FAA is apparently starting a new environmental impact assessment for Boca Chica
Damaged but working flap during June 6, 2024
Starship/Superheavy test flight
Today I received the following email from the FAA:
Dear Interested Party:
The FAA is holding public meetings on the Draft Tiered Environmental Assessment (Draft EA) for SpaceX’s proposal to increase the number of launches and landings of its Starship/Super Heavy vehicle at the Boca Chica Launch Site in Cameron County, Texas. The Draft EA will analyze SpaceX’s proposal to increase its launch and landing cadence as follows:
- Up to 25 annual Starship/Super Heavy orbital launches
- Up to 25 annual landings of Starship
- Up to 25 annual landings of Super Heavy
The Draft EA will also address vehicle upgrades.
There will be three public meetings, one on August 13, 2024 on South Padre Island, one on August 15, 2024 in Port Isabel, and the third a virtual zoom meeting on August 20, 2024. Anyone can register for the zoom meeting. For all the meetings, “The public will have an opportunity to submit written and oral comments during the meetings.” Expect the leftist anti-Musk, anti-SpaceX activists to come out in droves.
What is really significant about this is that SpaceX has applied to expand its operations at Boca Chica beyond the limitations set by the environmental reassessment issued in 2022. The FAA had said in that reassessment it would re-open it if and when SpaceX requested any changes. It has now done so.
That SpaceX has made this request now suggests it expects the FAA’s new environmental impact statement at Cape Canaveral to limit Starship/Superheavy operations there far more than previously expected. The company had requested permission to make 44 launches at Cape Canaveral, a number both Blue Origin and ULA are fighting. SpaceX probably has a sense that the FAA will slash this number significantly, and probably shaped its new request at Boca Chica to make up the loss.
This new request thus gives us a sense of the total number of Superheavy/Starship launches SpaceX thinks it needs each year — about 25 to 50 total — to get the rocket fully operational. It also tells us that if the FAA does not allow these numbers, both in Florida and Texas, then Superheavy/Starship will likely not be ready on time for NASA’s Artemis lunar program.
Either way, we have now entered the new world of petty rule by the administrative state. Environmental Impact Statements were never intended to control and supervise every change in a company’s operations. They were conceived as simply a first look investigation to make sure any environmental impacts of a company’s proposed new factory or facility would be reasonable. Once finished and its findings implemented, the company was supposedly then free to operate competitively and on its own.
Instead, the law is now used to force a company to get permission from government bureacrats step-by-step for anything it wants to do. And those bureaucrats are quite willing to be petty dictators, and squelch or destroy those companies, if they feel like it.
Freedom in the U.S. is largely dead. We say we believe in it, but our actions falsify that belief.
Readers!
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your support allows me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
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You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
Damaged but working flap during June 6, 2024
Starship/Superheavy test flight
Today I received the following email from the FAA:
Dear Interested Party:
The FAA is holding public meetings on the Draft Tiered Environmental Assessment (Draft EA) for SpaceX’s proposal to increase the number of launches and landings of its Starship/Super Heavy vehicle at the Boca Chica Launch Site in Cameron County, Texas. The Draft EA will analyze SpaceX’s proposal to increase its launch and landing cadence as follows:
- Up to 25 annual Starship/Super Heavy orbital launches
- Up to 25 annual landings of Starship
- Up to 25 annual landings of Super Heavy
The Draft EA will also address vehicle upgrades.
There will be three public meetings, one on August 13, 2024 on South Padre Island, one on August 15, 2024 in Port Isabel, and the third a virtual zoom meeting on August 20, 2024. Anyone can register for the zoom meeting. For all the meetings, “The public will have an opportunity to submit written and oral comments during the meetings.” Expect the leftist anti-Musk, anti-SpaceX activists to come out in droves.
What is really significant about this is that SpaceX has applied to expand its operations at Boca Chica beyond the limitations set by the environmental reassessment issued in 2022. The FAA had said in that reassessment it would re-open it if and when SpaceX requested any changes. It has now done so.
That SpaceX has made this request now suggests it expects the FAA’s new environmental impact statement at Cape Canaveral to limit Starship/Superheavy operations there far more than previously expected. The company had requested permission to make 44 launches at Cape Canaveral, a number both Blue Origin and ULA are fighting. SpaceX probably has a sense that the FAA will slash this number significantly, and probably shaped its new request at Boca Chica to make up the loss.
This new request thus gives us a sense of the total number of Superheavy/Starship launches SpaceX thinks it needs each year — about 25 to 50 total — to get the rocket fully operational. It also tells us that if the FAA does not allow these numbers, both in Florida and Texas, then Superheavy/Starship will likely not be ready on time for NASA’s Artemis lunar program.
Either way, we have now entered the new world of petty rule by the administrative state. Environmental Impact Statements were never intended to control and supervise every change in a company’s operations. They were conceived as simply a first look investigation to make sure any environmental impacts of a company’s proposed new factory or facility would be reasonable. Once finished and its findings implemented, the company was supposedly then free to operate competitively and on its own.
Instead, the law is now used to force a company to get permission from government bureacrats step-by-step for anything it wants to do. And those bureaucrats are quite willing to be petty dictators, and squelch or destroy those companies, if they feel like it.
Freedom in the U.S. is largely dead. We say we believe in it, but our actions falsify that belief.
Readers!
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your support allows me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
“Lawfare” seems to be the weapon of choice these days for the Democrats/Marxists/statists.
“That SpaceX has made this request now suggests it expects the FAA’s new environmental impact statement at Cape Canaveral to limit Starship/Superheavy operations there far more than previously expected.”
I grok your cynicism – I really do – but I think it’s actually just as likely that this is a way to deal with the fact that even in the best case scenario, the Starship launch pads planned for the Cape won’t be ready for use until well in 2026. And I don’t think they want to wait until then to do the kind of launching they want to do in the short-term. So, that leaves Boca Chica.
But that doesn’t mean that hedging against the FAA hacking their launch requests at the Cape down is not at the back of Elon’s mind.
Robert wrote: “This new request thus gives us a sense of the total number of Superheavy/Starship launches SpaceX thinks it needs each year — about 25 to 50 total — to get the rocket fully operational.”
SpaceX has expressed a desire to successfully fly and land 100 Starships before considering it safe for human travel.
“Freedom in the U.S. is largely dead. We say we believe in it, but our actions falsify that belief.”
We definitely lost our freedom and liberty in 2010, when the government declared itself responsible for and arbiter of our individual health, not just the general welfare, as specified in the Constitution’s Preamble and in its Article I, Section 8. General welfare was not intended to mean individual or collective health, wealth, or wisdom. It was intended to mean protected from all enemies, foreign and domestic.
The government’s overreach in 2010 led to government protecting our health with its Lockdown, Shutdown, Smackdown oppression strategy ten years later. Government now considers itself our loving, smothering mother, responsible for every aspect of our wellbeing, and as the responsible party, it may tell us what we can do, what we must wear, what to say, what to think, what pronouns to use, and — most important — what gender we were meant to be, complete with the authority to bypass our real parents and permanently change our sexes at very young ages. Changing our sex always means taking away our sex with a promise of changing to the other, but always ending up without sex: asexual human beings.
Then government complains that we are not having enough children.
Messing with our businesses is small potatoes, when compared to messing with our most intimate of personal lives.
This is the fundamentally transformed America.
From the US Constitution:
ARTICLE I,
SECTION 8:
“general Welfare of theUnited States”
Not the general welfare of We the People. Not the general welfare of any individual person or of individuals collectively.
https://constitutionstudy.com/2018/10/26/general-welfare-clause/
Directing businesses as to what to do and how to do it is definitely anti-American. It is worse than feudal. It is marxist, which never goes well, and always ends badly.
I pray by the grace of God that Trump is able to climb back to the top of the federal leviathan. And this time, really take a hatchet to the beast. He must enlist people like Vivek R. to eliminate some government departments wholesale (like Dept. of Education for starters) and rolling back the others by 75%. The SCOTUS Chevron decision will be a big help in reining in these rogue, sociopathic overlords. There must be no hesitation this time.
Concerned .. well stated
We will get some sense of how serious Trump is regarding these issues when he announces his VP.
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury.” – A. F. Tytler Lord Woodhouselee
But we do not have a pure democracy. So the Democrats have bent this truism to use the treasury to buy votes, and thus maintain their hold on power. While in power they they have the ability to enrich themselves (insider trading).
An increased flight rate at Boca Chica was kind of obviously going to be necessary given the projected scale of Star Factory production. This facility is not designed for prototyping and research and development, it is designed for SERIAL PRODUCTION of the largesr rocket in history.
So a first order increase to 25 launches a year is simply a first step as Musk has indicated in recent interviews that Boca Chica as configured should scale up to about 100 vehicles a year, and remember, these vehicles are to be COMPLETELY REUSABLE which will obviously require a substantially higher launch cadence to be realized.
As Bilbo Baggins once said “Every journey starts with a first step” and this is simply that for the first real effort to make humanity a multi-planetary species..
Everything is in the air now after the attempt on trumps life. Survived by an inch. Male shooter on a building roof nearby shot dead by snipers.
https://x.com/isabellasg3/status/1812263111904166014
I love animals and the environment and believe in its protection.
But not every single inch for any reason.
The original environmental assessment still stands. Nothing has changed with the environment.
If one rocket launch does not harm the environment then 1000 will not harm it either. It might need rechecked for landings but not so much. Space X has that landing targeting system down pretty well.
Besides the NTSB does not do an environmental study every time there is a truck or car crash.
I have never liked the Green Movement.
If you are a coal miner, not only does management want to bust their unions–but Greens want them out of a job–period.
The working man has no friends in DC