SpaceX closing in on first Starship launch from Florida

SpaceX is close to flying Starship from Florida for the first time, and it could happen within a few months.

All 14 Starship test flights so far have lifted off from Starbase in South Texas. The most recent, on Sept. 28, reached orbit for the first time. Now the company is finishing work at three pads on Florida's Space Coast, and one of them is nearly ready, Space.com reports.

That pad is historic Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, where SpaceX has been building a new Starship launch tower.

Things are going super well at 39A.

Julianna Scheiman, SpaceX's director of NASA science and Dragon programs, said that during an Oct. 1 briefing, according to Space.com. She said the main construction is done and the team is moving into acceptance and operational testing before the pad is activated. Work at the pad began in late 2021.

Why Starship needs different hardware

Starship stands about 408 feet tall, making it the largest rocket ever built. For scale, the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy vehicles, the only rockets that have flown from Pad 39A since SpaceX began leasing it in 2014, are each about 230 feet tall.

It also lands differently. Falcon boosters touch down on a ship at sea or a pad near the launch site. Starship's Super Heavy booster and Ship upper stage are designed to return to the launch tower, where giant "chopstick" arms catch them. That means the tower has to do a job Falcon towers never did.

The engines are different, too. Raptors burn liquid methane and liquid oxygen, while Falcon's Merlins use rocket-grade kerosene and liquid oxygen. So Pad 39A needs a new tank farm for the different propellant mix.

What happens next

SpaceX plans to fly at least one more Starship test from Texas before launching from Florida, Scheiman said. That could put the first Florida Starship launch as soon as Flight 16. No official target dates have been announced, but provisional planning documents list Oct. 19 and Oct. 30 as possible no earlier than dates for Flights 15 and 16, Space.com reports. Those might be optimistic, but they suggest Starship could fly twice in quick succession. For perspective, it has flown three times this year: May 22, July 24 and Sept. 28.

A Florida debut would echo history. Apollo 8 and Apollo 11 left Earth from Pad 39A in the late 1960s, and the pad is also part of the future. Starship's Ship upper stage was chosen as the first crewed lunar lander for NASA's Artemis program, and it is scheduled to dock with NASA's Orion capsule on Artemis III, a planned 2027 mission. That liftoff will happen from Pad 39A.

SpaceX has other Starship plans in Florida and beyond. The Air Force has approved flights from two pads at nearby Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, SLC-37A and SLC-37B, which could together host 76 Starship launches per year. And next year, SpaceX plans to break ground on a 12-pad complex in Louisiana with an estimated price tag of $100 billion.

That many pads starts to make sense with SpaceX's stated goal of more than 10,000 Starship launches per year by 2030. Most of those flights would support two projects, according to Elon Musk: a next-generation Starlink network of about 100,000 satellites, and Starmind, an AI data center constellation of 1 million spacecraft.

• Artemis
• Kennedy Space Center
• NASA
• Pad 39A
• SpaceX
• Starship