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Comment by jdiez17 | Hacker News Reader

Take that with a BIG grain of salt. When SpaceX says they are ready and the FAA is holding them up, it is actually Elon saying they are ready. For example, take a look at the "Starships are meant to fly" post from September: https://www.spacex.com/updates/

As someone who has been following these developments for a while, I can 100% detect Elon's fingerprints all over this post. They are basically completely dismissing government oversight as "unnecessary obstacles to progress". Keep in mind, the area where SpaceX operates Starship is a wildlife sanctuary and was only chosen because it is one of the few undeveloped, southernmost points of the US, which matters because the closer you are to the equator, the more advantage you can take of the Earth's rotational velocity.

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Every launch pad in the US is a de jure or de facto wildlife sanctuary. Launch pads need a large human keep-out zone. Keeping out humans is great for wildlife.

The site was chosen because it was it could launch East over water. The rotation of the earth gives a boost to easterly launches. Boca Chica isn't a great launch location because there's a fairly narrow window of directions it can launch in without overflying land, requiring expensive dog legs to hit different inclinations. They might have been better off with a piece of coastline in Maine, but try and find a piece of Eastern coastline in the US without any development in a 4 mile radius around the site...

Being so far South is quite nice, gives you quite the performance boost, do you have any analysis on what the dog legs cost compared to more Northern launch sites? Would be interesting to consider. Clearly Florida was the right place to do this for the US in the 1960s.

Noob question: How comes hurricanes aren’t a problem?

> How comes hurricanes aren’t a problem?

They're slow and unsurprising. You don't launch in a hurricane.

You just launch the day before...

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/10/european-mission-depar...

You launch in the eye of the hurricane:

"Marooned" m.imdb.com/title/tt0064639/

> Every launch pad in the US is a de jure or de facto wildlife sanctuary. Launch pads need a large human keep-out zone. Keeping out humans is great for wildlife.

Would note that ULA's Vulcan 4 October launch test at Cape Canaveral sprayed debris and presumably propellant around the same area [1]. Vulcan's GEM SRB burns a perchlorate fuel [2]. Perchlorates are toxic [3].

SpaceX isn't taking any crazy risks, particularly relative to the technology risk and potential pay-off, with its IFTs.

[1] https://spaceflightnow.com/2024/10/04/ula-launches-second-vu...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphite-Epoxy_Motor

[3] https://wwwn.cdc.gov/tsp/ToxFAQs/ToxFAQsDetails.aspx?faqid=8...

As recently as last week FAA was saying no launch license before late November, and even if you don't believe SpaceX was ready in August they are clearly ready today. That's what SpaceX complained about, and it got fixed. What more proof do you need that the FAA was the holdup here? https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1fupkny/the_f...

I would guess SpaceX decided to provide everything the FAA/other agencies were asking for and thus their launch license was issued.

SpaceX already provided all the required information. FAA was not waiting for anything from SpaceX. They had inexplicably decided a new environmental review was required for trivial changes to the launch license, and today they reversed that decision in a "written re-evaluation" which as far as I can tell is not based on any new information.

So in your opinion, as soon as SpaceX uploads a PDF, the launch license should be issued immediately?

P.S.: I wish SpaceX succeeds in bringing down the cost of access to space.

Stop willfully misinterpreting it. The new 60 day window was something newly added this time just to give other agencies time to complain if they wanted.

The FAA did their normal review like they’ve done for every other starship and falcon launch in a timely manner.

Okay, I read the FAA's written reevaluation (source: https://www.faa.gov/media/85696).

My notes:

- SpaceX requested to amend its existing "Programmatic Environmental Assesment" of 2022 to support jettisoning the interstage heat shield and (importantly) using an updating sonic boom model based on flight data. In my opinion, this is the critical point of this assessment.

- The impact on endangered wildlife is reassessed based on a report submitted by SpaceX.

- There are other points like concerns about waterway closures, and the water discharged by the deluge system. I know there was some controversy about the deluge system and the cleanliness of that water, but according to this report, it's all good.

The new evaluation of the sonic boom using flight data shows that SpaceX's original assessment was way off and the intensity and area affected by these sonic booms is much larger in reality. The FAA then goes through a significant amount of rationalizations (with sources, to be fair) to justify that the predictions of the new sonic boom model are still acceptable.

The biological resources section also shows that SpaceX underestimated the effects of their launch operations on local wildlife, but some research and monitoring measures are proposed to counteract this.

All in all, my opinion is that the FAA is doing everything it can to not be an obstacle. But they do have to analyze this stuff much more rigorously than SpaceX does. That is quite literally their job after all.

Boca Chica is not the Southernmost point in the US. One if the Florida Keys is.

The main reason that area was a wildlife sanctuary was that nobody wanted it for anything else, so it was a cheap political move to make it "protected."

A launch site needs more than latitude. It needs possible launch trajectories that star by going over water to avoid possible debis falling in people or property.

Launch sites at higher altitude are better than those at lower altitude.

True. Updated my comment.

Regardless of how it was preserved it is still a valuable habitat for some vulnerable species. And a recreational amenity for people. Nor would the absence of a sanctuary make it automatically ok to kill wildlife or cause pollution.

Honolulu is like 100 miles further south than the Florida keys

Ever tried shipping anything to Hawaii?

Boca Chica at 25°59′49″N is within 50 N/S miles of Cape Sable, Florida 25°7′6″N the southernmost point on the U.S. mainland. It's just about the southernmost place not near a town. -- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extreme_points_of_th...

Have you been to that "wildlife sanctuary." I have. People are driving cars up and down that beach all day. Best thing that could happen to the wildlife is if it were shut down permanently for rocket launches.

I have. Really enjoyed my time there. But obviously, there are no roads to the places where the endangered species live.

Yeah except for the beach that people drive on all the time.

And lack of roads is an attraction for all those people riding their quad bikes and other off road vehicles.

> They are basically completely dismissing government oversight as "unnecessary obstacles to progress".

SpaceX works quite well with the government and doesn't mind oversight with regards to safety at all. What they don't care for is frivolous oversight/bureaucratic rubber stamping without looking at the intention behind the rules. They also don't like being surprised last minute. All of which happened in the prelude to that update post you referenced. I know a lot of people on this site are from Europe or have European sentiments, but the two places really function quite differently normally. The job of regulators isn't to be obstructionist for the sake of it. It's to create rules that actually improve safety and overall move society forward.

I understand the US and Europe work differently. Although I am European, I also have a strong dislike of bureaucracy and am sympathetic to advancing society through technological progress.

But there should be some oversight. You cannot just let a private company do whatever industrial processes wherever they want in the name of progress.

> cannot just let a private company do whatever industrial processes wherever they want in the name of progress

We don't.

The question was why the FAA was enforcing rules that have nothing to do with its remit. There is protocol of regulatory agencies having each others' backs. But it was silly in this situation—it probably calls for reviewing the regime.

> But there should be some oversight. You cannot just let a private company do whatever industrial processes wherever they want in the name of progress.

Then we're in agreement as is SpaceX and even Elon Musk. He's previously stated he's in favor of regulations in general. He just is against an overwhelming overbearing quantity of them that just exist because they've always been there.

Having a 60 days consultation with the Fish and Wildlife Service whether a falling hot-stage ring (essentially dumb steel piece) causes danger to fish is just silly.

I wonder if fishing boats need to have a 60 day consultation with the Fish and Wildlife Service before each fishing expedition.

It seems to me that fishing expeditions pose a significant threat to the welfare of fish.

> SpaceX works quite well with the government and doesn't mind oversight with regards to safety at all. What they don't care for is frivolous oversight/bureaucratic rubber stamping without looking at the intention behind the rules.

How could you possibly know this? There's no way an outsider can be privy to all of the details of this situation to make an objective call.

Looking at it from the outside it's obvious to me that one party has a financial interest while the other doesn't, and the party that has a financial interest is run by a person who is more than willing to misrepresent situations to his financial benefit.

SpaceX could be right in this situation but you and I will never know.

I know it based on what in-the-know reporters (dedicated space industry reporters) have said, what I've read in some books on SpaceX's history and the (albeit very limited) contacts with people I have who work in the industry.

I can also go with what Elon Musk has previously said about him being fine with regulations. His companies operate in some of the most highly regulated industries in the world and he doesn't complain about the vast majority of those regulations. People love to jump to the assumption that because Elon Musk complains about _one_ regulation in question he wants to remove them entirely.

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