It's absurd how these licenses are not fast-tracked by the government. This is one of the greatest technological assets the US have over other nations. It boggles my mind how the US government is shooting itself in the foot here if you compare it against other national security projects run by the government itself.
There are environmental concerns, I get it, but this feels a little bit like delaying the Manhattan project for a year because the test detonation would endanger some birds in the desert.
The environmental concerns are illegitimate though, the probability of hitting a sea creature is so vanishingly small.
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.
Absolutely. Being able to get mass to orbit at orders of magnitude less cost than competing nations (China, Russia, India, ...) is of paramount strategic importance. This touches communications, intelligence, space exploration, orbital resource extraction, moon bases and all sorts of other things that have tremendous economic, military and societal impact.
China is second in mass to orbit after SpaceX. All others amount to a rounding error. There are currently a couple dozen Chinese startups working to build reusable orbital class rockets. Launches or test fires every week. No other country has an active program to build a reusable launch stage. It's not a hot war... yet. One might call it a cold war.
The most obvious pressure would be China's space exploration program. If it turns out that there's useful stuff outside our atmosphere, America doesn't want their economic rival in control of it.
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.
There's nothing useful out there, except for the high ground and vantage point. All satellites that make money or have military value are pointed at Earth.
If you're right, we're all dead. Maybe within a few hundred years, probably under a thousand.
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.
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.
We're in a very small window in the battle against climate change where people are even allowed to spend money on space programs.
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.
That's what you get when the Congress is too divided to pass laws, while the Supreme Court keeps telling the executive branch to stop inventing new interpretations of existing laws. If nobody is capable of setting national priorities, regulators just keep doing whatever they are doing.
Regulators can't even keep doing what they're doing, because what they were doing was publishing rules to resolve ambiguities in legislation, and now the Court system has preempted that privilege. Loper-Bright has turned the existing body of regulations into a target-rich environment. Every agency rule can be challenged, possibly overturned, applying retroactively.
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.
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.
You do realize this is a government funded project right? If the government wants to delay it by 2 months for environmental reasons, they can. It's not like Musk is paying for this himself and they are getting in the way.
What are you talking about? They knew or should have known they would need these permits for years. ESGHound pointed it out years ago. This isn't a surprise that was dropped on them. Every other launch facility somehow managed to do it without any significant problems.
Thank you. Not getting the NPDES permit does seem like something they had time to do. Still confused why this is an FAA issue. (Is there any indication these are what is causing the delay?)
As I said in another comment if it were otherwise everyone would ignore all the other laws to get a launch permit.
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.
I don't know what "bad faith actor" means to you, but reasonably, albeit mistakenly, concluding that SpaceX violations would prevent launches isn't it.
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.
I'm sure you are intelligent enough to read his arguments and then go search out contradicting arguments and figure out for yourself which make more sense.
That's funny because he predicted that they were in violation of the Clean Water Act a year ago, while people like you kept saying it was bullshit. It seems like there is definitely someone not worth listening to but it isn't him.
ESGHound has lobbed many accusations, most of which did not pan out. Some of his accusations, such as the idea that SpaceX's development was a front for their real goal to drill for fossil fuel, could be considered conspiracy theories.
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.
The arguments seem to be that SpaceX ought to have used their time machines to go back several years to request a permit for something they've only just now started doing, something new and unique never before done by the entire human race.
"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.
They did not have years to apply for anything. You can't apply for something you don't know you were planning to do. Also the FAA is overloaded and can't handle applications for all possible plans. So they need to pick and choose and if plans change because of new developments then they need to apply again.
> At times, these roadblocks have been driven by false and misleading reporting, built on bad-faith hysterics from online detractors or special interest groups who have presented poorly constructed science as fact.
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.
The video is of cars parked next to the launch pad area, taken by remotely operated cameras. No one was endangered.
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.
How quick your argument went from "what are you talking about, the only damage was to the launch pad" to "yeah, so it flung chunks of concrete into the ocean miles away, hit cars parked at the facility and stuff, but so what?"
> 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.
SpaceX did make changes to prevent damage to the launch pad in the future, true. I did not mean to suggest otherwise.
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.
This is not true. The path of the rocket is carefully chosen so that an abort/explosion does not intersect with other people's property. It launches over the ocean.
Unless the guidance/steering systems are damaged, of course. Like by chunks of concrete hitting them that might otherwise have enough energy behind them to land a mile or two away in the ocean? Might that potentially affect the path of a rocket? If not, why not?
Trajectory is planned such that the ballistic trajectory minimizes the probability it will hit land. So it is relatively safe even if the engines and abort system fails.
You can see the trajectory here and how they thread it through the Caribbean islands & Cuba.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Does this "giant mess" matter in any practical way?
A bit tarnished with verified remediation is the regulatory framework we need to be aiming at precisely because a 60 day delay for a regulatory review process is an enormous cost on an operation of this scale.
Not at all. Elon wastes much more money on his "fuck around and find out" method of engineering^H^H^H accretion. A million monkeys could do it better and more cheaply.
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:
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
Hilarious, we used to throw SRBs from the space shuttle in the ocean repeatedly.
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.
I think what you mean to say is that regulations GROW over time.
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.
I don't think letting the richest man in the world do whatever he wants (especially if he's proven to be a bit reckless) is worth winning any race. And it isn't even "a race", there is no actual finish line. China and the US can both be in space and even both go to the moon separately, and both can have perceived wins from that.
Reasonable people can disagree on this, but I don't think that resentment towards the richest man in the world or a perceived need to "put him in his place" is worth self-sabotaging your civilization's position on something as important as space.
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.
>is worth self-sabotaging your civilization's position on something as important as space.
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.
Please go read China's GDP and try to understand how it would completely crash if they went to war with the US. We're far too dependent on each other to go to war over anything.
I stopped relying on rationality of humans when it comes to war.
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.
Wasn't SpaceX founded with Musk's goal of getting mankind to Mars ASAP? Hasn't he made several promises of timelines for unmanned and manned flights to Mars?
The Moon is just a vanity project for both countries. The real race is to be the country capable of putting the most mass into orbit before the war between the US and China starts. China was briefly in the lead a few years ago, until SpaceX singlehandedly squished them like a tiny bug. But the Chinese aren't laying down and accepting defeat, they're hard at work developing Falcon and Starship clones of their own. If America gets too cocky and retards SpaceX's development, China wills overtake America again. Probably in time for their promised invasion of Taiwan.
Okay, if there's "a race", then what is the finish line? What needs to happen for someone to "win"? And what happens to the loser? Does the loser still get to pass the finish line? What award is given for "winning" this "race"? This is not a first-past-the-post game. Superiority in space isn't predicated on someone "getting there first", and if we're talking about military pursuits, then getting there first simply won't win if the competition puts up a weapon 100x more powerful even if it's "second" getting there by a week or a month. China and the US are not at war, and both sides know it would be extremely foolish for either side to engage in a war with each other, so I'm not sure what you really think is going on.
Corporate culture of "move fast and break things" probably gets regulator's panties in a bunch.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
It's difficult for me to determine how far this deviates from the normal bureaucratic absurdity. Just because something "can" happen doesn't mean it will. They "can" shut down the whole operation if they want, right?
> But the FAA really does take much more time than they should
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?
> Don't they take the amount of time they need in order to ensure safety
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.
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.
Rockets from every other organization on Earth drop whole stages into the ocean (except China, who drop them on villages instead). But EDS sufferers act like SpaceX dropping a fraction as much hardware in the ocean is a great crime against humanity.
Also very harmless (consider how many meteorites hit the Earth every year and consider how reactive the steel is compared to the random rocks) and very normal for rockets.
I listened to a podcast last year featuring a FAA employee saying that the best way to delay the FAA is to complain to congress, who will demand a review. Then they have to drop everything and work on the review for a month.
This spacex release and complaint is justifiable but I wish they didn’t use such strong language it just raises the rhetoric against itself
> Despite a small, but vocal, minority of detractors trying to game the regulatory system to obstruct and delay the development of Starship, SpaceX remains committed to the mission at hand.
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.
It's the media they're talking about, like writing hit pieces without doing research about mercury pollution that was because of a misplaced decimal point and making a huge deal about a couple of bird nests.
SpaceX works on the leading edge of today's aerospace capabilities, and it's reasonable to expect new problems during their work. So it could justifiably be terra incognita to regulating agencies, including environment protection organizations.
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.
I think it's part of the uniqueness of the United States that different states can try different experiments.
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.
As long as the environmental consequences fall entirely within the state borders, states should be allowed to decide independently.
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.
From the outside looking in, the behaviour of the FAA looks corrupt. They’re being influenced by someone (Boeing?) to slow down SpaceX because they’re too hard to compete with fairly on a technological merit alone.
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.
As a consultant I have experienced this exact scenario at a government contractor. My team sat in a hotel for a week because the security badges needed to go through some third agency before they could give them to us and we could be physically on the corporate campus.
As I noted in previous threads this is brazen lying: they are not dumping tap water into the ground they are dumping (boiling hot) water that has been processed by blasting it with rocket fuel, which their own third-party analysis contains contaminants that are not present in "tap water".
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.
Hello. I just want to start by saying I appreciate this post as every other post on this article is: "this is politically motivated because I think it is".
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.
I suspect the truth is somewhere in between, but parent's comment that
> 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.
This unprofessional release mentions "literal" tap water being used. It appears that this is "literally" not true - is this a lie, or are you just upset with the parent comment's conclusion?
Both sides can be wrong and lying. Does it matter if water is "tap water" or if it meets the regulations for tap water? Lying to call someone out for lying just undermines the point.
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.
I wouldn't trust any analysis that SpaceX submits itself given Musk's long history of lying, including right now on this very subject. Others have pointed out problems in the way the water is being sampled (surface water vs ground water) but I'm not an expert. It is certainly possible that no serious contamination has already occurred.
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".
Contrary to what SpaceX has claimed USFWS does not regulate industrial waste water discharge (unsurprisingly). The TCEQ has said they are in violation. FAA has paused launches pending an investigation. Both should have done this many months ago.
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.
Industrial waste water permits are not less restrictive than domestic waste water. They could not have "filled in the wrong form" because they need a domestic waste water permit as well.
Also, these permits can't be applied for ahead of time for new technology that is still being developed.
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.
How is this different than launches at Canaveral or elsewhere? Don’t those pads also have water deluge systems and service a variety of liquid fueled rockets?
Can you link me to those processes? From everything I've seen, the shuttle basically had a much much more toxic exhaust and they just treated the pH of the water before dumping it or letting it evaporate.
Please remember that comments are supposed to get more interesting as they nest more. That guideline helps keep discussions from turning into flamewars or reddit style jokes.
It is telling, though, that the strongest argument against SpaceX seems to be whether they followed all the correct procedures rather than whether there was actually any harm.
If the facts aren't on your side, then pound the law I guess.
The area around the launch sites is used for neither.
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!”
The water is tap water. If it's toxic, then the source of the tap water should be punished for poisoning the civilian population, not the users of the tap water.
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.
How does this mixing happen? Consider the location of the deluge system and consider its right next to the ocean (which you really really shouldn't be drinking).
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?
SpaceX did not obtain a permit from the EPA to discharge industrial process water into the ground and therefore did not go through the steps the EPA requires to show that they aren't contaminating the water. I don't know if the tests they ran are reasonable or acceptable to the EPA --- we have expert agencies for a reason --- but in any case are only a part of the permitting process, where I imagine you have to show a number of things like how the contaminants will not build up over time, documenting mitigation and ongoing testing procedures, change processes etc.
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.
There are significant questions about how they do their testing. Apropos of anything else, the water is generally superheated which causes issues with microorganisms in the soil.
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.
Drinking contaminated water to show it is safe is such a bad trope and doesn't prove anything; it's just the sort of stunt Musk would love to pull and we just may see it.
Unfortunately that is not how it will be perceived. If he drinks the water it will be taken to be proof that there is no problem with the water. This stunt has occurred before where a CEO drinks water that is later shown to be contaminated to prove it is safe.
You seem to be willfully misinterpretating SpaceX's post. They say that only potable water is used in the deluge process. That's all they are saying. They aren't saying that the post deluge water is potable.
No-one cares about the water before deluge, that's why. Worst case scenario, a leak there floods some wetlands with "drinking 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.
Combustion is imperfect and it is occurring over metal which will erode into the mix of air and water. Then there is also whatever chemicals and material are on the ground prior to launch activities that get washed away with the deluge system
I would imagine most of the wash away is not close to the exhaust, but down slope, mainly consisting of construction, maintenance, and vehicle activities.
Though the area does receive many orders of magnitude more water from natural rainfall than the deluge system, so anything present in that water would have been washed away anyway.
Not according to the tests SpaceX submitted themselves. But if it were you would first show that to the EPA and then they would give you a permit to go ahead.
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?
The ecosystem that is business is so interesting. You have creatures like SpaceX that are watered by the government and grow into magnificent trees but the tree has parasites that want to extract some of the value for themselves.
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.
I think that people just have friends who like to take them on vacation - nothing untoward. Just nice friends who do nice things for them. Out of the kindness of their hearts.
As a US company they are required to get launch permits from the US regardless of where they launch from. Mixing jurisdictions would likely make things harder, not easier.
Probably nothing, but that would surely be quite the feat. Just getting the necessary people there would be difficult, let alone the supply chain and the structures. Even operations like SpaceX need some degree of efficiency.
This launch is intended to test the ability to land on the original launching tower, which is a core ability to the intended economics of starship; launching offshore would defeat much of the purpose of the launch.
It’s surprising to me that a company so important to the success of many American aspirations is getting sandbagged by environmental regulations. For a rocket whose outputs are carbon dioxide and water, no less. It’s hard to ignore the possibility that Democrats are purposely slow walking SpaceX approvals due to Elon’s politics.
This sounds very much like an incomplete story. Knowing nothing else, I'd guess that SpaceX pissed off somebody or somebodies, and it doesn't make a lot of sense to evaluate how reasonable or unreasonable their reaction is without knowing what triggered it. It looks like somebody is using whatever tool they have at their disposal, and the question is why.
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.
I bet this wouldn't be happening if Elon Musk wasn't shitposting on twitter, and particularly, doing it in a way that pisses off liberals/progressives.
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.
> bet this wouldn't be happening if Elon Musk wasn't shitposting on twitter, and particularly, doing it in a way that pisses off liberals/progressives
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.)
He is still a paragon of industry. Are there any comparably successful American companies outside of the software sector? it's just he's constantly creating distractions.
Let him go build his rockets in Russia or China. If he wants to support anti democratic folks he’ll be right at home somewhere else. Musk and his troll farm can piss right off imo.
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.
The comments on the linked Twitter thread are entirely one-dimensional, and more than a little conspiratorial on average. Is there a neutral news source for this?
That twitter thread is brigaded by a blue-mark army of Elon fans who seem confident this was done by Biden administration.
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.
Musk's right wing shift and naked conservative bias do not serve Spacex well when the opposition is in power. Most commercial enterprises with operations that fall under federal control play both sides of the street.
They were already biased against SpaceX because the government and the parasitical military contractors react violently against any competence that embarrasses them when people inevitably make the comparison. How do you think this makes NASA administrators or Boeing executives feel? The latter had a nice thing going before SpaceX came along, tens billions of dollars guaranteed from the government without having to work too hard.
I've wondered about the long-term implications for the Mars goal as Elon keeps burning bridges within politics. Not that he was treated well by the current White House with regard to electric vehicles, so it's understandable that he would be upset. But turning around and endorsing the other candidate all while going on the attack against the current administration probably isn't winning anyone over.
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.
How has the current White House mistreated Elon's ventures? For Tesla, the tax credit is still there, they pushed for and adopted the Tesla charger as the North American standard; heck they even levied a 100% tax against Chinese EVs (and batteries, and solar panels). SpaceX is still getting tons of federal money, it just got a billion dollar contract to deorbit ISS at the end of its life. It seems like policy is really working in Elon's favor right now to me.
It makes perfect sense when you realize those sorts of things aren't about helping American industry or promoting sustainable energy. They are strategic campaign events meant to appeal to union bosses who can help them maintain power.
> 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.
So all the administration’s policies are actually favorable to Tesla, but the president said something in August 2021 that offended Musk and he holds a grudge.
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.
Yeah, as much as I can understand where he's coming from in his frustrations I'm not sure it's the most productive route unless he wins in the end. As they say, if you take a swing at the king you'd best not miss.
“Starship and Super Heavy vehicles for Flight 5 have been ready to launch since the first week of August. The flight test will include our most ambitious objective yet: attempt to return the Super Heavy booster to the launch site and catch it in mid-air.
…
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.
Its almost funny how important environmentalism is to Musk when Tesla is the context, and how unimportant it is when SpaceX is the context. It's wild how his image has gone from forward thinking genius businessman to bipolar self-serving workaholic in less than four years.
> Every US launch site is next to a de facto or a de jure wildlife refuge.
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.
To prevent ignoring other agencies/laws the FAA does not issue a launch permit unless the other agencies/laws are satisfied. Otherwise people would just do what the FAA directly regulates and ignore the rest and get a launch permit.
> prevent ignoring other agencies/laws the FAA does not issue a launch permit unless the other agencies/laws are satisfied
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.
Having a Lead Federal Agency (FAA's role here) during permitting is a very common and positive thing. It helps avoid the left hand not talking to the right hand when permits from multiple agencies are required for a single activity.
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.
The archive link that references Shotwell is dead. What was that pointing to?
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.
There's a user on reddit with a bunch of alts that keeps spamming the conspiracy theory that SpaceX is a front by the military and intelligence agencies to funnel money into building a missile defense shield. They like to point to an AI chat with Twitter/X's Grok as proof.
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.
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 nothing like the Steele dossier, Heritage Foundation and others behind it have put their names all over Project 2025. Heritage is in the copyright block of the site footer!
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.
> 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.
I’m a conservative (though not “republican”/neocon/neolib/uniparty) and I don’t even know what “project 2025” is. Nor do I know any supporters. As far as I can tell it’s just a smear device along the lines of “when did you stop beating your wife”, or fake “dossier”, or “Russian collusion”.
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.
Nobody knows or cares what it is except the couple of weirdos who wrote it in a basement and people who spend too much time watching certain partisan news TV shows.
Those "couple of weirdos" are Trump's former transition team members, cabinet officials, and leadership of federal government agencies Trump appointed.
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.
That’s the thing though. One cannot be a Scientologist without being familiar with Hubbard. Here you’re telling me that this is my Bible and I’ve never heard of it. If it were real, I’d know.
It’s “real” in the same way as Steele Dossier was real. Who are these people? How do they relate to Trump? Did he endorse this? Did anyone of any consequence endorse this?
> Who are these people? How do they relate to Trump?
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.
> 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.
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.
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
Oh lord this made up story again. Your entire posting history is about this. There's no basis in reality for any of it.
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).
Allowing your personal crusade against a person to impact your regulatory duties as a government official should land you in jail. Because what you're doing in your regulatory oversight position should be regulatory oversight of the issue not trying to impend on someone's freedom of speech.
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.
Biden held an EV summit in 2021 and didn't invite Tesla. He declared GM's Mary Barra as the pioneer of EVs when GM had only manufactured 28 EVs that quarter and Tesla sold hundreds of thousands that were all manufactured in the US. The WSJ recently reported that it was because the UAW donated heavily to his campaign.
I do see a bit of a difference between a summit organized by an elected official and bureaucrats in unelected positions exerting personal influence. At some level when we elect someone we elect them based upon how they will exercise their discretionary authority. The role of the president isn't simply to carry out process. There is discretion and how they execute the duties of their office and holding a summit as in your example is one of those things. The recourse here is that is an elected official and if the people are unhappy with how they're executing that discretionary duties they simply elect another person.
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?
I think the difference is that the president doesn't hold a regulatory role. Like, he isn't supposed to be "impartial", he's inherently political in a way that civil servants shouldn't be (not openly, and not in a way that affects their jobs).
Wasn't it a UAW EV summit? Or was it an event organized by executive power? Because if it was organized by executive power, i find it baffling. If it was organized by the Union like i just read, and they invited Biden who accepted, i find it weird but quite normal, and the rest is just outrage bait and whining.
It was an EV event organized by executive power, Tesla wasn't invited because a major political donor to the presidential campaign, the UAW, didn't want Tesla there.
> Allowing your personal crusade against a person to impact your regulatory duties as a government official should land you in jail. Because what you're doing in your regulatory oversight position should be regulatory oversight of the issue not trying to impend on someone's freedom of speech.
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.
I agree that there can be unconscious bias and how you execute things. This is something that should be relatively easy to control for. When performing at your duties the assignment should be handed out in an impartial fashion you have a stack first in first out. You can simply measure the time to completion and the deviation. This should give you a good enough metric to know to look if there is potentially a deeper issues happening. It could be reviews from SpaceX take longer because the technology is different or is rapidly changing or a host of other factors. Once you know the actual metrics is when you can start to examine if it's bias conscious or subconscious or just the nature of the request.
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.
> Allowing your personal crusade against a person to impact your regulatory duties as a government official should land you in jail.
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.
What if the scenario is the other way around? What if they've been cutting corners for SpaceX because they appreciate the work that they're doing but now they're not because they don't like the way Elon Musk is behaving towards their organization or others?
In my mind the same would apply. When you're in an unelected position meant to be exercising some sort of regulatory oversight you should do your job with neutrality toward the person who's requesting it.
Whelp, considering the FAA seems to think the same as you…looks like we need to revise civil service protections and do to the federal agencies what was done to Twitter. Sorry folks!
I don't know why this is an unpopular opinion. Whether you agree or disagree with, or despise, that person's political views, the concept that people can criticize the US government to their heart's content, and that the US government does not retaliate for that, is a bedrock principle. Access to federal government agencies is not contingent on voicing support of specific (incumbent) politicians, or ideologies.
as well as drag my feet by placing any and all other tasks in front of these.
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.
POTUS could and should waive this with a stroke of a pen. We're at war, and this is exceptionally valuable military hardware for near-future national security launches. The priorities are all out of whack.
(In the alternative: ask yourself how'd you respond if US Fish & Wildlife paused US missile exports to UKR for 60 days, to further evaluate their sonic impact on nesting birds. Is it not the same thing?)
I do think we need to make the US a place where builders can build, but I disagree with this justification pretty strongly. This isn't a public organization working for the public good, it's a private company doing R&D to create a spacecraft that they will own and control.
We're also, at least in the legal sense, not at war.
Private companies can have strategic value, too. The capabilities of SpaceX is what puts the entire US on the top of the current space technology race.
Imagine having to beg the Russians to get the two stranded astronauts back to Earth.
It's a defense contractor with a track record of delivering things to USGov no one else is capable of (Starlink/Starshield). They're not a public service—but they do work for the US.
SpaceX is private, however this whole Starship program has NASA (public organization) funding parts of Starship's development for lunar exploration, as part of the Artemis program
For me, it is a national security risk to allow an unelected, largely unaccountable, private individual to have this much control over crucial areas of national interest.
Musk's company accomplishing a heroic feat could improve public opinion of his political endorsements. I mean, I don't think this way, but it seems like the sort of thing a petty bureaucrat might fear.
Can you believe when you get dicked around by unelected bureaucrats for political reasons people get upset? They should know to listen to their betters!
There won't be any real progress if there's no freedom of though and speech allowed and every country starts censoring everything and people with communist-like tendencies who are total corrupt (hence why "no hate speech" BS) get into power everywhere.
Could you please stop posting tedious flamebait and ideological battle comments? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. We've also asked you to stop in the past: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37182078.
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.)
No, go ahead and ban me. This topic is about politicians being butt-hurt and shitting on a company that has the most potential for humanity's progress. What I've described is NOT flamebating: it's the reality of what is happening.
People incapable of doing (or even understanding) something, interfering with other people who can do it, with no consequences if they are found to be wrong (or biased) in their basis for objecting to the activity.
Fundamentally, this is loathing and envy encoded into law.
Yeah, spaceX is an aerospace company, what business do they have saying the environmental scientists have no idea what they're doing? It's trivial for them to complain and get them crucified in the court of public opinion because spaceX is almost immune from the law since the US military relies on them so heavily.
