In her remarks to local officials in South Texas, Lueders said Starbase will remain SpaceX's "workhorse area" for Starship development and testing. Musk has said he envisions the Texas location as a research and development complex and Florida as an operational launch base.
"We will also need the Florida base to be able to do the number and sequencing of the missions. We're trying to figure out how to do the mix," Lueders said. "We're still working through this but ... we know Starbase is going to be the home of Starship."
There's currently no capacity to build Starships in Florida and no evidence of imminent construction of a Starship factory at Cape Canaveral.
The Cape Canaveral spaceport is a draw for almost every US launch company. Starship's arrival will "unlock a lot more potential at places like Cape Canaveral that are already world leaders in terms of space launch," said Rob Long, president and CEO of Space Florida, a state-backed enterprise established to attract aerospace business.
Eventually, SpaceX may build a rocket factory on Florida's Space Coast, but if Starships are really going to launch from the Kennedy Space Center in the next couple of years, the company will need to ship the 30-foot-diameter (9-meter) vehicles from the factory in South Texas. Officials haven't said how they will transport boosters and the ship 1,000 miles (1,600 km) across the Gulf of Mexico.
Whatever SpaceX decides, Long said Cape Canaveral is uniquely positioned for Starship. With a deepwater seaport, air, road, and rail connections, plus access to space, the region is home to the nation's only "quintemodal" port.
"I think that really leans into this thought of normalizing space launch as a true mode of transportation, just like air, land, or sea modes of transportation," he said.
SpaceX's shifting plans for Starship in Florida are not a big surprise to anyone who has watched the arc of the company's development. At one time, SpaceX acquired oceangoing oil rigs to convert them into mobile launch and landing pads for Starship. For now, SpaceX has dropped that idea.
The three Starship test flights over the last year have each been valuable learning exercises, influencing design changes that SpaceX will incorporate into future launch pads. In that context, SpaceX's decision to temporarily halt construction at LC-39A makes some sense.
SpaceX also abandoned a plan to build a Starship launch pad at an undeveloped site, known as Launch Complex 49 (LC-49), on the northern side of the Kennedy Space Center. In late 2021, NASA announced it was beginning the environmental assessment process for LC-49. Early this year, NASA said it suspended those plans.
Instead, SpaceX has proposed basing Starship flights at SLC-37, which sits on Space Force property. If SpaceX doesn't get approval to launch there, it proposed a backup option of building a brand new launch pad called SLC-50 just north of SLC-37.
With two launch pads at Starbase, plus LC-39A and SLC-37 in Florida, SpaceX would have four active Starship launch pads. This should be enough to support the kind of Starship launch rate SpaceX needs to achieve through the rest of this decade for test flights, lunar missions supporting NASA's Artemis program, and launches of Starlink broadband satellites.
Ultimately, if Musk's grandest ambitions for a Mars settlement become real, SpaceX probably needs a lot more launch pads.
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