![]() “We’re seeing up to a couple of launches per week from SpaceX. “NASA has been able to get a lot of bang for its buck using SpaceX as a commercial provider,” says de Leon. What’s more, SpaceX has consistently served the private and public sectors, with 216 launches of its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket since 2010, including 61 in 2022 alone. “You don’t have that low center of gravity.”īut NASA has faith in SpaceX-and not without justification: the company has made seven crewed flights to the ISS aboard its Crew Dragon spacecraft since 2020, and 27 uncrewed cargo runs to the station since 2012. “When you look at that huge thing on an unprepared terrain like it will be on the surface of the moon, it’s a little bit scary,” says Pablo de Leon, the chair of the department of space studies at the University of North Dakota. Starship is a different matter, potentially prone to tipping if its own four legs don’t set down on a flat surface. Dynetics’ and Blue Origin’s proposed landers are low-slung, four-legged machines like the old lunar module, with an equally low center of gravity, increasing the stability of the machine if it lands on uneven lunar terrain. Other space watchers questioned the choice too. The other two companies publicly griped that NASA should have selected at least two providers to build the HLS, as it did in 2014 when it awarded contracts to both Boeing and SpaceX to build vehicles to fly crew to the International Space Station (ISS). The company was awarded an exclusive contract to build the HLS, beating out two competitors for the coveted deal: Houston-based Dynetics and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s Kent, Washington-based Blue Origin. In April 2021, NASA selected the Starship upper stage as the vehicle that will serve as the program’s Human Landing System (HLS)-the 21st century version of the Apollo era’s lunar module. Much more important, though, is Starship’s role in NASA’s Artemis program. (The original launch date of Monday, April 17, announced in a tweet from SpaceX, was postponed due to unspecified technical problems in the first stage of the rocket.) On April 14, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) gave its long-awaited clearance for the launch, saying in a statement, “After a comprehensive license evaluation process, the FAA determined SpaceX met all safety, environmental, policy, payload, airspace integration, and financial responsibility requirements. And as early as Wednesday, April 19, the town will have distinguished itself as the place from which the tallest, most powerful rocket ever designed, SpaceX’s Starship, will blast off. Today, Boca Chica is where the future of human space flight is being shaped. Or that was about it-until nine years ago. ![]() ![]() Distinguished mostly by its proximity to the city of Brownsville, the county seat of Cameron County, Boca Chica was the site of the Civil War battle of Palmito Hill, is home to a state park, a public beach, and a nearby ship channel and, well, that’s about it. Time was, nobody gave much thought to the town of Boca Chica, a little community at the toe of Texas, hard up against the Gulf of Mexico. ![]()
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