SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced earlier today the company has broken ground on a new, dedicated launchpad for its Starship rockets on Florida’s Space Coast (via CNBC).
Construction of Starship orbital launch pad at the Cape has begun
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 3, 2021
Starship is a next-generation, fully reusable spacecraft designed by SpaceX to ferry both cargo and people on missions to the moon and Mars.
The new Starship-specific launchpad is being constructed on Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, and technically isn’t ‘new’.
SpaceX in 2019 received approval from NASA to add additional launch infrastructure to LC-39A, which Musk and his company lease from the space agency to launch their Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets. SpaceX poured concrete for the foundation of the Starship launchpad in late 2019, but construction activities have remained suspended ever since.
Speaking to CNBC, NASA confirmed that SpaceX is “within the rights of their lease agreement to make launch infrastructure improvements within the boundaries of the pad.” Tom Engler, director of planning and development at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, called SpaceX’s plan “really exciting.”
Musk’s tweet confirms that construction on the new launchpad has started back up again, which comes as SpaceX gears up for the first orbital test flight of its Starship SN20 prototype.
SpaceX originally had its sights set on July for the first attempt, but it wasn’t until August that the company moved its Super Heavy booster rocket onto the launch site and finally stacked Starship SN20 on top of it.
SpaceX is currently awaiting regulatory approval for Starship’s first orbital launch, which Musk hopes will take place in January or February. Preparations for the orbital flight, due to launch from the company’s ‘Starbase’ in Boca China, Texas, are going well — last month, Starship SN20 successfully achieved multi-engine static fire for the first time.
Musk’s rocket company has run into a “crisis” with the production of its Raptor engines for Starship prototypes, though. “We face genuine risk of bankruptcy if we cannot achieve a Starship flight rate of at least once every two weeks next year,” Musk told employees in an email, according to reports from earlier this week.
