Also I'm a bit confused why people are surprised the methane for these rockets will come from a well. Did people really think Elon Musk was going to stick a hose up a cow's ass to collect the methane?
It suggests the FAA’s role is consideration of launch failure and safety on the proposed plant. FERC also evaluated the proposal. FERC doesn’t really do environmental reviews.
Here is a document from April which at the time said EPA had no comment on the draft environmental impact statement as part of an interagency process: https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2021-03/SAR%20-%2...
In short, it looks as if all the usual players are engaged here. While I suspect the FAA has considered the impact of Oil and gas infrastructure on flight paths and airports, I would guess their involvement in this kind of process is an extra layer, not a circumvention.
The EPA headcount was 14,779 in 2016 and was 14,172 in 2020.
The technology already exists. Fundamentally (damn laws of thermodynamics) it is also a energy negative process, and hence expensive. It is far cheaper to just frack and burn fossil fuels (where that energy expense was paid however many millions of years ago by someone else), than it is to expend the energy to reverse the process - even if they were getting nearly free energy.
Not saying all human endeavor needs to have a healthy profit margin. SpaceX is a business however and besides doing it for the lulz, or getting a government contract, it doesn’t make much sense to try to spin up colonies or the like there. Everyone will starve and/or their US backers will go bankrupt pretty quick.
This isn't an original SpaceX idea. Robert Zubrin pointed it out back in 1990 with his Mars Direct plan.
And if we have all that, getting a mobile lab there and sending back bits instead of physical chunks of things is even easier.
You’d also need to get chemical feedstocks and process them (namely to extract the hydrogen, which is not readily available in the Martian atmosphere but is in the soil in various amounts in minerals and small amounts of dispersed water and methane ice) which would be non-trivial and a huge hassle to get even on Earth where you can go outside and smack the machinery with a shovel or stick your arm in somewhere to unclog something.
The existing Mars rovers struggle sometimes with dust on solar panels, let alone a broken bolt in a crusher due to harder than expected rocks or the like.
Having done some basic mining and a lot of earth moving over the years, it’s an incredible pain in the ass.
It’s also rare you don’t periodically need a human getting hands on, and using every bit of dexterity and strength they have to fix something. Robotic tech is nowhere near good enough to do this remotely.
So at a small, very very very slow scale? Maybe?
There are a lot of cool thought problems from all this, and some cool potential solutions. My fav is Project Orion [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propu...]
And we’ll just have to see what happens.
SpaceX has been described as a company with a Mars cult inside of it.
I think it's more fair to say that it's a Mars cult that has organized a company.
If you think that SpaceX won't do hydrocarbon generation on Mars, then you don't understand why SpaceX exists.
It is up to the controllers of incentive structures to change the fundamentals of commerce/ecology.
5x over what? The US doesn't have a carbon tax does it?
They found that if avoiding fossil fuel use (natural gas is the cheapest easily available Hydrogen source right now), and cracking water to get it, end to end energy efficiency is between 44-56% (as in electrical efficiency to theoretical available chemical energy in the fuel). Burning said fuel for energy (turbines being one of the most efficient ways) then varies from 40-63% efficiency, rockets can hit up to 70% efficiency (varies immensely by many factors).
So, getting what they need from a fossil fuel is up to 70% efficient. Getting what they need from a Sebatier process? 28-41% efficient (combined). Add in extra capital costs and maintenance of acquiring and running the equipment, about 5x more expensive fossil fuel evens out.
It’s potentially worse than that of course when you factor in potential increases in electrical rates if fossil fuels did get 5x, but there is nothing saying that would for sure happen. They presumably could run it during oversupply from a large solar plant, but that is already factored into those studies. If you’re doing it at scale, that ‘free energy’ won’t be free for long.
who knows what expense space X would be willing to shoulder to be sustainable... We are fortunate that it is still privately owned, and isn't legally obligated to pursue the financial interests of shareholders like all the other players in aerospace.
It’s not an unusual playbook at all, but it is unusual that it is done in the satellite launch space. Kudos to him for that.
All the other players are military industrial complex, and the reason they act the way they do is more about market capture than anything else - shareholders are of course a concern, but not a huge one.
It also doesn’t change thermodynamics or any of the energy gathering, chemical precursor gathering, infrastructure, or raw input gathering problems.
Mars gets very little insolation. Mars has no infrastructure. Mars has no breathable air. Mars has no known life or biological sources we could survive on. Mars is very cold. Mars has no raw materials (or useful environments we know of to process anything) that would justify the energy required to export it.
It’s literally more hospitable and more useful to be on the North Pole, and I don’t see anyone in a rush to build housing developments there.
I don't think that anyone is trying to make the claim that SpaceX will use the Sabatier process to fuel Starships here on Earth right now routinely. As you say, gas is cheaper to buy here on Earth. But they still must have the technology mastered before they fly away from the low Earth orbit.
This isn’t something unknown or theoretical.
And contemporary off-the-shelf components that perform the Sabatier process aren't probably meant to operate outside the Earth.
Not if NASA did that decades ago.
Mass to mars is incredibly expensive, it's worth spending the time and money to optimize whatever equipment you are sending there.
Yet they aren’t, correct?
SpaceX making a well to power the human colonization of mars is a drop in the bucket vs all the other wells in the state.
It doesn’t sound like it is happening here necessarily, but it does happen pretty frequently.
The FAA is subject to NEPA review, and hence any SpaceX activity in this area must go through the same process as every other industrial activity that impacts federal interests.
Protecting the environment is not the point of this stunt, is it?
It doesn't matter what Musk does with the methane, what matters is that he's at best exploiting loopholes and at worst operating extrajudicially.
Also, SpaceX "powering the human colonization of Mars" is a pretty huge sip of the Kool Aid there. Given the founder's track record, it's about as believable as "fully self-driving cars in a year".
But, more importantly, it's irrelevant to the problem at hand, sidestepping the regulation process
"The FTSE 250 group, which is the largest well owner in the US with over 61,000 in its portfolio, found itself on the defensive after a Bloomberg report said several wells owned by the company were leaking methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas."
[1] https://newsflash.one/2021/10/12/market-report-leaking-wells...
Again, the EPA exists, so where are they in this? What loophole is SpaceX using to skirt around the EPA?
I strongly agree, but not for the reason you give. Environmental destruction is likely to start more wars than it prevents...
The document clearly states that Spacex has an application with the FAA for the use of the land as a Launch Site.
The subsidiary “Lone star mineral extraction” is an entity that purchased another company along with all their licenses for extraction rights in addition to seemingly applying for their own licenses.
I’d recommend you edit your comment to correct it. There is no sidestepping of regulations here, the regulations themselves cover different things and the article makes it sound like one set of regulations should cover these activities while clearly saying that it currently does not.
So unless there is something truly magical up someone’s sleeve, we need to keep Earth workable for us for the foreseeable future. And I think that is a good thing.
“The ends” are the most laudable things I can imagine: electrifying the world and colonizing other celestial bodies.
While I love the goals, I am afraid of what a mission-driven person might rationalize and do to achieve them.
I was thinking more along the lines of how one in his position could drift in their perspective and values as they get distorted by the blinders of hyper mission focus.