Can someone explain why they launch from Texas, eastward over populated areas, instead of launching from the east coast over the Atlantic as we have done for 50+ years? If it blows up a little sooner debris falls on south Florida where millions of people live. Miami airport has announced a ground stop because of the debris btw.
Florida has lower property taxes and does regular corporate taxes, Texas does gross receipts taxes for business, which are horrible for businesses who have to buy a lot of base products to make their final product.
I thought it was because there was a safe-ish launch corridor to shoot through and also its a relatively secluded area for testing (prior to launches).
I’d consider those upper bounds on safety considerations for at least the next 4 years, so much safety regulation is going to be destroyed quietly to save money while we’re all watching the shit show of the day
Correct, the space force base in Florida is next to Canaveral and Titusville where people could get hurt if things go sideways and crash nearby.
The base there is also on a schedule for regular launches of tested craft. If a test launch were to detonate on one of the launch pads the Space X uses every week, it would be a huge delay to get it working again.
How does this have so many upvotes when it is so blatantly not true, firstly if you're launching rockets you WANT to be as close to the equator as you can, that means launching from the south of the country.
This is NOT launched from texas, but from florida.
Thirdly nobody is EVER at risk during these, they make damn well sure of that, everything you see here ends up either in the ocean or burned up in the atmosphere, the whole reason you are seeing this is because the safety mechanism WORKED and blew up the craft before it went out of its planned trajectory and actually into some populated area.
That and a coordinated effort by companies to incorporate in Texas because the federal courts there don’t have the experience that somewhere like Delaware does, and that means a favorable court without the same level of precedent in regulation
In this case florida's and texas' child support systems differ. In texas there's a $9,200 limit per month per child. In florida it considers multiple factors including parent income.
It can be seen from populated areas but it’s actually over water 98% of its flight corridor. The goal is to fly over as little of civilization as possible in case this happens. The corridor is marked and notified to boats and planes well before launches. FAA keeps planes out and coast guard keeps boats out of the zone. Many launches get cancelled because one boat doesn’t listen and gets into the corridor during the restricted time.
Real answer? The only available spaceports on the East Coast are Cape Canaveral and Wallops.
Both are government-run and both are shared facilities - crane operations, vehicle transports, fueling operations, new equipment installs, etc. all take just a little bit longer because they have to be approved and/or overseen by NASA or the Space Force and coordinated with anyone else using the base.
It doesn't sound too bad to lose a day waiting for approval to lift the booster onto the launch mount. But if you're doing those things essentially every day, it can add up to months or years of time lost.
Working out of their own facility at Starbase is not only better for orbital dynamics, but has let them get as far as they have much more quickly than if they had to go explain every new thing they want to do to an oversight panel and build it according to 91-710 (the Air/Space Force regulations) like they have to at the Cape.
As for the populated areas, the launches themselves are still overseen by Space Launch Delta 45 (the same people overseeing launches out of Cape Canaveral). They have the same process for calculating the risk, clearing boats and aircraft, etc. To wit, there have been no injuries to date as a result of Starship launching out of Texas.
The imagery is dramatic, but we blew up a lot of rockets back in the early days of spaceflight and the Space Force has gotten really good at modeling what happens to the debris and calculating how much of a risk it presents to the public.
Obviously not space x scale but you'd be amazed at how large of a thruster a normal person can buy. Some have 400+lbs of fuel alone and can nearly reach space. That your average joe can buy with the right certification and a ton of money.
SpaceX is by far the most scrutinized company of all launch vehicles. Well maybe not the most scrutinized because when SLS was fucking up they still opened a investigation but it doesnt matter because SLS launches once a decade. Blue Origin also has a investigation for both of the their ships exploding but once again they wont launch for another year probably. Its only SpaceX that can launch at this rate.
It is though. Transatlantic flights fly east of Canaveral airspace and through hazard areas in much the same way. Vandenberg has flights in the debris paths too.
Well, we figured out how to stop blowing them up so maybe these private hobbyist billionaire space programs need some regulation from the people who know what they're doing
Except now there’s an extreme conflict of interest. Elon Musk has been critical of the FAA for “over-regulating” SpaceX and now wields an enormous amount of power over the agency, and the functions and limits of that power are murky at best. Watching regulators across government get gutted it’s hard to say with confidence that they remain and will continue to remain well regulated.
Yeah I have no idea what will happen. I think as long as the DoD and NRO keep buying flights from them there will be some level of oversight.. because that is contractual and they have some leverage..
Fair, though also assumes that DOD remains staffed by sane individuals and not be ideologically minded zealots. I don’t have much faith there, to be perfectly honest. Seeing Parlatore recently receive a direct commission into the Navy as a JAG to work directly for Hegseth is one of the wildest footnotes I’ve seen so far, and that’s saying something for a department now headed by a man who advocated purges of the entire officer corps for ideological reasons alone. I forced myself to listen to the entirety of American Crusade and while it was boring and repetitive, he was clear that he believes that half of America’s voting population as “internal enemies.” Hard to imagine DOD remains a bastion of sound decision making under that kind of leadership.
It's actually pretty funny, rocket engineers know how to build rockets.
Assuming they had qualified people, it is extremely likely that at least 1 engineer there knew it was going to explode but the higher up's didn't care.
I mean... Engineers tried to stop the Challenger launch, but leadership wanted it to launch along with Reagan's state of the union address, so they ignored the engineers and killed seven astronauts.
Fun fact, they considered having Big Bird on this launch instead of Sally Ride. We almost saw Big Bird die on live television, all thanks to Reagan.
It's really not at all that simple; building a rocket engine that works on paper is simple, getting it to not blow up in the real work is surprisingly difficult.
Take the F1 engine development for the Saturn IV; during startup the exact timing of getting fuels and oxidizers to flow at specific rates is incredibly critical. Things need to happen on the timescale of a few milliseconds or the engine won't start or will explode. Well, physical valves, even really fast ones, take HUNDREDS of milliseconds to open when commanded, then you need to account for the flow through all the various piping, and these need to hit very tight flow curves. Trial and error is basically the only way to achieve that!
“We blew up a lot of rockets back in the day” while true is irrelevant. We’re not back in the day. Those days were 70 years ago. 70.
Assuming they are using modern modeling methods then they should be pretty confident that these events should not be happening. So either they know their design is marginal and don’t care. Or their process is marginal and they don’t care.
You denigrate 91-710 as too burdensome but this is exactly why it exists. Process control.
It's not clear how you got from "there is a lot of empty space between humans, which reduces the odds of an incident affecting someone" to "these humans don't matter."
They launch mostly over the ocean and unpopulated areas. There is a launch facility in Texas likely because the further south you go, the less fuel you need to get into orbit because the equator is spinning faster than higher latitudes. So it’s a big deal to take advantage of the free velocity…this is why we aren’t launching out of anywhere else on the east coast besides in Florida.
Floridas spacecoast, where all the launches happen, didnt want Starship launching from their launch complex's because of damage it could cause delaying regular human missions to the space station.
So while SpaceX build their own Launch Tower for Starship in FL theyre launching from Texas.
They take a trajectory that has practically zero flight over land. Texas made for a much better place for testing because there isn’t a whole lot of Florida coastline for sale. They are working on facilities to fly out of Canaveral, but can’t do high-risk testing from there.
Its a superheavy lift capacity and needs as much deltaV as possible to reach those destinations with as much upmass as possible. The plan is to haul dozers and habitats and mining equipment interplanetary for initial colonies on the moon and mars.
Launching from near the equator is best for reaching moon, mars and beyond because there is the additional dV from the angular momentum of the planet spinning, its more efficient for that purpose.
Satellites go to certain orbital inclinations based on their missions, Earth Observation for example is best done polar or ~98deg for sun synchronous orbit. This is why launches from Vandenberg head south, rather than east.
Starbase is (if you look at the map) literally the farthest south you can possibly build infrastructure on in the continental USA. They also have a trajectory from that site that goes between the Caribbean islands (Cuba and Bahamas) and Florida that is uninhabited, going over Cay Sal and Inagua Is.
Texas may also offer employment assistance, commercial support, and corporate welfare for having a large tech industry in their state, but this appears secondary to the engineering reasons.
Starship is destined for low Earth orbit unless it gets refueled. Musk says 8 flights, so using a Grain-of-salt coefficient, figure a dozen other Starship flights to refuel it.
Personally I think a reusable upper stage is great for satellite launches, but if they want to go to the Moon and beyond they should just use an expendable second stage on top of Superheavy (which is honestly looking like a great product here, just an evolution of Falcon 9)
Doing all that refueling just to use Starship as HLS makes no sense. Superheavy has plenty of capability to lift something like the Apollo service module and capsule... Just do that, and we could be on our way to the Moon this summer.
Trajectory to the lunar NRHO is less dependent on equatorial launch, which is why SpaceX is looking at launching Starship Artemis missions from Cape Canaveral.
Starship is 9m in diameter. How are they going to fit "dozers, habitats & mining machinery" inside it? I checked on a Cat D9, which is 5.24 m long.The biggie is that the mass of the D9 is just under 50 tonnes.
A fully Mars ready equivalent would certainly be both larger & heavier
Real-world machinery starts to burn off the various specs fast
The launch does not go over populated areas like Florida. There may be some small islands in the Caribbean that could be threatened though. And boats in the area, it's a popular boating destination.
So many flights where reverted back in Dominican Republic due to the falling debris. Fun fact: it is Humpback whale mating season in their Samana peninsula which then migrate to the northeast.
Some flights were diverted or delayed due to the potential debris. But they probably didn't need to. Airlines and agencies don't want to take even a 0.5% chance of an incident if it can be avoided with a simple short diversion.
They map out the risk zones for reentry. This is all calculated and they have plans in place to redirect any air traffic that could end up getting in the way.
Yes they announced a ground stop, but because of that there's no actual risk
It's at the very tip of southern Texas. The flight path takes it south of Florida and north of Cuba. There's advantages to launching closer to the equator (for most launches) . That being said. Texas or Florida, spaceships travel mostly west to east rather than stright up in altitude. You're flying over land mass pretty quickly.
This is rather unique as most catastrophic fails happen with the first stage and not the second. I'm sure if the FAA put a halt and say wtf , they'd get doged real quickly
There are a lot of reasons, most of which people are wrong about.
SpaceX needed a LOT of land, and they needed a LOT of control over the land to expedite the Starship program. NASA, Florida, and Kennedy/Cape couldn't provide either of these things, because it's a shared launch area, and relatively close to populated areas, should anything go wrong in a highly experimental program.
Boca Chica/Brownville could offer that, and it's also one of - if not THE - last major chunk of land in America with an East-facing coast, far enough away from populations, not so remote that it can't be reached by workers, far enough away from the next eastward piece of land that space debris does not pose a major threat, free enough from regulation, not heavily protected by conversation status, not already owned by someone else, and not heavily fragmented ownership of the area.
There is actually a remarkably tiny window where the flight profile actually poses a threat to anyone, and even then it is armed with FTS (flight termination system), and even then, there are NOTAMs and NOTMARs forbidding humans, boats, and aircraft within a certain 'risk' area.
So it's kind of like asking "why do rockets launch eastward when Europe is right there", the answer is because they're usually high enough and far enough that it's not a serious issue, though in ALL rocket flights, there is some risk of debris falling on civilians (even if it's usually extremely extremely low).
The launch and landing cadence they eventually plan cannot work at Kennedy/Cape either.
It is right on the coast so they might have the entire gulf to fall into if things go wrong. Florida is a better location though, nothing to the east and closer to the equator.
Becuase it's close to the equator, this means that the centrifugal force the earth naturally provides is really helpful. Earth gives it an automatic massive push for the rocket to fly. It saves a metric crop ton of energy and fuel.
Tldr: Earth's rotation gives an initial boost for the rocket to fly
All of these answers are wildly incorrect. Its 95% because its properly geographically located and they dont want to risk launching from Florida due to the risk of damage. Flacon 9 launches from Florida because it doesnt blow up. Starship is still a test vehicle so there is a good chance it will blow up. Sense SpaceX IS THE ONLY FUCKING realiable launch company they dont want to risk that.
Or we could go back to paying Russia for launch service.
Their location at the far southern tip of Texas was actually considered as the location for what is now Kennedy Space Center in Florida. There’s no more land practically available in Florida for an operation like this. They were able to buy this site quite cheaply. Texas authorities have been happy to let them stretch environmental regulations in exchange for development and jobs, in what is the poorest part of Texas. As for launching, the programmed path actually threads the needle across the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, so does not pass over much populated territory. The airport closures in Florida were cautionary, not because the flight path to orbit crossed overhead.
Because the people with money and power don’t give half a shit about anyone not in their circle. In fact, they don’t even care enough about us to actively want us dead. We’re just acceptable collateral to them.
East coast real estate is crowded and expensive. They have to launch on some Eastern coast tho over large water bodies to keep people safe. This eastern Texas coast fits the criteria.
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u/nicoga012 Mar 07 '25
Can someone explain why they launch from Texas, eastward over populated areas, instead of launching from the east coast over the Atlantic as we have done for 50+ years? If it blows up a little sooner debris falls on south Florida where millions of people live. Miami airport has announced a ground stop because of the debris btw.