NASA (labels by Ars Technica)
United Launch Alliance and Blue Origin are concerned about SpaceX’s plans to launch its massive Starship rocket from Florida.
In documents filed with the Federal Aviation Administration last month, ULA and Blue Origin raised concerns about the impact of Starship launch operations on their own operations on Florida’s Space Coast. Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’s space company, urged the federal government to consider capping the number of Starship launches and landings, test flights and other operations, and restricting SpaceX’s operations to certain times.
Elon Musk, SpaceX founder and CEO, called Blue Origin’s filing with the FAA “a patently unfair response. Not cool of them to try (for the third time) to impede SpaceX’s progress through lawfare.” We’ll get to that in a moment.
The FAA and SpaceX are preparing an environmental impact statement for launches and landings of the Super Heavy booster and the Starship rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) Launch Complex 39A, while the U.S. Space Force is working with SpaceX on a similar environmental impact statement for Starship flights from Space Launch Complex 37 at the nearby Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (CCSFS).
These reviews likely won’t be completed until late 2025 at the earliest, and only then will SpaceX be cleared to launch Starship from Florida. SpaceX will also need to build launch infrastructure at both sites, which could take a few years. This is already underway at Launch Complex 39A.
Big rocket with a big footprint
During the environmental review process, the FAA must consider how regular flights of the reusable Starship — as many as 120 launches per year, according to TechCrunch — will impact other launch providers operating at Cape Canaveral, ULA and Blue Origin said. SpaceX’s final proposed launch cadence from each location will be part of draft environmental reviews released for public comment later this year.
SpaceX plans to launch Starlink satellites, customer payloads and missions in support of NASA’s Artemis moon landings from launch pads in Florida. Setting up and commissioning a launch pad in Florida is one of several scheduling hurdles facing SpaceX’s program to develop a human-rated lunar lander version of Starship, in addition to demonstrating orbital refueling.
Starship Super Heavy launches and landings “are expected to have a greater environmental impact than any other launch system currently in service at KSC or CCSFS,” Blue Origin wrote. In its current configuration, Starship is the most powerful rocket in history, and SpaceX is developing a larger version that will be 492 feet (150 meters) tall and carry nearly 15 million pounds (6,700 metric tons) of fuel. That larger variant is the one that will fly from Cape Canaveral.
“It’s a very, very big rocket, and it’s getting bigger,” ULA CEO Tory Bruno wrote in a post on X. “That amount of fuel requires an evacuation zone when it’s being refueled, including other people’s facilities. A (weekly) launch has harmful noise levels all the way into the city. The Cape is not designed for a monopoly.”
At SpaceX’s private Starbase launch site in South Texas, the evacuation zone is set at 1.5 miles (2.5 kilometers) when Starship and Super Heavy are fueled with methane and liquid oxygen. During an actual launch, the control point is set farther back, more than 3 miles (5 kilometers) from the pad.
“The Cape’s overall launch capacity will be reduced if other providers are forced to evacuate their facilities every time a vehicle is refueled,” Bruno wrote.
We don’t yet know the radius of the keep-out zones for Starship operations in Florida, but Blue Origin wrote that the impact of Starship operations in Florida “may be even greater than at Starbase,” presumably because of the larger rocket SpaceX plans to launch from Cape Canaveral. If this is the case, nearby launch pads would need to be evacuated during Starship operations.
Based purely on Cape Canaveral’s geography, ULA seems to be most concerned. The launch pad for the Vulcan and Atlas V rockets is less than 2.2 miles (3.5 kilometers) from Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A). SpaceX’s proposal for up to 44 launches from LC-39A “will result in significant airspace and ground closures, result in acoustic impacts felt by nearby operations, and potentially generate debris, particulate matter, and property damage,” ULA said.
According to ULA, these hazards could prevent the company from fulfilling its contracts to launch critical national security satellites for the U.S. military.
“Given that this is the world’s largest rocket, an accident would cause severe or even catastrophic damage, while normal launch operations would have a cumulative impact on structures, launch vehicle hardware and other critical launch support equipment,” ULA said.