Back then I doubt even Musk thought he was going to become CEO of USofA. If he had known that, I doubt he'd ever have been concerned about having any restrictions from any gov't agency. Now, he's pretty much bulldozed a clear path for SpaceX doing whatever it wants. That definitely makes the need for an expensive ocean platform totally unnecessary.

They're trying to make their little slice of land into an actual city. Next stop, carve out that land to become a separate state. Then he can just become governor since he can't be president without having a co- prefix.

> he's pretty much bulldozed a clear path for SpaceX doing whatever it wants

SpaceX is waiting for Starship launch authorisation from the FAA.

I'm sorry, has Musk completed his takeover of the gov't or is he still working?

> has Musk completed his takeover of the gov't or is he still working?

"Pretty much bulldozed a clear path for SpaceX doing whatever it wants" implies the former.

There will be a Democratic administration in 4 or 8 years, and they'll want to settle scores.

It worked out fine. It's an example of iterative design where you find out the problems of an approach by doing the experiment, rather than by analysis, where you find out and have to address all the nonexistent imaginary problems too.

Except we'd already done a lot of experiments and you don't have to test it at full scale to realise it's gonna be chaos.

Yes, there's some interesting papers post-fact on the ejecta but it was still dumb.

My understanding is that it was a matter of timeline. They simply did not want to wait and we're willing to trade off the consequences.

At the end of the day, the rocket did get off the pad. The repair was completed deluge system installed in less than 3 months.

The alternative view is they got off really really lightly for wrecking wetland and sandblasting the neighbourhood.

The reason the deluge system was installed so quickly is exactly the reason you can't argue that 'they wanted to see if they could do without'. They knew a priori that it was necessary, that's why they'd basically already staged the hardware.

Installing a deluge system pre-launch would have cost them a month, a month that they wouldn't have spent afterwards, waiting for another round of sign-offs.

It was a dumb decision and posting fan-blogs like Teslarati isn't a good argument.

The blog was refenced for time stamped evidence of what I presented. The fan nature of it shouldn't matter unless you think the pictures are fabricated.

That said, I think you are right. Most of it comes down to how much someone cares about debris in the wetland and dust clouds.