Did Fisheries and Wildlife finally figure out the areal density of whales in the ocean for impact probability estimation?
When some random person interacts with the bureaucracy, and hits these catch-22 scenarios, it's often not personal, they just fall under the wheels of the bulldozer, so to speak, and nobody notices or cares. But with something like Space X it's a bit more political, and it seems whoever drives the bulldozer was turning it towards Musk a bit to get him on purpose.
Apparently SpaceX must wait patiently to take humanity to the stars because sharkfin poachers have infiltrated spies into a wildly unrelated government agency.
I feel like SpaceX should just launch the damned rocket and then if anyone from the government takes issue just demand a public explanation. As in, literally, get the busybody bureaucrat from Fisheries and Wildlife to stand up behind a podium and explain themselves on live, national television.
"Err... you see, Mr Musk was clearly in the wrong here because... umm... we couldn't... umm... share information internally to complete the appropriate paperwork, so... umm..."
It would be glorious.
What else could they possibly do? Some dude at the Fish & Wildlife Service isn’t gonna bust out COMSOL. I don’t really know what people expect.
And then I wonder if they would have to cancel multi-billion dollar missions to deep space if the answer is non-zero.
People really need to get a grip and use their common sense for a bit.
A hundred workers — humans — died in the construction of the Hoover Dam, and that was considered acceptable.
The Starship test could literally bomb the ocean with a nuclear weapon and the ecological consequences would still be worth it considering the benefits to the human race.
PS: The US government routinely nuked delicate ecosystems like the Bikini Atolls and I bet they never had to fill out the shark, whale, and seal paperwork.
PPS: any individual modern fishing trawler will kill more endangered wildlife daily than Starship might annually in a worst-case scenario.
Tell me again why this paperwork is more important than our ascendancy to the stars.
Be specific.
Even for just US itself, the Spaceship program might well have a chance to prove to be as existentially important as the Bikini Atoll tests (if we consider that it increased the believability of MAD and prevented nuclear holocaust).
If not that, it will likely still make US have an incredible lead in mass to orbit capability which might lead to dibs on, well, whole stellar objects like moons to mine, planet to realistically colonize ...
NASA has been actively involved in wildlife preservation since the beginning. By doing that they are effectively in control and can design it into their mission operations.
https://www.kennedyspacecenter.com/blog/07/the-wild-side-of-...
SpaceX was unlikely to succeed and it’d be irresponsible for NASA to not have a human rated launcher in case SpaceX failed.
Also, it keeps a lot of rocket scientists current, sharp, and happily employed while it prevents them from considering moving to North Korea.
I just don't like the attitude that treat all investigation as joke.
Many “investigations” are not done in good faith.
Ask yourself a simple question: does the government subject anyone else — especially themselves — to the same scrutiny?
Really?
Collision studies between space rockets and sharks!?
Because we never have it. Not once in the history of humanity has anyone done anything with the benefit of all the information. It's simply not possible to know everything about something.
Your choices are to do things where you don't know what's going to happen, or never do anything.
It turns out this is basically fine, because doing them is one of the best ways to find out what happens. And if it turns out something bad happens, then you can prohibit it, so it doesn't keep happening.
Talking of the more reasonable bureaucratic hoops, SpaceX has done quite a job filling all of FAA's requirements they landed on the program from the previous attempt. In a way I hoped that SpaceX would operate outside US to not have to abide by all the crazy laws they have (even with hiring!) but this seems to be the only way.
Overall, Starship isn't being given a fraction of the coverage it should be. This is the Apollo of our time, but without the dependency of hyper-inefficient and unstable government funding. But this time, Moon will be just a bus stop.
Footage of a boat hitting a shark - https://youtu.be/yYuh_TNLThg?t=332 this unusual event being .1% of their trip for the day.
And even then it should be ridiculously easy to determine it is more beneficial for humanity to revolutionize mass/cost to orbit even if one or a few animals get hurt during many years of operation. If the US government truly cared this crazy much about sharks and whales we would have sent a carrier battle group to sink all Japanese whaling vessels already for example, or at least funded some black ops guys to sink them while keeping deniability.
But let’s make Elon Musk put headphones on seals (plural) because it’s funny to make the billionaire jump through hoops.
If I was in Musk’s position I would simply threaten to pack up everything and take all Starship development over to China. I bet a lot of the “essential” paperwork would magically be made to go away.
Yeah good luck with that one. ITAR doesn't work that way. The worst threat they could realistically make is to make their IP 100% public domain (in the ITAR sense which is a bit different from the copyright/patent sense) and the US probably would not care in the slightest since that would be a massive whale fall for the domestic launch system industry.
Notably the founding father of Chinese space industry worked under von Karman in Caltech and left the USA in disappointment. However that was just one scientist in a rather different time. Today, neither Europe, nor China, nor Russia, nor India or Japan offer opportunities to develop things similar to SpaceX; I'd be quite interested in Chinese development, but would still bet against them.