SpaceX likely to get FAA approval for 25 Starship launches in 2025

The latest Starship reentry fielded basic uncertainties of e.g. the heat shield, while they lost tiles the robustness and dynamic stability of the aggressively angled belly flop (massive engines up relative to center of mass) looks good enough.

So it looks promising.

These landings would occur at the launch tower,
Actually the next launch-and-catch tower will handle the lengthened boosters next year. Next launch will be the v2 Starship (longer, more shielded front fins), but as soon as the next and higher tower can take the v3 lengthened booster the whole v3 migration will be complete.

Presumably the old launch tower supports Starship catches, until the Florida towers are completed.

What a difference an election makes. Twenty four little hours (you know the tune)
? No, I don't know that tune. The election hasn't changed anything yet, it's two more months until that happens. And the environment assessment underlying this has been ongoing for a long time and won't be finished until after that.

The ongoing environmental review stems from SpaceX's desire to increase the scope of its operations from South Texas and is not yet finalized. Beginning today, the FAA will open a public comment period that will close on January 17. In addition, the FAA will hold five public meetings to solicit feedback from the local community and other stakeholders.
The 158-page document makes for interesting reading, and it details the extent to which the FAA and other agencies reviewed air quality, climate, water, noise, cultural, wildlife, and other impacts. In all of these areas, the federal agency concluded that the mitigations SpaceX undertook as part of the 2022 environmental review process are sufficient to account for the increase in its Texas launch activities.
However, it seems unlikely that this document—which has been in the works for more than a year—was unduly influenced by Trump's election. It was prepared by an FAA still under the Biden administration. Rather, the tone of the environmental assessment signals that SpaceX was probably already on a path to complying with federal regulations.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/...ted-from-the-faa-for-texas-starship-launches/

If you expect changes, FAA is a government agency. In democracies such entities [as well as religious entities] are routinely separated from the government under transparent laws and regulations. This avoids e.g. corruption and compromised efficiency while ensuring freedom of speech. US is a democracy (though I gather more corrupt than most Western nations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index).
 
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In democracies such entities [as well as religious entities] are routinely separated from the government under transparent laws and regulations. This avoids e.g. corruption and compromised efficiency while ensuring freedom of speech.

Speaking from inside experience, I can say that the U.S. regulatory agencies are not perfectly shielded from political pressure.

But, they are resistant to it.

And that is what the new administration intends to fight against, this time.

During the previous Trump administration, a new process (new "Schedule F") was introduced and in-progress to change the top levels of Civil Service technical employees from protected status to "serves-at-the-pleasure" status so that they would have to obey the political pressures.

That was stopped by the following (Biden) administration, but will most likely be more fully implemented this time due to the next Trump administration having majorities in both houses of Congress to make any needed changes to the implementing legislation for the agencies and the Civil Service.

However, the lower levels of most of the Federal agencies have employee unions, who will resist political and administrative pressures on those employees. The unions have actually been more effective than the enacted laws in shielding the employees from political pressures.

But, that is not to say that the Civil Service employees in a particular agency do not develop individual internal "cultures" that are never out-of-step with what the public supports in the way of government actions. Don't just assume that something is correct because it is the position of a regulatory agency. That was actually a legal presumption recognized by the courts (called the "Chevron Defense") until it was recently overturned by a U.S. Supreme Court decision.

I am expecting a lot of disruption in Federal agencies. I just hope it does not lead to them becoming as disfunctional as our Congress has become when it is almost evenly split on the political spectrum.
 

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