SpaceX’s Starship launches at the company’s Starbase facility near Boca Chica, Texas, have allegedly been contaminating local bodies of water with mercury for years. The news arrives in an exclusive CNBCreport on August 12, which cites internal documents and communications between local Texas regulators and the Environmental Protection Agency.
SpaceX’s fourth Starship test launch in June was its most successful so far—but the world’s largest and most powerful rocket ever built continues to wreak havoc on nearby Texas communities, wildlife, and ecosystems. But after repeated admonishments, reviews, and ignored requests, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) have had enough.
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SpaceX is cool, Elon is the world’s most colossal asshole. Some people won’t separate the two because they rightfully don’t want to enable him.
Shotwell could run the whole thing herself, I wish the government would step in and cut Musk out of it entirely.
People who blame the thousands of hard working engineers at SpaceX for Elon’s follies are committing the exact same logical fallacies as the people who hero worship him and praise him for what is the hard work of all those engineers.
It’s very easy to say in one sentence that Elon sucks and what SpaceX is doing is pretty wild and revolutionary, yet people like the OP I’m responding to seem bothered by even that.
I’d rather NASA be funded well enough to not need private, profit-driven, corporations dictating how we explore space. That and Musk’s stench sticks to all his companies, for good or bad.
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SLS does it the old way, with NASA contracting work out to the old school companies.
The Commercial Crew and Supply contracts are there to try it a different way. And they’re accomplishing their goals much more quickly and at a fraction of the cost.
There’s a great synopsis of the situation further up the thread, but the short is:
SpaceX originally wasn’t going to launch rockets from this facility… until they announced that they were, then asked for permission from the regulatory bodies after their first launch.
When concerns were raised about the rockets being launched half a kilometer from nature preservation land, and specifically in regard to the possibility of failed launches damaging the launchpad, Elon assured them that no such thing could happen… and then a quarter of the launchpad was destroyed by a failed launch.
So they installed the water deluge system, again asking for permission after they had already installed and used it.
Within their permit application for the system - which, again, was installed and used before the application was even submitted - are mercury measurements 50x higher than the Texas maximum threshold for acute mercury toxicity, and far higher than the thresholds for human safety.
The Elon hate is one thing, and I believe much of the hate for SpaceX is because of how he handles himself and his companies. But the general assurance has largely been that SpaceX has a team of handlers to keep him from screwing things up, and it sounds more like Boeing over there every day.
They may have Elon on a leash, but they seem to be running his playbook anyway.
They got approval from the fish and wildlife agency before launching with the deluge system
https://www.tpr.org/technology-entrepreneurship/2023-11-16/faa-gives-ok-to-spacex-for-second-starship-launch
*emphasis mine.
Flight 2 was on November 18th, 2 days after they get approval for the deluge system.
Edit: further, spacex has replied to this and said the following (among other things as well)
https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1823080774012481862
Heavy metals are some of the worst things to dump into the environment, and I’m curious to see where the mercury is coming from, why they’re using it, and how they’re going to address it, but it really feels like you’re blowing up a relatively small issue into a massive one.
They had one launch where they blew up the launch pad accidentally, so they added a deluge system to cope. Now there’s mercury toxicity downstream of the site, but it’s not clear it has anything to do with the deluge system.
That absolutely is where most of it comes from. Articles that hate on Elon get clicks, so for every actual thoughtful nuanced critique of SpaceX, there’s two dozen click bait articles written by glorified bloggers that will look for any flaw because critiques of Musk’s space company drives traffic.
Boeing is failing to do what they used to do 50 years ago. SpaceX is successfully doing things that no one has ever done. Yes the wreckless rule breaking is trademark Elon, but let’s not be hyperbolic.
So was I. Upon closer inspection, it seems possible that this entire story is based on two typos in the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality report.
This story may have been one of the latter.
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It is possible that this entire story is based on two typos in the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality report.
Maybe the latter is like, bad for the planet?
https://www.statesman.com/story/news/state/2024/06/28/spacex-is-destroying-earths-ozone-layer-elon-musk-new-study/74171065007/
Hmm, did you read that article before posting it?
Because Im struggling to see how Starship, a fully reusable spaceship made out of stainless steel, is going to deplete the ozone the way that aluminum satellites do when they are deorbited and burned up…
What exactly do you think SpaceX is regularly launching into space? Because it isn’t Starship.
You literally quoted me talking about Starship, and the article OP linked is about Starship.
SpaceX is going to launch the ~4000 satellites it has permits for, starship doesn’t change that in any way shape or form.
Your words? Because, again, it’s not Starship they’re launching every two weeks.
Yes, it is. That is using their projected budget and the launch cadence that’s possible with both SLS and Starship. SLS can at most launch twice a year, Starship will be able to launch every two weeks, and costs orders of magnitude less.
And meanwhile, SpaceX will destroy the ozone layer with endless Starlink launches, so maybe let’s not praise them, like I initially said?
My god. What do you do for a living? Does it have no effect on the environment in any way shape or form?
They literally just discovered that Starlink satellites are having that effect, and you have given them precisely zero time to even try and address and fix it. And in the meantime I literally just came back from a remote first Nations community that only has high quality internet because of it, amongst virtually every rural community in the world.
Honestly, disconnect yourself from the internet before you spend any time looking into the environmental impact of your phone, the servers you use, and the billions of miles of fibre optic cables that connect everything. Because if that’s the kind of blood that prevents you from praising a company that is literally revolutionizing space launch, then literally nothing any of us ever do is worth praising because it’s all built on a giant foundation of blood.
Hell, those solar thermal power plants that use mirrors to reflect light onto molten salts originally killed a whole bunch of birds. Are they bastards for trying to build out a new technology, realizing there’s environmental consequences, and then finding ways of addressing it?
Do you know what the clouds coming out of the engines at shut down and start up are? Methane and oxygen. Do you think injecting methane into the upper atmosphere does the earth any favours?
Huh, if only NASA Earth’s science budget could stretch farther somehow so they could better monitor and tell us… now I wonder how they could reduce their mission costs by orders of magnitude…
They are literally monitoring it and telling us. You just don’t like what you’re being told.
No they’re not. You’re sitting here asking open ended questions like “do you think that will be good for the upper atmosphere”.
It was a rhetorical question.
No, you said that NASA is monitoring methane emissions in the upper atmosphere and that it’s harming us.
Please provide your source for that claim.