News

People who blame the thousands of hard working engineers at SpaceX for Elon's follies are committing the exact same logical fallacies as the people who hero worship him and praise him for what is the hard work of all those engineers.

It's very easy to say in one sentence that Elon sucks and what SpaceX is doing is pretty wild and revolutionary, yet people like the OP I'm responding to seem bothered by even that.

SLS does it the old way, with NASA contracting work out to the old school companies.

The Commercial Crew and Supply contracts are there to try it a different way. And they're accomplishing their goals much more quickly and at a fraction of the cost.

They literally are.

That's what SLS is, a rocket built by NASA using their traditional contractors and it costs orders of magnitude more to do the literal exact same thing.

Again, I get that Musk sucks, but hating on the hardwork of thousands of engineers and personnel because of what one of the employees does in their free time is just as biased as everyone who irrationally praises Musk for what is the hardwork of thousands.

The folly of hero worship cuts both ways.

They got approval from the fish and wildlife agency before launching with the deluge system

https://www.tpr.org/technology-entrepreneurship/2023-11-16/faa-gives-ok-to-spacex-for-second-starship-launch

Published November 16, 2023 at 9:00 AM CST

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has approved SpaceX’s next Starship launch, just hours after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) concluded its assessment of the rocket’s launch infrastructure.

The FAA gave the company a launch license Wednesday afternoon, saying Starship and its new launch infrastructure would have “no significant environmental changes” for its second launch.

FWS stated that SpaceX’s water deluge system, meant to suppress the flames and sound from the rocket’s 33 engines, would produce the same amount of water from an average rainfall. The agency does not expect the water to change the mud flats’ salinity or affect shorebird habitat.

*emphasis mine.

Flight 2 was on November 18th, 2 days after they get approval for the deluge system.

Edit: further, spacex has replied to this and said the following (among other things as well)

https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1823080774012481862

SpaceX worked with the Texas Commission of Environmental Quality (TCEQ) throughout the build and test of the water deluge system at Starbase to identify a permit approach. TCEQ personnel were onsite at Starbase to observe the initial tests of the system in July 2023, and TCEQ’s website shows that SpaceX is covered by the Texas Multi-Sector General Permit.

We only use potable (drinking) water in the system’s operation. At no time during the operation of the deluge system is the potable water used in an industrial process, nor is the water exposed to industrial processes before or during operation of the system.

We send samples of the soil, air, and water around the pad to an independent, accredited laboratory after every use of the deluge system, which have consistently shown negligible traces of any contaminants. Importantly, while CNBC's story claims there are “very large exceedances of the mercury” as part of the wastewater discharged at the site, all samples to-date have in fact shown either no detectable levels of mercury whatsoever or found in very few cases levels significantly below the limit the EPA maintains for drinking water.

Heavy metals are some of the worst things to dump into the environment, and I'm curious to see where the mercury is coming from, why they're using it, and how they're going to address it, but it really feels like you're blowing up a relatively small issue into a massive one.

They had one launch where they blew up the launch pad accidentally, so they added a deluge system to cope. Now there's mercury toxicity downstream of the site, but it's not clear it has anything to do with the deluge system.

The Elon hate is one thing, and I believe much of the hate for SpaceX is because of how he handles himself and his companies.

That absolutely is where most of it comes from. Articles that hate on Elon get clicks, so for every actual thoughtful nuanced critique of SpaceX, there's two dozen click bait articles written by glorified bloggers that will look for any flaw because critiques of Musk's space company drives traffic.

But the general assurance has largely been that SpaceX has a team of handlers to keep him from screwing things up, and it sounds more like Boeing over there every day.

Boeing is failing to do what they used to do 50 years ago. SpaceX is successfully doing things that no one has ever done. Yes the wreckless rule breaking is trademark Elon, but let's not be hyperbolic.