SpaceX pitches shift of human launches to Canaveral amid Starship explosion concerns at KSC: report

With the chance that SpaceX’s development of its new Starship rocket will pivot to Kennedy Space Center, NASA has reportedly been working with the company to consider moving astronaut launches to Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

In an interview with Reuters’ Joey Roulette, Kathy Lueders, NASA’s Associate Administrator of the Space Operations Mission Directorate, said the agency has concerns about the unproven Starship rocket suffering some sort of explosive incident that could damage the launch pad at KSC.

Such damage could render NASA with no way to send its astronauts to the International Space Station since SpaceX is the only approved provider of launch services under the Commercial Crew Program, and only approved with Crew Dragon to launch from KSC’s Launch Pad 39-A. Boeing’s Starliner is on a path toward being approved but has yet to perform its crewed flight test.

She said SpaceX was offering two options to assuage those concerns including getting approval to launch Crew Dragon from its Cape Canaveral launch facilities, and also looking into ways to make 39-A more resilient in the case of a Starship accident. Both actions would still require NASA approval, Lueders told Reuters. SpaceX did not provide a comment to the news agency.

SpaceX has been working on its next-generation rocket from its Boca Chica, Texas test facility, but uncertainty over the results of an environmental assessment overseen by the Federal Aviation Administration drove the company to begin plans to potentially shift Starship development to Florida. The FAA, though, issued that assessment’s results Monday finding that there would be no significant impact as long as SpaceX followed a series of proposed mitigation efforts.

The big sigh of relief from SpaceX was the finding that no Environmental Impact Statement would be required, a more intensive study that would have delayed any test flight from Texas at least into 2023.

Elon Musk said in March that shifting to KSC amid the threat of such a Texas requirement was already in the works as a contingency with the aim of performing the test flight before the end of 2022. SpaceX launches from KSC would not require further environmental review.

Despite the Texas path to launches getting closer to reality, SpaceX still has several other federal approvals to get before its first orbital attempt.

To date, the company has flown prototype versions of Starship without the booster to about 6 miles altitude and attempted landings back in Texas, sometimes with fiery results. Those used only three or fewer of the new, powerful Raptor engines. The fully working orbital version will be coupled with a Super Heavy booster with 39 Raptor engines, 33 on the booster and six on Starship.

The planned test flight still proposed for Texas would be to launch a stacked version of Starship and Super Heavy, have them separate, return the booster to land on a SpaceX vessel 20 miles offshore in the Gulf of Mexico while Starship achieves orbit for least one trip around the Earth and then lands in the Pacific Ocean.

When it does launch, the Starship and Super Heavy combo would generate more than 16 million pounds of thrust. That nearly doubles the power of NASA’s planned Artemis flights and more than doubles those of the Apollo missions.

Immediate plans for Starship are for Starlink satellite delivery to add to the company’s growing constellation of internet satellites, as well as to develop a version to assist NASA in getting humans back on the moon by 2025. Also upcoming is a tourist flight to orbit the moon funded by a Japanese fashion tycoon who’s taking along several artists.

The main purpose for its development, though, is eventually to help create a self-sustaining colony on Mars.