This is how you get Elon buying Twitter and starting Elon PAC!

Strike him down and he will return a thousand times stronger.

He really should start both anyway. The power inherent in the Sword of Damoclese is that it hangs, not that if falls.

I doubt the Democrats want Musk throwing tens of billions of dollars onto the dumpster fire the next two elections are going to represent for them anyways,

I fear the problem may be far worse than that. It seems to me that the Chicom would not want SpaceX
to out compete THEM. And of course, whatever Zhi Jin Ping, the first Emperor of the United States of
America says, the wholly bought “let’s go Brandon” administration will do for their Emperor Zhi.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/doesnt-sound-very-balanced-elon-musk-hints-he-may-launch-new-platform-to-take-on-twitter

The progressives and Ds risk much if they keep playing this game. Musk is smarter than they are and has the resources and profile to get his message out, and it will be to their detriment if he feels pressed to play hardball. He is uncancellable, and if he throws in with DJT as Van Dune predicts he will sway a large enough block of the youth and techno world away from the idiocrocy they now follow, and the democratic party will be consigned to the dustbin of history.

MHO anyway : )

Jason Lewis: No, this is not about Starship only.

When SpaceX first got its environmental approvals for Boca Chica years ago, it was for a launch site for Falcon 9/Falcon Heavy. Because the company wants to now launch Starship/Superheavy there, those approvals need to be reassessed.

When Trump was president, this whole process was proceeding quickly. The FAA reviewed the data, and had quickly concluded that a spaceport is no threat to the environment, as the government has concluded many times before in many places, based on more than a half century of evidence at Cape Canaveral and elsewhere. If anything, spaceports help endangered wildlife, because they stop development across a large swath of land.

Thus, in the fall of ’21 the FAA released its draft approval of that environmental assessment. It still needed to go through public comment, and several public hearings (which it has), but it was then expected to be approved by December, at the latest.

However, it appears the Biden administration likes regulation and restricting private enterprise, so its leadership has apparently decided to make this process more odious. The result has been repeated delays, and a willingness to let bureaucrats in NOAA and Fish & Wildlife impose their veto on the approval.

I first predicted the Biden administration would act to block SpaceX back in October ’21, writing:

Thus, while SpaceX is ready to go, our lumbering, oppressive government is not. As I’ve written before, I fully expect there to be pressure from the Biden administration and NASA to slow walk that government approval so that Starship does not launch before February 2022, when SLS is now scheduled for its first launch. Having SpaceX get its heavy lift rocket into orbit before NASA would be very embarrassing, considering that SpaceX has spent about a third the time and about a tenth the money getting it done.

I was only wrong about two things. First, I thought the effort to delay SpaceX was to have SLS launch first. I now believe the effort is more in line with the normal oppressive effort of the Washington bureaucracy to simply flex its muscles against free Americans, in this case Elon Musk. Very petty, very evil, and very obvious.

Second, I was wrong about how much the Biden administration and the Washington swamp would delays things. It now appears the goal is to block this project entirely. Politically that will be a disaster for the local Democrats in Texas, so I believe the Biden administration is simply stalling month to month until after the November elections, after which they will proceed to reject the reassessment, forcing a multi-year delay as a new enviromental impact statement will have to be written and approved.

I continue to hope I am wrong. Sadly, my pessimistic predictions so far in this matter have been on the money, far too often for my tastes.

I like Gwynne Shotwell for president, but there are many other qualified candidates.

That said, I would love to be proven wrong and see some competence in the current administration.