Musk and SpaceX Call Out Biden/Harris FAA Obstructionism

Elon Musk is very polite about it. We are not. The Biden/Harris administration is deliberately strangling our industry, in general, and President Trump's Artemis Project, in particular. This is why President Trump will soon put Musk in charge of reorganizing the federal government to make it function efficiently for the people as a whole—not according to the convenience or whim of petty bureaucrats, partisan politicians, predatory litigators, or Imperial oligarchs.

The Starship/Superheavy test program has been repeatedly delayed, for months at a time, due to tardy Federal Aviation Administration launch approvals. Starship is a key component of the Artemis Project which will begin the process of Lunar industrialization. Astronauts and cargo will soon begin making trips to the surface of the Moon in modified SpaceX Starships, but the repeated FAA delays are adding delays of up to years! It is no wonder that we cannot build anything in this country under the current regime!

SpaceX has been ready to fly the 5th test flight of the Starship/Superheavy combination since early August. Now it appears that FAA approval will be delayed until November. On September 10, 2024, SpaceX issued a statement objecting to the FAA's delays. We quote from it here:

Every flight of Starship has made tremendous progress and accomplished increasingly difficult test objectives, making the entire system more capable and more reliable. Our approach of putting flight hardware in the flight environment as often as possible maximizes the pace at which we can learn recursively and operationalize the system. This is the same approach that unlocked reuse on our Falcon fleet of rockets and made SpaceX the leading launch provider in the world today.

To do this and do it rapidly enough to meet commitments to national priorities like NASA’s Artemis program, Starships need to fly. The more we fly safely, the faster we learn; the faster we learn, the sooner we realize full and rapid rocket reuse. Unfortunately, we continue to be stuck in a reality where it takes longer to do the government paperwork to license a rocket launch than it does to design and build the actual hardware. This should never happen and directly threatens America’s position as the leader in space.

FLIGHT 5

The Starship and Super Heavy vehicles for Flight 5 have been ready to launch since the first week of August. The flight test will include our most ambitious objective yet: [our] attempt to return the Super Heavy booster to the launch site and catch it in mid-air.

This will be a singularly novel operation in the history of rocketry. SpaceX engineers have spent years preparing and months testing for the booster catch attempt, with technicians pouring tens of thousands of hours into building the infrastructure to maximize our chances for success. Every test comes with risk, especially those seeking to do something for the first time. SpaceX goes to the maximum extent possible on every flight to ensure that while we are accepting risk to our own hardware, we accept no compromises when it comes to ensuring public safety.

It's understandable that such a unique operation would require additional time to analyze from a licensing perspective. Unfortunately, instead of focusing resources on critical safety analysis and collaborating on rational safeguards to protect both the public and the environment, the licensing process has been repeatedly derailed by issues ranging from the frivolous to the patently absurd. At times, these roadblocks have been driven by false and misleading reporting, built on bad-faith hysterics from online detractors or special interest groups who have presented poorly constructed science as fact.

We recently received a launch license date estimate of late November from the FAA, the government agency responsible for licensing Starship flight tests. This is a more than two-month delay to the previously communicated date of mid-September. This delay was not based on a new safety concern, but instead driven by superfluous environmental analysis. The four open environmental issues are illustrative of the difficulties launch companies face in the current regulatory environment for launch and reentry licensing.

The statement then goes on to identify the fraudulent nature of "environmental issues" used to delay progress. Lyndon LaRouche long identified the primary motivation behind the British Imperial "environmental, or green movement" as being the determination of the British and allied oligarchies to turn the clock back to ye goode olde days of feudalism—when peasants knew their place.