New photos of SpaceX Starship stacked in Boca Chica, Texas - The Washington Post

Now the landscape has changed dramatically. SpaceX has a production line that is pumping out Starship test vehicles one after the other. Several have flown several miles high. And while some of those crash landed in debris-strewing fireballs, SpaceX finally stuck a landing last spring, achieving a milestone that it says will allow it to re-fly the vehicles over and over, as it does its other rocket, the Falcon 9.

Perhaps most significantly, NASA awarded SpaceX a nearly $3 billion contract last spring to use the spacecraft to land its astronauts on the moon as part of its Artemis program. It was a major stamp of approval that survived legal challenges thrown up by one of the losing bidders, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

But little has changed in Musk’s space ambitions. On Thursday night at SpaceX’s facility at the southernmost tip of Texas, Musk talked about his desire to get humanity to Mars and the importance of becoming a multi-planet species — ground he has covered many times in the past.

“We need to seize the opportunity and to do it as quickly as possible,” he said. “To be frank, civilization is feeling a little fragile.”

He made no mention in his prepared remarks of when Starship, his 40-story-tall spaceship and booster rocket that was assembled as the backdrop for his presentation, will be ready for an orbital launch attempt and whether it is on track to meet NASA’s goal of getting astronauts to the lunar surface by 2025.

In an answer to a question from an audience member, he said he had “no insight into where things stand” with the Federal Aviation Administration, which must grant SpaceX a license before it can launch Starship. There was a “rough indication” that might happen in March, he said.

“There might be a few bumps along the way, but we’ll get there,” he said of Starship’s schedule. “At this point, I feel highly confident we’ll make it to orbit this year.”

One of Starship’s biggest hurdles is an FAA assessment of how using the Boca Chica facility might affect the environment. The FAA moved the deadline for completing its environmental impact study from the end of 2021 to Feb. 18, in part because of the 18,000 public comments that had been filed on the plan — a huge influx both from supporters who believe in Musk’s vision that Starship will allow humanity to reach the moon and Mars, and from detractors who fear it will ruin a fragile ecosystem along a fragile coastline.

Musk painted himself as unconcerned about the delay. “I am optimistic that we will get approval,” he said. “Objectively I think this is something that is not harmful to the environment. … The reality is it would not have a significant impact.”

If the FAA concludes otherwise, he said, SpaceX has approval to launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla., if it has to.

SpaceX’s Texas facility, dubbed “Starbase,” has been utterly transformed in the years since Musk gave his last presentation here.

On Thursday, a Starship spacecraft stood stacked on top of a Super Heavy booster, a nearly 400-foot-tall tower of stainless steel gleaming in the winter sun. The first-stage booster has an astonishing 29 Raptor engines and is designed to deliver Starship to orbit and then fly back to its launchpad and be caught by a pair of metal arms that look like giant chopsticks.

The promise of the system has galvanized Musk’s obsessive fan base, who at times flock to SpaceX’s facility here, which sits next to a public road.

Musk has a tendency to be overly optimistic about the timeline for his ambitious projects. And when he feels his teams aren’t rising to meet his demanding timelines, he’ll let them know. In November, for example, he reportedly wrote an email to SpaceX employees complaining about the slow rate of progress in the development of its next-generation Raptor engine. “The Raptor production crisis is much worse than it seemed a few weeks ago,” he wrote. And he said the company faced a “genuine risk of bankruptcy if we cannot achieve a Starship flight rate of at least once every two weeks next year.”

That dire prediction was probably overblown, analysts have said, a way for Musk, a notoriously hard charger, to motivate his teams. But flying anything of Starship’s size is going to be a daunting challenge, and SpaceX faces additional layers of complexity: Beyond the lack of a license from the FAA, Starship will need to be refueled in orbit several times by tanker ships before making its way to the moon.

Not everyone is convinced that launching from southern Texas is a good idea. In a letter to the FAA, the Interior Department wrote that it has “remaining concerns” that the use of Starbase to launch Starship could adversely affect air quality, climate change and force the closure of wildlife preserves.

“Boca Chica is an important link of the Lower Rio Grande Valley ‘Wildlife Corridor,’” according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s website. “It connects habitat along the Gulf Coast to the Rio Grande and allows wildlife to travel unimpeded.” The agency notes that the Kemp’s ridley sea turtle, “the most critically endangered sea turtle in the world, comes ashore to nest on refuge beaches in the spring and summer.”

Many local officials, however, remain supportive because SpaceX is bringing jobs to a border area struggling with poverty and unemployment.

While the FAA conducts its review, NASA is charging ahead with its Artemis campaign to return astronauts to the moon. While Starship would ferry the astronauts to and from the lunar surface, the crew would be launched in an Orion capsule perched on top of the space agency’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket. Like Starship, it is massive and has never flown to space before. Unlike Starship, it is expendable — the core stage of the SLS will fall into the ocean after launch, never to be used again.

The program has suffered all sorts of setbacks and delays. But NASA is planning to roll the rocket, with the Orion stacked on top of it, to the launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida next month so that it could be fueled and technicians can simulate a countdown. It will then be rolled back into its assembly building for further tests. NASA hopes to launch it for the first time this spring. That mission would send the Orion capsule, without any astronauts on board, in orbit around the moon.

Astronauts would be on board the next launch, Artemis II, and would orbit the moon again, but not touch down. On the Artemis III mission, Starship would dock with Orion near the moon, and then ferry the astronauts to the surface before returning them to Orion, which would carry them back to Earth.

Starship also has some key tests coming up, pending the FAA’s approval. If the orbital launch attempt goes well, SpaceX intends to start flying it frequently. And it also intends an uncrewed test landing on the moon before landing astronauts there.