FAA gives SpaceX the nod for Starship Flight 9 but doubles the danger zone The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has given SpaceX the go-ahead to launch Starship Flight 9, but has nearly doubled the size of the vehicle's Aircraft Hazard Area (AHA). SpaceX's Starship exploded during the two preceding flights, showering the Turks & Caicos Islands with debris and causing aircraft to be diverted. …
Airlines fly through the hazard zone at their own risk, that is the point of the zone. The FAA is saying that this area of airspace might need to be closed with no notice on a given date, and that airlines take the risk of needing to divert if they fly though it and it gets activated.
The alternative is for the FAA to just close the airspace.
No it's not, no more than the western half of the Atlantic (Shanwick) is Irish airspace, but if you ignore the internationally agreed control of that airspace and crash your plane into another or fly into a high risk published area and bad things happen to you, you'd better have a good explanation ready :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanwick_Oceanic_Control
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Civil_Aviation_Organization
NAV Canada controls the Eastern half of the Atlantic,
A nice map of the internationally agreed flight information regions.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/m3n84s/map_of_the_worlds_flight_information_regions_firs/#lightbox
this will only get worse if regulation gets lighter because the courts might decide to take it up
Musk doesn't care, he can afford enough lawyers that anyone trying to sue over a piece of rocket falling on their house and killing grandma will go broke trying. If they're from another country he'll get Trump to threaten tariff increases unless their government puts pressure on them to drop the suit and accept a $1000 check and "sorry not sorry" fake apology.
"Highway to the danger zone"
"Ride into the danger zone"
Hopefully it will go better this time. The last two complete failures of ship were more than a little concerning. At least the booster and catching the booster seems to be progressing well. When they first announced they were going to catch the booster I thought it was probably going to fail due to the complexity of the task. SpaceX has managed to far surpass my expectations. This bodes well for fixing ship's problems.
Interestingly they are claiming the second failure, even though it was at roughly the same point in time in the flight, was from a different source.
"The most probable root cause for the loss of Starship was identified as a hardware failure in one of the upper stage’s center Raptor engines that resulted in inadvertent propellant mixing and ignition."
And
"While the failure manifested at a similar point in the flight timeline as Starship’s seventh flight test, it is worth noting that the failures are distinctly different. The mitigations put in place after Starship’s seventh flight test to address harmonic response and flammability of the ship’s attic section worked as designed prior to the failure on Flight 8."
https://www.spacex.com/updates/
UPDATE
May 28
“The flight started smoothly, but Starship encountered some issues in orbit. The first-stage Super Heavy booster exploded shortly before its expected splashdown, and fuel leaks on the upper-stage vehicle caused it to spin uncontrollably before its planned re-entry through Earth's atmosphere.”
I understand that. But what I don't understand is : how is the next starship supposed to reach orbit with the current settings ? If they're not reaching orbit with an empty payload, how on Earth are they going to get enough momentum to reach orbital velocity with 50t of payload ?
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