The only "safe" place to launch is in Florida on land that was grandfathered into being an EPA-free zone back in the 1960s by NASA.
I understand that there will be a performance penalty at higher latitudes, however that really shouldn’t matter to what bocca chica is used for by spaceX
- FAA would never give licenses 100s of launches from Texas ever, volume is always planned from be Florida , just for experimental flights the penalty shouldn’t be a factor,
- given the order of magnitude change in payload capacity with Starship and reusability the performance factor shouldn’t really be critical even for production ?
The current , past and inevitable future delays at Bocca Chica is costing spaceX a lot , they are cash flow positive and far ahead of competition so they can afford it, but this is certainly does not look like the most optimal plan .
Name a better place.
I feel doubly embarrassed making a grammar mistake, now that you quoted including that mistake and all :)
That's why R&D is in Texas.
Yes, it is hard to believe, if you've done no research and choose to believe whatever you want.
From my own experience:
I drove to Bocca Chica three weeks ago and also took the fantastic helicopter tour from south padre, while it was awesome to get ridiculously close to the launchpad (walking behind the dunes gets you really up close) unlike at Vandenberg, KSC where you cannot get so close from public land this easily it definitely looked like an inconvenient site
- roads are pretty narrow and don’t look to be that high load bearing for heavy traffic and are being worked on (it is single lane in part as they are still working on it piece by piece to strengthen them), it takes a while to go from Brownsville to Starbase
- there is also a border checkpoint that takes a long time to cross during peak hours > 30 mins on the way back.
- you can actually see the Mexico border (a light house) from the OLM, I was getting cell signal from Mexico. It is less than 10 miles, so close to the border comes with its own problems was my impression .
- limited space to expand either Starbase and also at the launchpad. You can fly close only to starbase and it is quite visible from the air.
I am no expert, these are just a tourist’s observations, however in 70 years of American rocketery smarter people than me private and public have done the research and rejected places like Bocca Chica before for good reason.
Claiming that this is the perfect spot and no other feasible location and it is just that I don’t know(which I don’t) better seems a bit silly?
People can make mistakes not every decision makes perfect sense in hindsight. It does not detract from the work they have been able to do so far.
East facing also isn't even remotely a requirement for a launch, Israel launches westward on a regular basis
It's not like the west coast has large stretches of undeveloped unprotected land either.
The only real alternative is Alaska, and that's suboptimal for other reasons.
What's worse is non-optimal launches will have far more environmental impact because you have to do more of them or use more fuel. Talk about cutting off your own nose.
Everything that happens affects the environment somehow, but the scrutiny here is wildly disproportionate to the actual impact, of disrupting a couple acres of beach.
The "corporation" of SpaceX is a unique national asset that no other nation currently has, and it provides incredible value to US citizens to maintain that edge (Starlink alone, and Starship would give us a launch capacity that dwarfs Russia or China).
That matters! That's important! This isn't a "corporations vs the people" issue. Industrial policy requires thoughtful tradeoffs, and this FAA/EPA action isn't one.
I'm surprised the DoD hasn't already overridden the EPA on this for matters of national security.
The administration could massively accelerate it with a couple phone calls, but I doubt they are even aware of the situation.