I did not either, I was more concerned about safety. So my point stands.
Although IIRC there were several improvements that were advised by the regulators, unlike Stockton Rush, Space-X has acknowledged and implemented changes, changes that in the long run also improve the reliability of the rockets. The fear here is that, as X-tweeter showed, that some rich owner could listen more to advisers that disparage regulation and oversight.
If you’re just speaking in the abstract, then sure, no argument from me. Stockton Rush is a good example of where a total resistance to oversight led to a bad outcome.
Complaining about delays is not the same as wanting the end of all regulations. Me complaining about the line at the DMV is not the same as thinking we’d be better off without them. Musk has been reasonably even-handed even with his complaints:
That doesn’t mean they’re immune to criticism, either. Things will have to change as Starship and other modern rockets increase their flight rate. It’s been a long time coming, but we’re finally getting to the point where rockets act more like aircraft than artillery.
Well, I guess this is, in the abstract, a big “whooosh!” happening to you. Again, the complaint and the point was against the conspiracy minded guys that @xtenkfarpl was referring to. And when an owner like Elon is in the mix, one has to consider that past performance is not a guarantee of future results.
Well, I don’t have much interest in picking apart conspiracy claims. But this deserves an answer:
Yes and no. The circumstances were so different that it’s hard to compare.
First, there was the Falcon 1, which was launched out of Omelek Island, which is controlled by the US military. It really is in the middle of nowhere and the military is the only party they had to answer to. That’s a lot more straightforward than the collection of civilian agencies they have to deal with now. So they could do things like build pad hardware and bring in oxygen generators without much trouble. I’m sure they still had to file things with the FAA, FCC, etc., but not to the same extent.
Then there was the Falcon 9, which launched out of Cape Canaveral. That is an established launch site and so much of the environmental, etc. stuff was already done. The Falcon 9 is a fairly conventional rocket and wouldn’t have needed anything beyond what all other rockets need.
The Starship program is currently launching out of a test site in Texas (Starbase). This is an entirely new site, built from scratch in the last several years. So all of the environmental stuff is also from scratch. It’s also a brand new vehicle design, using propellants not yet in common use (methane/oxygen). So it should not be a surprise that they run into far more regulatory issues.
So while they aren’t subject to any more regulation than the Falcon 9, it’s that all of those issues had been worked out by others long before the F9 launched. And that’s no longer the case with Starship/Starbase. Falcon 1 definitely had it easy in some respects, though.
Seen what coming? That the FAA would decide that there were enough changes to trigger a new environmental review, after SpaceX had been cleared by an environmental review already? That the F&W agency would drag its heels? Because that’s what happened. A new environmentall review for a water deluge system is not something that has to automatically happen. I can certainly see this catching SpaceX off guard.
This also gives them three months of heavy capital investment and salaries to pay for. The burn rate on the Starship program is massive. A three month delay, even if they can work on some other stuff in the interim, will cost SpaceX millions.
What basic environmental requirements are SpaceX avoiding?
Other than Stockton Rush, who did you have in mind? It seems to me that Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson, two other ‘space billionaires’, have been exercising the same amount of caution as anyone else would. In Bezos’ case, maybe too much.
Have other billionaires been demanding that safety regs be removed somewhere? Which ones?
As for thr environment, you would think environmentalists would like reusable rockets rather than dumping rocket stages with various contaminants in them into the ocean.
Stockton Rush’s problem wasn’t that he was a billionaire, it was that he thought he knew way more than he did. People kill tyemselves and others through hubris all the time, and it has nothing to do woth being rich. NASA’s hubris killed two shuffle crews, and a simple and seemingly obvious issue killed the Apollo 1 astronauts.
Space is hard. Let’s not go throwing stones at private space when they have incidents, because everyone has incidents.
As for the FAA, after decades of choking innovation in aviation the agency did an about face years ago, realizing that they were choking off the industry, and began deregulating, simplifying, and streamlining their operations. I think the recent FAA has been doing great, from the LSA rules and sport pilot licensing to their accelerated review processes for NewSpace and electric aircraft.
That said, this time they passed the buck back to Fish and Wildlife, and that’s a whole different thing. We’ll see where this goes.
Whoosh!!
It is getting windy out here. 
Well, according to the linked article, there are established F&W regulations regarding discharge of water in industrial processes, which this clearly is. That makes a lot of sense. And since Starship didn’t previously require the discharge of large amounts of water, that’s a pretty obvious change.
You’d think that at some point between noticing the problem (rocket exhaust is damaging the pad), coming up with a solution (blasting the exhaust with water), and implementing the solution, someone would have considered the fact that regulatory agencies might have something to say about that and gotten ahead of the problem. Elon might want to employ some regulatory compliance consultants in the future. Someone should have noticed, “we are adding a bunch of water discharge to our process, we should look into what regulations are involved” ages ago.
What a strange non-sequitor.
I think SpaceX is doing wonderful things, and I agree that when we have simple access to space we will find solutions to almost all pur resource and energy problems. I think reusable rockets are absolutely the way to go.
I also think regulations are, for the most part, there for a reason. If a specific regulation doesn’t make sense, that’s a valid debate to have; but the idea that regulatory bodies just make shit up willy-nilly is pretty ridiculous.
It seems like there’s probably some middle ground between letting corporations discharge infinite industrial waste for whatever reason vs. it taking 135 days to evaluate an obviously innocuous discharge of clean water.
Well, maybe it won’t actually take that long. We’ll see.
In the grand scheme of things, they’re not discharging that much water, so I doubt it will take too long. However, I wonder why no one thought to start the process earlier.
One thing that does get regulatory agencies’ undies in a bundle is supposedly capable corporations that simply pretend regulations don’t exist. Then act all butt-hurt when somebody points out the corp’s oversight.
By the time you’re at the scale of SpaceX, the assumption is that you have professional compliance people who know about everything regulatory. Or have the mindset to dig hard to be sure there are no regulatory surprises before approving the corp taking action X.
A corp which is ignorant through deliberate blind-eyeness, or through haphazard processes, or through psychopathic leadership amounts to the same thing from the agency’s point of view: An organization to be stopped until it alters its behavior and its attitude.
If SpaceX did not contact F&W for the last 180+ days since the pad failure due to whichever of the above stupid reasons, it’s not F&Ws job to make up for the time SpaceX wasted.
“Failure to plan on your part does not constitute an emergency on our part” has a time honored pedigree in business for a reason. It places the pain squarely on the party causing the problem. If SpaceX is a learning organization, hereafter it will prioritize letting the compliance team in on every decision early. Like long before it’s made.
Do you happen to know what triggers the start of the process? Elon seems to think it is only given urgency when you show you are actually ready to fly. I don’t know if SpaceX just didn’t pursue the license earlier or if it couldn’t pursue the license earlier.
Surely even professional compliance officers screw up sometimes? I could very easily see someone just not realizing that dumping clean water would even be an issue at all.
I’m still wondering if it is an issue. The Chron article mentions compliance with “industrial process wastewater” rules in the Clean Water Act. The EPA has some information here:
https://www.epa.gov/npdes/industrial-wastewater
It focuses on mining and oil/gas extraction, but more generally it appears to be entirely about pollutants in the water, whether metal contamination, dissolved salts, radionucleotides, or otherwise.
On the other hand, clearly there are some limits to discharging even clean water–a company can’t just decide to blow up their dam and not care about the downstream consequences–but that would presumably be covered by some different set of laws than the ones about industrial wastewater. Maybe nothing to do with the Clean Water Act at all.
It’s possible it will be as simple as F&W verifying that their water is in fact clean.
F&W said this to NASASpaceFlight:
So it was triggered by the FAA. I’m not sure if it was possible for SpaceX to trigger a re-assessment earlier than that.
The water that deluges the pad / blast deflector is clean until the rocket exhaust impinges on it. Then I’m not sure what chemicals the water will pick up from the exhaust at what concentrations. Plus of course whatever grunge it scours off the pad / blast deflector early on before ignition and during the rest of the time water is flowing.
It would certainly be easy for regulations aimed at much more polluting industrial situations to be written broadly such that all bulk water exposed to heavy industry is covered. Triggering a need for SpaceX to capture and clean all the water that isn’t turned to steam. Even though as you say, a decent rain will deliver the same volume of water just over a larger area and longer time.
At this point we’re all guessing AFAIK. But my hypothesis coming true would not surprise me. Or SpaceX may be able to prove the degree of water contamination is below whatever floor is in the regs and all will be well. Once the proof is forthcoming and evaluated.
I hope we’ll get some more details soon.
That’s a good point. The rocket exhaust is fairly clean–mostly water and CO2–but combustion isn’t perfect. Reports on the atmospheric effects of the exhaust showed that other byproducts were fairly small, but that was partially because some combustion happened after the exhaust left the nozzle. I.e., it wasn’t fully combusted yet, but still hot enough to finish burning later. If the exhaust is instead directed into a bunch of relatively cool water, that post-combustion might not happen.
So it could be that the level of contamination isn’t quite trivial, though at the same time we’re still just talking hydrocarbon combustion. Nothing particularly nasty in there.
Heck, if they add some sort of corrosion inhibiter to the water in the deluge storage tank(s) even that might be an issue when you dump umpteen million gallons of water (and BTW a thousand gallons of anti-freeze / corrosion inhibitor) onto a beach.
But they’ve already done this deluge twice, haven’t they? Once by itself, and once with an engine test of the current first stage. Does this mean no more engine tests until the study is done? I fail to see the difference between a long-ish engine test and an actual liftoff, in terms of what the water does…
Perhaps it is not an issue with static fires, but I can imagine a situation where vaporized ablative surfaces from launch operations could mix with the runoff. Maybe that is the concern.