SpaceX's Next Big Challenge? Safely Launching Starship.

At its best, launching rockets into space combines technological ingenuity with a forward-thinking idealism. There’s a reason why, long after NASA’s first missions into space took flight, people still gather to watch high-powered rockets blast off with space as their destination. But there are also practical concerns afoot when planning a launch, and that’s something that SpaceX is reckoning with as it readies plans to launch its ambitious Starship vehicle from the company’s Texas facilities.

This month, the FAA released a document exploring the effects of airspace closures related to Starship launching from, and landing at, SpaceX’s Boca Chica complex. As the agency phrased it, this report “evaluates the potential environmental impacts associated with updates to Starship-Super Heavy operations at the Boca Chica Launch site.” And, as Ars Technica’s Stephen Clark explained, there’s a very good reason why the FAA needs to review these flight plans: mitigating potential damages in case something goes wrong.

The location of SpaceX’s launch facility in Texas means that there’s a chance that more residential areas are in a rocket’s flight path than, say, a comparable mission launched from Cape Canaveral. Clark’s analysis of SpaceX’s flight plan notes that it avoids flying close to large metropolitan areas in Mexico and the United States.

If the launch of Starship goes according to plan, there won’t be anything to worry about. Unfortunately, ever since humanity began launching missions into space, some have gone awry — and, in a few cases, that’s led to vehicles and rockets crashing down on inhabited areas. This is precisely what SpaceX’s flight plan and the FAA’s latest analysis seeks to avoid.

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Earlier this year, a rocket launched by the company Isar Aerospace from a launch facility in Norway crashed less than a minute after it took off. In January, one of the boosters helping propel a Chinese satellite into orbit fell back to Earth and crash-landed near a home in Zhenyuan County. Thankfully, no one was hurt when it did so — but it’s an unsettling occurrence regardless. There’s an ages-old property concerning things that go up, and it’s a reminder of the need to balance safety with ambition.

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Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been published by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Vulture, Punch, the New York Times and Men’s Journal. At InsideHook, he has…