The first orbital flight of SpaceX's Starship spacecraft will take place no earlier than March. According to Space. com, this is due to the fact that the United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has postponed the completion of the programmed environmental assessment (PEA) of the company's launch site in South Texas.

Now it will be completed no earlier than February 28. SpaceX previously planned to launch Starship in January-February.. This was possible provided the PEA was completed by December 31st as planned..

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The postponement is due to the " The FAA said it received 18,000 comments on the PEA draft, which was published in September..

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Starship is being developed as a ship to deliver cargo and people to the Moon, Mars and other deep space objects.. NASA has already signed a contract with the company to deliver people to the moon with its help as part of the Artemis program.

The craft consists of two fully reusable elements: a first stage booster called Super Heavy and a 50-meter-high spacecraft known as Starship.. Both will be powered by SpaceX's next-generation Raptor engine - six for Starship and around 30 for Super Heavy..

On the night of May 6, SpaceX successfully conducted a test flight of the Starship prototype.. The ship repeated the test program of the Starship SN8 and SN9 prototypes, which crashed during landing after a suborbital flight, as well as SN10, which exploded seven minutes after a successful landing due to the resulting damage..