[ptha]

From the article: That makes Starship, which conducted a successful flight to the edge of space last year, especially threatening to the contractors and their allies in Congress.

So far Starship has flown to 12.5 km [1], which seems to be a stretch to describe as "the edge of space" [2].

It seems like the FAA Environmental Assessment for the "SpacePort" at Boca Chica has been delayed again from Feb 28th, by a month to March 28th [3]. If they recommend a full Environmental review that will delay progress even further. I believe Elon mentioned in the recent Starship update that they will move Starship testing to Cape Canaveral which already has permissions to launch Starship there if this is required [4] [5], but that will require building out an orbital pad for Starship.

It will certainly be interesting to see how long it takes Starship to get to orbit. I would guess that the raptor 2 performance/reliability and also the heatshield performance will be significant challenges to overcome. When/if SpaceX do overcome them, the incumbents will be justified in "shitting the bed", as per the article.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_SpaceX_Starship_flight...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n_line#Interpre...

[3] https://www.faa.gov/space/stakeholder_engagement/spacex_star...

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3N7L8Xhkzqo (SpaceX Starship update)

[5] https://futurism.com/the-byte/spacex-starship-orbital-cape-c...

[martyvis]

The height reached was more of a limit imposed by FAA, and that SpaceX had more important things to demonstrate than to literally just burn more fuel and go straight up. I mean look at how they had to turn off engines as they ascended just to keep the velocity in check.

[maccam94]

The heat shield isn't a blocker for getting to orbit, it's only needed to recover the second stage. Musk thinks that the Florida launch site will be ready before the end of the year anyway (and sure, add a few months for Elon Time, but they've already built one of them so the timeline should be fairly well understood). The overall economics and reliability may take another year or two to really get dialed in.