Hey hey, Marcus House with you here. Yes, you are right, it is certainly not Saturday
so what is this video about? I mean.. You’ve seen the title, you’ve clicked on it right,
so you’ve got a few hints already., Well, some very exciting and long awaited
news over the last day.The Federal Aviation Administration has finally released the 2021
Programmatic Environmental Assessment for Starbase and their findings alongside it.
SpaceX has been granted a Mitigated FONSI which stands for Finding of No Significant Impact,
with many mitigations already in place. Alongside this, the final PEA document has been published
with SpaceX securing the environmental approval from the FAA to conduct orbital
Starship launches on the South Texas coast. So yes, this is terrific news, and after
12 months of work and several monthly delays, the FAA has ultimately issued
SpaceX extremely favorable plans to conduct orbital Starship launches out of Starbase,
Texas. This has overcome one of the most difficult regulatory barriers for the future of Starbase.
SpaceX soon chimed in on their own twitter account tweeting that they are “One step closer
to the first orbital flight test of Starship” So we are going to be seeing the fully stacked
starship launching for sure now right? Well, we aren't quite that far. Before SpaceX can receive
the actual launch license they must mitigate dozens of environmental impact points including
protecting fish, wildlife, plants and other environmental resources. They also need to reduce
closures of the beach, parks and highway which will be a bit of a shift from what they would
probably like. So to address all this, and put the appropriate systems in place, it will still
take a significant amount of work. Specifically I think to at least partially alleviate some of the
launch site’s environmental impact. Along with all that they must also meet safety, risk, and
financial responsibility requirements. SpaceX has already begun that process with the FAA, but it
could still take many weeks after the Final PEA to secure an operator license or experimental permit.
In many ways, it is a bit simpler than what SpaceX initially requested in its September 2021
draft. However, aside from the already expected removal of onsite methane fuel production and
all associated facilities, the rest of the Final PEA appears to be surprisingly close to SpaceX’s
Starbase Draft PEA. Thankfully, SpaceX was not forced to reduce the number of permitted orbital
launches, suborbital launches, or ship and booster static fire tests that they originally requested.
Ultimately for SpaceX and the amazing team at Starbase in Boca Chica Texas,
it is an extremely positive outcome. There is very little doubt now that SpaceX will
complete all mitigations requested of it and help improve aspects of Starbase, Texas as a result.
I’ll dive into this more as the story unfolds in our weekly update video always released on
Saturday along with a great deal of other interesting space news. So thanks for all
you subscribers here that have helped us get through this quite lengthy period of uncertainty.
Really appreciate it.. Just a quick update on last weekends video here in the top right if
you missed that one. I had shared the announcement that the NASA James Webb Space Telescope team was
going to release its first full-color images and spectroscopic data on July 12th. For some silly
reason my brain didn’t quite work out that they said July 12th… and not June 12th. But then I even
said July 12th… I was implying that these images would have been released by now, not a month from
now, so yes…. Oops. I did pin a comment there with no shortage of replies laughing about that one.
Hey.. you’ve got to own your mistakes don’t you. So yes, I hope this news has brightened your day.
If you scroll through comment threads from these videos over the last few months,
there are just so many that said the FAA would never approve it, no Orbital Starships would fly
from Texas. Hopefully this finally puts those comments to rest for a while. This is a complex
system, and it needed all the appropriate approval processes to take their course as frustrating as
it can be. I think with hindsight if anything, the FAA could have been able to predict with a
little more certainty the timeframe… but saying that… everything with space takes longer than
we would all like. Elon Musk is no exception. Also just quickly, be sure to check out Tim Dodds
3rd part discussion with Musk linked in the description. Really interesting listening to
the discussions around Falcon 9’s Merlin engine in particular. They talk a lot about some of the
early design decisions. The Raptor engine for Starship is so much more complicated, it is not
hard to see why Merlin was the best decision for getting SpaceX off the ground… literally.
Anyway, I’ll see you again on Saturday. On screen are some more of our deep dive videos here if you
haven’t seen any of those. Enjoy the rest of your week and I’ll see you in the next video.