I recommend the above link because it gets even weirder than you might surmise from the parent's comment.
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.