WASHINGTON — The Federal Aviation Administration has postponed a set of public hearings on an environmental review linked to SpaceX’s plans to increase the number of Starship launches from its South Texas facility.
The FAA announced Aug. 12 that it has called off a set of public hearings scheduled for two communities near SpaceX’s Starbase facility at Boca Chica, Texas, as well as online. The public hearings were intended gather input on a draft environmental assessment prepared for the FAA on increasing Starship launches from Starbase.
Two hearings were scheduled for Aug. 13 in South Padre Island, Texas, and two more Aug. 15 in Port Isabel, Texas, the two towns closest to Starbase. An additional virtual public meeting, scheduled for Aug. 20, has also been called off. The FAA said it will reschedule the meetings but did not offer a timeframe for doing so.
The FAA did not initially explain why it postponed the meetings. “The FAA is seeking additional information from SpaceX before rescheduling the public meetings,” the agency said late Aug. 12 in response to a SpaceNews inquiry.
The FAA published in July a draft of a “tiered” environmental assessment for Starship launches from Boca Chica. The report is an update of a 2022 assessment, which at the time examined the impacts of five Starship/Super Heavy launches and landings annually. The revised assessment examined increasing the number of launches and landings to 25 per year, as well as other upgrades to the vehicle like increased thrust.
The report did not make any recommendations on allowing the increase in launches or any environmental mitigations that would be required. Previous studies had not identified any significant environmental consequences but a 2022 assessment did require SpaceX to perform dozens of relatively minor mitigations to allow launches to take place.
The FAA’s announcement that it was postponing the public hearings coincided with a report by CNBC Aug. 12 that regulators had concluded that SpaceX was discharging industrial wastewater at Starbase without a permit. Those discharges were linked to the deluge system installed on the Starship launch pad after the vehicle’s first flight in April 2023 caused significant damage to the pad.
According to the report, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) issued a “notice of violation” to SpaceX last week about the wastewater discharges. That came after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued its own notice of violation in March, just before the third Starship/Super Heavy test flight.
“CNBC’s story on Starship’s launch operations in South Texas is factually inaccurate,” SpaceX said in a lengthy post on social media after the article’s publication. It said that TCEQ personnel had observed tests of the deluge system and that the system is covered by the “Texas Multi-Sector General Permit.” The company recently applied for an individual permit for the deluge system after consultation with the EPA after its notice of violation.
“Throughout our ongoing coordination with both TCEQ and the EPA, we have explicitly asked if operation of the deluge system needed to stop and we were informed that operations could continue,” the company stated, a sentence published in bold text in its post.
The CNBC article also stated that SpaceX, in its permit application to Texas regulators, said that mercury concentrations in one outfall location were more than 50 times limits set by the state for “acute aquatic toxicity.” The company, in its post, instead claimed that “all samples to-date have in fact shown either no detectable levels of mercury whatsoever or found in very few cases levels significantly below the limit the EPA maintains for drinking water.”
It is not clear what impact this will have on plans for SpaceX’s next Starship/Super Heavy test flight, the fifth for the vehicle. The company said Aug. 8 that both the booster and Starship upper stage are “ready to fly, pending regulatory approval.”
SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk said in a comment on social media Aug. 10 that the next Starship launch would be in “about 3 weeks.” However, Musk said in a July 5 post that the launch would take place “in 4 weeks,” or early August.
