NASA really doesn’t want SpaceX’s Starship to blow up on the launch pad at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Reuters reports — a potential disaster so severe it could cut off the United States from accessing the International Space Station.
The facilities in question, Launch Complex 39A, served as NASA’s “Moonport” to deliver astronauts to the lunar surface during the Apollo program. Now, it’s the only launch pad capable of sending astronauts to the ISS — on board SpaceX’s much smaller Crew Dragon spacecraft — from US soil.
Now, SpaceX wants to pick up where NASA left off in the 1970s and return astronauts to the Moon in the upcoming years with its nearly 400-feet-tall Starship and Super Heavy booster stack. But the risk catastrophe, it terms out, is palpable.
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