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Comment by estearum | Hacker News Reader

> Pecan Island and nearby wetlands are high-value habitat for migratory waterfowl, shorebirds, wading birds, and other coastal wildlife. SpaceX is not developing the full footprint of the land and will preserve wetlands and wildlife habitat.

Pretty cynical corpo-ambiguity-speak, even by Musk standards.

We're supposed to be happy they're promising not to develop one-hundred percent of the land footprint? They will leave at least 0.00001% of land area as wetlands and therefore we oughta be happy?

Such empty bullshit it's more insulting they even put an environment-leaning section on the site. Just say "fuck it, our space fetish is more important than the wetlands."

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Many industries, and SpaceX particularly, will say this like this, then a couple years later be like "oh, it's actually much easier if we destroy it", _do it_, then claim "oh well, nothing to be done now!" and push forward on something else.

"Promises" or "commitments" like this need to be evaluated based on the previous behavior of the people "making" them (although they were very careful with working to not use either of those words, and just imply them)

I agree, and the premise is that we're supposed to believe the remaining waterfowl are going to coexist peacefully with... rocket launches?

Evolution has done stranger things, but my bet is that the birds will find somewhere else to be over learning to not be startled by nearby earth-rumbling explosions.

The wetlands around Cape Canaveral/Kennedy are thriving. Men with guns prevent people from getting too close to the rockets, and people do far more damage to wetlands than a rocket launch once every few days.

A rocket launch every hour or so as SpaceX is promising might be quite different.

Kennedy is also surrounded my federally protected land. SpaceX? Noooope. Never trust Elon.

Why don't you check a map of the area?

Good point and thank you, I should have specified ongoing/constant rocket launches.

The Solar City timeline should have taught us everything we need to know about these astronomical projections... they couldn't even throw enough billions at solar panels that kinda look like roof tiles to get them to work, and the same cabal wants us to think the next step is space travel and terraforming?

Building multi-decade service life infrastructure on the coast in this era of the Anthropocene actually requires you (from an engineering point of view, not merely a regulatory one) to have a buffer zone of wetlands, marshes and sea walls to absorb storm surges.

You can still choose to read that cynically, but I think the cynical angle is taking moral ecological credit for a pragmatic engineering reality :P

A single Starship launch produces motorcycle (100dB) to permanent hearing loss + immediate pain (140dB) sound out to about 7 miles.

Having that intermittently a couple times per day I think will be very disruptive.

To be clear, I'm not trying to argue that this project is ecologically beneficial or neutral (I think that part is beyond debate for many reasons including the noise pollution you've identified)

I was just trying to say that the marshland restoration stuff is likely not lip service, insofar as they actually do need wetland buffer zone to keep their launchpads above sea level.

Well yeah, but that is exactly the cynical lip service that I'm referring to. It's a useless statement for exactly the reason you mention.

Turns out draining swamps is actually a bad thing.

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