“Limiting factor for first launch is regulatory approval”, Elon Musk tweeted
The founder and CEO of SpaceX Elon Musk has tweeted about his scheduled meeting at National Academies’s first virtual The Space Studies Board. It is going to be the first Starship-specific update on the company’s next generation rocket.
The multi-platform media company focused on Tesla tweeted, “SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to discuss Starship at National Academies meeting”.
The “SpaceX Starship Discussion” is going to be scheduled for 18:00 EST on November 17 and will be streamed live. The billionaires presented the last partial update in September 2020 and since the, SpaceX has made a tremendous amount of progress which made the CEO to have a large number of topics to discuss about. Musk believes that this stage is crucial for Starship as the CEO of SpaceX Elon Musk cannot launch the Starship/Super Heavy vehicle until the Federal Aviation Administration completes its licensing process including the environmental review. He tweeted replying to Teslarati,
“Limiting factor for first launch is regulatory approval. Thereafter, fundamental issue is solving engine production.
Prototypes are easy, production is hard.”
The reusable launch system Starship is still making changes in its rockets to get the best results. The first successful flight by any Starship test article was performed by Starhopper in 2019. The first complete Starship test article was SN8, which crashed upon landing in 2020. Then in May 2021, SN15 became the first test article to land successfully. And now, the company is working on SN20 and BN4 to make its prototype more efficient and the engine better as the pace of Starship and Super Heavy assembly and testing is being unusually slow.
