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SpaceX Rivals Raise Concerns about Starship-Super Heavy Coming to Florida
SpaceX’s plan to launch its monstrous Starship-Super Heavy two-stage tandem from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center caught the attention — and concern — of two rival space companies that warn federal officials the up-to-492-foot-tall rocket will be too untested, too dangerous and too potentially disruptive for the nation’s busiest spaceport and the surrounding environment. United Launch Alliance and Blue Origin — which both have significant footprints on the Space Coast and view SpaceX as direct competition — have submitted written concerns to the Federal Aviation Administration. Phil Metzger is director of the Stephen W. Hawking Center for Microgravity Research & Education at the University of Central Florida. In an email, he said he thinks the ULA statement about Starship is fair, because it asks the FAA to do its job while noting potential impacts on the environment, neighboring communities, and launch operations of other companies at the Cape. “They noted that it is in the national interest to have multiple healthy launch companies for assured access to space so the operations of one company should not shut down its competitors. I think this is all legitimate and should be emphasized,” Metzger said. However, he said he thinks Blue Origin made “a serious mistake” by suggesting a cap on the Starship launch rate. “This would be the least creative and least helpful solution for potential problems at the Cape,” Metzger said.
Florida Today
What Will Emerge from the Wreckage of the Arecibo Telescope?
In a corner of his laboratory, Professor Abel Méndez, director of the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico, keeps one of his most cherished mementos related to the Arecibo radio telescope. Simple sheets of paper hanging on the wall show the schedule where astronomers and scientists from all over the world were assigned blocks of two to four hours to use the telescope and listen to the universe. Méndez’s initials are still there: AM. For more than 50 years, Arecibo was the world’s largest single-dish telescope. And starting in 2017, Méndez made frequent visits to the Arecibo Observatory, about a 30-minute drive from the university, to focus on the stars. His goal? To explore the habitability of exoplanets. “There are stars that are very active, such as red dwarfs, and others like the sun, which you could say are rather quiet,” he says. “I used the radio telescope to observe which stars were the most stable because those are the ones that planets with a more habitable atmosphere are likely to be around,” he adds. In part, Arecibo helped him understand what to prioritize in his research. Until December 1, 2020, when the telescope collapsed. Luisa Fernanda Zambrano, a Colombian planetary scientist who had observed and classified asteroids with the Arecibo radio telescope since 2013, remembers that painful day: “I cried, my team cried, we were all crying,” she says from her office in the United States, where she works with the Florida Space Institute at the University of Central Florida.
Connecticut Public