The FAA has repeatedly pushed back the estimated release date of the final report.
We'll have to wait at least
another month to see the results of the U.S Federal Aviation Administration's
(FAA) environmental review of SpaceX's Starship program.
The FAA has been working for
months on that review — officially known as a programmatic environmental
assessment (PEA) — which is assessing the environmental impacts of
Starbase, the South Texas site where SpaceX has been building and
testing its huge Starship vehicle.
The agency published a draft PEA
in September and estimated that the final version would be wrapped up by the
end of the year. But the FAA has repeatedly delayed the final PEA,
generally by a month at a time, citing the need to analyze the public comments
submitted in response to the draft report and discuss next steps with other
government agencies
Late last month, the FAA told us
that it expected to release the final PEA today (April 29) — but that's
not going to happen.
"The FAA plans to release the Final PEA on May 31, 2022. The FAA is finalizing the review of the Final PEA, including responding to comments and ensuring consistency with SpaceX's licensing application," FAA officials wrote in an update today.
"The FAA is also completing
consultation and confirming mitigations for the proposed SpaceX
operations," they added. "All consultations must be complete before
the FAA can issue the Final PEA."
Starship consists of a huge
first-stage booster called Super Heavy and a 165-foot-tall (50 meters)
upper-stage spacecraft known as Starship. SpaceX is developing the system to
take people and cargo the moon, Mars and other distant destinations.
The company is gearing up to
launch the first-ever Starship orbital test flight, which will lift off from
Starbase and send the upper stage on a round-the-world trek that will end with
a splashdown off the Hawaiian island of Kauai, if all goes according to
plan.
That flight cannot happen with
the final PEA still pending as it is, but it's unclear how much the latest
delay will affect SpaceX's Starship plans. SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk
said last month that the company likely wouldn't be ready to launch the orbital
flight test until May at the earliest, citing the need to build and
integrate the requisite Raptor engines. (Each Starship stack will need 39
Raptors — 33 for Super Heavy and six for the upper-stage spacecraft.)
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