In the lawsuit, the groups accuse TCEQ of exceeding its authority by allowing the discharges.
Elon musk legit conned an entire generation.
Just another reason why I don’t respect my peers.
TCEQ is a fucking joke. They’re a rubber stamp for anything industry wants, and they don’t care where.
Burnet county TX residents are currently trying to fight the installation of (another) rock crusher/quarry in an area with limited water and where three other similar plants already exist.
TCEQ rubber stamped their air quality permit after admitting they have ZERO air quality monitors in the entire county. But I’m sure it’s fine.
I totally get that we need to figure out cleaner ways to access space and need to reign stuff like this in.
But also…
gestures wildly at the entirety of oil/coal/manufacturing industries completely dwarfing the operations of one space launch facility
It just feels like being proud of the clean yard you just picked up all the street trash from when you live directly behind a landfill.
Yet, every bit counts. It’s also good to win smaller things to help win bigger fights.
Also, fuck Elon.
The “drop in the bucket” and “it’s such a small percentage” argument only works for so long. It’s like saying the Wright brothers are just a couple of kookie inventors who’s plane is so slow they will never compete against rail travel.
Plus, reusable rockets are a lot cleaner than letting them sink to the seafloor, with propellant residue inside. Or letting them burn up in the atmosphere, where heavy metals degrade the ozone layer and have other negative effects.
Half of the rocket still gets disposed and “burns up”. There’s nothing clean about injecting kerosene and methane into the upper atmosphere.
Sure. That’s why I’m looking forward to Starship, and, in the distant future, a space elevator. But we need rapidly reusable rockets before we can build an elevator.
Starship is not feasible for anything but space tourism, maybe, if it doesn’t blow up or crash every other launch.
It currently barely has the energy to reach orbital speeds while completely empty. How is it going to achieve orbit with the supposed 100 tons of cargo on board, or even the more realistic 50 ton payload.
The Government Accountability Office, the pre-existing competitor to the Efficiency Office Musk wants to run, put out a report over a year ago that the main engines of the starship do not meet the energy requirements for the Artemis mission that SpaceX has already been payed for. Those engines are already run so over throttled that they routinely melt themselves, that’s the green fire you see whenever one of the boosters or Ship itself relights its engines for landing.
SpaceX does not have the technology to make starship work as designed, if they did, they could have retrofitted the Falcon rockets to have reusable second stages like was originally planned. Instead they went straight for the big scam of a reusable moon rocket, because why tell a small lie when you can tell big one and have someone fraudulently award you a 3 billion dollar contract to make it.
