SpaceX can launch its Starship megarocket from Florida pad, Air Force says

SpaceX just took a big step toward launching its Starship megarocket from Florida.

The U.S. Air Force has given SpaceX permission to develop Space Launch Complex-37 (SLC-37) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station as a launch site for Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built. All 11 of the giant vehicle’s test flights to date have flown from Starbase, SpaceX’s facility in South Texas.

SLC-37 could end up hosting up to 76 Starship launches and 152 landings every year, provided the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration determines that the airspace impacts aren’t too onerous.

The approval, delivered via a Nov. 20 Record of Decision (RoD), wraps up a long and drawn-out environmental review that included a series of public hearings.

Some people in those hearings raised concerns about the impact of Starship launches on the diverse flora and fauna of the Space Coast. In the RoD, Air Force officials said they will “implement mitigation measures to avoid, minimize or compensate for” any such environmental ill effects.

Those measures will help safeguard on-site populations of threatened and/or vulnerable species such as the southeastern beach mouse, Florida scrub-jay, tricolored bat and eastern indigo snake, according to the RoD.

SLC-37 was built to support NASA’s Apollo program, which put 12 people on the moon between 1969 and 1972. The site consists of two pads, A and B, though the former never hosted any launches.

SLC-37B served as the jumping-off point for eight Saturn I and Saturn IB missions from 1964 to 1968, the last of which launched the Apollo 5 mission to low Earth orbit. Pad B then lay fallow until 2002, when it began hosting launches of Delta IV rockets, the last of which flew from the site in April 2024.

SpaceX is next in line to use the facility. It plans to launch Starship from both SLC-37A and SLC-37B as well as historic Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, which is next door to Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

“With three launch pads in Florida, Starship will be ready to support America’s national security and Artemis goals as the world’s premiere spaceport continues to evolve to enable airport-like operations. We’d like to thank the Department of the Air Force (@usairforce), 45th Space Force (@SLDelta45), and U.S. Fish and Wildlife (@USFWS) for their effort on the environmental review,” SpaceX wrote in an X post on Monday (Dec. 1).

In that post, the company also said that Starship-related construction at SLC-37 has already begun.

Starship, a two-stage vehicle that stands more than 400 feet (122 meters) tall, is designed to be completely and rapidly reusable. SpaceX believes the vehicle will help humanity settle Mars and establish a footprint on the moon. As SpaceX noted in that X post, NASA is invested in the vehicle, choosing it as the first crewed lunar lander for its Artemis program of moon exploration.