The Center for Biodiversity, the American Bird Conservancy, the Surfrider Foundation, Save RVG, and the Carrizo/Comecrudo Nation of Texas have filed suit in federal court against the FAA alleging that the agency failed to follow the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) before signing off on SpaceX’s Starship/Super Heavy launch project in June last year.
The coalition claims that the agency didn’t perform an adequate environmental analysis of SpaceX’s operations at its Boca Chica, Texas, launch site.
“Federal officials should defend vulnerable wildlife and frontline communities, not give a pass to corporate interests that want to use treasured coastal landscapes as a dumping ground for space waste,” said Jared Margolis, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, one the plaintiffs, in a press release.
“Space waste”? He’s not serious, is he? It’s a launch site, not a trash dump.
The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is one of those federal environmental laws that can be interpreted to mean almost anything the greens want it to mean. In this case, the FAA conducted an extensive study and published a 40-page summary report that found there would be no environmental impact as long as SpaceX adopted 75 “mitigation actions.”
You might think that these 75 mitigation actions were meant to prevent environmental damage. Don’t be stupid.
Ars Technica described a couple of those mitigation actions in an article from last year. SpaceX would have to shield its artificial lights to prevent interference with turtles nesting on nearby beaches, prevent falcons from nesting on site, and hire a biologist to monitor impacts to flora and fauna from its launches and other activities.
To placate humans who might want to vacation in the area, SpaceX also agreed to not launch rockets on various federal and Texas holiday weekends. SpaceX launches require the closure of access roads to public beaches in the area.
There were also more unusual demands made of SpaceX, including that it make annual $5,000 payments to an “adopt-an-ocelot” fund and pay for the installation of placards in the area detailing the local history of the Mexican-American and Civil Wars.
This is the FAA making these recommendations. Now imagine a full-scale, top to bottom, horizon-to-horizon environmental review.
SpaceX’s hope was that the reduced footprint of the site would enable the company to avoid a full-blown Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). That’s the most severe form of NEPA review. The documents themselves often run hundreds of pages. They take 4.5 years to complete, on average, and run over 600 pages. Some statements for large and complex projects like highways or power transmission lines can take over a decade.
Plaintiffs argue in their lawsuit that the SpaceX Starship launch program is the exact kind of program that requires an EIS, given the launch site’s agency to several state parks and wildlife areas and the size of the rockets being fired.
“Permitting SpaceX to launch the largest rockets known to humankind is a type of significant federal action that requires full analysis in an EIS,” reads the lawsuit.
The plaintiffs are demanding that SpaceX adopt “mitigations to prevent explosions in the first place.” That’s a great trick if you can manage it. Anticipating a million different anomalies is one thing. But don’t the bozos know that if SpaceX knew how to prevent explosions they’d have done so before the launch?
The last thing any of us want is for a SpaceX launch to mess with turtles nesting on nearby beaches. I’d just as soon club a baby seal. Indeed, this has nothing to do with saving the environment. It’s about a bunch of Luddites who are terrified of the future being allowed to bring human progress to a standstill.