It isn't a joke whenever I say that the new space race is Elon Musk versus the rest of the world, and I'm not joking now when I tell you that his company's biggest competitor isn't China — and it certainly isn't Russia — but the Biden-Harris FAA.
SpaceX's Starship promises to revolutionize spaceflight by reducing launch costs by two orders of magnitude — that's a 99% savings — and vastly expanding current limits on the size and mass of what can be lifted into orbit and deep space.
If SpaceX can get permission to perform the necessary flight tests, that is — and the FAA is dragging its feet.
"Starships are meant to fly," the company reminded the Biden administration in a lengthy statement released on Tuesday. "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 next Starship flight test is meant to demonstrate vital operations like landing both stages for reuse and the massive launch tower "chopsticks" designed to guide the first stage right back onto the launch pad instead of a landing barge out at sea. The Starship has been ready for weeks. The Biden-Harris administration keeps finding new excuses for delays.
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.
"What is the point of our giant military-industrial-intelligence complex (which relies on SpaceX) if they can’t even tell the Fisheries Service to buzz off?" Robert Shibley pointedly asked at Instapundit today.
Minus SpaceX, the U.S. is behind China. In the race back to the moon — led by NASA and "Old Space" contractors with "New Space" firm SpaceX in a secondary (but necessary) role — China is in vital ways ahead of us.
Biden-Harris would have us lose the New Space Race — putting our entire national security at risk — in a fit of partisan pique against the man whose other company, X, had the temerity to restore free speech to just one social media platform.
That's damnably un-American.
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