It's a joke the FAA take longer to shuffle paperwork than SpaceX take to design and build an entire spacecraft.
> For example, the company's Falcon 9 launches from Vandenberg Space Force Base sometimes fly over Jalama Beach, which is due south of the spaceport in California. SpaceX has been performing calculations, based on flight path and breakup analysis, to determine whether the beach needs to be closed. But because this work would compete directly with the FAA's Starship analysis, it has put the Jalama Beach review on hold and attempted to find nighttime launch windows when the beach would be empty.
All safety critical stuff comes down to high-stakes gambling.
One approach that I've seen work well is to estimate the expected number of terrible events per year (which is just the mean time to failure of the system). Things start to be reasonably at about a 0.01 probability per year. (So, we'd expect SpaceX to crash in a populated area once a century. If they launch roughly 100 rockets per year. That means that there has to be a less than a 1 in 10,000 chance that a given rocket crashes and that it kills someone in the process.)
(The 0.01 is picked as an example. I have no idea how many zeros the actual FAA regulatory process aims for, or if they go by expected deaths vs. incident rates, etc.)
"...many large concrete chunks, stainless-steel sheets, metal and other objects were 'hurled thousands of feet away,' along with a plume of concrete particles that resulted in the miles-away scattering. A 3½-acre fire also started on Boca Chica State Park, south of the launch pad, the agency said."
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-04-26/spacex-sta...
Also articles dated 4-26 significantly predated any lab analysis of the particles that reached Boca Chica Ranch and Port Isabel. It was presumed they were concrete particles, but they were just sand.
Like, bruh: blowing up your pad and showering the surrounding area isn't cool.
It's not a surprise that this freaks out local residents. It's not a surprise that lots of freaked out local residents makes for a freaked out regulator.
And the regulator wasn't freaked out. The FAA rubber stamped Starship incident report and list of corrective actions.
That's well below the typical turnaround time for new house construction around here. Heck, I've heard of generator permits taking longer than that.
To be clear how absurd that is, a generator permit is one that gets you permission to pour a concrete pad, place a store-bought residential generator on it, and then trench and run electrical lines between it and an existing electrical panel.
I empathize with SpaceX, but there are similar issues with far larger economic impact throughout all layers of the US government. Ever hear the story about the access road in Marin that they needed to build for Golden Gate Bridge maintenance? It took longer to permit and cost more to build than the bridge (inflation adjusted).