Tomorrow’s Starship orbital flight test may well go explosively wrong, and SpaceX’s less than stellar coordination with officials responsible for overseeing debris cleanup at nearby state parks could leave them with another “substantial burden,” emails between the organizations show.
Starship’s upcoming test does not have a very high probability of success, according to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. Last month, he put the chances of success at around 50%; in a Twitter Spaces earlier this week, he seemed to downgrade that probability even further. “If we do launch, I would consider anything that does not result in the destruction of the launch mount itself, the launch pad […] I would consider that to be a win,” he said.
The possibility of another testing anomaly at Starbase is likely not good news for environmental managers, who must oversee SpaceX’s clean-up efforts for any debris that falls on lands under their jurisdiction, like state parks.
Past explosions at Starbase, the company’s testing and launch facility in southeastern Texas, have generated debris fields that have impacted the adjacent Brazos Island State Park and Boca Chica State Park. A test of Starship’s upper stage in March 2021 generated a debris field impacting across 700 acres of surrounding parkland, Shyamal Patel, SpaceX’s senior director of Starship operations, told regulators in a January 2022 email.
The anomaly generated the largest debris field of all the Starship explosions to date, Patel added.
The final piece of debris from SN11 was an approximately 1,500-pound actuator component, Leonardo Alaniz, SpaceX’s manager of environmental, health and safety, reported to regulators in June 2021. The company had to submit a retrieval plan, involving the use of a heavy-duty Case 210 excavator, to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD) befo …
