I'm a huge fan of SpaceX, but this press release just screams "Musk ordered us to post a screed"

By SpaceX's logic any factory would be able to dump toxic water into the ground as long as they sourced the input water from the city's drinking water distribution system.

This is probably the most basic environmental and health and safety law, namely to prevent businesses from dumping toxins into the water; trying to frame this as government overreach and knick-knack regulations is seriously depraved and it would be banana-republic-esque if he actually succeeds in ignoring or removing these rules.

That being said... on the linked page it says:

> Outflow water has been sampled after every use of the system and consistently shows negligible traces of any contaminants, and specifically, that all levels have remained below standards for all state permits that would authorize discharge. TCEQ, the FAA, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service evaluated the use of the system prior to its initial use, and during tests and launch, and determined it would not cause environmental harm.

Is this all lies?

But the way it works is not that you dump stuff out of your factory and then, after getting caught, try to run some tests to show it's okay. It's almost impossible to remove contaminants out of the water after the fact so the way it works is that you go through a process with the government where you show that you are not going to dump contaminants into the ground, then they issue a permit, then you can discharge the water. Otherwise you would have people doing what Musk is doing now, which is to dump the water first and if there is any irreversible contamination say "oops, my bad".

In any case with respect to existing contamination the only thing I would trust is an independent third party testing lab testing the water with the data made public. I don't know why you would want anything else.

1. They misplaced a decimal point when transferring a value from the lab report to the summary

2. They filled in the wrong form. They paid a $2000 fine for this violation.

The lab reports are public.

https://www.threads.net/@esg.hound/post/CzvTxp-uZe8

"That is for a domestic wastewater permit (toilet water treatment)"

They have a permit that is more restrictive than the permit they need.

Someone filled out the wrong form.

Stop the whole thing. Abandon the cosmos. Just stay here.

Some bureaucrats weren’t satisfied.

I regularly face this issue in IT circles, where I'm supposed to have a time machine to compensate for the multi-month forewarning everyone else needs.

> By SpaceX's logic any factory would be able to dump toxic water into the ground as long as they sourced the input water from the city's drinking water distribution system.

is patently wrong and unfortunately undermines their entire comment.

I believe SpaceX is stretching the truth and trying to sneak by with improper permits, but also people lying about what SpaceX is doing is not helping keep them in check and gives them ammunition.

Of course water in contact with the flamey end of a rocket has chemicals not found in drinking water, that's not really relevant. What's relevant are the actual levels in that water.

Edit: Sigh, on re-reading the SpaceX statement they say the input water is "potable" and then later say, "Again, it uses literal drinking water", they never say "tap water". While an exaggeration, that is the definition of potable. They are not saying the output water is drinking water! Only that "all levels have remained below standards for all state permits that would authorize discharge."

But again, I'm not claiming they aren't lying or stretching the truth, just that we should be contesting them on the facts.

If the facts aren't on your side, then pound the law I guess.

As others have said, the letter of the law is being applied in a way that appears either punitive or corrupt. In all honesty if a few decades later it turned out that Bazos or Boeing were behind this I wouldn’t be shocked in the least.

“We can’t beat them with technology so we’ll beat them with red tape!”

In your bizarro world you could just dump toxic water in most places.

The fuel is just natural gas. Again, if it contains toxins such as mercury, then the source of the fuel should be punished because they are certainly delivering it to civilian users for cooking, or to industrial users elsewhere.

Why are we not hearing about those other linked pollution incidents!?

Or, is it that the pollution doesn't exist -- it is merely a sufficiently plausible fiction that is being used as an excuse to halt their progress?

Because from where I sit, it definitely looks like the latter.

Before you respond: Please very specifically explain why it is perfectly logical that there is no uproar about the "poisons" in cooking gas or the town water supply, but SpaceX's use of the same justifies stopping multi-billion dollar projects. But... not in any way investigating where the "poisons" might have come from. Just stopping SpaceX. No other actions. Just that.

Do you actually think it plausible that any human could get sick when trying to drink their home water due to this discharge? Or are you just being contarian here?

Saying "hey, below level trace contaminants over here, later on" isn't conclusive.

SpaceX IS being deliberately deceptive when they say (and emphasize in bold, in case we're dense): "Again, this is drinking water". Great. Let's do what they did in Flint, and have Musk and SpaceX take a drink from that "drinking water".

Remember, according to Tesla, FSD is already dozens to hundreds of times safer than human drivers[1].

[1] On the subset of roads, in the subset of weather, in the subset of driving conditions where it may be activated, when compared to "all human drivers, on all roads, in all weather, in all conditions". And don't forget, if airbags don't deploy, it's not an accident, according to Tesla.[2]

[2] This includes collisions at 20mph or more where the passenger restraint subsystem determines that it is safer not to deploy airbags (first gen airbags were dumb - impact above a certain force, deploy. Current airbags take into account angle of impact, deflections, etc., before deploying). Tesla amazingly also doesn't consider it to be an accident for their stats when the airbags didn't deploy because the vehicle was so damaged or destroyed by the accident that the system could not or did not deploy.

So forgive some of us for taking any Musk venture condescending press release with a grain of salt.

However, REFUSAL to drink this water indicates that it may not be as safe as is being claimed.

Besides, according to SpaceX, it's not contaminated water...

> Again, this is drinking water

(That 'again' really rubs me the wrong way - it's like they think they're speaking to a dense child.)

It's funny too that apparently it's simultaneously tap water and also water that contains contaminants not found in tap water and that requires testing.

I guess at the end of the day I prefer the American government does everything it possibly can to fast-track these SpaceX launches. And I prefer the American government and the American citizen prioritizes space supremacy over the local environment of a launch site facility.

I think studies should be done to understand the environmental effects of the launch site. I think mitigations for pollutants (etc) should be put into place. I think there are reasonable requests that the government can make, and SpaceX (being a business) has different incentives. But I also see a clear political bias from the current administration, and we can't have that sort of thing preventing real and obvious technological progress. Our children need to see America achieve something great and that achievement needs to be tangible. Not a commodity. Not something ephemeral or stuck in "the cloud" somewhere. I understand that Kamala Harris wishes she had the censorship machine that Twitter provided her in 2020, but those days are gone and she and her boss need to put America first and find a way to put some rockets into space.

https://www.tceq.texas.gov/permitting/wastewater/industrial

https://www.tceq.texas.gov/downloads/permitting/wastewater/f...

Interestingly, ~70% of the water is evaporated during a launch.

SLS's main engine is hydrolox fueled, so it's byproducts should be water and hydrogen. But the SRBs have a lot of nasty ingredients like perchlorates.

I just don't understand why this seems to be an issue with this launch in particular, cause to me it just something that's done at every launch ever (throw water at a launching rocket). Isn't this a very well understood env impact anyway that Falcon 9 launches don't face those delays?

Washed away after first being superheated by that water.

People are only concerned about the post deluge water.

Why does SpaceX repeatedly, and condescendingly, keep saying "Again, this is drinking water!"

So no, I don't think he's willfully misinterpreting SpaceX's post. In fact, I think SpaceX's repeated references to drinking water, at a non-problematic stage of the complaints, is willfully misleading.

On the plus side, every day the Biden administration delays SpaceX, IFT-5 becomes more likely to succeed, digging the pit of despair for EDS sufferers even deeper. Invest in salt futures.

The point is there is no world in which Musk survives under Putin or Xi. He’d get Prighozin’d or Jack Ma’d because he represents a threat to the sort of authoritarian power that prefers folks like him far away.

I mean, yes, though to imagine it’s just the left Elon has disappointed is naïve. Musk went from representing a paragon of American industry to something much less. Being a paragon is powerful, in part because it’s undefined.

Being a partisan political agitator has its own power, but it’s much easier to constrain and counter because there’s a playbook for that. (Witness, for example, how Musk was given a singular free pass on his relationship with China, but now isn’t able to push back on either party’s China policy.)

…

We recently received a launch license date estimate of late November from the FAA, the government agency responsible for licensing Starship flight tests. This is a more than two-month delay to the previously communicated date of mid-September. This delay was not based on a new safety concern, but instead driven by superfluous environmental analysis.”

Maybe they should have thought about that before building their launch site next to a wildlife refuge. Maybe they shouldn't have caused significant damage to that same reserve (requiring months of cleanup) when they ignored their own engineers and blew up their own launch pad. The fact that they repeatedly violated their permit isn't helping.

The reality is SpaceX can't be trusted when it comes to compliance with rules, laws, and permits. They've proven this repeatedly (even when their own engineers point out better ways). Of course that means oversight agencies have to provide more oversight.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/spacex-launch-site-boca-chica-t...

> requiring months of cleanup

no it didn't.

Yes, this is difficult to avoid for various reasons, perhaps the most pertinent being that all the safest places to launch things from are along coastlines where it's easy to divert wayward rockets into the ocean and away from populated areas. Coastlines have plenty of water and thus plenty of wildlife. Launching from e.g. an inland desert is much more risky and the environmental impact isn't necessarily all that much better to boot.

I suppose I’m confused why this is the FAA’s remit.

Which is wild. This isn’t how regulation, including with the FAA, works in other contexts. (If an airline mucks up a securities filing, that isn’t the FAA’s jurisdiction.)

The legislative fix may be in separating launch permits from environmental clearances.

Is there a discussion about what the actual harms are?

If they were separate SpaceX couldn't just ignore the lack of EPA permit and launch anyway just because they have an FAA permit, and by having them coordinated it decreases run-around from different agencies giving conflicting demands. SpaceX would likely face more delays not fewer if the FAA wasn't acting as a Lead Federal Agency here.

https://www.achp.gov/digital-library-section-106-landing/fre...

https://www.epa.gov/nepa/what-national-environmental-policy-...

Fundamentally, this is loathing and envy encoded into law.

It's like fertilizing the soil and finding that not only your crops but also weeds grow stronger.

Everyone wants their cut. Which is why for a certain sum of money, the desert iguana will turn out to not be a problem.

Great stuff. I understand how much fun it must be to be an agriculturist.

> Everyone wants their cut. Which is why for a certain sum of money, the desert iguana will turn out to not be a problem.

Or just keep shitposting lazy cynical memes I suppose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downwinders

Put differently: what's the strategic impact of a 2 month delay?

Also - if our species doesn't make it off-planet before the current one is rendered uninhabitable, it's curtains for us all. So that's a pressure of a sort.

Columbus thought he could find a fast route to Asia because he grossly underestimated the circumference of the Earth. Spain was advised of this (the more correct circumference derived by Eratosthenes was commonly known), and only funded Columbus on the off chance that if he might stumble across something of value, they would rather that belong to Spain than a rival power. It was a cheap gamble for Spain at the time.

If you're wrong, but enough people believe you're right in the spirit of maximising quarterly returns, then we're all dead on the same timeline.

The only path to survival as a species is to work out how to do space exploration. I'm hoping to find water on the moon and mars as the next step, and to find it within the next few years.

In a few decades at our current rate we're going to see so many natural disasters and mass migrations that the general populace will be far more concerned about food and water for the populace than wasting it on extravagances like space, and then we may end up all dying on this rock.

Once we're able to successfully mine minerals from space and have some hope for colonizing other planets the game changes, because people could see it as a lifeline rather than a waste.

Where's the outrage around the thousands of container ships that burn the dirtiest crude oil and dump their waste into the ocean? Or all the airliners killing birds?

Let's be real, this isn't environmental concerns, it's a way to punish Musk for his political stance.

In the way they have time to apply for licenses for an eventual Mars landing, yes. The practical timer started with IFT-4.

Link to the ESGHound source?

If you read esghound's Twitter/threads he argues that the violations are so serious/done-in-bad-faith/contrary-to-submitted-paperwork that they would require a significant redo of the environmental impact permitting. In particular the FAA initially ruled that there was a finding of no significant impact (FONSI) and they did not require a (time-consuming) environmental impact statement (EIS). Esghound argues that they will legally need to complete an EIS which will take months. I wouldn't necessarily bet on that given how powerful Musk is.

https://x.com/ESGhound/status/1833544766019276923

The reality is much more complicated, https://www.flyingmag.com/news/spacex-pushes-back-on-rocket-...

SpaceX insists (and it makes sense considering the prominence of the program) that they had been in communication with TCEQ and EPA and were told they were in compliance under the TMSG permit they had, until they were told they would have to apply for a different permit.

Foobarqux is clearly also not an unbiased source despite trying to appear that way, considering they refuse to accept SpaceX's public document filings to government agencies as meaningful claiming them to be lies but insist that you look past the ad hominems in ESGhound's "reporting".

Your rebuttal linked in that article is simply the "Elon Musk says so" that is the original tweet, with a bunch of easily falsified claims already discussed in the comments here, like that the water is potable. I don't know what a "TMSG" permit is, searching Google and Twitter doesn't produce anything. I assume you mean the storm water permit which is not for industrial waste water and I can guarantee that no agency ever told them it was good for that purpose, if they had SpaceX would be posting the communication all over Twitter.

I did not "refuse to accept" SpaceX's public document filings I simply, correctly, said that third-party test results are not the same as a permit, this isn't difficult to understand. To get a permit you go through the permitting process, you don't invent your own rules.

Finally, when someone presents ad-hominem arguments, as you have, it doesn't mean the rest of the arguments are wrong. For example, your arguments are wrong for the reasons I explained above, irrespective of your ad-hominems.

What does this even mean?

Sounds like a really unbiased source.

https://x.com/esghound/status/1511730625333665799

He's worthless as a source and not worth paying attention to.

Throw enough at the wall and something will stick.

I am not convinced he is correct in this case either, just that he's gotten the ear of a likeminded journalist.

I’m not sure why that is. Techno-optimism perhaps.

"Why did you not know the results of your tests and the outcome of your multi-year R&D project a decade ago!? Are you incompetent?" -- said by someone unable read a few dozen pages of text faster than 60 days.

Libertarians may cheer at this, but not so fast. The edge cases and particulars of laws aren't abolished, they're just fuzzy. You can't be sure you're complying with the law, even if the regulatory body says you're in the clear. You're at the mercy of judges who know nothing about the field they're ruling over. The chaos of legal uncertainty will grind the permitting of new technologies to a halt, as the regulators wait for Congress or the Courts to clarify how old laws apply to new circumstances before issuing any licenses.

Remember Oracle v. Google? How octogenarian Justices struggled to understand what an API was, when they could barely open their email? Imagine that, applied to the entire US code.

It's basically this in a nutshell, except that far-right activists intend to use the same 3 justices in Texas to reinterpret all federal regulations.

In the last SOTU address, I gather to Biden one of them was healthcare/limiting pharma prices.

Thankfully they have shown us a new way.

I agree with the poster's assessment that this is pretty stupid regardless.

What does that mean? Don't they take the amount of time they need in order to ensure safety, so that's the perfect amount of time? Or are you saying they're purposefully dragging their feet behind them just to make it slower for no good reason?

I think the perception is that they spend all their time calling the meeting to order, identifying participants, itemizing the agenda, breaking for lunch, slowly reading a checklist of procedures, reconvening after a formal proposal for investigation takes place, etc. etc., eventually followed by about 48 hours of actual review activities. The typical bureaucratic process.

Endless review cycles, approvals, re-approvals, wordsmithing, legal, compliance, risk, re-re-re approvals. It really does take a lot of time.

If by bureaucratic you mean the same typical tropes about lazy government employees sucking off the taxpayers tit that's probably not what the person you're referring to meant.

If by bureaucratic you mean laborious and involving a lot of people thoroughly dotting i's and crossing t's then yeah, that's probably what the person you're replying to meant.

Along with some measure of frustration, even though most of it is actually necessary.

As the article makes clear, they do not. And this is not the first time this has happened.

According to SpaceX no safety concerns have been raised in quite some time.

It's also odd how much slower this approval process is compared to the previous and much more complex ones.

> Furthermore, the mechanics of these types of consultations outline that any new questions raised during that time can reset the 60-day counter, over and over again. This single issue, which was already exhaustively analyzed, could indefinitely delay launch without addressing any plausible impact to the environment.

I do agree, there seems to be a ton of extra scrutiny on SpaceX for no apparent reason. We can only speculate and I'm sure HNers have a ton of theories.

Americans may not feel it as keenly, but here in Central Europe, we have a visceral feeling that a new period of wars is upon us. Ukraine, the Near East, Taiwan: everything converging like back in 1938-9. Authoritarians all over the world feel emboldened. And, at the same time, the West is weaker than it was, not least because of loss of industrial capacity. Space is one of the few industries where we still command some advantage, and 2/3rds of that advantage is concentrated in SpaceX.

Yeah, I don't think that sacrificing that advantage to personal dislike of Musk is worth it. Even though I agree that he is obnoxious.

And yet we can't really be sure that Musk has anything but self interest involved. He's gone all-in on right-wing climate denying politicians. I honestly don't really care what his aspirations are for life on Mars if he's willfully helping to destroy this planet just so he can save some money on his taxes, or whatever short-term goal he thinks supporting right-wing politicians will get him.

Russia and Ukraine had terrible birth rates before the war and Russia had a clearly inadequate amount of soldiers for occupying a country of that size (only about 200 000, where a million or more would be realistically required). Not very good preconditions for a massive war. Putin went ahead anyway.

GWB's attack on Iraq wasn't a particularly smart action either.

Maybe China can learn from those mistakes. Or maybe Xi feels that his time is slowly coming to an end anyway, and a Heroic Feat is necessary to fix his position in the textbooks of tomorrow.

I don't understand these takes that don't get the industry

Where is NASA in that?

That's also what China wants to do

I'm sure you've heard of "here to stay" wrt to the moon.

I'm sure you remember the victory lap with the moon landing. Here it's China rather than Russia.

The US has won in commercial launch and LEO communications. The next step is the moon. All this has been in planning before SpaceX existed.

Someone else has answered you too.

If you only add regulations but never remove them, eventually you end up with a society where most things are illegal and the only people who can get anything done are wealthy enough to afford to deal with years-long bureaucratic processes.

SpaceX is doing development the right way, planning for multiple failed launches and attempting to learn as much as possible from each one as it develops the final product. This sort of rapid prototyping is orders of magnitude cheaper than trying to perfectly engineer everything right from the start. Downside is increased risk of unintended consequences on the initial test launches.

And regulatory agencies are here to make sure these "unintended consequences" won't damage more than the company finances. Regulators don't care about rockets exploding, as long as the company can show that they have taken the necessary steps to make sure no one is hurt when it happens, it includes the environment.

"Move fast and break things" is fine if your things break. It is not fine if my things break.

Now something off topic: I wonder if blue checkmark ratio can be used to determine the political direction of a thread. Testing thia could be a fun data science weekend project.

We're also, at least in the legal sense, not at war.

"Hey Mr. President, we're working on fulfilling our contract and are going over budget/time/whatever due to the opaque concerns of executive agencies" is much more sensible than "we're at war, so the public interest of SpaceX having another functional rocket design clearly outweighs the public interest of having clean waterways."

Imagine having to beg the Russians to get the two stranded astronauts back to Earth.

They should be punished, they keep blowing up spaceships. Know what didn't blow up on it's first trip to space? The Saturn V rocket, from the 60s!

Yes they are one launch platform, and the only launch platform capable of some of the things they do!

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Try and set your ego aside and just do your job. This kind of attitude you have right here where you think the FAA should punish somebody's opinions is what makes the phrase "drain the swamp so popular". Literally unelected bureaucrats should be doing their job and not trying to control the speech of others.

If you're just 5% slower at answering requests to people you dislike in favor of people you like, imagine how much this weighs down a person in aggregate across all actors and decision makers in the state space. This wouldn't even have to be a conscious bias here, it could be a completely subconscious preference.

The op was indicating an actual conscious bias that they indicated would cause them to institute delays which is where the real problem comes down to.

Considering the state goal of the Republican platform is “to rid itself of the woke mind virus” and to hire only conservative loyalists, I’m not sure how popular your idea would be.

When you're talking about a bureaucratic lifer at some agency who is supposed to implement regulations and regulatory oversight that Congress has enacted that's a completely different thing. What recourse do the people have if this non-elected bureaucrat is not acting in an impartial way when they execute their duties?

More details from the WSJ.

https://archive.md/856RL

Maybe the FAA can raise funds by starting a Disney-esque line jumper program. How much money do you have? Send it to us to get to the front of the line. Very similar to the simplified IRS tax form.

Wouldn't that be a first amendment violation? Not that it stops people like you from doing it.

https://www.spacex.com/updates/#starships-fly

Is the "small but vocal minority" the FAA here? They seem to go on the offensive instead of trying to work with the very people who can possibly decide their fate, seems a bit short-sighted.

https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1823080774012481862

Citation needed.

No matter, the FAA (and rest of bureaucracy) is supposed to be apolitical

But now the name has become toxic so he's trying to distance himself from it, but he hasn't disavowed much of the content.

> No matter, the FAA (and rest of bureaucracy) is supposed to be apolitical.

Yes, and Trump has been vocal about wanting to change that. There's no conspiracy here, just listen to what he says.

It won't be when they fire all the career civil servants and replace them with stooges as they've said over and over they want to do.

The Heritage Foundation can say whatever they want about SpaceX-- just because they can say it, that doesn't mean that SpaceX as an entity is onboard with the position Project 2025 paints for them.

Trump has been pitching a reboot of Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative using Elon's Starlink. At least publically since his reelection campaign: "the United States will build a missile defense shield to intercept nuclear weapons" https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/politics/donald-trump-pla... It's also in Project 2025 / Heritage Foundation docs.

SpaceX was founded in 2002 with help of a CIA agent named Mike Griffin ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career ) who funneled them funding (lots of citations at end of https://archive.ph/D2zIG ). Griffin worked for In-Q-Tel and also was the Deputy of Technology for the Strategic Defense Initiative, later started the Space Development Agency (SDA) which is to become Trump's SDI in 2025.

It's true that some people connected to SpaceX were also interested in missile defense, but that's hardly unusual given that we're talking about the intersection between defense and the aerospace industry.

To the extent that SpaceX enables missile defense it's in the same way they enable any other space endeavor, as a natural consequence of lowering the cost of lifting payloads to orbit.

Overall, I just don't understand why Elon has allowed the Twitter political brainrot to take hold. If he's playing strategically, then it's happening at a level which isn't legible to me. I really don't see how engaging so much in divisive political issues is going to help him advance his claimed primary goal of extending human life to Mars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career#:~:t...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Zubrin

What SpaceX hasn't done: Develop Mars habitats.

What SpaceX has done: Develop precisely the kind of rocket you need to launch mega constellations like Brilliant Pebbles.

> Then in August 2021, Biden organized an EV event, to be anchored by him signing an executive order with a target to make half of all new vehicles sold in 2030 zero-emissions vehicles.

> “In the auto industry, Detroit’s leading the world in electric vehicles,” Biden said at a November 2021 event while promoting the new infrastructure bill. He then turned to GM’s Mary Barra and praised the CEO. “You electrified the entire automobile industry. I’m serious. You led, and it matters,” Biden said.

> Tesla’s leaders, including Musk, were outraged. During the fourth quarter of 2021, when Biden made these remarks, Tesla delivered more than 115,000 EVs in the U.S. while GM produced just 26.

...

> The reason: Biden officials didn’t want to anger the powerful United Auto Workers union, which leaned on the White House to keep its distance from Musk, according to people familiar with the matter.

https://archive.md/856RL

Perfectly normal decision-making process for a CEO of a company with $700B market cap. You’d think he would have noticed by now that American politicians have to say things to please swing state voters.

Not for lack of trying. They tried to make the subsidy exclusive to UAW companies and exclude Tesla.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2021/08/05/biden-wa...

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/biden-bill-includes-boo...

It could be a result of repeated violations of regulatory action, and this is a smackdown to show that yes, the government can fuck you up if it wants to. But that's pure speculation on my part.

Of course, Musk will try to make this look as bad as possible. If his handy tool Trump wins this fall, Musk will use this to motivate his "let's streamline government by creating a new government oversight committee!" plan, which is probably largely intended to cripple any regulatory oversight that could possibly get in his way.

You're probably already over the line at which we ban accounts for doing this, but I'm not going to ban you right now. We need you to fix this, though, so if you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

(And no, we don't care what ideological side you're on. We care about not having tedious flamewars from any side.)

Trump has been pitching a reboot of Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative using Elon's Starlink. At least publicly since his reelection campaign: "the United States will build a missile defense shield to intercept nuclear weapons" https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/politics/donald-trump-pla... It's also in Project 2025 / Heritage Foundation docs.

SpaceX was founded in 2002 with help of a CIA agent named Mike Griffin ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career ) who funneled them funding (lots of citations at end of https://archive.ph/D2zIG ). Griffin worked for In-Q-Tel and also was the Deputy of Technology for the Strategic Defense Initiative, later started the Space Development Agency (SDA) which is to become Trump's SDI in 2025.

It was never about Mars. Look into the Mars Society leadership, they were military / Strategic Defense Initiative people

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career#:~:t...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Zubrin

It was never about Mars. Look into the Mars Society leadership, they were military / Strategic Defense Initiative people

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career#:~:t...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Zubrin

You're even citing a grok post from an AI bot as proof.

Griffin was not a CIA agent and was not founded with Griffin's support. Griffin was asked to join the company but he refused. Griffin had no part in getting any funding to SpaceX. Your link is him lying (backed up by zero other sources) to raise his own status and rewrite history in his own favor (he's been on the talk circuit extensively after leaving government).

Mars Society is absolutely about Mars.

Most Democrat voters have never read their policy documents, does that mean they don't exist?

You don't know who Ben Carson is?

Just spend two minutes looking at the author page of the document. Just a few selections:

> Ken Cuccinelli served as Acting Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in 2019 and then, from November 2019 through the end of the Trump Administration, as Acting Deputy Secretary for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

> Rick Dearborn served as Deputy Chief of Staff for President Donald Trump and was responsible for the day-to-day operations of five separate departments of the Executive Office of the President. He also served as Executive Director of the 2016 President-elect Donald Trump transition team. Before that, Rick served in several roles, including as Chief of Staff, in the office of then-U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) for nearly two decades.

> Thomas F. Gilman served as Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Administration and Chief Financial Officer of the U.S. Department of Commerce in the Trump Administration.

> Christopher Miller served in several positions during the Trump Administration, including as Acting U.S. Secretary of Defense, Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Combating Terrorism, and Senior Director for Counterterrorism and Trans-national Threats at the National Security Council.

> Peter Navarro holds a PhD in economics from Harvard and was one of only three senior White House officials to serve with Donald Trump from the 2016 campaign to the end of the President’s first term. He was the West Wing’s chief China hawk and trade czar and served as Director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy and Defense Production Act Policy Coordinator

> William Perry Pendley was born in Cheyenne, Wyoming. He earned a BA and an MA from George Washington University, was a U.S. Marine Corps captain, and earned his JD from the University of Wyoming College of Law. He was an attorney on Capitol Hill, a senior official for President Ronald Reagan, and leader of the Bureau of Land Management for President Donald Trump.

https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FUL...

> Did anyone of any consequence endorse this?

Do you think Trump is a person of consequence?

> Because our country is going to hell. The critical job of institutions such as Heritage is to lay the groundwork. And Heritage does such an incredible job at that. And I'm telling you, with Kevin and the staff, and I met so many of them now, I took pictures with among the most handsome, beautiful people I've ever seen. I didn't like that picture. If you could lose that picture, please would you Kevin? But this is a great… No, he says I won't do that. But this is a great group. And they're going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America and that's coming. That's coming. Because nobody can stand what's happening right now. Only a fool, only a fool or somebody that hates our country can like what's happening right now. Never been in this position before and already we know a very big part of our agenda.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-video-project-2025-c...

Project 2025 is this groundwork the Heritage foundation was to lay. Trump says the Heritage Foundation does such an incredible job at laying out the policies.

And yet you can't even bother to check out their website or listen to the leadership of the Heritage Foundation talk about it.

It's completely different from the Steele Dossier. Project 2025 was written by dozens of former Trump administration officials and surrogates, by an organization he has previously outsourced policy to, and largely aligns with what he and his top advisors have said they want to do. He even praised the project before it became well known. But now the name has become toxic so he's trying to distance himself from it, but he hasn't disavowed much of the content.

Then maybe you should actually look up what it is before throwing out a lot of falsehoods and conjecture about it.

> As far as I can tell it’s just a smear device

The smearing is coming from inside the house then. It is written by the people Trump appointed in the past and likely to appoint again. They're proud of their work, they've talked about it a lot.

If the people writing it are weirdos, well, I guess it would be a big werido who would appoint them to positions of power. Maybe we shouldn't elect someone who would appoint such people to power if these ideas are so distasteful.

And the people who know about are too hooked on partisan TV? Well, Trump certainly knows about them and the work they do. But I do agree he's probably too habitually glued to partisan cable news so much he's spewing weirdo falsehoods at debates.

> The critical job of institutions such as Heritage is to lay the groundwork. And Heritage does such an incredible job at that. And I'm telling you, with Kevin [the president of the Heritage Foundation] and the staff...

- DJT

We should really be questioning Trump's mental acuity when he repeatedly says he doesn't know who Ben Carson or Peter Navarro or Kevin Robers is. He doesn't remember the person he campaigned against eight years ago, the guy he hired to head Housing and Urban Development? He doesn't remember the guy who worked in the Whitehouse for four years closely with him? He doesn't remember the person he's praised many times in the past couple of years?

And yeah, I do agree a lot of people don't really know about Project 2025. It's incredible to me so many people are voting for a party in which they don't know most of the real policy positions of its highest members and thought leaders. If you think the Heritage Foundation has little to no influence in the direction of GOP policy, you haven't been paying attention to the last 40 years.

People reading this should remember that Flight 1 was preceded by hysterics from online detractors who predicted, correctly, that the launch would make a giant mess. The FAA ignored them and allowed the launch anyway. The Wikipedia article would like to remind us that it wasn’t a toxic mess, but it was still a mess.

Given the lack of any acknowledgement of that incident in this PR piece, I’m a bit disinclined to fully trust it. And I can certainly see why regulators would like to give stakeholders 60 days to comment on what might go wrong, since SpaceX’s history of predicting what will go wrong with Starship launches is a bit tarnished.

https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/12v7qsp/view_of_the...

Also, as dramatic as it looks, it is hardly an environmental disaster. I daresay paving over the land with asphalt and concrete had a larger impact.

And there have already been several launches since then. Those went more smoothly and were not delayed. The reasons for the delay this time have nothing to do with this.

The point that the launch did not cause major environmental issues remains true.

The fact that subsequent launches were approved demonstrates as such.

I would also point out that other rocket launches routinely dump their boosters containing solid or liquid fuel in the ocean.

My apologies - that was an oversight on my part.

> The fact that subsequent launches were approved demonstrates as such.

No it doesn't. SpaceX made several changes to the launchpad and supporting structures. Implying that there were zero changes between that launch and the subsequent is not accurate.

My point is that the "mess" the original comment complained about was not a major environmental issue, as they implied, and that it did not prevent subsequent launches from being approved.

You can see the trajectory here and how they thread it through the Caribbean islands & Cuba.

https://sattrackcam.blogspot.com/2023/11/new-starship-launch...

People need to stop repeating this bad faith argument without providing facts.

No educated people were predicting disaster as a result of the launch. In fact NASA scientists said the damage was way worse than expected because of an unexpected ground water steam explosion.

I want to point out that while giving people time to comment sounds harmless, it's actually a systemic problem that's at the root of many issues.

Allowing special interest groups to delay development is a major reason why it's nearly impossible to build anything on time and on budget in the US.

If they don't cancel the project outright, or prevent it from starting in the first place via chilling effects, then the delays increase the price tag enormously.

Jerusalem Demsas at The Atlantic often writes about this:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/local-gove...

> Development projects in the United States are subject to a process I like to call “whoever yells the loudest and longest wins.” Some refer to this as participatory democracy.

> Across the country, angry residents and neighborhood associations have the power to delay, reshape, and even halt entirely the construction of vital infrastructure. To put a fine point on it: Deference to community input is a big part of why the U.S. is suffering from a nearly 3.8-million-home shortage and has failed to build sufficient mass transit, and why renewable energy is lacking in even the most progressive states.

> . . .

> Every new development has so-called negative externalities: Construction is always annoying, trains can be loud and unsightly, wind farms may obstruct ocean views, and for some the simple knowledge that a nearby home is actually a duplex is enough to ruin the neighborhood character. Regardless of how valid you find any of these complaints, they should not by themselves be sufficient to block new projects, or else no mass transit, no new housing, no wind or solar farms could ever be installed.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/national-e...

> Signed into law in 1970, the National Environmental Policy Act and its state and local equivalents require federal agencies to assess the environmental effects of major projects before they sign off on them. Supporters argue that NEPA “empowers local communities to protect themselves and their environment.”

> But NEPA is more burdensome than it may sound. As the economist Eli Dourado has documented, environmental-impact statements were initially very short—just 10 pages, in some instances. But now they average more than 600 pages, include more than 1,000 pages of appendices, and take four and a half years on average to complete.

> How did this happen? Lawyers—the answer is always lawyers. Over time, the courts have embraced more and more expansive definitions of what these statements should cover. And lawyers—terrified of getting their clients caught up in lengthy court proceedings where a judge tells them they should have thought through the fourth- or fifth-order impacts of an apartment building—spend eons fleshing them out. The goal is not to mitigate environmental ill effects but to get an A+ for thoroughness.

> . . .

> Caution and deliberation are good in moderation, but waiting cannot relieve this uncertainty; it merely changes its form. Doing can cause harm, but not doing won’t preserve the world in amber. Neighborhoods in desirable communities that don’t build more housing see skyrocketing prices and demographic shifts toward high-income, white, and older residents. And nations that don’t build the necessary renewable-energy infrastructure will be subject to the very environmental degradation that 20th-century activists tried so hard to prevent.

> The unforeseen consequences of blocking change should weigh as heavily as the ones that come from allowing it. Those lost students, missing refugees, absent neighbors, and failed government projects may never intrude on our sight line or cause us frustration during our commutes, but they cost us all the same.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/environmen...

> Delays run up the cost of vital infrastructure and exert something like a chilling effect on new projects, as developers may not want to contend with the expensive legal battles that lie ahead. These laws have been used to stymie wind farms in Nantucket (residents dubiously claim that offshore wind kills whales), Martha’s Vineyard (the owner of the solar company that opposes the project lives near the proposed site part-time), and dozens of other purportedly progressive communities across the country.

> . . .

> Consider the way NEPA preemptively chills development or the fact that the delays themselves are costly. The economist Eli Dourado has studied NEPA’s failures for years, and he is skeptical that thoroughness and time spent should be read as a policy success: “If every review were done so thoroughly that it took 100 years to complete and the resulting lawsuit rate were zero, that would be a failure, not a success.” The problem is “the threat of litigation continuously increases the burden of NEPA review, rendering our agencies unable to make speedy decisions even in cases where it is obvious there is no significant environmental impact,” Dourado told me.

Does this "giant mess" matter in any practical way?

Disagree?

Okay, then explain why the FAA just sits there passively seemingly giggling to themselves every time SpaceX makes a typo? Any excuse to press the multi-month pause button is mercilessly exploited.

If you think that the government is working with industry to achieve supremacy in space, is this what you would expect to see?

Can you imagine if right after signing the CHIPS act the Whitehouse just stood by while some tiny agency just held up a many-billion-dollar fab construction that’s vital to national security!?

Someone in power is out to get Elon Musk and/or SpaceX. They’re most likely a competitor or in the pocket of one.

Everything I’ve seen in the news fits that theory.

The opposite theory of “SpaceX is the world’s best space tech company but also crazy incompetent and deserving endless punishment from every agency” doesn’t hold water. If the agencies cared about the environment or the water or whatever they would be working with SpaceX instead of harming their progress in a way that appears entirely punitive.

Hasn’t anyone here been held up by a paperwork troll in your work? Haven’t any of you had this conversation?

Secops: “Firewall requests take two months to implement.”

Me: “I’m a consultant and this is a one week project. I’m finishing up Friday.”

Secops: “That’s your fault for not submitting the request ahead of time.”

Me: “It’s Monday morning! I just got here. I haven’t even finished my coffee that I got at the airport on the way here.”

Secops: “Your lack of planning is your own fault.”

Me: “Auditors prohibit me from working on any projects until the official start date, which is today. My guess though is that the rules will be: x, y, and z.”

Secops: “You need to use our form 832b and use the specific IP source and destination addresses.”

Me: “Can I have a list of your subnets and their IP ranges?”

Secops: “No, that’s a secret. For security!”

— this is how a one week project blows out to six months.

This spacex release and complaint is justifiable but I wish they didn’t use such strong language it just raises the rhetoric against itself

Yet it's unprofessional if they are showing up and demand delays at the last moment. It's the work of government agencies to watch companies like SpaceX closely and coordinate with them way ahead of large events.

Nobody's winning when the environment is ignored, or when the aspiring company has to stop and switch to something else while waiting for permissions for important actions in development. So far USA administrations demonstrated reasonable balance, hope they'll manage to improve the current situation.

If states like Texas and Florida governance want to run fast and are ok with potentially breaking things environmentally by easing regulation - we should let them.

Perhaps they are right that commercial/industrial interests should be prioritized over the state's local population if the United State's space ambitions are to be achieved.

Perhaps there's plenty of available land so not much is really being sacrificed and if something really bad happens? Elon, the leadership and engineering teams can probably move (back) to California.

However, when it comes to polluting rivers, sea and air, consequences of pollution are of often planet-wide. Thus, a global approach is required.

That said, the sooner Starship achieves full reusability, the sooner we'll stop burning rocket stages into the atmosphere and letting the incombustible parts fall into the ocean.