Understood.
People respond to incentives. Unfortunately, incentives set by outside parties tend to be… unsubtle. Here, the incentive is “don’t fuck up, ever, or else we will pin everything on you”, and extreme conservatism is the predictable result.
Oh yes. It’s dumber than dirt.
But Congress put a bunch of these demands into law. Not just a sense of Congress resolution or a committee report. Nobody at FAA is going to go against plain language of an act of Congress. And rightly so.
Why should the FAA trust NASA and the Space Force? Each of them are looking for different things. If I need a plumber, an electrician and a structural engineer to sign off on a renovation plan and the electrician is booked out and can’t come for a few weeks, I can’t go to them and be like, “Look, can’t you just sign off on the plan already because the plumber and structural engineer have already inspected and they said everything was fine? Don’t you trust them?”.
That’s a separate discussion from like, whether you should require an electrician to sign off on you needing to change a light bulb or not and arguably in this case, it’s over regulation. But regulatory agencies are not fungible and shouldn’t be treated as such.
That’s true in general, of course. But in this particular case, we’re talking about a propellant tank farm. The only reason for the FAA to be involved is if there’s a safety concern. And if there’s a safety problem, that should be even more important to the actual property owner (NASA and the Space Force).
Ideally, there would just be one Federal standard for propellant tank placement which everyone is held to, and it shouldn’t matter which agency performs the evaluation. If it’s approved by one it should be approved by all.
Three’s no real news. The Fish and Wildlife Service is still doing their thing. They did say they have started on their evaluation, and that they don’t expect it to take the full 135 days, but that’s about all we know. FWS people have been seen at Starbase doing stuff.
There have been a bunch more deluge tests. It is funny that an operation which is perfectly ok to do in isolation is not ok to do for a launch. It’s nothing to do with the heat or chemicals or anything else–they’ve done static fires with the deluge system as well. It’s just that the FAA is only involved for a launch, and ground tests aren’t launches. No launch, no FAA, and no FWS. I get that bureaucracy moves in mysterious ways, but you’d think they could solve this contradiction somehow.
Since it’s a lazy Sunday, here’s a picture of the seal that some environmental agency (back in ~2013) forced SpaceX to kidnap, strap to a board, and play sonic booms through headphones to in order to measure its startle response, in case it would somehow impact pupping season:
Aw that poor sea doggy!
You can imagine him/her getting back to the flock of other seals and trying to explain that experience.
A human would do as badly trying to explain what happened onboard that Raelian ship. Except for the part about the sore anus. That everyone could understand.
THAT was done by an ‘environmental agency’?
Is this real?
Wait till you find out what Pavlov did to those poor dogs
Yep (well, they had SpaceX hire some agency to do that). Unfortunately, I haven’t found which one yet, though it’s probably NOAA. But they were concerned that the sonic booms from booster landings in Vandenberg would startle the seals, causing them to abandon their pups, and then being unable to find them again.
It’s not an insane thing to worry about… but the chain of reasoning that starts there, and ends with a seal strapped to a board with headphones, seems… dubious to me. They could have just allowed the landing conditionally and measured the real-world response. If it turned out to be a problem, then do something about it.
This is excellent news:
Ok, so they’re still waiting on the environmental stuff. But a big open question is whether the FAA was satisfied with the fixed Flight Termination System (FTS), and although they didn’t say so explicitly, if they’re done with the safety portion, then they must be ok with the upgraded FTS. As well as any other safety issues.
Moving forward, at least… and maybe the FWS will feel some pressure now that the FAA has thrown the ball in their court.
Yeah I’m willing to bet the FAA absolutely did not want to find the USFWS finishing their bit before them and leaving them with the negative headlines.
The least they could do is to invite the seal for a complimentary orbit flight on the house with all expenses covered. After all the dogs, monkeys, flies, frogs, mice and what not that habe been up there already and after putting the seal through this humiliating, denigrating ordeal it seems the decent thing to do.
I wonder how well they’d do in space! They’re used to a sorta zero-g environment already. Maybe they’d find it perfectly comfortable swimming around in the air. Maybe give them some extended flippers to give them more thrust.
Just doing some more reading about seals and sonic booms and such, and some of the material is just funny.
So, apparently a sonic boom causes 1/4 of sea lions to wake up and go what the fuck was that?, but they fell back asleep in 30 seconds. And a few pups take it as a cue to ditch their parents and play in the water for hours. Adorable, I’m sure.
Anyway, after all the analysis, SpaceX received authorization to harass marine mammals as part of the landing process:
The way these agencies phrase things can be a little odd, sometimes…
“Mom’s distracted. Let’s gooooo!”
Couldn’t this just be “chasing off the pads”? Technically, it’s harassment, but the alternative is toasted wildlife.
Airfields have long “harassed” wildfowl off the grounds to prevent birdstrikes on landing or takeoff.
So, was this Texas location for SpaceX a mistake?
I don’t think any of us without insider information know what went into the selection of that site?
Speculatively, I think they underestimated the amount of regulatory paperwork that woul be involved in creating a new launch site from scratch?
There are good physical reasons for wanting your launch site to be as close to the equator as possible. There are good safety reasons for wanting your launch site to have a lot of open water to the east. And there are good economic reasons to want your launch site to be in the continental US. Put it all together, and you end up with Florida or Texas.