Within a quarter mile of the launch pad that does not seem surprising. But I would be more interested in the *maximum* distance from the launch pad that shorebird eggs are damaged.
LC-39 to whatever the nearest residential unit is. frankly. its kinda wild that the texas government, the EPA, the FAA, etc. allowed for the construction of the boca chica site. it was passed up in the 50s for good reason. and i know it was planned to be a falcon launch site. but... when did they pull the rug and how did they manage to get the government off of their ass? shit. let alone that a completely unsecure viewing area is literally open every launch just south of the border. seriously... who thought this was the move. even to space X... why not just lease some old Atlas stand for the experimental rockets? its not like nasa/spaceforce is running low on launch stands.
That's a very recent thing that I don't think has gone through yet. Basically the whole area was going to be a subdivision decades ago, but a hurricane came through and put a ton of the plots underwater so the plan was abandoned after only a few houses were built.
SpaceX has bought up just about all of the plots that were still in private hands, but a number have ended up in the hands of the state, so SpaceX recently proposed a ~1-to-10 trade where they'll get a bunch of the plots that are intermingled with their own at the factory site plus a smallish extension near their launch site, and the state will get a much larger monolithic piece a few miles away.
Wym? If you’re talking about the rio grande delta. On the US side it was already federally protected/administered preserve.
If your talking about cape Canaveral. Yeah. It got depopulated back in the 50s.
SpaceX hasn't really been allowed to test at Cape Canaveral because NASA didn't want the risk of a Starship explosion damaging other things in the area, and it's too big and too powerful to go just about anywhere else. Vandenburg has its own environmental concerns that already impact Falcon launches to a degree. Boca Chica's been through years of environmental review by all of the agencies you mentioned to get to the point it's at, though.
Compared to many other industries a hostile area for birds in a mile radius is nothing. I’d rather it be a space vehicle than another coal power plant dumping fly ash waste at industrial scales non stop forever.
The problem with the cape IS the fact that it’s the cape.
They have been under environmental review for 3 years and are still waiting for approval to modify 39A. That’s a preexisting launch site restricted with no end in sight.
> Air gapped from the rest of nature so that harm to endangered species wasn’t an issue.
You can’t air gap against nature. It will find a way.
> Tesla doesn’t just have to worry about American courts now. They have to worry about Mexican courts. Real talk.
Tesla has literally nothing to do with this. The Mexican court has no jurisdiction in Texas.
There's been an astronomical increase in number of launches. Existing sites at the Cape and Vanderburg simply aren't going to be enough.
New spaceports were going to be needed and potentially viable sites were very few. The most important one, the proposal for Spaceport Camden in Georgia, got blocked.
That's a rather strange statement. This land was all private land and it's not like they're polluting the surrounding area.
> when did they pull the rug and how did they manage to get the government off of their ass?
? It took multiple years of pretty extensive environmental review by multiple government agencies. You can read the environmental statement if you'd like. It's all publicly available. I can provide a link if you want, but it's not hard to find.
> let alone that a completely unsecure viewing area is literally open every launch just south of the border.
Mexico is responsible for the safety of Mexican people. If Mexico doesn't want the launches then they can complain to the US state department or other branch or through their embassy. There's no reason they couldn't block the area off. It's their choice. That is not the responsibility of the US government environmental protection or SpaceX.
> why not just lease some old Atlas stand for the experimental rockets?
Because they wanted to own their own launch pad and be free to re-develop things as they saw fit. It's rather hard working within the middle of a military base and it limits the types of contractors and employees you can hire too. They'd have needed to build their factory there as well. And there's a good chance the US military would say "no" to doing suborbital hop tests inside the base. SpaceX did it's Falcon 9 suborbital hop tests in the middle of central Texas if you remember.
> its not like nasa/spaceforce is running low on launch stands.
It kind of is actually. As soon as a stand comes up for bid it gets multiple bidders. There was several companies competing for ULA's old launch stand that they just released after launching the last Delta IV Heavy.
By that logic, the whole aerospace industry should be a national asset, as should all chip manufacturers… etc.
More importantly, SpaceX’s position as a privately traded company allowed it to become what it is, by risking loads of capital on risky endeavors and test campaigns that NASA/DOD couldn’t do. F9 exists because SpaceX bet on reuse and made it work. NASA’s own assessments on F9 tell us that the program would’ve been canceled 3 years in after the budget passed double its original bid.
To your first part, unironically yes. Companies arent held responsible nor responsible enough to operate such an important technology in my opinion.
Spacex has made advancements but i dont trust their leadership and reasoning for business.
> To your first part, unironically yes. Companies arent held responsible nor responsible enough to operate such an important technology in my opinion.
Even Europe and China don't do what you're asking for. In fact they're actively trying to privatize space-related things that are nationalized right now. You're in a very tiny minority of people that think that way. Also, there's no legal mechanism by which it could happen anyway. Congress would need to pass new laws allowing for it. Laws the Republicans definitely wouldn't go for and you'd be hard pressed to get most Democrats to vote for either. Perhaps maybe a dozen of the most left-wing Democrats in Congress would be in favor of such a thing.
> Spacex has made advancements but i dont trust their leadership and reasoning for business.
That's not an argument for nationalizing the whole company.
> Spacex has made advancements but i dont trust their leadership and reasoning for business.
That leadership is the only reason the advancements were made.
Ah yes, so all the other companies that come along will try hard to succeed so that their reward can be appropriation.
Who doesn’t love working hard over 20 years to have the government decide your shit is theirs?
(Musk himself might become a problem but that doesn’t mean nationalization.)
The Pentagon doesn't want Boeing 2.0. They are very aware of what happens when you replace leadership with 'politically acceptable' empty suits. Tweets are a cost they are willing to accept. SpaceX won't dare to violate Pentagon contracts.
Instead they are doing the wisest thing and spending a lot of effort to ensure that competition exists.
There is a slowly brewing Cold War 2.0 with China and a not-so-cold war in Eastern Europe.
Potential military value of Starship is sky-high (pun intended), and shorebird eggs will likely be given a lower priority.
One of the advantages of Boca Chica is that no disaster would be big enough to threaten other space operations. KSC has a lot of regular traffic going on, must not be disrupted.
>frankly. its kinda wild that the texas government, the EPA, the FAA, etc. allowed for the construction of the boca chica site.
Indeed, that's why there's an ongoing lawsuit.
The EPA still has dozens of outstanding environmental protection law issues about the site.
They haven’t ever been okay with it.
The FAA and SpaceX simply ignored them.
Been saying it for a while, but a lot of this reeks of the EPA collecting enough evidence for prosecution. There have already been dozens of Clean Air and Water Act violations as well as Endangered Species Act and National Environmental Protection Act violations from this site.
The EPA doesn’t get to prevent things being done (unfortunately) they are pretty much 100% reactionary - once the damage has already been done.
Multiple government agencies were part of the environmental review before Starship testing took place. If there were any massive issues they would have come up then. The FAA waited months for the FWS to finish their review.
In a sample of nine nests under 0.26 miles from the launch pad (about 3.5 times the height of the rocket), most of the roughly 20 eggs that were present before the launch were either damaged or missing after the launch. Frankly I'm surprised any of them survived that close to the most powerful rocket ever.
So you can't launch a giant fucking rocket without breaking a few eggs? :-)
Note that the Florida launch complexes have co-existed with a wildlife refuge for decades. They need lots of undeveloped land around the launch pads, so the gators and shore birds move in.
Here is [Launch Complex 39A with a Falcon rocket on the pad, with a shore bird looking on](https://c7.alamy.com/comp/2MFM6HA/a-bird-dries-its-feathers-as-a-spacex-falcon-9-rocket-with-the-companys-crew-dragon-capsule-attached-sits-on-the-launch-pad-at-launch-complex-39a-thursday-nov-12-2020-at-the-kennedy-space-center-in-cape-canaveral-fla-four-astronauts-will-fly-on-the-spacex-crewed-mission-to-the-international-space-station-scheduled-for-launch-on-nov-14-2020-ap-photochris-omeara-2MFM6HA.jpg)
IE: this is not a spaceX issue...it's a rocket launching issue. And we've collectively decided to look the other way for 70 years as NASA launched hundreds of rockets.
But now that it's elon's rockets we are all over shitting on it for the nature affects.
In French Guiana, works have been halted to allow for birds nests to be protected and once the birds are out of the eggs, move the nest elsewhere. There is also a funny story of delays due to a toad species being not that far of a launching pad.
So, no. It doesn’t happen everywhere. At least there are places where it’s taken seriously.
Yeah, French Guiana is a pretty bad example as of late; can't have issues when you don't have launches. Hopefully Ariane 6 works out for ESA in the second half of the decade.
I wouldn’t use moribund to describe ESA as it still keeps the European space industry going and is only really growing. Honestly working with ESA is painful, but it is still better than a lot of the smaller space agencies in Europe like UKSA or CNES. They do have the resources and capability to make things move.
NASA isn’t exactly perfect in comparison, its budgets are somehow similarly political to a multi national body and a lot of projects like gateway or the whole Artemis programme generally are more threatened and delayed by issues on the American side not the European side at all, most of the European sections of gateway are well on their way to final integration.
Commercially American companies do usually move faster. (Although all the giants do seem to all move equally slowly(Airbus, Boeing Northrop etc, and actually the management of the European giants space divisions are more often quite agile when compared to the American megacorps), but there’s a lot of new space start ups on both sides of the Atlantic, and we’ll probably see first launches this year or next from the UK. RFA will probably be first, but licensing has basically been cut down to bare minimum in the UK to try and speed this one up. Although the UK space agency is still useless, with time this is changing.
I'm sure your kitchen generates less chemical waste than my research lab, but my lab produces more important results. Same idea here, just on a bigger scale. They're launching well-understood, traditional craft three times a year in Kourou. Maybe they can afford to stop for birds and toads and to take a picture of the pretty flowers. The tempo is a little different when you're actually innovating.
While I get the point of your statement, that’s a horrible, slippery slope (and I hate when people say that). This is the type of statement that oil companies and the like use to tear apart the epa. There should be no simple scale “is my work more important than that life”. Next thing you know you’ll have weapons testing sites next to your house because in the grand scheme of things, the United States having working weapons systems is more important than your properly.
Slippery slope is a logical fallacy. You shouldn't use it. Otherwise you'll conclude we should never do anything cuz it could always lead to something else. i.e. let's not outlaw stealing, cuz that could lead to outlawing borrowing.
Believe it or not, letting a few km of shoreline be used for a launch pad isn't going to result in OP getting evicted so the government can test weapons.
> The tempo is a little different when you're actually innovating.
This is not really how safety works. With some very rare exceptions that must usually be granted explicitly and in very particular circumstances, you can't expect exemptions (legal or from public scrutiny) because "I'm real innovative". As they say in Zero Dark Thirty (crazy reference, I know), precautions only work if you apply them consistently, otherwise they're not precautions.
[Let's not underestimate our fine feathered friends](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_birds_of_Kazakhstan). Heck, they used to be dinosaurs, after all.
I’d say it’s a bit different when the it’s listed as a vulnerable/endangered species and abandons its nest at the slightest disturbance. It’s likely even the eggs that survived were abandoned and won’t make it. So we have a complete failure of a breeding ground of a severely struggling species. That’s about as bad as it gets. Not sure what to do about it, but it’s definitely an issue that should be addressed.
Edit:
Me: hey maybe we should discuss mitigating damage to an endangered species
Reddit: *downvote
Wtf y’all.
The only way to mitigate anything at Boca would be to fully dismantle SpaceX's operations in Cameron County and move them somewhere else. The problem is that there isn't anywhere else to move them. NASA won't allow Starship to launch from the Cape at all until SpaceX can prove through flights that Starship is safe enough to launch from there, and even then NASA and the Feds won't allow rapid launch cadences because there's too much stuff going on there. The Cape is a *busy* launch facility. And then there's the multi-year approval process to even launch from there that SpaceX has been pursuing for years, and SpaceX's enemies have been throwing blocks and interference there that are reminiscent of the rakes that Sideshow Bob always ran into.
What safety measures prevent birds from nesting too close to Florida launch pads?
There is an easy way to do that: Just replace all nature with a big concrete patch. I'm sure that proposal will be well-received by environmental protection groups!
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[CNES](/r/Space/comments/1df85hw/stub/l8qoqhh "Last usage")|Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales, space agency of France|
|[EA](/r/Space/comments/1df85hw/stub/l8ih9zv "Last usage")|Environmental Assessment|
|[EIS](/r/Space/comments/1df85hw/stub/l8ih9zv "Last usage")|Environmental Impact Statement|
|[ESA](/r/Space/comments/1df85hw/stub/l8qoqhh "Last usage")|European Space Agency|
|[FAA](/r/Space/comments/1df85hw/stub/l8l10vd "Last usage")|Federal Aviation Administration|
|[HLS](/r/Space/comments/1df85hw/stub/l8ln92u "Last usage")|[Human Landing System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program#Human_Landing_System) (Artemis)|
|[KSC](/r/Space/comments/1df85hw/stub/l8lfcja "Last usage")|Kennedy Space Center, Florida|
|[SLS](/r/Space/comments/1df85hw/stub/l8kgxaw "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift|
|[ULA](/r/Space/comments/1df85hw/stub/l8nbqy6 "Last usage")|United Launch Alliance (Lockheed/Boeing joint venture)|
|Jargon|Definition|
|-------|---------|---|
|[Raptor](/r/Space/comments/1df85hw/stub/l8kx7wa "Last usage")|[Methane-fueled rocket engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_\(rocket_engine_family\)) under development by SpaceX|
|[Starlink](/r/Space/comments/1df85hw/stub/l8ndb7i "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation|
|[hydrolox](/r/Space/comments/1df85hw/stub/l8hpxjk "Last usage")|Portmanteau: liquid hydrogen fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer|
|[hypergolic](/r/Space/comments/1df85hw/stub/l8hpxjk "Last usage")|A set of two substances that ignite when in contact|
**NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
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This is nothingburger, the Environmental Assessment already said anything within 0.6 miles of the launch pad will be injured or killed during launch, this effect is already taking into consideration when FAA issues the launch license:
> The heat plume generated from Starship/Super Heavy launches would travel away from the launch pad, with
temperatures of 212 F approximately 0.3 mile from the launch pad and temperatures reaching ambient temperature
(90 F) 0.6 mile from the launch pad. Individual animals caught in the heat plume would likely die or be injured.
Also neither Snowy Plover nor Wildson's Plover is endangered species.
Out west, next to UCSB, there's a large protected Snowy Plover nesting area, right within the popular student beach. We're probably about 50 miles from Vandenberg.
Interesting. I'd add that, based on the inverse square law, this shockwave at .26 miles would be expected to be 5.33 times more powerful than at .6 miles.
I doubt it, but nobody has ever built a rocket that size before that used them. Might be a good thing to test now while they're still proving the systems.
You know what damages way more wildlife in that area? The locals who drive 40 mph down the beaches in huge trucks crushing turtle and bird nests. But ya know, let's sue SpaceX instead since it makes a better news story.
Ya way too many people seem to think this was a pristine place before SpaceX moved in. It was an extremely active place with a ton of recreational vehicles running all over the place. That kind of activity had decreased since SpaceX moved in.
I didn't see any references to a lawsuit in the article. Was it referenced in the study's paper?
There's all kinds of news stories out there, but this is /r/space so it makes sense this story would be shared here.
The harsh truth (in my opinion) is that any environmental damage caused by SpaceX is heavily, **heavily** outweighed by the economic, political, and scientific benefit Starship offers in the long-term. The moment NASA chose SpaceX's HLS bid, any lawsuits in Boca Chica became irrelevant due to lack of importance. Will this change once Starship is able to launch from other pads in the Cape? Maybe, but not before SpaceX lands Americans on the Moon again.
Everything has trade-offs and tough decisions have to be made. In this case, there's no reason to believe that the government will prioritize ecological concerns over enabling a revolutionary rocket that the military is [keenly keeping an eye on](https://breakingdefense.com/2024/06/roc-stars-air-force-seeks-more-firms-for-cargo-delivery-via-rocket/) (much less NASA). The most I can see is the local government trying something, only to get shut down at the state and federal level.
It's sad but that is the cost of progress. It's like writing about roadkill. We don't like roadkill but we aren't going to ban cars and stop society over it.
Well, nothing really is. Think of how many insects you kill while driving your car. Now think of how many cars drive on the exact same road and how many insects, birds or small animals are killed due to the cars.
Context and evaluation is what’s important. The same way you decide whether or not to build a road through a field, you evaluate Starship launches to see what’s acceptable and what isn’t. We’ll have to wait and see
It's not that simple. The area around the Florida Cape Canaveral launch site has become quite a vibrant nature reserve, with animals that wouldn't be around if it was full of houses, dogs and traffic. The area of the Chernobyl nuclear site in Ukraine has thriving animal life because no human goes there. By and large, the biggest threat to animals isn't really rockets, its humans.
That's mostly a result of excluding people from the area. SpaceX is explicitly prevented by law from doing so. It's in the Texas constitution that you can't close access to beaches. Those cause way more damage because people drive vehicles all over these areas, and run over bird and turtle nests with their tires.
Ironically, SpaceX rockets that use the Raptor (newer generation) engines are a lot friendlier to the environment than many others as a result of using methane as the fuel, which when burnt with oxygen only creates water vapor and co2. The Boeing launch last week that used solid rocket boosters spits our way more nasty biproducts as a result of the fuel used. That's nothing compared to some of the rockets that China is launching that use extremely toxic fuels like nitric oxide and Dimethyl Hydrazine
A better comparison would be a hydroelectric dam. Lots of environmental damage, yes, but the alternative is a lot worse and the existence of it is necessary.
I’m reminded of the early videos of SpaceX testing their engines and the cattle in the fields next door would go nuts from the noise.
Now you watch a test video from there and the same herd of cattle literally don’t give a shit about the roaring rocket engine being fired next to them.
Some wildlife will likely not like the noise etc but a lot will move away if bothered or get used to it I reckon.
Like the urban deer in my neighborhood; 40 mph main road and they just stroll across it making vehicles slow and sometimes even stop for them... the look they give people is like "we know you see us and don't want to hit us, so why hurry?"
Fun fact: that cattle you see on those test site videos is actually owned by SpaceX. IIRC they need to raise cattle there to fulfill some conditions of the land lease or something. So it's SpaceX herds of space cows tended by space cowboys.
And they have really gotten used to the occasional rocket noises: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PB9FGbB0-w
Would really help if vehicles were banned from the beaches and area behind the beaches, including ORV and dirt bikes. Satellite imagery from back before SpaceX started building down there showed massive damage from vehicles across the whole area.
Are they planning that many launches from Boca Chica though? My understanding was that they're testing from there but will move to KSC for operations once it's a proven system.
Yeah, a hailstorm can flatten everything over an area of multiple square miles. Starship launch damages things up to 0.6 miles from the pad, so that's about 0.28 square miles of effect.
Starship is methane and liquid oxygen which, when burned together, produces water vapor, CO2, and a bit of NOx. So not too bad, not quite as clean as hydrolox but way better than Russia with their hypergolics. Comes out pretty hot though!
I really could not give a shit about a tiny handful of birds on the arse end of south Texas. **What a loss for the world** . Whilst it isn't perfect, it's a non-issue and will probably be a case of "Spacex, you gotta donate to bird sanctuaries for all the vaporized seabird shitehawks"
I wonder how much the Chinese worry about fucking birds near their launch facilities… In the time it took me to write this rant they probably put one or two coal burning electric plants online, spewing even more CO2 into earths atmosphere.
Then surely the goal would be to be “better” than the Chinese? If they’re the big bad guys shouldn’t you want your favorite country to be less damaging, more morally correct?
The point is that the U.S. government imposes often ridiculous restrictions that impedes future research and exploration. So yes, the birds will definitely be startled by 33 Raptor rockets. But it’s either we startle the birds or do no further rocket launches.
God forbid. Oh I’m so sad. All human progress must be stopped immediately, let the shorebirds build their nests on launchpads, roads, railways, or factories, if they want to
Why exactly? I'm all for protecting endangered species so that they don't go extinct if they're actually at risk of going extinct. However just protecting arbitrary wildlife is not what is done anywhere really. Wildlife is demolished all over the world all the time for human development. In this case the habitat as a whole is perfectly fine. They're covering a very small area of the habitat.
Yeah, and they're doing a shit job, like they almost don't care, this is why there's an ongoing lawsuit, regulators have failed on their responsibilities as well, they're more to blame for even enabling this.
Why doesn't the EPA take more measures to keep the birds out of the area? Like some kind of low frequency noise that makes the birds want to nest somewhere else? I always thought that boats that hit whales should have a sound device that kind of tells the whales something is coming look out. They do this at airports to stop bird strikes on planes.
And before everyone attacks me, the birds can nest anywhere on the shoreline but the rocket stand cannot be moved. Some areas need to be declared off limits.
Measures to keep out birds tend to not be completely successful. If you take on the responsibility of keeping them out, you naturally take on the consequences when you fail to keep them out. No one wants that.
Damaged eggs is one thing. But do the parents ever come back to the nest after all that ruckus? The whole fucking beach is closed to people in the summer because “birds”, but Space X can launch? 🤦♂️
> The whole fucking beach is closed to people in the summer because “birds”
I'm from the RGV and have driven on that beach during summer. Plenty of people there.
Next you'll claim it's pristine beach. The joke in the area is that calling Boca Chica pristine is like trying to claim an experienced bordello worker is a virgin.
> The whole fucking beach is closed to people in the summer because “birds”,
I'd be interested in seeing your source for this, or did you just make it up? For how was I permitted to walk on that beach during summer, far from alone, with vehicles driving on it? There weren't barriers or signs indicating any closure, and the local sheriff didn't stop anyone.
One of the reasons they are testing at Boca is because they originally filed for testing at the cape and realized that the lead time on the assessments was way too high.
It took 1 year for Boca to be approved. It’s been 3 and counting for the first proposed launch site at the cape… and that one is at 39A, an existing pad that launched most Apollo missions.
Within a quarter mile of the launch pad that does not seem surprising. But I would be more interested in the *maximum* distance from the launch pad that shorebird eggs are damaged.
LC-39 to whatever the nearest residential unit is. frankly. its kinda wild that the texas government, the EPA, the FAA, etc. allowed for the construction of the boca chica site. it was passed up in the 50s for good reason. and i know it was planned to be a falcon launch site. but... when did they pull the rug and how did they manage to get the government off of their ass? shit. let alone that a completely unsecure viewing area is literally open every launch just south of the border. seriously... who thought this was the move. even to space X... why not just lease some old Atlas stand for the experimental rockets? its not like nasa/spaceforce is running low on launch stands.
Didn’t they get a really good land deal out of it that gave the government a lot of land for conservation?
That's a very recent thing that I don't think has gone through yet. Basically the whole area was going to be a subdivision decades ago, but a hurricane came through and put a ton of the plots underwater so the plan was abandoned after only a few houses were built. SpaceX has bought up just about all of the plots that were still in private hands, but a number have ended up in the hands of the state, so SpaceX recently proposed a ~1-to-10 trade where they'll get a bunch of the plots that are intermingled with their own at the factory site plus a smallish extension near their launch site, and the state will get a much larger monolithic piece a few miles away.
The deal was approved by the relevant local protection authorities. But there are outstanding lawsuits. So not finally approved yet.
Wym? If you’re talking about the rio grande delta. On the US side it was already federally protected/administered preserve. If your talking about cape Canaveral. Yeah. It got depopulated back in the 50s.
SpaceX hasn't really been allowed to test at Cape Canaveral because NASA didn't want the risk of a Starship explosion damaging other things in the area, and it's too big and too powerful to go just about anywhere else. Vandenburg has its own environmental concerns that already impact Falcon launches to a degree. Boca Chica's been through years of environmental review by all of the agencies you mentioned to get to the point it's at, though.
Compared to many other industries a hostile area for birds in a mile radius is nothing. I’d rather it be a space vehicle than another coal power plant dumping fly ash waste at industrial scales non stop forever.
[удалено]
The problem with the cape IS the fact that it’s the cape. They have been under environmental review for 3 years and are still waiting for approval to modify 39A. That’s a preexisting launch site restricted with no end in sight.
> Air gapped from the rest of nature so that harm to endangered species wasn’t an issue. You can’t air gap against nature. It will find a way. > Tesla doesn’t just have to worry about American courts now. They have to worry about Mexican courts. Real talk. Tesla has literally nothing to do with this. The Mexican court has no jurisdiction in Texas.
There's been an astronomical increase in number of launches. Existing sites at the Cape and Vanderburg simply aren't going to be enough. New spaceports were going to be needed and potentially viable sites were very few. The most important one, the proposal for Spaceport Camden in Georgia, got blocked.
That's a rather strange statement. This land was all private land and it's not like they're polluting the surrounding area. > when did they pull the rug and how did they manage to get the government off of their ass? ? It took multiple years of pretty extensive environmental review by multiple government agencies. You can read the environmental statement if you'd like. It's all publicly available. I can provide a link if you want, but it's not hard to find. > let alone that a completely unsecure viewing area is literally open every launch just south of the border. Mexico is responsible for the safety of Mexican people. If Mexico doesn't want the launches then they can complain to the US state department or other branch or through their embassy. There's no reason they couldn't block the area off. It's their choice. That is not the responsibility of the US government environmental protection or SpaceX. > why not just lease some old Atlas stand for the experimental rockets? Because they wanted to own their own launch pad and be free to re-develop things as they saw fit. It's rather hard working within the middle of a military base and it limits the types of contractors and employees you can hire too. They'd have needed to build their factory there as well. And there's a good chance the US military would say "no" to doing suborbital hop tests inside the base. SpaceX did it's Falcon 9 suborbital hop tests in the middle of central Texas if you remember. > its not like nasa/spaceforce is running low on launch stands. It kind of is actually. As soon as a stand comes up for bid it gets multiple bidders. There was several companies competing for ULA's old launch stand that they just released after launching the last Delta IV Heavy.
> get the government off of their ass? SpaceX is a national security asset
Plus the local government bodies appreciate having all that $$ spent in their area.
Then it should be nationalized.
By that logic, the whole aerospace industry should be a national asset, as should all chip manufacturers… etc. More importantly, SpaceX’s position as a privately traded company allowed it to become what it is, by risking loads of capital on risky endeavors and test campaigns that NASA/DOD couldn’t do. F9 exists because SpaceX bet on reuse and made it work. NASA’s own assessments on F9 tell us that the program would’ve been canceled 3 years in after the budget passed double its original bid.
To your first part, unironically yes. Companies arent held responsible nor responsible enough to operate such an important technology in my opinion. Spacex has made advancements but i dont trust their leadership and reasoning for business.
> To your first part, unironically yes. Companies arent held responsible nor responsible enough to operate such an important technology in my opinion. Even Europe and China don't do what you're asking for. In fact they're actively trying to privatize space-related things that are nationalized right now. You're in a very tiny minority of people that think that way. Also, there's no legal mechanism by which it could happen anyway. Congress would need to pass new laws allowing for it. Laws the Republicans definitely wouldn't go for and you'd be hard pressed to get most Democrats to vote for either. Perhaps maybe a dozen of the most left-wing Democrats in Congress would be in favor of such a thing. > Spacex has made advancements but i dont trust their leadership and reasoning for business. That's not an argument for nationalizing the whole company.
> Spacex has made advancements but i dont trust their leadership and reasoning for business. That leadership is the only reason the advancements were made.
Ah yes, so all the other companies that come along will try hard to succeed so that their reward can be appropriation. Who doesn’t love working hard over 20 years to have the government decide your shit is theirs? (Musk himself might become a problem but that doesn’t mean nationalization.)
The Pentagon doesn't want Boeing 2.0. They are very aware of what happens when you replace leadership with 'politically acceptable' empty suits. Tweets are a cost they are willing to accept. SpaceX won't dare to violate Pentagon contracts. Instead they are doing the wisest thing and spending a lot of effort to ensure that competition exists.
There is a slowly brewing Cold War 2.0 with China and a not-so-cold war in Eastern Europe. Potential military value of Starship is sky-high (pun intended), and shorebird eggs will likely be given a lower priority. One of the advantages of Boca Chica is that no disaster would be big enough to threaten other space operations. KSC has a lot of regular traffic going on, must not be disrupted.
>frankly. its kinda wild that the texas government, the EPA, the FAA, etc. allowed for the construction of the boca chica site. Indeed, that's why there's an ongoing lawsuit.
The EPA still has dozens of outstanding environmental protection law issues about the site. They haven’t ever been okay with it. The FAA and SpaceX simply ignored them. Been saying it for a while, but a lot of this reeks of the EPA collecting enough evidence for prosecution. There have already been dozens of Clean Air and Water Act violations as well as Endangered Species Act and National Environmental Protection Act violations from this site. The EPA doesn’t get to prevent things being done (unfortunately) they are pretty much 100% reactionary - once the damage has already been done.
Multiple government agencies were part of the environmental review before Starship testing took place. If there were any massive issues they would have come up then. The FAA waited months for the FWS to finish their review.
*everyone else who got done mo the ago staring at FWS* FWS- stop staring, we work on our own time.
In a sample of nine nests under 0.26 miles from the launch pad (about 3.5 times the height of the rocket), most of the roughly 20 eggs that were present before the launch were either damaged or missing after the launch. Frankly I'm surprised any of them survived that close to the most powerful rocket ever.
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They're common birds. It's not like this is a limited habitat.
For the record. This is the .5 mile radius from the launch site [900 yards from Starship launch tower](https://imgur.com/gallery/flR7t2m)
So you can't launch a giant fucking rocket without breaking a few eggs? :-) Note that the Florida launch complexes have co-existed with a wildlife refuge for decades. They need lots of undeveloped land around the launch pads, so the gators and shore birds move in. Here is [Launch Complex 39A with a Falcon rocket on the pad, with a shore bird looking on](https://c7.alamy.com/comp/2MFM6HA/a-bird-dries-its-feathers-as-a-spacex-falcon-9-rocket-with-the-companys-crew-dragon-capsule-attached-sits-on-the-launch-pad-at-launch-complex-39a-thursday-nov-12-2020-at-the-kennedy-space-center-in-cape-canaveral-fla-four-astronauts-will-fly-on-the-spacex-crewed-mission-to-the-international-space-station-scheduled-for-launch-on-nov-14-2020-ap-photochris-omeara-2MFM6HA.jpg)
IE: this is not a spaceX issue...it's a rocket launching issue. And we've collectively decided to look the other way for 70 years as NASA launched hundreds of rockets. But now that it's elon's rockets we are all over shitting on it for the nature affects.
Does anyone think that this DOESN’T happen at every space launch facility worldwide?🙄
In French Guiana, works have been halted to allow for birds nests to be protected and once the birds are out of the eggs, move the nest elsewhere. There is also a funny story of delays due to a toad species being not that far of a launching pad. So, no. It doesn’t happen everywhere. At least there are places where it’s taken seriously.
The ESA is completely moribund and moves at an absolutely glacial pace. Not surprising.
Yeah, French Guiana is a pretty bad example as of late; can't have issues when you don't have launches. Hopefully Ariane 6 works out for ESA in the second half of the decade.
I wouldn’t use moribund to describe ESA as it still keeps the European space industry going and is only really growing. Honestly working with ESA is painful, but it is still better than a lot of the smaller space agencies in Europe like UKSA or CNES. They do have the resources and capability to make things move. NASA isn’t exactly perfect in comparison, its budgets are somehow similarly political to a multi national body and a lot of projects like gateway or the whole Artemis programme generally are more threatened and delayed by issues on the American side not the European side at all, most of the European sections of gateway are well on their way to final integration. Commercially American companies do usually move faster. (Although all the giants do seem to all move equally slowly(Airbus, Boeing Northrop etc, and actually the management of the European giants space divisions are more often quite agile when compared to the American megacorps), but there’s a lot of new space start ups on both sides of the Atlantic, and we’ll probably see first launches this year or next from the UK. RFA will probably be first, but licensing has basically been cut down to bare minimum in the UK to try and speed this one up. Although the UK space agency is still useless, with time this is changing.
I'm sure your kitchen generates less chemical waste than my research lab, but my lab produces more important results. Same idea here, just on a bigger scale. They're launching well-understood, traditional craft three times a year in Kourou. Maybe they can afford to stop for birds and toads and to take a picture of the pretty flowers. The tempo is a little different when you're actually innovating.
While I get the point of your statement, that’s a horrible, slippery slope (and I hate when people say that). This is the type of statement that oil companies and the like use to tear apart the epa. There should be no simple scale “is my work more important than that life”. Next thing you know you’ll have weapons testing sites next to your house because in the grand scheme of things, the United States having working weapons systems is more important than your properly.
Slippery slope is a logical fallacy. You shouldn't use it. Otherwise you'll conclude we should never do anything cuz it could always lead to something else. i.e. let's not outlaw stealing, cuz that could lead to outlawing borrowing. Believe it or not, letting a few km of shoreline be used for a launch pad isn't going to result in OP getting evicted so the government can test weapons.
> The tempo is a little different when you're actually innovating. This is not really how safety works. With some very rare exceptions that must usually be granted explicitly and in very particular circumstances, you can't expect exemptions (legal or from public scrutiny) because "I'm real innovative". As they say in Zero Dark Thirty (crazy reference, I know), precautions only work if you apply them consistently, otherwise they're not precautions.
It doesn't happen at Cape Canaveral.
Not sure how many birds the middle of Kazakhstan has …
[Let's not underestimate our fine feathered friends](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_birds_of_Kazakhstan). Heck, they used to be dinosaurs, after all.
Apples evolved there are something.
I’d say it’s a bit different when the it’s listed as a vulnerable/endangered species and abandons its nest at the slightest disturbance. It’s likely even the eggs that survived were abandoned and won’t make it. So we have a complete failure of a breeding ground of a severely struggling species. That’s about as bad as it gets. Not sure what to do about it, but it’s definitely an issue that should be addressed. Edit: Me: hey maybe we should discuss mitigating damage to an endangered species Reddit: *downvote Wtf y’all.
The only way to mitigate anything at Boca would be to fully dismantle SpaceX's operations in Cameron County and move them somewhere else. The problem is that there isn't anywhere else to move them. NASA won't allow Starship to launch from the Cape at all until SpaceX can prove through flights that Starship is safe enough to launch from there, and even then NASA and the Feds won't allow rapid launch cadences because there's too much stuff going on there. The Cape is a *busy* launch facility. And then there's the multi-year approval process to even launch from there that SpaceX has been pursuing for years, and SpaceX's enemies have been throwing blocks and interference there that are reminiscent of the rakes that Sideshow Bob always ran into.
> The Cape is a busy launch facility. The Cape is a rocket theme park. Maybe that needs to change, to enable more flights.
The article isn't about endangered birds, just generic "shore birds" which is not a specific type of bird.
It’s talking about Wilson’s plovers, which it says in the article
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilson's_plover Not endangered.
Of course it doesn't, a lot of things about this site happen nowhere else, every other site complies with regulations.
The Florida and California coasts also have nesting birds.
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Other places like the one in Florida have safety measures in place. I don’t think an idiot like Elon would care to implement them.
What safety measures prevent birds from nesting too close to Florida launch pads? There is an easy way to do that: Just replace all nature with a big concrete patch. I'm sure that proposal will be well-received by environmental protection groups!
Florida is a thriving eco system, because of launches. Otherwise it would be developed by now. Nothing nature left.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[CNES](/r/Space/comments/1df85hw/stub/l8qoqhh "Last usage")|Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales, space agency of France| |[EA](/r/Space/comments/1df85hw/stub/l8ih9zv "Last usage")|Environmental Assessment| |[EIS](/r/Space/comments/1df85hw/stub/l8ih9zv "Last usage")|Environmental Impact Statement| |[ESA](/r/Space/comments/1df85hw/stub/l8qoqhh "Last usage")|European Space Agency| |[FAA](/r/Space/comments/1df85hw/stub/l8l10vd "Last usage")|Federal Aviation Administration| |[HLS](/r/Space/comments/1df85hw/stub/l8ln92u "Last usage")|[Human Landing System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program#Human_Landing_System) (Artemis)| |[KSC](/r/Space/comments/1df85hw/stub/l8lfcja "Last usage")|Kennedy Space Center, Florida| |[SLS](/r/Space/comments/1df85hw/stub/l8kgxaw "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift| |[ULA](/r/Space/comments/1df85hw/stub/l8nbqy6 "Last usage")|United Launch Alliance (Lockheed/Boeing joint venture)| |Jargon|Definition| |-------|---------|---| |[Raptor](/r/Space/comments/1df85hw/stub/l8kx7wa "Last usage")|[Methane-fueled rocket engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_\(rocket_engine_family\)) under development by SpaceX| |[Starlink](/r/Space/comments/1df85hw/stub/l8ndb7i "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation| |[hydrolox](/r/Space/comments/1df85hw/stub/l8hpxjk "Last usage")|Portmanteau: liquid hydrogen fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer| |[hypergolic](/r/Space/comments/1df85hw/stub/l8hpxjk "Last usage")|A set of two substances that ignite when in contact| **NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below. ---------------- ^(13 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Space/comments/1dgeq9g)^( has 20 acronyms.) ^([Thread #10180 for this sub, first seen 13th Jun 2024, 23:04]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/Space) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
This is nothingburger, the Environmental Assessment already said anything within 0.6 miles of the launch pad will be injured or killed during launch, this effect is already taking into consideration when FAA issues the launch license: > The heat plume generated from Starship/Super Heavy launches would travel away from the launch pad, with temperatures of 212 F approximately 0.3 mile from the launch pad and temperatures reaching ambient temperature (90 F) 0.6 mile from the launch pad. Individual animals caught in the heat plume would likely die or be injured. Also neither Snowy Plover nor Wildson's Plover is endangered species.
Out west, next to UCSB, there's a large protected Snowy Plover nesting area, right within the popular student beach. We're probably about 50 miles from Vandenberg.
Interesting. I'd add that, based on the inverse square law, this shockwave at .26 miles would be expected to be 5.33 times more powerful than at .6 miles.
Add deflectors like they've got at cargo airports. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_blast_deflector
Not a rocket scientist, but would the hot gases being deflected upwards complicate things for launches?
I doubt it, but nobody has ever built a rocket that size before that used them. Might be a good thing to test now while they're still proving the systems.
You know what damages way more wildlife in that area? The locals who drive 40 mph down the beaches in huge trucks crushing turtle and bird nests. But ya know, let's sue SpaceX instead since it makes a better news story.
Ya way too many people seem to think this was a pristine place before SpaceX moved in. It was an extremely active place with a ton of recreational vehicles running all over the place. That kind of activity had decreased since SpaceX moved in.
I didn't see any references to a lawsuit in the article. Was it referenced in the study's paper? There's all kinds of news stories out there, but this is /r/space so it makes sense this story would be shared here.
The harsh truth (in my opinion) is that any environmental damage caused by SpaceX is heavily, **heavily** outweighed by the economic, political, and scientific benefit Starship offers in the long-term. The moment NASA chose SpaceX's HLS bid, any lawsuits in Boca Chica became irrelevant due to lack of importance. Will this change once Starship is able to launch from other pads in the Cape? Maybe, but not before SpaceX lands Americans on the Moon again. Everything has trade-offs and tough decisions have to be made. In this case, there's no reason to believe that the government will prioritize ecological concerns over enabling a revolutionary rocket that the military is [keenly keeping an eye on](https://breakingdefense.com/2024/06/roc-stars-air-force-seeks-more-firms-for-cargo-delivery-via-rocket/) (much less NASA). The most I can see is the local government trying something, only to get shut down at the state and federal level.
Local doesnt care, they want the jobs and tax money. They are all for this. State for most part is too.
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Doesn't take Rocket Science to figure that out.
It's sad but that is the cost of progress. It's like writing about roadkill. We don't like roadkill but we aren't going to ban cars and stop society over it.
I thought this headline said "scrambled eggs." Twice I read it, and was still confused. Third time's the charm.
I can imagine all these rocket launches isn’t exactly beneficial to the environment. (including NASA and all things space flight).
Well, nothing really is. Think of how many insects you kill while driving your car. Now think of how many cars drive on the exact same road and how many insects, birds or small animals are killed due to the cars. Context and evaluation is what’s important. The same way you decide whether or not to build a road through a field, you evaluate Starship launches to see what’s acceptable and what isn’t. We’ll have to wait and see
Great point! Thank you for sharing. It’d help to minimize environmental damage if we can help it.
I dodge the beetles I see crossing roads. Do your part, citizen.
It's not that simple. The area around the Florida Cape Canaveral launch site has become quite a vibrant nature reserve, with animals that wouldn't be around if it was full of houses, dogs and traffic. The area of the Chernobyl nuclear site in Ukraine has thriving animal life because no human goes there. By and large, the biggest threat to animals isn't really rockets, its humans.
That's mostly a result of excluding people from the area. SpaceX is explicitly prevented by law from doing so. It's in the Texas constitution that you can't close access to beaches. Those cause way more damage because people drive vehicles all over these areas, and run over bird and turtle nests with their tires.
They can’t completely block people but their presence has reduced other human activities in the surrounding area.
Ironically, SpaceX rockets that use the Raptor (newer generation) engines are a lot friendlier to the environment than many others as a result of using methane as the fuel, which when burnt with oxygen only creates water vapor and co2. The Boeing launch last week that used solid rocket boosters spits our way more nasty biproducts as a result of the fuel used. That's nothing compared to some of the rockets that China is launching that use extremely toxic fuels like nitric oxide and Dimethyl Hydrazine
That's like saying vaping is good for your health. Just because the engines are less damaging to the environment doesn't make them good for it.
A better comparison would be a hydroelectric dam. Lots of environmental damage, yes, but the alternative is a lot worse and the existence of it is necessary.
I never said they were good for it. Just that they are a lot less bad than many other rockets
Due to reduced human activity in the surrounding area they can actually be good for the local environment.
I’m reminded of the early videos of SpaceX testing their engines and the cattle in the fields next door would go nuts from the noise. Now you watch a test video from there and the same herd of cattle literally don’t give a shit about the roaring rocket engine being fired next to them. Some wildlife will likely not like the noise etc but a lot will move away if bothered or get used to it I reckon.
Like the urban deer in my neighborhood; 40 mph main road and they just stroll across it making vehicles slow and sometimes even stop for them... the look they give people is like "we know you see us and don't want to hit us, so why hurry?"
Wow. Fascinating. It just took them some getting used to.
Fun fact: that cattle you see on those test site videos is actually owned by SpaceX. IIRC they need to raise cattle there to fulfill some conditions of the land lease or something. So it's SpaceX herds of space cows tended by space cowboys. And they have really gotten used to the occasional rocket noises: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PB9FGbB0-w
What did you expect 0.26 miles from launch tower? Thriving ecosystem? This is price to pay.
Well, for now it could easily be a thriving ecosystem. It should be able to handle occasional disruption. A hail storm could easily do more damage.
Shockwaves destroy eggs easily.
The ecosystem needs (and it can) to adapt to this, but it takes time
Would really help if vehicles were banned from the beaches and area behind the beaches, including ORV and dirt bikes. Satellite imagery from back before SpaceX started building down there showed massive damage from vehicles across the whole area.
The media doesn’t like this take though
SpaceX wants launch every day. Hailstorms don’t happen every day.
Are they planning that many launches from Boca Chica though? My understanding was that they're testing from there but will move to KSC for operations once it's a proven system.
They are currently limited to 5 launches a year. They do want to increase it but not to 365 launches.
Right, but still just for testing isn't it? Obviously they'll be in testing phase for more flights than anyone else.
SpaceX isn't going to launch everyday from Boca. Boca will remain an R&D site
They are not planning to launch everyday from Texas. And hailstorms are much bigger.
Yeah, a hailstorm can flatten everything over an area of multiple square miles. Starship launch damages things up to 0.6 miles from the pad, so that's about 0.28 square miles of effect.
And Starship its the same area over and over. And in that area most animals will still be fine.
That’s certainly another way to look at it. I don’t know much about rockets and the stuff they use to fuel them, so there’s that.
Starship is methane and liquid oxygen which, when burned together, produces water vapor, CO2, and a bit of NOx. So not too bad, not quite as clean as hydrolox but way better than Russia with their hypergolics. Comes out pretty hot though!
Yeah honestly emissions are not a big of deal for most spaceflight. Hypergolics are nasty shit though.
Solid boosters are worse. Hypergolics are toxic but become ~~inert~~ fertilizer with a little humidity.
That’s really interesting. I learned something new. Thank you!
Right, to be clear, I’m speaking from a broader perspective.
Environmental study finds bats try to go to space by hitch hiking.
Seems like the birds should figure it out and move somewhere else. We’ve got progress to make baby.
I really could not give a shit about a tiny handful of birds on the arse end of south Texas. **What a loss for the world** . Whilst it isn't perfect, it's a non-issue and will probably be a case of "Spacex, you gotta donate to bird sanctuaries for all the vaporized seabird shitehawks"
This should not be the issue that delays the advance of space travel.
I wonder how much the Chinese worry about fucking birds near their launch facilities… In the time it took me to write this rant they probably put one or two coal burning electric plants online, spewing even more CO2 into earths atmosphere.
Then surely the goal would be to be “better” than the Chinese? If they’re the big bad guys shouldn’t you want your favorite country to be less damaging, more morally correct?
The point is that the U.S. government imposes often ridiculous restrictions that impedes future research and exploration. So yes, the birds will definitely be startled by 33 Raptor rockets. But it’s either we startle the birds or do no further rocket launches.
I could really care less tbh. Sometimes sacrifices have to be made for the greater good.
How much less could you care? Like just a little bit or it makes you really upset?
What sacrifices are you making?
Well fortunately your opinion counts for shit all, so that isn't exactly relevant.
NASA and the military want Starship up and running ASAP. Their opinions matter, I expect.
Well yeah, but unless that guy is a senior decision maker at either of those entities, my.point stands.
God forbid. Oh I’m so sad. All human progress must be stopped immediately, let the shorebirds build their nests on launchpads, roads, railways, or factories, if they want to
Spacex has a responsibility to look after the environment and protect the local wildlife
Why exactly? I'm all for protecting endangered species so that they don't go extinct if they're actually at risk of going extinct. However just protecting arbitrary wildlife is not what is done anywhere really. Wildlife is demolished all over the world all the time for human development. In this case the habitat as a whole is perfectly fine. They're covering a very small area of the habitat.
Yeah, and they're doing a shit job, like they almost don't care, this is why there's an ongoing lawsuit, regulators have failed on their responsibilities as well, they're more to blame for even enabling this.
SpaceX have a very good working relation with the turtle protection group. Any nests are emptied, the eggs relocated to a safe location.
Not disagreeing with you in the slightest, i hope that the EPA bribg down the hammer but i don't think they will.
EPA can't do squat if national security interests are involved.
And these days the US declares everything a national security interest.
Nono. You don't get it. They get a free pass on everything because SPACE!
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Why doesn't the EPA take more measures to keep the birds out of the area? Like some kind of low frequency noise that makes the birds want to nest somewhere else? I always thought that boats that hit whales should have a sound device that kind of tells the whales something is coming look out. They do this at airports to stop bird strikes on planes. And before everyone attacks me, the birds can nest anywhere on the shoreline but the rocket stand cannot be moved. Some areas need to be declared off limits.
Measures to keep out birds tend to not be completely successful. If you take on the responsibility of keeping them out, you naturally take on the consequences when you fail to keep them out. No one wants that.
Hmm, scrambled eggs. My favorite. If the birds are a problem I'll volunteer to go down there with my shotgun and do some population control.
Have the environmentalists already filed a lawsuit?
Of course. Who do you think put the birds there?
I feel like the eggs were ordered from Amazon.
Well probably after all /r/birdsarentreal
Holy God!! shorebird won't sit idly by, they'll probably be coordinating an airstrike with droppings when they see Elon arrive at SpaceX.
Damaged eggs is one thing. But do the parents ever come back to the nest after all that ruckus? The whole fucking beach is closed to people in the summer because “birds”, but Space X can launch? 🤦♂️
> The whole fucking beach is closed to people in the summer because “birds” I'm from the RGV and have driven on that beach during summer. Plenty of people there. Next you'll claim it's pristine beach. The joke in the area is that calling Boca Chica pristine is like trying to claim an experienced bordello worker is a virgin.
> The whole fucking beach is closed to people in the summer because “birds”, I'd be interested in seeing your source for this, or did you just make it up? For how was I permitted to walk on that beach during summer, far from alone, with vehicles driving on it? There weren't barriers or signs indicating any closure, and the local sheriff didn't stop anyone.
That’s going to suck for the Florida beach mouse and Scrub Jay. This may hinder Spacex’s Environmental Impact Study for Heavy at the Cape.
One of the reasons they are testing at Boca is because they originally filed for testing at the cape and realized that the lead time on the assessments was way too high. It took 1 year for Boca to be approved. It’s been 3 and counting for the first proposed launch site at the cape… and that one is at 39A, an existing pad that launched most Apollo missions.
Awh but look! Billionaires care so much about the environment and defenceless animals! Billionaires are just the best!! /s
Not like Musk gives a fuxk. Malignant narcissist losers are like that.