SpaceX Is Pushing to Quickly Launch Another Starship, NASA Says

“As of today, SpaceX is still saying that they think it will take at least two months to rebuild the launchpad and, concurrently, about two months to have their second vehicle ready,” Mr. Nelson said.

SpaceX didn’t respond to a request for comment. 

The Elon Musk -led company, along with local officials, regulatory and environmental agencies, has been reviewing flight data and assessing damage after the inaugural flight of a rocket that SpaceX has called the most powerful ever built.

Starship, which includes a booster called Super Heavy and a spacecraft stacked on its top for the first phase of flight, is designed to handle deep-space missions and satellite launches, including for the company’s own Starlink internet business, executives have said. NASA has hired the company to create a Starship variant for a planned astronaut moon landing. 

Illustration: Jordan Kranse

The first Starship test flight ended after about four minutes, when SpaceX’s flight-termination system destroyed the vehicle. While the explosion in the air captured public attention, Mr. Musk said before the flight that destroying the company’s launchpad was one of his top worries. 

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Wednesday that the launch portion of the flight spread debris over 385 acres of SpaceX and state park land. It also started a 3.5-acre fire, the agency said. The company’s pad is located on a beach on the Gulf of Mexico, east of Brownsville, Texas.

The Fish and Wildlife Service is responsible for overseeing lands that are part of the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge and the public beach adjacent to the SpaceX site.

Fish and Wildlife staffers documented “numerous large concrete chunks, stainless steel sheets, metal and other objects hurled thousands of feet away along with a plume cloud of pulverized concrete that deposited material up to 6.5 miles northwest of the pad site,” the agency said.

If SpaceX is able to repair the pad and prepare another rocket for a second flight attempt within roughly two months, the company would still need permission from the Federal Aviation Administration to try to fly again. A spokesman for the FAA, which regulates commercial-space launches, declined to comment on when any second flight attempt might occur. 

“Safety will dictate the timeline,” he said. Some mishap investigations might conclude in a matter of weeks, but more complex ones could take several months, the agency’s spokesman said.

Not long after the launch on April 20, Mr. Musk said he expected to try to fly again within a few months, but later said the company could be ready within one to two months. 

Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for the Hawthorne, Calif.-based company, has considered adding additional ground infrastructure at the Texas site to handle launches, according to the FAA’s environmental assessment of the Starship project. 

Mr. Musk, the founder and chief executive of SpaceX, recently said the company had started work to add a large, water-cooled steel plate underneath a mount for Starship at the pad. The company didn’t complete that effort before the first launch, and incorrectly believed a concrete material at the pad would make it through the blastoff, he said.

“The force of the engines when they throttled up may have shattered the concrete, rather than simply eroding it,” he said in a tweet about the first Starship launch.

Write to Micah Maidenberg at [email protected]