The Federal Aviation Administration issued a new license on Saturday allowing Elon Musk’s SpaceX company to launch its Starship rocket again from South Texas, and it included new requirements to limit the harm to birds’ nests and other wildlife in an adjacent state park and National Wildlife Refuge.
The action by the F.A.A., which came after weeks of pressure by Mr. Musk on the agency to speed up its latest review, allows Mr. Musk to go ahead with his next test of Starship, with a launch now set to take place as early as 8 a.m. Eastern time on Sunday.
So far, SpaceX has been required to obtain a license for each launch. With the latest license, the F.A.A. is allowing the company to launch more than once, unless it modifies its procedures.
Starship, the largest rocket ever built, has not yet carried any humans into space, as its reliability is still being assessed. But this is the spaceship that Mr. Musk is under contract to use to land NASA astronauts on the moon — and that he hopes to someday use to take humans to Mars.
But as prototypes and full-scale versions of the rocket have been tested at the company’s launch site at the edge of the Gulf of Mexico near the Mexican border in South Texas, there has been widespread evidence of environmental consequences to the region, as detailed in a New York Times investigation in July.
The report in The Times examined, in part, damage that a Starship launch in June caused to the fragile migratory bird habitat surrounding the launch site, including destroying eggs in nearby nests.
The New York Times
