The most powerful rocket ever flown is getting a second home. In January 2026, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) published its Final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for SpaceX’s Starship-Super Heavy at Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A), Kennedy Space Center, Florida — the document that clears the environmental path for the world’s most powerful launch system to fly from the historic pad. It is a milestone measured less in spectacle than in scale — and the numbers inside it are extraordinary.
The Machine, As Filed With the Government
The numbers in the FAA’s filing describe a system sized for the future, not the prototype flying today. The EIS’s Starship-Super Heavy is 121.9 metres (about 400 feet) tall, with a diameter of 9 metres (29.5 feet), and it stacks a 69.3-metre booster under a 52.6-metre ship. It carries up to 7,897,000 kilogrammes of propellant in the booster alone, with a sea-level design thrust of 77,610 kiloNewtons — about 17.4 million pounds of force at liftoff — from 35 Raptor engines on the booster and 9 on the ship: 44 engines in all. At full load, the combined stack weighs roughly 5,605,000 kilogrammes, and both stages offer vertical take off and landing capability, burning liquid oxygen and liquid methane: the methalox combination SpaceX chose so propellant can one day be manufactured on Mars.
For comparison, SpaceX’s current public Starship configuration flies 33 Raptors on the booster and 6 on the ship, and the company’s Raptor 3 — the production engine unveiled in August 2024 — is rated at 280 tonnes of thrust, a 350-second specific impulse and a mass of just 1,525 kg. The EIS configuration, at 35 and 9 engines, is the growth version: the document regulators are clearing is bigger than the rocket the public has seen fly. The supporting noise study models the full operating rhythm at LC-39A — orbital launches, return-to-launch-site landings of both vehicles, sonic booms, and static fire tests in which all 35 booster engines fire for 15 seconds at a time — on the order of 110 daytime operations a year.
Why a Paper Document Moves the Business
An Environmental Impact Statement is not a launch license, and SpaceX still needs the FAA’s vehicle operator license for LC-39A operations. But in the American regulatory sequence, the Final EIS is the heavy lift. It means the environmental review — noise, sonic booms, wildlife, airspace, the surrounding communities of the Space Coast — has been studied, published and opened to the record. What remains is process, not open-ended uncertainty. For a company planning billions in infrastructure, that distinction is everything: capital gets committed when the regulatory path becomes a timeline instead of a question mark.
The location multiplies the value. LC-39A is the most storied pad in human spaceflight — Apollo 11 left for the Moon from it, and the Space Shuttle fleet flew from it for three decades. SpaceX already launches Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy there under lease. Adding Starship turns Kennedy into the second pillar of the Starship programme beside Starbase, Texas — and the Florida coast has been watching the idea approach for years, as our earlier coverage of the Florida debate over Starship noise and operations shows. A Final EIS means that debate now has a definitive technical document at its centre.
Two Coasts, One Launch System
Strategically, LC-39A gives Starship what no single site can: redundancy and cadence. Two launch coasts mean weather on one side of the Gulf rarely stops the whole programme, different orbital inclinations are easier to serve, and NASA’s own backyard gets direct access to the vehicle that is contracted to return astronauts to the lunar surface under Artemis. It also anchors a second industrial cluster — integration towers, propellant plants, refurbishment halls — in a state that has been building launch infrastructure for seventy years. SpaceX’s ambition has always been airline-like operations, and airlines need more than one hub; the catch-tower choreography SpaceX is proving — the subject of our report on Starship’s next giant leap toward full reusability — only pays off commercially when flight rate follows.
What to Watch Next
The milestones from here are concrete: the FAA’s Record of Decision on the Final EIS, the vehicle operator license for LC-39A, the completion of the Starship launch mount and integration tower at the pad, and the first Florida static fires of a 35-engine Super Heavy. Each one converts a line in a government PDF into hardware on the coast. The January 2026 Final EIS will not make headlines the way a launch does — but in the business of spaceflight, this is what the runway to those launches actually looks like: 44 engines’ worth of thrust, documented, studied and cleared to move forward.
Source: FAA, “Final Environmental Impact Statement — SpaceX Starship-Super Heavy Launch Vehicle at Launch Complex 39A, Kennedy Space Center, Florida,” January 2026 (Volume II, Appendix C1 noise report, KBR Inc.) — read the official document (PDF). Engine configuration and thrust figures as filed in the EIS; current configuration and Raptor 3 figures from SpaceX’s public specifications.
