SpaceX banking on Starship launches from South Texas to ramp up deployment of Starlink satellites

Elon Musk’s private space company this month has been conducting static fire tests — full dress rehearsals for a rocket — in preparation for the massive Starship’s long-sought first trip into orbit from Boca Chica. It’s also been raising billions of dollars to fund the Starship and Starlink projects.

While Musk has been widely quoted about his dreams of colonizing Mars and taking people and cargo to the moon, his company’s immediate plans are in low earth orbit, with a satellite business that’s taking an increasingly Texas flavor.

“The big secret that is not so secret is that they now have actual Starlink satellites there in Boca Chica and have loaded them in to SN24 like a giant PEZ dispenser,” an ex- SpaceX employee said this week, referring by number to a Starship that’s been on the launch pad since early last month. “On the first orbital launch from Boca, Elon wants to deploy satellites on its very first test mission, which is very ambitious.”

The former employee spoke on condition of anonymity to share knowledge of the company’s plans.

In a tweet early this month, Musk said “a *successful* orbital flight is probably between 1 and 12 months from now.”

SpaceX has long touted Starship’s potential to ramp up its Starlink network. In 2019, Gwynne Shotwell, president and CEO, said that while its Falcon 9 rocket could launch 60 Starlink satellites per batch, Starship could “take 400 satellites at a time” into orbit.

Since 2019, the company has deployed thousands of satellites into low-Earth orbit to create its planned constellation of tens of thousands of orbiting transmitters beaming internet service to customers from 100 miles above the planet. The Starlink service is available in parts of Texas, and Musk recently said it’s now active in Ukraine.

In anticipation of the orbital launch, SpaceX fans have posted articles, tweets and YouTube videos about Starlink sightings at the Starship compound.

“The YouTube fanboy videos are guessing correctly,” the ex-SpaceX employee said. “But the average Joe on the street certainly isn’t aware of it.”

In the meantime, SpaceX is continuing to use the Falcon 9 to grow its satellite business. Last week, the reusable rocket carried 46 Starlink satellites to low-earth orbit from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. It was the company’s tenth flight of the Falcon 9 booster, including two Starlink missions.

SpaceX, which is headquartered in Hawthorne, Calif., has built a launch facility in Boca Chica it calls Starbase, and a rocket testing facility in McGregor, near Waco.

While the private company continues to manufacture its Starlink units in Redmond, Washington, east of Seattle, it’s also apparently preparing to start making them in Texas.

“To keep up with global demand, SpaceX is breaking ground on a new, state of the art manufacturing facility in Austin, TX,” the company said in a March 2021 job posting seeking an engineer for its Starlink satellite internet division.

Tuesday, SpaceX’s website had three job openings in Austin including a senior application software engineer, facilities engineer and development test engineer.

“Our team is currently creating and evolving systems to enable rapid build and reuse of Starship as well as designing the next generation manufacturing software that will be used in high throughput factories for Starlink,” according to the software engineer posting. “Other applications range from platforms that support concurrent streams of data from many always-on assets to manage the world’s largest satellite constellation to public facing systems where customers can join our Starlink network globally.”

Another four of the company’s 120 jobs postings for Brownsville made references to Starlink.

Starship prototypes went through five suborbital tests in the spring of 2021. Until earlier this year, though, the engines had fallen silent.

The static fire tests being conducted as recently as last week on the Starship on the launch pad at Starbase are a sign SpaceX is advancing toward launching the vehicle into orbit from the Boca Chica site.

Last week’s successful tests came nearly a month after an explosion rocked the site while firing the rocket’s engines, creating a fireball that sent plumes of smoke into the skies above nearby Boca Chica Beach.

“Yeah, actually not good. Team is assessing damage,” Musk, founder of SpaceX, said in tweet on July 11.

Musk, who flew to Starbase that night, said problems arose from testing all the Raptor 2 engines on the booster at once. “This particular issue, however, was specific to the engine spin start test (Raptor has a complex start sequence),” he said. “Going forward, we won’t do a spin start test with all 33 engines at once.”

SpaceX managed to save the hardware, he said, and the booster was inspected.

The explosion came about a month after the Federal Aviation Administration concluded an environmental review of SpaceX’s plans for orbital launches from the 47-acre facility, issuing a finding of “no significant impact.” The FAA said it would require SpaceX to take more than 75 actions to mitigate environmental impacts before issuing the operator license needed to launch from the site.

The company hasn’t yet obtained a license from the FAA.

Last week, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission suggested another Starship launch date as it said SpaceX could pursue “radio-spectrum” tests between Sept. 9 and March 1. The FCC granted special temporary authority for the company to conduct “experimental orbital demo and recovery test of the Starship test vehicle from Boca Chica TX,” according to an FCC filing.

“The radio spectrum license is just to let FCC and FAA know that they will be communicating radio signals on frequencies throughout the upper levels of the stratosphere and possibly beyond,” the ex- SpaceX employee said. “They need FCC approval so as not to conflict with any possible telecommunications satellite.”

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