By Steve Holland and Joey Roulette
WEST PALM BEACH, Florida (Reuters) – President-elect Donald Trump may be planning to attend a SpaceX rocket launch in person in Texas on Tuesday, another sign of his close ties with the company’s billionaire founder and CEO Elon Musk.
The Federal Aviation Administration on Monday issued “Temporary flight restrictions for VIP Movement” over Brownsville, Texas, in the type of practice that usually precedes a high-profile visit.
Flight restrictions in place over Trump’s oceanfront property in Palm Beach, Florida, will be lifted temporarily during the same timeframe.
The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment about the president-elect’s plans.
A close friendship has developed between Trump and Musk, the Tesla CEO and world’s richest man who founded SpaceX in 2002. Musk frequently advises Trump, and has stayed a lengthy stretch at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach.
Musk was part of the Trump entourage who traveled from Florida to New York on Saturday to an Ultimate Fighting Championship event.
The launch will be SpaceX’s sixth test flight to space for Starship, the company’s next-generation rocket system at the center of Musk’s goal to send humans and cargo to Mars.
NASA plans to use Starship to land humans on the moon this decade under its Artemis program, an effort that is expected to more heavily involve Mars missions and favor SpaceX and Musk’s cosmic plans under Trump.
Using large arms attached to a launch tower, SpaceX will again try to catch Starship’s 233 foot (71 metres)-tall first stage “Super Heavy” booster roughly 10 minutes after it lifts off, a novel reusability technique that intrigued Trump the first time SpaceX tried it in October.
“Did you see the way that sucker landed today?” Trump said at a rally after the Starship test.
(Reporting by Steve Holland and Joey Roulette; Editing by Stephen Coates)
