensing with the FAA,” Kathy Lueders, Starbase general manager and a former NASA deputy administrator in charge of human spaceflight programs, said at a May 14 event in Harlingen, Texas, saying they’re “going through a few T’s and crossing I’s at the last minute.”
“We hope to get the license by the end of May, beginning of June,” she said. “The first day we get the license we will fly.”
Much of her presentation to a local business group focused on the company’s development of the Starbase itself, where SpaceX makes Starship ships and Super Heavy boosters. Lueders said more than 3,000 people, including SpaceX employees and contractors, work daily at the site at the end of a two-lane highway near where the Rio Grande flows into the Gulf of Mexico.
“We have poured billions into this area to complete the facilities,” she said. “It’s not easy to build at the end of Highway 4.” A slide from their presentation said SpaceX has invested more than $3 billion in Starbase infrastructure since the facility’s symbolic groundbreaking in 2014 and currently spends $1.1 billion annually on Starbase and other facilities in Texas. She said an update to a 2021 economic impact report on the company’s activities should be ready in the next few weeks.
One priority is to build a large, one-million-square-foot manufacturing facility called the Starfactory, replacing the tents used to build Starship components. “Elon said a year ago, ‘You know what, we need to get rid of these tents and this is going to be a permanent site,'” she recalls. “So we will build a Giga Starship factory.” She later said that the company plans to complete this factory by the end of the year.
SpaceX is building an office building to consolidate the engineering workforce at Starbase, along with a second high-bay warehouse, she said. The company is also building a second orbital launch pad for Starship near the existing launch pad.
In addition to the Texas infrastructure, SpaceX has been working on a Starship launch complex at Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The FAA announced May 10 that it is beginning work on an environmental impact statement for modernizing Starship infrastructure there, while in parallel the Department of the Air Force is exploring potential Starship launch facilities at two sites at the neighboring Cape Canaveral Space Force Station examined.
Musk suggested at a 2022 event that Starbase would become the “advanced research and development site” for Starship work, with Florida hosting operational launches, but Lueders said there would be opportunities for both Texas and Florida to support Starship missions.
“We need two launch sites to be able to fulfill our manifesto,” she said, particularly spacecraft launches for the NASA Human Landing System program. “A single landing requires 15 tanker launches, and these must be completed within a specific time period.” This estimate of 15 tanker launches is larger than what other company officials have previously stated, including an estimate of “around ten” launches in January.
“This will be our main area of work,” she concluded, “but we will also need the base in Florida to be able to handle the number and sequence of missions.”
She said she is also working on other aspects of Starbase and its impact on the community, from the quality of life of employees to improving traffic on the single road leading to the site. “It’s a critical period for us right now,” she said, while discussions are ongoing with local and state officials on issues such as the timing of traffic lights on the road to Starbase and encouraging hotel and restaurant development on the east side of Brownsville, the part closest to Starbase.
That included discussions about future infrastructure improvements for Starbase, she said, “to create a place at the end of Highway 4 where we can do long-term business.”
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