It all comes down to the FAA before SpaceX’s Starship gets a launch date

Have these last two weeks flown by for anyone else or just me? I don’t think we have ever been closer to seeing SpaceX’s first Starship orbital launch than we are now. But, according to two SpaceXers, we are just waiting on the FAA’s approval.

SpaceX VP says teams are ‘so close’ to launch

During the rocket roundtable at Satellite 2023, SpaceX’s Vice President of Commercial Sales, Tom Ochinero, states the company is getting close to launching the full version of its Starship rocket. The final hurdle the company is working on is a launch license from the FAA, which oversees all commercial spaceflights.

“Currently waiting on our FAA license so that we can announce our launch date, but that should be happening very shortly,” Ochinero told reporters and conference attendees. Last month, SpaceX conducted a static fire of 31 of the 33 engines on the Super Heavy booster. The total thrust surpassed NASA’s Saturn V rocket used in the 60s and 70s to launch humans to the Moon first. At full power, Starship is expected to retake the thrown as the most powerful operational rocket, passing NASA’s Space Launch System, which first launched last November.

Elon Musk gives us another ballpark launch date

Would you be shocked if I told you SpaceX’s founder and CEO guessed that Starship could launch its Orbital Test Flight on April 20? Yeah, I’m not either, but something always seems to be rumored to occur on that date with one of his companies every year.

Musk confirmed Ochinero’s statement with a tweet a few days later. He guessed that if the process only takes a couple of weeks, Starship’s first orbital launch attempt will occur “near end of third week of April, aka …,” implying April 20.

While it’s exciting to see only one last hurdle for Starship before launching, this could still be a difficult one to get past. There isn’t really a way to know what the FAA is thinking without being in the room with its discussions with SpaceX, and Musk has usually been over-optimistic with his timelines (refer back to the joke in the first sentence of this article).

SpaceX and the FAA, along with a plethora of other agencies, spent months on the Environmental Assessment to launch Starship at all from South Texas. So while I don’t expect another long wait like that, a push into late spring would not surprise me.