SpaceX may dig a tunnel to enable frequent South Texas launches | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX may dig a tunnel to enable frequent South Texas launches

arstechnica.com

18 pointsdeegles12 comments

how do we know they arnt bringing in illegal immigrants

>"Residents of South Texas use the highway primarily to travel from Brownsville and nearby towns to Boca Chica Beach, the southernmost beach in Texas. When the road is closed, no one can access or remain on the beach."

For goodness sake, it is a beach. There are plenty of beaches along the Gulf of Mexico. You would think the city could simply say, "this is an industrial area now, you must swim elsewhere."

The problem is precedence. If you let one company commandeer a public resource(in this case access) without resistance, then that will allow others to do the same. I understand your rationale but, resistance isn't necessarily bad in this case. People shouldn't have to work around companies... companies should be preventing/solving the public conflicts they create.

There is something called the "Texas Open Beaches Act" which guarantees free access to beaches in Texas. Beach closures are actually not that easy and from what I know the number of days per year on which SpaceX could request the beach to be closed is limited.

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

HARD disagree. We shouldn’t take people’s access to parks and nature away to appease a private company! Ever!

For goodness sake, it's a company, there are plenty of places it could put the facilities, it could simply relocate to another one without a road in the middle (or a beach)

Orbital rocket companies have far fewer options. They want to be as south as possible with nothing but water for quite a ways.

That basically leaves CA, FL, and TX with two having ideal launch sites that SpaceX was already using.

Right? And I cannot use the beach next to naval facilities and harbors. So clearly there is a precedent for disallowing beach access near something important that has to be on the coast. There's also plenty of other beaches nearby.

"Something important" means something our democratically elected government is in charge of, not something run by a private company.

Plenty of private companies restrict beach access. Power plants, water treatment facilities, harbors.

This is less and less accepted nowadays though

I am not in favor of a corporation telling me how I can use public lands

Reply on news.ycombinator.com