New York Times investigative team digs up the truth about the world’s largest rocket
Frontiers of Journalism: “Wildlife Protections Take a Back Seat to SpaceX’s Ambitions”.
A New York Times investigation found that Elon Musk exploited federal agencies’ competing missions to achieve his goals for space travel.
The investigative team first figured out that blasting off the world’s largest rocket can be disturbing or harmful to nearby animals:
As Elon Musk’s Starship — the largest rocket ever manufactured — successfully blasted toward the sky last month, the launch was hailed as a giant leap for SpaceX and the United States’ civilian space program.
Two hours later, once conditions were deemed safe, a team from SpaceX, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and a conservation group began canvassing the fragile migratory bird habitat surrounding the launch site.
The impact was obvious.
The launch had unleashed an enormous burst of mud, stones and fiery debris across the public lands encircling Mr. Musk’s $3 billion space compound. Chunks of sheet metal and insulation were strewn across the sand flats on one side of a state park. Elsewhere, a small fire had ignited, leaving a charred patch of park grasslands — remnants from the blastoff that burned 7.5 million pounds of fuel.
Most disturbing to one member of the entourage was the yellow smear on the soil in the same spot that a bird’s nest lay the day before. None of the nine nests recorded by the nonprofit Coastal Bend Bays & Estuaries Program before the launch had survived intact.
Based on the 2000′ scale, it looks like SpaceX has trashed or burned roughly one square mile of land in Elon’s Fool’s Errand to Mars (TM). That leaves only 268,820 square miles of Texas that SpaceX hasn’t trashed or burned (more like 261,193 square miles if one counts only the land area).
(Note that the launch operations at Cape Canaveral have been tremendously beneficial to wildlife because they’ve prevented humans from developing the areas near the pads. Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge was set up in 1963 in tandem with the launch pads. If you do a tour of the Kennedy Space Center the density of birds, gators, etc. is similar to what you find in Everglades National Park. I’m confused as to how the area escaped intensive development prior to NASA’s arrival. Wikipedia provides only a bit of history.)
SpaceX did respond to the article…
