Wildlife officials say SpaceX launch left behind significant damage::undefined
Government when Elon asks for 10 billion dollars in subsidies to blow up rockets: 😳
Government when educatiors ask for enough money to buy crayons for the classroom: 😡Government when a poor veteran needs disability expenses: 😒
“Sorry, our unbelievably massive military budget is only for active duty military. Best we can do is schedule you an appointment to talk to someone next year about the benefits you won’t be receiving.”
I think Elon is a giant cunt and deserves the public backlash he’s getting.
But this is a stupid ass thing to focus on, and a blatant attempt to cash in on bad Musk news.
Yeah, fuck the environment, right? Theres plenty of it everywhere else. /s
One small area of Texas coast getting a little bit of damage from some flying concrete and a big explosion is absolutely nothing compared to what oil companies, cars and trucks, and a million other polluters do every single day all over the world.
Correct.
One bottle in a river and a single use barbecue left in the forest are nothing compared to industrial waste. Thought 200000 people all at once
And if the launch was trash, contributed nothing to the advancement of space travel, and wasn’t paving the way for new development, your comparison would be good.
But since none of those things are true, your comparison is dumb and meaningless.
I’ve seen a lot of people becoming anti-space just because they don’t like the crappy attitude of one guy in the industry. To that I say:
Fuck you. Fuck you so much you stupid, braindead fucks. You’ll condemn our species to stay on a single planet with your idiocy, and you’ll be clapping and drooling the whole way down.
I don’t give a shit if you hate Musk. He’s out of touch, spoiled, and doesn’t deserve even a quarter of the personal credit he gets. But leave space out of it. Not only do advances in space technology give back more to public than any other industry, it’s damn important work. No matter what happens, this planet has an expiration date, and we NEED to get off it.
I think you could use a break dude. Dont get so stirred up.
Im all for space exploration but doing preventable damage to the environment got us to the point that the one planet we are still “stuck on” slowly stops being habitable by us. There will be no space exploration if in 20 years we’ll all be running around fighting for scraps of food.
Also, you sound like that “one guy in the industry”.
200000 people thought to create their own space agencies? Wow!
This was obviously a mistake that cost them time and money, seeing as how their entire launch site was destroyed. Could they have been smarter? Perhaps. But given how many companies are actively malicious, I’m not too concerned at one that made an honest mistake.
Decades of rocket building says you need energy absorption systems and serious ones. Probably enough papers published on this topic to cover walls of my apartment.
honest mistake
The article mentions deliberate decisions that caused more harm. But it was an “honest mistake” says the comments, so that’s ok.
How is it honest when they were informed by e Employees about the need to dampen the blast? It seems willful and reckless.
Probably enough papers published on this topic to cover walls of my apartment.
I’d imagine it’s more like every apartment in the building.
It was a stupid failure of engineering, but focusing on the enviromnetalism aspect of the explosion is not particularly rational.
As someone who has been following the Starship development closely for a number of years, I’d like to point out a number of flaws with this article, which leaves out critical information and gives it a clear anti-SpaceX bias. Please note that I am most certainly NOT an Elon fanboi. I disagree with a lot of what he says and does. I follow Starship as someone interested in the engineering and technical advancements the workers have been making.
…they found chunks of concrete across the area and foot-deep craters on the tidal flats.
There were only a few pieces big enough to make “foot-deep craters”. Most of the pieces that left the site were far too small to make craters that big (on the order of fist size or smaller). The largest chunks never left the launch site. I was personally there 3 weeks after the launch and saw it myself, and the area is watched constantly by many observers over remote streaming webcams, so it’s unlikely that SpaceX was able to sweep some damage under the rug by removing large pieces from the flats.
Wildlife officials were not allowed into the site area until a whole 48 hours after Starship’s launch.
Nobody was allowed in except for a small number of SpaceX employees due to safety issues, and even those weren’t for quite some time after the launch. There was some damage to the cryogenic liquid storage tanks and other parts of the site, so it and the surrounding area were off-limits until they could verify that it was safe to be there. Yes, wildlife officials were prevented from accessing the area, but for a very good reason and not just to cover up potential harm to wildlife. It should be noted that SpaceX learned from this experience and are now replacing the vulnerable vertical storage tanks with a number of smaller horizontal ones that will be less susceptible to damage from flying debris.
SpaceX did not use flame-suppression technology like a flame diverter or flame trench, a standard in the industry that redirects energy away from the rocket ship.
Applying industry standards to a non-standard rocket program is disingenuous. This rocket is more powerful than any before, so “this is how we’ve always done it” is constantly being challenged and being shown to simply not work in a number of areas. Also, physical space limitations effectively preclude the use of a flame trench at this location. SpaceX fully expected that the concrete under the launch pad as it was at the time of this launch wasn’t going to be sufficient (there had been some damage during static fire tests), so they had already started the process of installing a different system (a water-cooled steel plate, which is now in place and seems to be working well so far during testing). Why didn’t they just wait until the new system was ready? The project badly needed some real-world flight data in order to continue moving forward with development of the next iterations of vehicle, so they went ahead with the launch using the inadequate pad with the understanding that what happened was a possibility, although not a certainty. Waiting was going to be even more problematic for the program, which NASA needs for its Artemis program of landing on the moon (the SpaceX Human Landing System will be based on Starship) in just a few years.
Without it, Starship blew a hole in the ground underneath it, subsequently destroying its launchpad.
No, it didn’t destroy its launchpad. It destroyed the concrete under the launchpad. The “orbital launch mount”, which is roughly 60 feet above the ground and what the rocket sits on along with a lot of the fuelling and launching equipment, came through largely unscathed and doesn’t seem to have needed much in the way of repairs.
The FAA is currently reviewing an investigation into the launch and has temporarily grounded further attempts.
The FAA has not “grounded” Starship. The Starship launch license was always written such that it was only valid for the first launch - regardless of the outcome - and would need to be modified to remove this clause for a second launch. Also, the investigation is a “mishap investigation”, which occurs whenever a launch experiences issues in various categories, including simply not reaching its objective. Mishap investigations are a normal procedure for any launch that has issues. There isn’t any kind of special “SpaceX screwed up” investigation going on, as the article is seemingly implying.
But one Wildlife official noted in the documents that it’s likely SpaceX won’t be ready for another launch anytime soon.
As of the date of this article, the current expectation is that the next vehicle stack (Booster 9 and Ship 25), as well as the launch site, will be ready for launch within the next couple of weeks. A US Coast Guard “notice to mariners” has already been published for a potential launch attempt on September 8, pending FAA approval. The word is that the FAA approval isn’t far off, either.
“Pad site was totally destroyed and will likely force them to re-design the whole thing,” the official wrote. “Probably won’t see another launch for a while.”
This statement is nothing short of extreme, uninformed hyperbole.
Now, I’m not trying to minimize the damage that was caused from the launch. There was indeed a fire that likely harmed wildlife, and the debris thrown beyond the site was also damaging to a degree. However, the launch didn’t destroy the entire ecosystem of the area, as some seem to like to imply. The FAA - in conjunction with a number of other agencies - did a comprehensive study of the impact the program was going to have on the area, and they were satisfied that SpaceX was going to do things responsibly enough and within guidelines. SpaceX and the FAA are now working together to make changes based on the outcome of the first launch to help prevent such issues from occurring again.
You say you’re not an Elon fan boy but you’ve gone to great lengths in this comment to bend the truth to make spacex look more favourable.
You can see the giant splashes in the ocean from the debris. That is not a “fist size” object cresting a metre tall splash. https://youtu.be/nocHO-ScR3c?si=HuzQVtnpgLqkprtC
You leave out that certain wildlife groups were allowed in, it was specifically the fish and wildlife service who weren’t allowed in because they’re part of thr government and could shut the operation down, whereas the other group didn’t have that power.
The paragraph about the flame diverted is pure white knighting. Everyone in the rocketry community knew they needed either a flame diverted or a deluge system. Even spacex knew this, but a combination of expense and wanting to get publicity soon caused Elon to insist on the launch even though everyone knew this would happen after the damage from the static fire. You even say this yourself. Spacex knew this would happen but didn’t give a shit, because keeping Elons ego up is more important to them than the risk of destroying a nature preserve.
This is just arguing semantics. The concrete underneath the launch mount (and now the rocket bidet) are still part of stage 0 which most people would call the launch pad. And if you wanted to get more specific then it would be more accurate to say the concrete IS the launch pad and the OLM is just the tower.
How is it not grounded? They can’t fly again until after the investigation and they get another launch licence. That means they are defacto grounded?
The date of the article doesn’t matter. The quote about it not being ready was from documents written just after launch. Which was 4 months ago now. Andits likely it won’t launch for at least another month, so I would say 5 months is long enough to make that statement fair.
and they were satisfied that SpaceX was going to do things responsibly enough and within guidelines
Which had absolutely nothing to do with Elons promises of large amounts of money and has received no pishback whatsoever from environmental groups that aren’t being paid off.
I mostly agree but I don’t think you can rationalize away not having ANY flame suppression/protection on one of the biggest rockets ever built. Yeah the launch was a “success” in terms of testing and data acquisition but it was disastrous and reckless in terms of safety mitigation and I don’t agree with the rationale that you put forward.
tech bro busy creating wild life on mars by destroying the one on earth
I’m curious what this has to do with technology.
Well, wildlife was destroyed by a popular major technology that’s still going through trials. I think that’s probably why. The whole, you know, technology part.
a popular major technology
A rocket. This would probably be better suited for the space communities because, you know, the space part.
You didn’t make it clear where the technology part comes in. Unless we’re going with the broadest sense of the word because literally everything could be connected to technology in some way.
SpaceX is a tech company that’s making new rockets. The tech blew up on the ground, not in space.
Your complaint/comment is invalid, childish, whiny, as well as frankly pathetic and I don’t have the patience to handle you with kid gloves.
Grow up and get over it.
I’d just like to see a bit more to the community than ever single thing that happens with SpaceX, Twitter, and Tesla simply “because they’re technology”. Almost all the comments are even saying how this article is really reaching and stretching the scale problem.
Almost all the comments are even saying how this article is reaching.
There are two. You are one of them.
Blocked. Not interested in ever seeing your takes again when they’re not based in reality.
Grow up and get over it.
Maybe you could have followed your own advice after reading my first comment instead of just being rude.
