Rocket Report: FAA eyes more Starbase traffic; India’s Skyroot snares US customer

Let us launch more, SpaceX asks FAA. Federal aviation regulators are reviewing a plan that could allow hundreds more Starship rocket launches and landings a year at SpaceX’s Starbase in South Texas, the San Antonio Express-News reports. The proposal calls for as many as 456 launches and 912 landings a year at the complex outside Brownsville, roughly 18 times the currently allowed 25 launches and 50 landings.

Starship recovery coming soon … The giant rockets have an upper stage, named Starship, and a lower stage booster, called Super Heavy. Both sections are expected to eventually land at Starbase, hence twice the number of landings. SpaceX has successfully landed boosters back at Starbase, but it has not attempted the feat with a Starship. That could happen as soon as the next Starship test flight later this year, according to Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO.

Ship 40 is back at Starbase. In other news at Starbase, SpaceX has returned the first Starship spacecraft to survive an ocean splashdown back to the South Texas launch site for inspection, Space.com reports. The rocket completed a trip halfway around the world in July before descending to a pinpoint splashdown in the Indian Ocean northwest of Australia. Surprisingly, the rocket survived splashdown without exploding or breaking apart, as SpaceX expects Starships to do after ocean landings. The company towed the rocket to calmer waters off Christmas Island, then loaded it onto a barge for the journey back to Texas.

Vertical again … SpaceX teams lifted Starship upright after unloading it from its transport ship, moving it inside Starbase’s Megabay hangar alongside a trio of its successor spacecraft awaiting their opportunities to fly to space. Inspections of the flight-proven Starship will “provide first-of-its-kind data on a flown Starship heatshield, Raptor engines, avionics, and more,” SpaceX wrote in a post on X.