And to think it took this much self-inflicted falling from grace before it became admissible to point that “boy genius”'s enterprises should be prosecuted as much as anybody else for wrongdoing.
The article has no details about the mercury beyond what is in the title. The specific issues it does talk about are things like water runoff, noise that frightens animals, and even “proximity to indigenous sacred lands” which are all, to be frank, trivial. Mercury (in significant amounts) is a problem. But a rocket making noise? Yeah, they do that.
They also do that in Florida. Where many of the pads are in a conservation area. Launching from those types of areas isn’t new, rocket launches are a well known impact.
Don’t ever see anyone talking about the NASA launch sites when these things are brought up. Always seems to be articles where the SpaceX stuff is in a vacuum and no one else launches or has launch pads to compare against.
Not saying that contamination shouldn’t be researched, just that much of the reporting seems to have a motivation behind it that isn’t what it claims to be.
What about the uproar between native Hawaiians and Nasa over observatories being built on sacred native land? It’s not launch pads but Nasa has definitely pissed ppl off
I never said they didn’t piss people off. But we’re talking about concerns at a launch site. An observatory and a launch site have nearly zero in common.
So your defense is that what they are doing, someone else may have done or done something you consider equally as wrong? I don’t need to make a strawman/example/anything for you, I think you already know it is morally/ethically wrong.
They don’t treat launch water, it runs off into the wetlands through open ditches. The SRBs that the Shuttle and SLS use are 100-ton bricks of perchlorates that contaminate and acidify water for miles every time there’s a launch, so treating the direct runoff is deck chairs on the Titanic. Kennedy Space Center is already a Superfund site, so they focus on things like underwater fencing to stop KSC fish full of teflon and cadmium from being eaten by normal fish.
The original cnbc report linked in the article posted states their application asked for 113 micrograms per liter of mercury for discharge. Texas considers 2.1 to be toxic to aquatic life and less than that for human life.
They also mention their application didn’t mention the temperature of the water discharge which could also be a problem if we are trying not to boil the wildlife near the pad.
Aren’t most immigrants just an economic gain for the communities they join? Last I recall the data also shows they commit fewer crimes than citizens. They certainly pay more taxes than the wealthy.
Oh yeah, when they try and throw the election they are definitely going to use this as their ‘proof’ the democrats are bringing in immigrants for votes 🙄
Elon’s daily dose. It takes a lot to get on his level.
Just kidding, but it seems like something to do with the fuel/exhaust.
I’ve read multiple articles and the most I’ve gotten is that their first launch didn’t have the cleaner fuel that future launches did. I am not sure how that would cause repeated incidents… perhaps it’s from metal parts in the rockets? 🤔 I could have missed something as I was reading but hopefully someone else will know the answer.
The pumps need to be running full bore before ignition and keep running after cut off. Watch a video of shut off and tell me where they’re keeping all that CO^2 and water on the rocket.
At shut off and start up the rocket pumps methane and oxygen into the atmosphere before ignition. The Falcon 9 pumps kerosene and oxygen. Watch the live streams and look at the engines at meco.
I couldn’t think of a source either. Upon closer inspection, it seems possible that this entire story is based on two typos in the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality report.
Dumping into the water. It is an overall expense, and not related to the business interests. They just needed some evil villain stuff going on because Elon really wants to meet Captain Planet.
Oh it just means he acquired a servant that has 30+ years experience in old timey hat making. But he’s rich, so we speak as if it’s him that’s doing it.
Slippery consistency helps the highest bidder to slide up Elon’s bumhole more easily and efficiently. What you really want in this situation is a low energy threshold for financial turnover - in this case the point at which dollar bills are more than 50% up musks arse. Mercury gets that done, and Elon likes the taste, but unfortunately on this occasion it got into the water supply which is sad to see.
This confused me as well. Upon closer inspection, it seems possible that this entire story is based on two typos in the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality report.
I can’t wait until this guy fades back into oblivion. I mean, he’s been causing harm for years with his anti-vax bullshit, but at least the volume was turned down. I hate him so much. Lying liar asshole.
Edit: and it looks like this entire story may have been based on a typo.
I mean, it depends how egregious / serious this violation is and how crucial it is to the rest of their overall successes.
Elon sucks, but for the same amount of money, NASA can either launch 150 tons of science missions 1 per year on SLS, or they can launch 170 tons of science missions every 2 weeks on Starship.
Quite frankly I don’t understand why they’ve gotten the level of hate they’ve gotten (and why some people seem so intent on finding ways to hate them), other than their association with their dumbass ceo.
People who blame the thousands of hard working engineers at SpaceX for Elon’s follies are committing the exact same logical fallacies as the people who hero worship him and praise him for what is the hard work of all those engineers.
It’s very easy to say in one sentence that Elon sucks and what SpaceX is doing is pretty wild and revolutionary, yet people like the OP I’m responding to seem bothered by even that.
Elon sucks, but for the same amount of money, NASA can either launch 150 tons of science missions 1 per year on SLS, or they can launch 170 tons of science missions every 2 weeks on Starship.
Because Im struggling to see how Starship, a fully reusable spaceship made out of stainless steel, is going to deplete the ozone the way that aluminum satellites do when they are deorbited and burned up…
Yes, it is. That is using their projected budget and the launch cadence that’s possible with both SLS and Starship. SLS can at most launch twice a year, Starship will be able to launch every two weeks, and costs orders of magnitude less.
My god. What do you do for a living? Does it have no effect on the environment in any way shape or form?
They literally just discovered that Starlink satellites are having that effect, and you have given them precisely zero time to even try and address and fix it. And in the meantime I literally just came back from a remote first Nations community that only has high quality internet because of it, amongst virtually every rural community in the world.
Honestly, disconnect yourself from the internet before you spend any time looking into the environmental impact of your phone, the servers you use, and the billions of miles of fibre optic cables that connect everything. Because if that’s the kind of blood that prevents you from praising a company that is literally revolutionizing space launch, then literally nothing any of us ever do is worth praising because it’s all built on a giant foundation of blood.
Hell, those solar thermal power plants that use mirrors to reflect light onto molten salts originally killed a whole bunch of birds. Are they bastards for trying to build out a new technology, realizing there’s environmental consequences, and then finding ways of addressing it?
I don’t. But even if I did, working for a company is not the same as being the company. I don’t blame an Exxon oil rig worker for global warming.
You have literally said that nothing anyone does at SpaceX is worthy of praise and complained that people praise SpaceX’s genuine accomplishments.
Not to the extent SpaceX will since it’s destroying the ozone layer. Not sure why you seem to think that’s trivial.
But they’re not, they’re slightly slowing it’s rate of recovery. This is not a problem on the scale of CFCs that actually destroyed the ozone layer, both in terms of damage being done and potential scale it can grow to (4000 satellites vs millions and millions of refrigerators and freezers), and it’s one that we literally just discovered now and have literally only started trying to address now.
Doing new things will have unexpected results and won’t be perfect the first try. News at 11. You wanna demonize the engineers who try and build new things for not having them 100% perfect the first time, then you’re free to be a Mennonite and separate yourself from all of t chbogy and modern society’s benefits too.
K, so when people praise SpaceX’s engineers for designing unprecedented machines that do things that no one has ever seen before, that doesn’t bother you?
You were referring specifically to all those times that people are praising SpaceX’s environmental regulation compliance?
When people praise SpaceX, the company, it bothers me.
When people praise an engineer at SpaceX that does something cool, I am happy for the engineer.
Again- saying I hate Starbucks doesn’t mean I hate the baristas who work there. Saying I hate Exxon doesn’t mean I hate an oil rig worker who’s just trying to make money to feed their family.
And sticking just with Musk-owned companies, saying I hate Tesla doesn’t mean I hate some random Tesla employee I’ve never heard of.
I’m really not sure why I have to explain this to you.
When people praise SpaceX, the company, it bothers me.
When people praise an engineer at SpaceX that does something cool, I am happy for the engineer.
I’m really not sure why I have to explain this to you.
You don’t have to explain either of those things to me, you can just answer the question I asked:
K, so when people praise SpaceX’s engineers for designing unprecedented machines that do things that no one has ever seen before, that doesn’t bother you?
i.e. when people praise SpaceX’s rockets and launches, does that bother you? Is that praising the company or praising the engineer in your mind?
At the end of the day what the company does is an output of the workers. When people praise what SpaceX does they are praising the workers, unless you view the company as just the CEO, in which case you’re falling into the folly of hero worship.
No, that is referring to the idea of a corporation having legal rights the way that a person does. That is not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about the output of a corporation. Is the output of a corporation the result of the CEO or of a bunch of workers?
See, the fun thing here is that I’ve answered the question you keep rephrasing multiple times the same way. You just don’t like my answer because it goes against your whole claim that this has something to do with Elon Musk.
And you are doing everything you can to defend a company which is destroying the ozone layer.
I, once again, have no idea why this has to be spelled out for you, but of course it bothers me when people praise a corporation that is destroying the ozone layer.
Similarly, it would bother me if someone praised Shell Oil or Nestle.
Why is it so hard for you to understand that SpaceX is destroying the ozone layer and that is a bad thing?
I, once again, have no idea why this has to be spelled out for you, but of course it bothers me when people praise a corporation that is destroying the ozone layer.
OK so when people praise SpaceX for destroying the ozone layer, which is totally a real thing that people praise them for, that bothers you.
But you’re ok with it when people praise SpaceX for creating reusable rockets that are more environmentally friendly than single use rockets?
Or no, people should shit on them for creating reusable rockets because something something musk makes you angry?
End of the day you think that because SpaceX is a Musk owned company, praise for what SpaceX does is praise for Musk, whereas people who don’t engage in hero worship view it as praise for the hardworking engineers who actually did those things.
And stop bringing up the ozone issue, we’ve been over this. Yes, it’s an issue that was literally just discovered and reported on, usually once you discover an issue you give people time to address it. That’s what happens when people try to do new things that have never been done before. If they ignore the issue and keep destroying the ozone layer then they will be the world destroying villains that you want them so badly to be.
Got it. And when Exxon ends up heating the world beyond 2 degrees C, then we can criticize them. Until then, criticizing Exxon means criticizing every secretary in their branch office in Des Moines.
I’ve never once said you can’t criticize them. This started because you said people can’t praise them.
And Exxon isn’t the bad guy for producing a product people want, they’re the bad guy for knowing the dangers of that product and not only ignoring them for decades, but also gas lighting the public about it.
Precisely, as in, you are bothered by the fact that people currently praise SpaceX, and are hoping that this revelation about mercury levels (which seems to be based on a typo), would make them stop.
You clearly are unwilling or incapable of acknowledging that you’re committing the folly of hero worship when you’re bothered by people praising SpaceX’s accomplishment because of their CEO.
I’m not going to block you in case you eventually come to your senses and post something worthwhile, but I am done with this conversation.
It wasn’t a paraphrase, it was a lie. I never said anything about what anyone can’t do. In fact, I asked a question about whether or not people will stop doing it.
It’s such an obvious lie that I’m not sure why you’re even trying to attempt this ‘paraphrase’ nonsense.
Do you know what the clouds coming out of the engines at shut down and start up are? Methane and oxygen. Do you think injecting methane into the upper atmosphere does the earth any favours?
Huh, if only NASA Earth’s science budget could stretch farther somehow so they could better monitor and tell us… now I wonder how they could reduce their mission costs by orders of magnitude…
The article I showed you about SpaceX destroying the ozone layer was not talking about methane:
Researchers at the University of Southern California released a study saying that satellites are significantly damaging Earth’s ozone layer. As their materials burn up upon reentry, leaving behind particle pollutants made up of aluminum oxides, which are “known catalysts for chlorine activation that depletes ozone in the stratosphere.”
Since 2016, the ozone layer has seen eight times as many of those pollutants, with an estimated 17 metric tons in 2022
Lol I know. Then you brought up their methane missions.
Your ‘bashing everything remotely associated with a villain’ is just as flawed as people’s hero worship. You see company’s as their CEO, I see them as a large collection of workers.
I’d rather NASA be funded well enough to not need private, profit-driven, corporations dictating how we explore space. That and Musk’s stench sticks to all his companies, for good or bad.
That’s what SLS is, a rocket built by NASA using their traditional contractors and it costs orders of magnitude more to do the literal exact same thing.
Again, I get that Musk sucks, but hating on the hardwork of thousands of engineers and personnel because of what one of the employees does in their free time is just as biased as everyone who irrationally praises Musk for what is the hardwork of thousands.
SLS does it the old way, with NASA contracting work out to the old school companies.
The Commercial Crew and Supply contracts are there to try it a different way. And they’re accomplishing their goals much more quickly and at a fraction of the cost.
There’s a great synopsis of the situation further up the thread, but the short is:
SpaceX originally wasn’t going to launch rockets from this facility… until they announced that they were, then asked for permission from the regulatory bodies after their first launch.
When concerns were raised about the rockets being launched half a kilometer from nature preservation land, and specifically in regard to the possibility of failed launches damaging the launchpad, Elon assured them that no such thing could happen… and then a quarter of the launchpad was destroyed by a failed launch.
So they installed the water deluge system, again asking for permission after they had already installed and used it.
Within their permit application for the system - which, again, was installed and used before the application was even submitted - are mercury measurements 50x higher than the Texas maximum threshold for acute mercury toxicity, and far higher than the thresholds for human safety.
The Elon hate is one thing, and I believe much of the hate for SpaceX is because of how he handles himself and his companies. But the general assurance has largely been that SpaceX has a team of handlers to keep him from screwing things up, and it sounds more like Boeing over there every day.
They may have Elon on a leash, but they seem to be running his playbook anyway.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has approved SpaceX’s next Starship launch, just hours after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) concluded its assessment of the rocket’s launch infrastructure.
The FAA gave the company a launch license Wednesday afternoon, saying Starship and its new launch infrastructure would have “no significant environmental changes” for its second launch.
FWS stated that SpaceX’s water deluge system, meant to suppress the flames and sound from the rocket’s 33 engines, would produce the same amount of water from an average rainfall. The agency does not expect the water to change the mud flats’ salinity or affect shorebird habitat.
*emphasis mine.
Flight 2 was on November 18th, 2 days after they get approval for the deluge system.
Edit: further, spacex has replied to this and said the following (among other things as well)
SpaceX worked with the Texas Commission of Environmental Quality (TCEQ) throughout the build and test of the water deluge system at Starbase to identify a permit approach. TCEQ personnel were onsite at Starbase to observe the initial tests of the system in July 2023, and TCEQ’s website shows that SpaceX is covered by the Texas Multi-Sector General Permit.
We only use potable (drinking) water in the system’s operation. At no time during the operation of the deluge system is the potable water used in an industrial process, nor is the water exposed to industrial processes before or during operation of the system.
We send samples of the soil, air, and water around the pad to an independent, accredited laboratory after every use of the deluge system, which have consistently shown negligible traces of any contaminants. Importantly, while CNBC’s story claims there are “very large exceedances of the mercury” as part of the wastewater discharged at the site, all samples to-date have in fact shown either no detectable levels of mercury whatsoever or found in very few cases levels significantly below the limit the EPA maintains for drinking water.
Heavy metals are some of the worst things to dump into the environment, and I’m curious to see where the mercury is coming from, why they’re using it, and how they’re going to address it, but it really feels like you’re blowing up a relatively small issue into a massive one.
They had one launch where they blew up the launch pad accidentally, so they added a deluge system to cope. Now there’s mercury toxicity downstream of the site, but it’s not clear it has anything to do with the deluge system.
The Elon hate is one thing, and I believe much of the hate for SpaceX is because of how he handles himself and his companies.
That absolutely is where most of it comes from. Articles that hate on Elon get clicks, so for every actual thoughtful nuanced critique of SpaceX, there’s two dozen click bait articles written by glorified bloggers that will look for any flaw because critiques of Musk’s space company drives traffic.
But the general assurance has largely been that SpaceX has a team of handlers to keep him from screwing things up, and it sounds more like Boeing over there every day.
Boeing is failing to do what they used to do 50 years ago. SpaceX is successfully doing things that no one has ever done. Yes the wreckless rule breaking is trademark Elon, but let’s not be hyperbolic.
I’m curious to see where the mercury is coming from, why they’re using it, and how they’re going to address it
So was I. Upon closer inspection, it seems possible that this entire story is based on two typos in the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality report.
for every actual thoughtful nuanced critique of SpaceX, there’s two dozen click bait articles written by glorified bloggers
SpaceX fans have known about this for a long time now, and they just don’t care. They’ve shouted down anyone who has pointed it out for well over a year now
A spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, Nasser Kanaan, said that “it is necessary to punish Israel,” echoing comments from other senior Iranian officials. But he also said that “Tehran is not interested in escalating the regional conflicts.”
Its like, actually fucking amazing how level headed the region has been at not being baited by Israel into a broader conflict.
This makes so much sense to me - Iran joining in would give an invitation to USA, EU, etc. to join in with Israel, and take away focus from Israel’s war crimes and genocide to instead focus on the new bad guy.
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