The people have spoken about SpaceX's plans to launch its Super Heavy Starship from Florida — and they have a lot to say.
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has concluded a series of public meetings as part of its draft environmental impact statement (EIS) process for approving Starship liftoffs from NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) on Florida's Space Coast.
The hearings, which included in-person sessions at KSC and nearby Cape Canaveral, were designed to collect public input before the FAA finalizes its environmental review and decides whether or not to grant SpaceX a license for Florida Starship launches. The agency emphasized that the completion of the EIS doesn't guarantee approval — SpaceX must also meet safety and financial requirements — but construction of a new Starship tower and infrastructure has been underway at KSC's Launch Complex-39A (LC-39A) for more than a year, and not all of the area's residents are happy about it.
While the FAA says that risks to public safety and property are low, the scale and frequency of Starship operations would mark a dramatic shift for the Space Coast, raising questions about how the surrounding communities, environment and infrastructure would adapt.
Starship is SpaceX's next-generation, liquid-oxygen/liquid-methane-fueled heavy lift launch vehicle. In Starship's final version, its stacked Super Heavy booster and Ship upper stage will stand nearly 500 feet (150 meters) tall over KSC's coastline and produce more than 16 million pounds of thrust using 33 Raptor engines at liftoff. Both stages are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, a key breakthrough that SpaceX thinks will be revolutionary.
Company founder and CEO Elon Musk views Starship as the Mars spacecraft that will make human life multiplanetary, ferrying up to a million people to the Red Planet by the 2060s. In the near term, Starship will be used to launch SpaceX's increasingly large Starlink internet satellite megaconstellation and other customer payloads, as well as crewed missions to Earth orbit and the moon.
Starship is central to NASA's Artemis 3 mission, which is designed to land astronauts on the lunar surface for the first time since Apollo. NASA has contracted Starship as the Human Landing System (HLS) for the mission, tapping the spacecraft to ferry astronauts to the moon's south polar region. Currently, the space agency is targeting 2027 to launch Artemis 3.
To accomplish this, SpaceX needs to graduate Starship from its development-and-test phase, which is centered at the company's south Texas Starbase manufacturing facility, and begin operational launches at LC-39A.
According to the draft EIS, SpaceX is seeking approval for up to 44 launches and landings of Starship and Super Heavy from the launch complex each year, with touchdowns being dispersed between returns to the Cape or droneship landings in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans.
SpaceX is already on a yearly cadence of more than 100 Falcon 9 rocket launches from Florida, each of which requires multiple beach closures and safety zones that disrupt maritime and air traffic routes. Starship's significantly larger size means those zones will expand, and the safety of, and impacts to, residents in the area are being put under a microscope.
During the public hearings, some residents and community members expressed strong concerns about the scale of the proposal. The FAA's in-person meetings consisted of a prerecorded video presentation but did not permit time for comments to be made publicly. Instead, the FAA hired a stenographer to type people's dictated statements and provided addresses for people to send their input. A Sept. 3 meeting held digitally over Zoom, however, did allow time for the public to make their voices heard, offering three minutes for anyone who wanted to speak.
The FAA's analysis notes that Starship operations could require more than 60 closures annually of Playalinda Beach — a public beach that's part of the Canaveral National Seashore — as well as frequent maritime and airspace restrictions that may delay flights from Florida airports by 40 minutes to two hours.
John Tiliacos is the chief operating officer at Tampa International Airport. He commented during the Zoom meeting that Starship will cause delays to flights across nearly the entire state of Florida. "There is the potential that there's going to be significant impact to commercial aviation and the traveling public," he said. "That's something that certainly the FAA needs to give consideration to and, frankly, come up with a plan to mitigate."
Noise modeling shows that Starship could wake 10% to 14% of residents during nighttime launches and up to 42% during Super Heavy booster landings, which take place about several minutes after liftoff. For people living in mobile homes and campers, those rates rise to as high as 82%.
While the FAA projects a low probability of structural damage outside KSC, noise levels within Merritt Island and Cape Canaveral could occasionally exceed thresholds to cause minor cosmetic building damage. They estimate a 1-10,000 chance of small windows breaking from sonic boom pressures associated with Starship and Super Heavy landings.
The FAA also completed a health risk analysis to assess the dangers of hearing loss from such events and found it to be minimal, though the draft EIS acknowledges that repeated nighttime awakenings could cause significant annoyance and compatibility issues for residential land use.
Residents spoke up about the FAA's noise figures, saying projections don't take deeper human health concerns into consideration. Robyn Memphis, a graduate student in neuroscience and psychology, cautioned that the estimated awakenings from launch noise and sonic booms could carry lasting consequences: "Chronic sleep disruption is not just inconvenient," she said. "This is directly linked to depression, anxiety … cardiovascular disease, even suicide risk. And being in Florida, we have many veterans and trauma survivors in the community."
Ken Kremer, a Titusville resident, chemist, and member of the news media, told Space.com that the plan risks alienating locals if beach access is repeatedly cut off for launches and scrubs. "The FAA and SpaceX need to be mindful of the local community, because we want to get people on board with space … and the way they have it right now, they're kind of antagonizing a lot of people," he said. The FAA's 60-closure estimate equates to nearby beaches closing for a cumulative two full months per year.
More than just the local population, many worry how Starship operations will affect tourism, a major contributor to the Space Coast's economy. Christina Fisher, a Brevard County resident, pointed to the reality of frequent launch delays, warning that closures would extend well beyond the estimated schedule. "It's going to create an immovably large number of days of beach closures for Playalinda and Canaveral National Seashore, because we all know every rocket launch gets slipped 20 times."
Lisa Mickey, who is involved with several conservation nonprofits in Volusia County, warned that the ecosystem and tourism draw of the region could both suffer. "When you talk about the animals that live here, the health of the estuary, the cleanliness of our beaches … there is a certain quality of life here."
"[The Indian River Lagoon] considered the most biologically diverse estuary in North America," Mickey said, citing the more than 4,000 species that call the area home. "People come and take fishing guided tours, people take ecotours and kayak tours. This area generates a lot of money, a lot of tourism."
Blair Wiggins worked as a fishing guide on the Space Coast's Indian River Lagoon during the space shuttle program. He recalls wildlife reacting strongly to the shuttles' widespread vibrations. "The noise and vibrations … kept the fish down for a good day, day and a half … the birds would scatter, they wouldn't come back," Wiggins said.
Some people had a more optimistic outlook, however. Kelly San Antonio, an environmental scientist at Bethune-Cookman University, noted her team's research studying vegetation around existing active launch pads. Their findings suggest that methane-fueled rockets may prove less damaging to vegetation than legacy solid rocket boosters: "Surprisingly, the impact … while detectable, was on a smaller scale than the solid rocket engine vehicles."
Canaveral National Seashore receives more than a million visitors each year. Some of those beachgoers flock to Playalinda, specifically, for its remote setting and … openness. Erich Schuttauf, executive director of the American Association for Nude Recreation, said that restricting Playalinda Beach would displace regular (non-nude) visitors into neighboring Volusia County, which he predicted would cause conflicts in nude sections of the beach between locals and newcomers.
Schuttauf was not the only nudist on the Sept. 3 Zoom call. Deborah Sue Stevens, calling in from California, said places like Playalinda are crucial for people who travel to places where public nudity is legal. And there are a lot of them, according to Stevens. "It's probably a quarter million people that travel and think like I do, who look for destinations that are beautiful and surrounded by like-minded people," she said.
Max West didn't agree. West says he plans to move to Florida to photograph Starship launches. "I'm not going to say that there is zero environmental impact there," he said, but added there might have to be some "little sacrifices" along the way. "The turtles and the nudists will have to migrate," West said. "That's the cost that you have to pay for this incredible stuff that's happening."
Other commenters pointed out the potential effects at nearby Port Canaveral, which hosts up to 10 ships per day, and millions of tourists year-round.
"You've got the port, the second-busiest cruise terminal in the world," Kremer pointed out. "You don't want to disrupt all of that." He noted that maritime exclusion zones would overlap with areas heavily trafficked by cruise ships and cargo vessels.
Bob Zales, executive director of the Southeastern Fisheries Association, described direct losses for commercial fishermen who already work around launch windows. "Because of the launch times they have, they're restricted from getting to their fishing grounds," he said. After restrictions are lifted, Zales said, pieces of rocket debris get caught in nets, tearing them and further eating away at valuable time. "They lose income from having to repair those," Zales said. "They lose time from shrimping. So there's a big economic loss here."
Debris that doesn't get tangled in fisherman nets is doing its own harm, according to Mike Merryfield, owner of Wild Ocean Seafood in Cape Canaveral. "We still don't have a resolution on how to get that debris picked up and collected and removed from the bottom of the ocean," he said.
It's worth noting that, while Starship has exploded multiple times during test flights from Texas, the Falcon 9, SpaceX's only rocket currently launching from Florida, has exploded fewer than five times out of hundreds of Space Coast launches. Kremer suggested that SpaceX keep Starship in Texas until the company gets all the bugs figured out.
"They need to perfect this rocket," Kremer said. "They can't be blowing the rocket up like they did on the three previous flights, and expect people to welcome them with open arms and be happy about that."
Kremer said he's concerned about a Starship accident damaging LC-39A, the site which launched Apollo 11 and the first men to walk on the moon, the Skylab space station and the first, as well as many other space shuttle missions. "The proposal at 39A I don't really care for myself ... if that rocket it does come back [uncontrolled], that would destroy the historic Launch Complex-39A, where shuttle and Apollo astronauts launched from," he said.
Kremer pointed out an alternative, which SpaceX is also considering. "That's pad 37 (SLC-37), which is under the Space Force control. If they go from there, the impacts on at least Playalinda beach would be very much minimized," he said.
The FAA included SLC-37 as part of a "Reasonably Foreseeable Future Actions scenario" in part of its draft EIS. SpaceX also posted an animated video of two Starship rockets occupying the pad on the company's X account.
Space Launch Complex 37 has a storied history in spaceflight, and will soon be part of launching Starship from Florida pic.twitter.com/cFQnUZXNYTAugust 26, 2025
Longtime Brevard resident Lori Guisewite, a NASA Social alum and real estate professional, tied the debate to patterns she's seen in the housing market, warning that SpaceX's expansion could echo what she called "shameful" land grabs in Brownsville, Texas: "They overtook the area, altered the legislation, the laws. Now they get to make their own laws," she told Space.com.
SpaceX currently launches the Falcon 9 from two separate pads in Florida: LC-39A and SLC-40 (as well as Vandenberg Space Force Base in California). Until recently, SLC-40 had been licensed for up to 50 launches per year. Recent upgrades to that pad's facilities, though, prompted SpaceX to apply for an increase to that number, which the FAA announced Sept. 2 it will approve for up to 120.
Brad Whitmore said he lives about 20 miles (32 kilometers) from the Cape's launch facilities. "It's not uncommon at all for the windows in my house to shake for two minutes … and I've seen as much as four," he said. "With this great increase in launches of Falcon 9 and bringing in a rocket with approximately four times as many engines, I can interpolate that this is going to get a whole lot more interesting. The noise and vibration in our area is currently very significant."
Others voiced support for SpaceX's plans, eager to welcome Starship to the Space Coast. Evan Fine, a 21-year-old aspiring law student, spoke in favor of approving launches, arguing that rejecting the plan would halt progress. "Accepting the no-action alternative to this EIS will only result in stagnation, and the stagnation of achievements and technology go hand in hand with the stagnation of culture, national will and determination," he said.
The FAA will accept public comments on the draft EIS through Sept. 22 before preparing a final version later this year. Locals wishing to add their voice can submit comments electronically at www.regulations.gov, using Docket ID FAA-2024-1395, or through the mail, addressed to Ms. Eva Long, FAA Environmental Protection Specialist, c/o Leidos, 2877 Guardian Lane, Virginia Beach, VA 23452.
A final "Record of Decision" is expected in Winter 2025, which will determine whether SpaceX receives the license to begin Starship launches from Florida.
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