SpaceX is expanding its Florida facilities to accommodate the Starship launch

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is expanding its facilities in Florida to make room for the space company’s forthcoming super heavy-lift launch vehicle dubbed Starship, according to a draft of the plans seen by Reuters on Friday. Starship, a 384-foot (117-meter) reusable two-stage rocket taller than the Statue of Liberty, is a central piece of Musk’s interplanetary space travel ambitions as well as U.S. space agency NASA’s goal to send humans to the moon again by 2024. The Starship rocket is expected to launch up to 24 times a year from SpaceX’s current flagship launchpad 39A, the draft of the company’s environmental assessment said. SpaceX did not specify in the report when it would reach that cadence, but Musk said in September 2018 he wanted to be conducting orbital flights with Starship in two to three years. SpaceX’s launchpad 39A would support NASA’s future moon missions from the same Kennedy Space Centre site used for the Apollo lunar missions a half-century ago. [caption id=“attachment_7110091” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”] Starship separating in space. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons/Flickr[/caption] “They’re moving very fast,” said Dale Ketcham, vice president of government relations at Space Florida, the state’s commercial space development agency. “This is actually getting closer to what Elon got into this business, to begin with. This is a fundamental infrastructure to get to Mars, the early stages of it.” SpaceX has also suffered a number of programme delays and mishaps over the years on its various space endeavours. In April, one of the company’s Crew Dragon capsules exploded on a test stand, raising fresh scheduling doubts over a flagship NASA astronaut taxi programme. Dozens of U.S.-based space companies have been scrambling to heed NASA’s goal of sending humans back to the lunar surface by 2024, an accelerated timeline set by Vice President Mike Pence in March. Separately, Boeing Co (BA.N) is developing NASA’s colossal Space Launch System to anchor the agency’s moon-to-Mars Artemis programme, though it is years behind schedule. SpaceX said in its draft environmental assessment that Starship will make return landings on the Air Force landing pad currently used for the company’s Falcon 9 boosters.