SpaceX vs. the birds: Environmental activists sue FAA over Texas rocket launch
Conn Carroll
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If you want to know why America can’t do great things anymore, just look to the federal court in Texas where environmentalist activists have filed a lawsuit to shut down SpaceX’s next-generation Starship program.
Last month, Elon Musk’s SpaceX company tested its Super Heavy launch vehicle from its Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas. If everything had gone perfectly, the unmanned test flight would have orbited the globe once in about 1 hour and 17 minutes before landing offshore in the Gulf of Mexico.
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But as often happens in the early testing of rockets, not everything went perfectly. Several of the rocket’s engines failed during the flight, and the vehicle self-destructed, as it was programmed to, just four minutes into the flight.
No injuries occurred and no property was damaged. However, the blast from the launch sent concrete and metal shrapnel flying from the launchpad, and a 3.5-acre brush fire was ignited.
Although neither the shrapnel nor the fire spread to the adjacent Boca Chica State Park, the Center for Biological Diversity has since sued the Federal Aviation Administration, claiming that the federal agency did not file a full environmental impact statement before granting SpaceX a license to launch its rocket in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act.
Passed on Earth Day in 1970, NEPA is an extremely powerful piece of environmental legislation that can stop pretty much any infrastructure project. Just three years after its passage, NEPA was used to block the construction of a Tennessee Valley Authority dam. It took a special act of Congress to exempt the dam, which was funded by the federal government, from NEPA’s onerous requirements.
SpaceX is a private company. It does not use public money to build or test rockets. But it does need permission from the FAA to launch rockets. And environmental activists now claim the FAA did not conduct a review on how SpaceX launches would affect the wildlife around the launch site.
As a result of this lawsuit, SpaceX could be grounded for years. As a result of NEPA, our economy has been grounded for decades.
In 1961, when President John F. Kennedy declared he had a goal to reach the moon, no one thought it could be accomplished within a decade. But by 1969, people were walking on the moon.
One year later, NEPA became law. It is no coincidence that we haven’t been back to the moon since 1972.
If NEPA had been law in 1960 instead of 1970, the Johnson Space Center in Houston and the Kennedy Space Center in Florida would never have been built. We would have never reached the moon, or, at a bare minimum, it would have taken decades longer than it did.
Decline is a choice. Until we repeal NEPA, we are not going to be able to do great things again.