It seems like only earlier today [It was only earlier today, Steve —editor] that I was telling you about NASA’s duct-tape-and-bailing-wire effort to get the much-delated Boeing Starliner up on its inaugural manned mission to the International Space Station (ISS). But while NASA and Boeing were working on workarounds to a design flaw in Starliner’s propulsion system, SpaceX was taking the lessons learned from the successes and failures of Starship’s third test flight while rapidly preparing for its fourth.
One man stands in the way of that epic test flight. His name is Joe Biden.
But before we get to Slow Joe, let’s get to the exciting Starship news that SpaceX released a couple of days ago.
Starship’s third test flight took place in March and corrected the deficiencies discovered in the first two. The spacecraft even conducted an intra-vehicle refueling test, moving volatile rocket fuel from one internal tank to another. The next step in the testing process will be to transfer fuel from one ship to another. In-flight refueling will be one of Starship’s superpowers, giving it the legs to deliver previously unimaginable amounts of mass around the inner Solar System — and eventually beyond.
Next up, according to SpaceX:
The fourth flight test turns our focus from achieving orbit to demonstrating the ability to return and reuse Starship and Super Heavy. The primary objectives will be executing a landing burn and soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico with the Super Heavy booster, and achieving a controlled entry of Starship.
Between test flights three and four, SpaceX made countless iterations and improvements to Starship.
This is the way.
I would also add that while Starship is a truly revolutionary spaceship that no other company or country has even dreamed of attempting, Starliner is just an orbital ferry of people and cargo. Starliner is nothing that the US, Russia, and China haven’t done countless times before. And yet it is years late and has cost Boeing $1.4 billion in losses. Starship, once proven, will change everything about how we get to and from space — including Luna and Mars — and has the potential to open up metals-rich asteroids to human exploitation.
Whoever figures out how to perform that last item will own the Solar System.
It’s no exaggeration when I say I believe that Starship is the single most important technology under development today.
Back to Presidentish Biden.
If Biden were genuinely interested in this country keeping and expanding our space dominance — which is necessary to our economic growth, technological innovation, national security, and our American need to dream — he’d tell his gawdawful federal bureaucracy that Starship is a national priority (which it is) and to get the hell out of Elon Musk’s way.
Instead, Starship’s fourth test flight awaits the slow-moving federal bureaucracy’s insistence that the soup doesn’t taste right until they’ve had a chance to pee in it. The ship is stacked and ready to go. SpaceX says the flight could take place as soon as June 5 (and likely could have come much sooner) but the bottleneck is the wait for an updated Federal Aviation Administration license and regulatory approval. Or maybe it will take longer.
Well, Joe? Does America’s future beyond “the surly bonds of Earth” matter or not?
Recommended: Leak, Schmeak: NASA Gives Go Ahead for Manned Starliner Launch
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