Florida Starship launch site moves forward
Starship is one step closer to launching from Cape Canaveral following a key Air Force approval.
The new complex will provide easier, wider access to launch than its facility on the southern tip of Texas in Boca Chica.
Anthony Colangelo, host of the podcast Main Engine Cutoff, said that the Cape is an ideal location for the high number of flights SpaceX needs for its Starship program.
“Getting a spot where they can fly so many times is really important, especially for a vehicle like Starship that not only needs to launch, but then it needs to continually launch, fuel up to refuel depots in orbit to then get refueled and fly elsewhere in the solar system,” Colangelo said.
“They're talking thousands of times a year to do anything interesting. Their roadmap requires way more flights than most vehicles, and so they need something like Florida that's able to handle that kind of cadence.”
The launchpad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station will replace the former Delta IV Heavy facility. The remaining structure will give SpaceX a strong foundation to build on, as the Delta IV Heavy had been the largest operational rocket before it was surpassed by SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy. The new space will give the company an opportunity for quicker and smoother testing.
“Based on the documentation filed, they'll be able to support about two and a half fillings of the vehicle [with fuel] with the amount of storage that they're putting on each pad, which is more than they're able to do in Texas,” Colangelo said. “They don't have to refill their tanks before they try again. There's a little bit of reserve there, so it should allow them to be smoother through operations.”
Starship will take NASA astronauts to the lunar surface in future Artemis missions, but the program has hit a snag. A COPV, a pressured vessel holding fuel, exploded on the next iteration of Starship during testing in November. This adds another setback to a year full of Starship failures and delays.
“They're moving on to this [version three] vehicle, that is the one that's supposed to be able to test orbital refilling and a lot of these new advanced things they need to do. Hopefully they still are able to fly early in 2026 and get that first launch underway,” Colangelo said.
Sparks fly on Mars
NASA’s Perseverance rover found lightning on Mars.
One of the instruments on the rover, SuperCam, picked up evidence using its microphone of lighting on the surface during a windstorm known as a dust devil.
Amy Williams, an astrobiologist and associate professor at the University of Florida, said the “lightning” was akin to the static electricity on Earth.
“The cool thing that the microphone can do is actually pick up on these little snaps and pop sounds. We were able to correlate this with electrostatic discharge,” Williams said. “These measurements that told us, ‘Oh my gosh, we're getting like static electricity as these dust devils move over the rover.’”
Dust devils, even electric ones, don’t pose a threat to the rovers. No storm has interfered with onboard electronics and scientists have continued advancing the grounding practices to mitigate any possible issue. In fact, they can be helpful -- the storms clean off Martian dust on the surface of the rovers.
“They were actually the saving grace for the Mars exploration rover Spirit and Opportunity, because they were solar powered. It was a sort of cleaning service to remove dust from the solar panels on those vehicles,” Williams said. “On Perseverance and Curiosity, now we have a nuclear power source, and so we don't need the solar panels, but you do accumulate a lot of dust on the rover deck.”
Communication black out
It will soon be impossible to talk to the Martian rovers – albeit temporarily. Mars’ conjunction with the sun will last a few weeks. The sun blocks the Earth from beaming signals to the planet -- cutting communication. Despite the ability to phone home, Curiosity and Perseverance will still be hard at work. The two will sit still and capture the weather on the surface of Mars overtime.
"You can't really do a whole heck of a lot, but we are able to use this opportunity as an environmental monitoring time. If you can set the cameras in such a way that you can take an image of the same spot, you can perform detection observations,” Williams said. “The cool thing about this particular holiday, plus conjunction timeframe, it's going to be about a month, and that's actually a pretty decent amount of time on Mars to be able to look at any potential change detection.”
The pair will resume their exploration after the signal is restored in the new year by looking at Mars’ ancient terrain, subsurface environments and possible habitable zones.
“Curiosity is still working in what we've called the boxwork area, that place that's sort of a mix of these ridges and hollow areas. We are just completing one coupled observation of a ridge and a hollow and trying to understand, why are they different? Why do they look different? Are they chemically different? We're going to be working on processing the data over the holiday,” Williams said. “Then, with Perseverance, we are roving to the west toward this place called Lac de Charmes, which should have all of these ancient Noachian terrains.
