Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition: SpaceX's Starship vs. the environment, with Eric Roesch

Episode Date: May 5, 2023

Prior to Starship's inaugural launch, environmental policy expert Eric Roesch was outspoken about the possibility of catastrophe. As the rocket launched, it kicked up massive clouds of dust and decimated its launchpad, scattering large chunks of concrete into delicate marine and coastal sanctuaries nearby. Eric blames both SpaceX and its regulatory body, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), for allowing the company to skirt responsibility in its environmental reporting and mitigating its impact on its surrounding wilderness. He joins the show to discuss the proper role of environmental regulations, why he believes the FAA was irresponsible in approving SpaceX's launch licenses, and how you can simultaneously protect the environment and local wildlife while still pursuing an ambitious path to space. Discover more at: https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/space-policy-edition-spacexs-starship-vs-the-environment-with-eric-roesch See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome, everyone, to our monthly Space Policy edition of Planetary Radio. I'm Sarah Al-Ahmet, the host of Planetary Radio for the Planetary Society, and I'm joined today by Casey Dreyer, our Chief of Space Policy. Hey, Sarah. Happy to be back. It has been a ridiculous month between our Digital Day of Action, our campaign to try to save Veritas, everything that went down with SpaceX's Starship, which you're going to get into today,

and everything that's going on in Washington, D.C. with budget negotiations and the debt ceiling. I'm sure it has been a ridiculous month for you. How are you doing? Good. It's exciting times. Let me tease the interview first, because that's the big thing we want to talk about today, which is with Eric Roche, who runs the substack called ESG Hound. He's an environmental regulations expert and background in science and has been a noted critic of SpaceX's environmental regulatory filings and FAA's approval of Starship's launch in this very kind of delicate eco habitat around Boca Chica in Texas. saw with Starship that it was a surprisingly, let's say, energetic event launching from that pad without a flame trench or a water suppression system. And it looked pretty bad, I think, in terms of the destruction and also the debris that it flew everywhere. And so, Eric, I wanted to have

talk about, because of this real fascinating to me intersection of space with environmental policy and environmental regulations and when those two sometimes combust or are at tension the awareness and the problems that this could pose for our efforts to get into space in the long term by potentially alienating parts of the public or creating environmental tensions or as what happened they are getting now sued by a consortium of environmental groups to ground the spacecraft. There are real consequences here if you don't follow the letter of the law very well. And Eric walks us through that. We talk about environmental policy and we talk about the tension between maintaining

environmental sanctity and progress, which is, I think, an unresolved tension in our society. Environmental policy and how it relates to space exploration in general has always been a fascinating subject. I've had some really fascinating conversations with people, particularly around commercial space and Starship, what fuels they use, how they impact their local areas. It's a huge subject, and I'm really glad that you're going to be covering it. Yeah. And you know, it really, tell me if this resonates with you. I felt this moment after the Starship launch was resonant to me of the time right after Jeff Bezos launched into space. Yes. Where it was a period where the space news broke through to the broader public.

the space news broke through to the broader public. And as a space fan and advocate, I was almost shocked like, oh, there are people who are not on board with this, or they see this and they don't get the fact that this is really, don't you know, this is truly exciting and revolutionary and this could really transform how we go into the solar system. But instead, they see debris flying into protected sanctuaries, they system. But instead they see, you know, debris flying into protected sanctuaries, they see explosions and they see failure. And obviously then Musk himself does not necessarily help in this polarized environment in which we live in. That's a problem we need to start dealing with. All of our general societal goodwill for space exploration has come from an era of public entities that have public commitments and public oversight. We are now in an era of mixed public

and private, and private individuals, as I've talked about before, bring with them a whole loaded bag of idiosyncrasies and personalities and associations that can create conflict and tension with this overall positive public view of space and space succeeds when broadly people like it it makes it a lot easier to do and if we start to polarize i mean that's to me the worst possible thing that can happen to spaceflight is it becomes polarized, not even politically, but among certain types of people online or groups or camps or progress versus environmentalists. I mean, this is ultimately, as you know, a very good thing going into space. But we need to remember that there's a lot of people who remain unconvinced, understand their critiques, and then really think about that, about how we

both operate by going into space and also adhere to and address concerns that are legitimate here on Earth. Now is also the perfect time to be having these discussions because we're just at the beginning of this age of commercial space. And we've given a lot of thought to how nations operate in space, but I'm really glad that we're having these conversations before entities the moon and killing cute shorebirds you're not getting a lot of support from that they're going to choose the the cute animals and i think it's a savvy of space entities and organizations not to to do that and again this is why i thought it was a great conversation it's a bit more critical than i think most people uh particularly space fans, hear about SpaceX and its successes. And I think that's really important. And so I look

forward to hearing the feedback from our members and listeners about the upcoming interview we'll have. Absolutely. And if any of our members want to really interact with us in this space, Casey has been doing a wonderful job of sharing all of our space policy stuff in our member community app, which you can find online. If you want to check it out, you can look for it at community.planetary.org. We've been having a great time in there. And another thing that we did in there recently, this month we had our first digital Day of Action. A little different from what we've done in the past with our Day of Actions, but I had a great time in there. And we recapped what went down with our day of action in a previous episode of Planetary Radio

that aired on April 26th, if anybody wants to listen to it. That was a great time. It was, and it was new this year. So we're gonna always do two big events now annually at the Planetary Society. One is gonna be our in-person Congressional Visits Day, our day of action. And we are back now in person post-COVID. And you can register online if you want to join us in Washington, D.C., September 17th and 18th this year at planetary.org slash dayofaction.

And to lead up to that now, we are always going to pair it with a digital Day of Action, something you can do from home if you don't have the ability or finances to travel. We held what we call a prep rally online where we talk about how to effectively advocate. We hosted special guests from the Veritas mission to Venus talking about this incredible potential there. We had a number of ways that people could write letters to Congress, share important space advocacy messages on social media. We had a great turnout on our community in this event, and we hope to build this and continue this every year, pairing it with our in-person day of action. We always have a digital component to it. So everyone everywhere can participate and become a space advocate and get better at

it. We learn by doing. And thank you to everyone that participated in that and to all of our members that helped support these events. Honestly, we can't do this show or actually host these advocacy events without you. So if you're already a member, thank you. But if you'd like to join our organization and help us push forward a thoughtful and beautiful future for humanity in space. Now's a good time to join the Planetary Society. You can check us out at planetary.org slash join. All right. Well, I'm really excited to listen to this conversation. Oh, and I'll preview this by just saying we start going into a lot of acronyms,

which I'm sorry about. I try to keep up with them, but just a couple of acronyms nipa that's the national environmental policy act it is the key piece of legislation passed in 1970 that mandates certain types of environmental disclosure about activities through you know big projects development and that is really what's coming into play and what eric is critiquing spacex here a lot so that's nipa And that is really what's coming into play and what Eric is critiquing SpaceX here a lot. So that's NEPA. And then we have a lot of discussion about environmental regulations and gas terminals. He calls them LNGs.

It's liquefied natural gas. That's just ways of transporting methane that Starship uses to launch with. I think those are the two key ones, but I think you'll get the gist of it. And again, it's a very fascinating discussion. So yeah, here's me and Eric talking about Starship and environmental policy. Eric, thank you for joining me on the Space Policy Edition today. Thanks for having me, Casey. So this is an area that I have to confess I do not know as much about as you do, which is why I'm happy to have you on. And we're really good at environmental policy, environmental regulations, things that are, in a sense, not really directly yet related with what I consider or think about mostly with spaceflight. But as we saw with the Starship launch starting to intersect pretty significantly in that area.

So for our listeners, before we really get into this, what's your background in environmental policy, you know, and how did you get into this area, you know, that helps establish kind of where you're coming from in this discussion? Right. I'm kind of a scientist by background in terms of like a bench scientist, right? So I got my chemistry degree, actually double degree in chemistry and molecular biology from the University of Colorado. In 2006, through a series of happenstance events, I ended up being a regulatory guy at a biosafety level three laboratory that actually dealt with tuberculosis and related infections. And so I took over a bunch of waste compliance, some environmental stuff, a lot of things such as calibrating hood equipment. So biosafety level three, again, I know there's a lot of chat about it in the COVID era, but

basically I decided that I wanted to go a little bit more macro than the bench level background I had. And so I went back and got my master's degree from Colorado School of Mines, graduated in, and got my master's degree from Colorado School of Mines. Graduated in, say, 2012. But during that time, I actually switched and I was a regulator with the state of Colorado. I actually specialized in oil and gas and general industry air pollution. So in other words, state and federal air pollution. And then I kind of ended up in industry a couple of years later. I ended up working in oil and gas in both auditing and kind of moved into a little bit of process safety. And I think a lot of aerospace people are much more familiar with that concept. The types of flight authorizations that go in where you look at failure modes and preventing

big accidents, I started doing a lot more of that with things like oil refineries and gas plants. And I moved down to the Houston area in 2015, where I live now. And I've basically worked for very large chemical and oil and gas companies, in particular in pipelining, refining, gas plants, that kind of stuff. And so when you work in that industry, you deal with

a backbone industry, but that gets a lot of well-deserved, I think, attention from the public due to its importance, its ubiquitousness, and then also the obvious harms that it can cause. And so you get involved with a lot of community meetings, community outreaches. You end up doing a lot of things that are PR type stuff where you're kind of placating the community that know this gas pipeline we're going to build under you probably won't explode, but you have to kind of prepare people for that kind of stuff. And so from a policy standpoint, you work for these large infrastructure companies that have been around forever and you kind of learn how to choose your words and you don't really get to talk about stuff a couple years ago started i

actually want to say like five years ago i started on the sly kind of as a i don't want to say i'm a tree hugger at heart but i'm very conscientious about the environment and i started i started doing anonymous comments to FERC proposals for things like LNG terminals, some refining projects along the coast, because I grew up in Colorado, but I have been here since 2015. I've really just fallen in love with the Texas coast. And so I started doing these types of outreach. And I basically ended up talking on a publication. I started kind of on a lark to talk about policy stuff. I ended up talking about SpaceX kind of for a roundabout reason, which is that in their initial environmental proposal

that was modified at one point, they had suggested building a utility-sized power plant, a LNG liquefier, and a gas refining unit in the middle of this very small and sensitive area. And so I kind of quickly got into it. And I was kind of the only person writing about policy and got lots of interest in the SpaceX project in Boca Chica. And I just kept writing. project in Boca Chica, and I just kept writing. Yeah, and I'll plug your substack ESG Hound, which the reason I'm talking to you now is that a few weeks ago, you published a piece called SpaceX's Texas rocket is going to cause a lot more damage than anyone thinks. And congratulations, you were proven. Your analysis was proven true, I suppose. You have a lot of other posts going back years looking at this aspect of LNG, liquefied natural gas, right? That's correct, yes.

Methane and all the other kind of infrastructure requirements that SpaceX is proposing to build in its site to service Starship. So you've been following this for a few years. So your background really is, you have a scientific background and then a background in the regulatory process. Right. This is an area, again, I think that's really fascinating because Starship launches for the first time a few weeks ago. And it became one of those fascinating moments for me. Obviously, I'm a big space nerd and a space fan.

And what I experience my day-to-day life and maybe a lot of listeners to this show is that space is like, great. It's the greatest thing. We're really excited about it. And the people we talk to are excited about it. It tends to be received well when you talk to other people about it. But sometimes when it hits a certain awareness in the public sphere, and I was thinking about this as it related to when Jeff Bezos went into space the first time, that suddenly there's this whole part of the society that isn't so excited about what's happening in space. And the Starship launch hit something that reminded me of that moment where the explosion itself, the debate whether it was a success or a failure and wanting it to be kind of one or the other. But then also the environmental impact of the launch itself. debate whether it was a success or a failure and wanting it to be kind of one or the other, but then also the environmental impact of the launch itself. And so you had called this out in advance, but to most observers, it seemed to be a surprise. And you saw pieces in the Washington Post and the New York Times and other major outlets suddenly talking about

the fact that Starship is launching in this small, in Boca Chica, which is surrounded by protected federal lands. Seeing this critique and suddenly realizing this is something we tend to take for granted that space is kind of cool and people are for this. But as we start intersecting more on these broader issues, I feel it's really important to understand the problems here that's starting to interface. And so I'd like to hear a little bit about what is Boca Chica? What makes it unique from a protected standpoint? And why is this something that we should, I mean, just as an area, why this triggers your awareness of worth caring about from

an environmental perspective? I guess I want to start off by saying that the environmental disciplines are really wide ranging. And so I have to be careful when I'm talking about endangered habitat, because stuff like rangeland management, endangered species is not my specialty. So I do want to be careful about that. But generally speaking, it's, you know, on a very basic level, it is home to both state and federally owned lands that are there for a very specific reason. And that is that they serve as a refuge to various endangered and protected species, including several shorebirds, sea tortoise as well. So kind of on that really basic level, I think that's where a lot of the primary concern stems from is that we have this really unique habitat.

It's low tidal flats. There's essentially like an offshore barrier that prevents large waves from crashing up and actually protects from hurricanes quite well as well. And the fact that it exists at the base of the Rio Grande River, it just has some really unique physical and geological characteristics that make it a stopping point where a lot of wintering birds will spend half the year before they go up to the Great Plains. From what we're talking about, regulatory, just straight up protection. I mean, it's land that's owned by government agencies that exist, you know, primarily to maintain the lands as they are. There's also been some controversy because of, you know, beach access has been a big talking point. And that is more of a local issue, although it does come into play with how they do permitting. But there's a community there that's used that beach for some time and they feel, many of them feel locked out. And so that's kind of the other portion of it too. Yeah, that's an interesting

point you make, I think, in terms of a lot of the discussion I've seen on this has just kind of reverts into a very polarizing perspective. But at the end of the day, if federal and state protected lands, whether or not you politically align with or philosophically agree with what the environmental responsibility should be, they do have existing environmental responsibility to those lands at the end of the day, like by current law, right? Like I think a lot of the discussion can even go to like, well, who cares about the birds in these places? Who cares about X? But it's almost besides the point because they're federal protected lands. And so as it stands now, you're supposed to protect them. Right. And that's exactly right.

And that's why it's so funny because people are like, well, you predict this would happen. I'm like, I didn't get it 100% right. I tried to focus on the process because it's like we have a legal process. I'm a policy wonk. I'm a policy wonk. I'm a rules wonk. I read the Federal Register for fun. I'm one of those people. Yes, yes.

So kind of on that basis, it's like, yeah, well, we have a rule of laws, and it either applies to everyone or it may as well not exist. It's kind of my framework. But I think there's a really interesting point there, because I know you and I talked about it in advance when we were preparing for this. I find the Kennedy Space Center comparison just really apt because it was built in a different time, right? And so people say, well, you couldn't do that now. And I think that's a fair point. I think a lot of this frustration comes from people saying, we don't build these cool things anymore.

And we've got this new era of space in front of us where we can do cool things. And we're stuck in our ways. And we're not going to do any big projects anymore. I think that's actually a really fair point. I think that's where a lot of the frustration comes from. Environmental regulations themselves have evolved pretty significantly since the 60s. And the key thing here is NEPA, which is an acronym that is thrown around a lot. Before we kind of get into that, what does NEPA mean?

And it came from the 1970s. Is that correct? The laws passed in the 1970s? It was pre-Clean Air Act. So I believe it was, I think actually, I think you're right. It was either 1969 or 1970. So it was actually the bedrock environmental law, the initial one. It was basically, we had this massive post-World War II expansion of our economy, which involved a lot of highway building, building a lot of

industry. Basically, we built a lot of rail as well. We cut highways through the middle of cities. And I think in conjunction, people will point out Rachel Carson's seminal book, Silent Spring, which it's not perfect, but it gives you a good sign of the times where people were suddenly paying attention to these issues. And what NEPA was intended to do is it said, okay, if we're going to do a big government-sponsored project, at the very least, we should go through and tell people what the impacts of it will be. And so NEPA exists primarily as a disclosure law. And it was actually intended to be not super overbearing, which is what, in fairness, has become. It's

become a lot of paperwork. I think some of it's really important, and some of it's probably not the best use of resources, if we're speaking purely objectively. But it existed to say, and I used an example the other day, if I want to go to the Everglades, and for whatever reason, I want to be able to dig a pit, throw a bunch of tires in there, light them on fire, and just have that burn 24-7, 365. I say that example not because that's something we would do, but NEPA doesn't actually prohibit you from doing any activity as long as the impacts are disclosed. And so it became a way for people to stop projects because of the disclosure, because of the requirements. And that's been kind of a long process. I think some of it's been very good. I'm not going to just

defend everything about it, but it puts the burden on government agencies that if they're going to go in and do a big project that can change a community, that at the very least, they have to disclose the rules. And so I guess before we talk about the intricacies of NEPA to the extent you want to, I think it's really fair to put that in comparison with the later environmental laws, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act in particular, because I always use the example of Houston where I live now. In 1985, the Houston metro area was something like 2.5 million people. Currently, it is over seven million people.

So you think about all those extra cars on the road. In 1985, the refining capacity since then to today, and this is just crude oil processing in the greater Houston area, has something like doubled on a volume basis. has something like doubled on a volume basis. Natural gas processing and storage and transportation has gone up like 10 or 20 fold, similar to terminaling of those large storage tanks. And so the reason I bring that up is that in the face of all those increases in what we call vault organic carbons, which is a precursor to ground level ozone and what we consider as smog, which is a precursor to ground level ozone and what we consider as smog. In light of all those factors that you would think that pollution would be out of control, ambient air quality here in Houston is better than it's been in decades. And so you talk to people who were here in the 1980s, you would rarely ever see a blue sky. And we see them all the time. It's not perfect and it needs

to get better. And there's other pollutants to be worried about. But kind of on a real basic level, and in particular, the Clean Water Act, you cannot deny that they've been successful in achieving what they set out to do. Those laws are what people think of, and they tend to be based more on how many pounds of emissions are you putting out? How many particles of this type of discharge are you putting in the water? And so it's easier to track. Whereas a lot of these NEPA rules, and in particular, things like endangered species, this type of discharge are you putting in the water? And so it's easier to track. Whereas a lot of these NEPA rules and in particular things like endangered species, you have to

extrapolate into the future. You're looking at what is the wildlife habitat going to look at 30 years from now? And we may not know that the results aren't necessarily as tangible. And that's why they bring this really kind of emotional component that, you know, works well on people who support and oppose projects. So kind of going from there, back to NEPA, you know, NEPA was really kind of our first attempt as a nation to be like, how do we get some of this stuff under control so we don't just ruin our entire planet and in our communities? Well, I mean, what's so interesting to me just from a policy perspective is that this is in a sense the public imposing friction on purpose, like strategic friction in order to direct the outcome of certain types of activities of industry.

And clearly industry just didn't self-regulate itself into environmental controls, right? And it's interesting to see this story kind of replay here and and i'm wondering it's like these environmental laws were placed on industries that were extant and pretty well established at the time and when you are talking about something like spacex with starship it's it very rapid, it's very experimental, it's in a sense, it's much smaller of an impact than the oil industry or the auto industry. Is it appropriate to apply these types of high friction regulatory systems to, in a sense, an experimental developmental project? Or will that just unnecessarily, in a sense, slow it down

and then we kind of get no, in a sense, transformational launch access to space? Are those fundamentally incompatible, do you think? Or where's the appropriate kind of balance here? Because I think that's, in a sense, what people are arguing about. Right. And I think, okay, let's actually look specifically at the project in Boca Chica, Right. So let's look at it from just talking about the facts. And I've got kind of most the dates in my head. And I apologize in advance if I get a year or month off or something like that. But but basically, we'll asterisk those. And you can you've written about this extensively and people can check your written work for those exact dates. So in, you know, I want to say like 2013-ish, SpaceX proposed to build a small launch site. They had considered a few other sites and they settled upon Boca Chica, right?

And so they did some community outreach. They hired some PR firms. They went and gave presentations. They basically just started a NEPA process from there. And they actually got an initial environmental impact statement, I think was issued in 2015. Now for that project, right? So let's talk about the launch site they have. They own about 20 acres. I'm not talking about the production area. I'm talking about just the launch area. They own about 20 acres, only about, i want to say like only like 12 or 13 of it is currently developed and this

initial project was had nothing to do with i think they called it the bfr or whatever at this time when they were first talking about it in i want to say 2015 or 2016 and so this launch site was intended for a handful of Falcon 9 launches per year. That was the original intent of the site. And there were people complaining back then. But, you know, you can say, okay, well, you know, for a rocket that especially by the time, I think they had that one mishap, I want to say in like 2016 in Kennedy Space Center. The pad explosion. Yeah, the pad explosion, correct.

Kennedy Space Center. The pad explosion. Yeah, the pad explosion, correct. But I think besides that, I mean, and especially since then, you want to talk about... I get a lot of flack as being like a SpaceX hider, but if you want to talk about an impressive program, the Falcon 9 is rock solid. They can turn them around really quick.

They can reuse them. They rarely have to scrub or cancel flights if it's not for an outside factor. I mean, it's an incredibly good platform. And so I guess kind of looking at that, the intent was to do these one-off launches of a fully developed rocket. And at that point, when they were kind of toying around with the idea of BFR, so we look at this, I want to say it's like 2016, you know, that kind of era, right? Is that about right when they were kind of

talking about that initially? Yeah. Right. My argument is that, right? So at that point, that's your decision point for like, where are we going to do these things? And what happened instead is over the course of the year, of the next several years, you know, the next, you know,

four or five years as they were developing this program, they never made long-term site plans. They kind of did it of the next several years in the next four or five years as they were developing this program, they never made long term site plans. They kind of did it on the fly. And so as they were starting to test some of the early tank and starship prototypes, they were going back to the FAA and say, hey, can you do a written reevaluation saying it won't, you know, the impacts won't be that much more. They kind of ratcheted up from there and they didn't propose to re-look at this, reopen this NEPA. It was actually FAA that was like, hey, we have to do this or we're going to get in big trouble. But at that point, it was already like 2020. And so I get what people say with that argument, but I would also say, well, you had years to plan this. And was Boca

Chica the best site for it at the time? Is there more land you could have, you could have bought? Could you have done offsets with, with department of interior and, and, and, you know, converted another portion of the Texas shoreline into, into a different refuge that would, you know, kind of offset these impacts. I mean, is, I guess what I'm saying is like, you know, we talk about iterating fast and I get it, but you know, the question was, is really, they actually did have plenty of time to go through and do these processes the right way. And that includes picking out maybe a different site, maybe working with Kennedy Space Center to develop something else. Maybe if they wanted to keep it there to really engage the community and say, how do we offset this? And it feels to me like they wanted to say,

well, we want to do this now. And then they just wanted the public and the regulators go along with it. And they've been pretty successful with it. But, you know, you ruffle enough feathers along the way and people are going to be mad and they're going to point out everything you do wrong. And so I think and you can correct me or I know one of the critiques, right, when people say, you know, well, they should just be launching from Kennedy Space Center, is that there's too much traffic there. There's not enough stuff. And I think to give credit to that point when we're talking about policies, yeah, we should have developed another spaceport. Absolutely, we should have. But is the right way to do it to have a private company come in, buy 20 acres and say, well, deal with the consequences as we light off?

I don't think so. But I mean, that's basically what FAA has allowed, in my view. So what I'm hearing from you is basically, in 2014-2015, SpaceX got, I think you called it a draft or a provisional environmental impact assessment? No, they got a finalized EIS. The EA process that they ended up going through with is actually a newer development. The NEPA was only really set up to do projects with significant impacts. You had to do this full EIS. Yeah, and okay, I saw there's something called a draft programmatic environmental assessment.

Is that related? I started getting lost into which regulations mean. These are all part of NEPA. That's right. Yeah. So what we saw is, well, programmatics, another thing that involves more than just one site, but I don't want to go in that too much because that's, I like to get wonky, but I don't want to get too wonky here. You know, the EIS, you know, when I talk about your tire fire in a pit in the middle of the Everglades, that is for something that has a significant environmental impact and above. And once the rules, and I don't know the exact timing here, but basically once activist groups figured out that they could, I don't want to say hijack the law because it kind of was what it was intended for. because it kind of was what it was intended for.

Once they realized they could go through and say, hey, you didn't consider this, you didn't consider that when you're doing this full EIS, the government started to realize that we had these projects that were maybe a little bit smaller that could still use a nice once-over, but maybe didn't require the full enchilada. And that is your EA. And that's your environmental assessment,

which is basically just a mini version of an EIS where the impacts would be below what we call a significant level. That's what SpaceX proposed, along with FAA. They proposed, in order to take this site from the small launch pad it is to a large launch facility with development tests, all the different things, landings, all the stuff that they wanted to do. We're going to use this EA process instead of the EIS process. And again, I would probably argue, right, if you went through the full EIS, again, going back to our tire fire, and I don't want to say that this is exactly a tire fire, I may disagree with it being placed there, but from a NEPA standpoint, they didn't do the large project. And so they essentially, by kind of doing this process that takes less time, that has less requirements, they made it so that they actually gave themselves, I don't want to say like permit requirements, they gave themselves regulatory thresholds where they, if they say that an impact is going to be below a significant level, they better do it or they will have some legal problems in the future.

I see. So if I can restate this to make sure I understand. So basically what SpaceX said, they kind of went this easier route years ago and then have gone back and modified it without having to redo this kind of full heavy-handed environmental impact assessment. Actually, no, the original 2015 was an EIS. was the okay what they did is they did what they did what they called our written re-evaluations i guess i want to be careful here but they did written re-evaluations because the original eis did not have exploding tiny little prototype starships included in it so the faa had to go through and say, here's why it's acceptable. You keep adding more and more of those.

And at some point you've ratcheted from what the site was into something different and you'd have to start a brand new process over. And so that's where we hit in that 2020 to 21 period. That's when they hit that process where they were re-permitting the site as a Starship test development and launch facility as compared to what it was before, which was a Falcon 9 occasional launch facility. This is the period that you really reserve for your harshest critique. Right.

Is that correct? This period where suddenly the fundamental need and use of this site changes from what it was. And not just for SpaceX in terms of what they're representing. And I think if I understand you correctly, Nipah just requires full disclosure about here's this massive level, like we have to analyze at a broad level the full impact of what we're going to do to an existing space. And your claim is that SpaceX has not been doing that, that they've been underselling themselves or diminishing what they've been doing in order to avoid the harsher

or longer term re-evaluations. But they've also been getting approval from the FAA, which is what controls the ability of SpaceX to launch. And I think I have a quote from you here that you'd said that the SpaceX FAA and the FAA's hired contractors who help evaluate these applications appear to have been actively complicit in greenwashing and minimizing the impacts from a very public operation run by the richest and arguably most famous man in the world is that is that kind of this and so what's the failings in your perspective of the faa in this situation yeah and actually it's funny because because you know your question that you just asked was like well spacex did this and and i want to be clear that i have plenty of critiques

about the culture of spacex which i think is probably the reason that they move so fast as well. So I understand the upsides there. A little bit of that kind of tech, you know, move fast and break things ethos. But really, at the end of the day, the onus for this does come down to the FAA. This is on the FAA. They are the sponsors of the program. They are required to certify it. They can do stuff in every single project you see.

I bring up FERC and LNG terminals. They obviously work with the company that's developing it. But that NEPA submittal, I can sit there and say, SpaceX did this, that and the other. But if we're talking about from a perfectly rational business perspective, if the agency is going to let you get away with it, you may as well. So I would say at the end of the day, my critique is 75 percent on FAA for this. It's kind of this really blasé attitude. And I had this realization, I'm going to bring up Kennedy Space Center again,

is that if you actually look at their requirements under NEPA, my suspicion is that there's probably some, I want to say just they've gotten complacent because NASA themselves, who's a very, very cautious agency, and that goes through to all their departments, they do almost all the work that goes into the NEPA documents, which then goes into the launch licenses that are granted out of Kennedy Space Center. partner that's doing most of these with you that is conservative, almost to a fault, that it's easy to get locked into being like, well, we just trust our launch partners because we don't have the expertise to do it. I think that may be a good explanation for why this particular project is different than most of the other NEPA stuff FAA does in commercial space. That they've gotten too credulous, in a sense, based on their past experience with a well-intentioned partner.

What are some examples? Where do you think specifically the FAA failed in their approval process that really rise to the top for you of things that shouldn't have happened? Well, I've told this to people that get really angry at what I write. Well, I've told this to people that get really angry at what I write. I was like, you should have hoped that they didn't try to put some of that natural gas infrastructure in because that's what got me riled up. And I think at the end of the day, they pulled all that stuff, which was good. I was very pleased to see that. And I've pointed this out before.

If you were to build a – one of the structures that they said they were going to build was a 250 megawatt power plant right and if you were to build a standalone in the middle of nowhere 250 megawatt combined cycle gas turbine power plant on federal land with federal funding you would have to do a separate eis that the whole the whole enchilada of nipa just for that standalone power plant and that's not like a to anyone. That has a significant impact. And so for me, I'm like, first of all, you've got all this rocket. You've got this wildlife. You've got this community concern about beach closers. You've got all this other stuff. And then on top of it, you're like, oh yeah, PS, we're going to throw in three separate processing units that would arguably merit their own extensive environmental reviews if done in conjunction with a federal facility. you know, three separate processing units that would arguably merit their own extensive

environmental reviews if done in conjunction with a federal facility. So that's kind of where, as a framework, that's what really just like set me off. Because I'm like, I have no idea how someone with that agency and then the consultants they hired, how you could just sit there and say, well, this is an okay way to use this smaller EA process. I'm still just kind of baffled that that even happened. But at this point, it's no longer an issue. Is that correct? They've moved away from it? Yes, correct. You could argue those were never going to happen or whatever, but I mean, they did put them in the documents. That portion of it has moved away. And so I guess the reason I bring those up is because that's why I got interested from my background. And I think it set the tone for some of the other stuff you saw that I've highlighted.

I mean, we saw the launch and it basically blew apart the launch pad area and threw debris everywhere. It looks like small fires were started and a big dust cloud and just kind of more destruction than anyone anticipated, so is the claim. And that really seems to be raising this kind of awareness of this kind of impact aspect. What would actually need to be done? I mean, from a regulatory standpoint, is it too late? I know that FAA is doing a mishap investigation, but that's because a rocket blew up. What is the proper responsibility, do you think? Or is Boca Chica incompatible with the type of

exploratory rocketry that SpaceX wants to do from a regular environmental regulatory perspective. I do. I really honestly do believe it's the latter. That being said, you know, I, you have to calibrate the fact that, for example, in NEPA, there are specific provisions where if we were in the middle of a war, the, if enough of the secretaries under the executive office, they could say, we're going to just completely forego NEPA. That process does exist. I don't know if it's ever been deployed before. I don't believe it has.

But that process exists. So that kind of gets into the political will. That's always a factor when you're talking about development and permitting. Those things certainly play in. But I think kind of from a basic standpoint, I mean, this is the example I gave, is that the orbital launch pad in Boca Chica, their full property is something like 20 acres. If you go to 39A at Kennedy Space Center, one of the large rocket launch pads, it's something like 175 acres, right? So you're talking about a, you know, eight folders or so increase in area. And so kind of just on that really like basic level, if you have land around there that is not owned by them, that is also protected habitat, I just, I guess I don't,

I don't see how it works fundamentally long-term. And to be be frank with you it's kind of struck me that i think spacex realizes this as well um because they have hedged a lot more about like we're going to move operations here i know they've been doing a bunch of stuff at kennedy space center so i think the initial vision that was kind of pitched that this would be like the starport to the stars and and we'd have this city here and whatever. I think, you know, you can see over the last two years, those have been ratcheted back. And I think it's some of it is that understanding that we'll be lucky to be able to launch four or five times a year here. And that would be a win.

You know, they have not outright said that, but that's kind of been my take reading between the lines when you see what they say. We'll be right back with the rest of Casey's interview with Eric Roche right after this break. Hi, y'all. LeVar Burton here. Through my roles on Star Trek and Reading Rainbow, I have seen generations of curious minds inspired by the strange new worlds explored in books and on television. I know how important it is to encourage that curiosity in a young explorer's life. That's why I'm excited to share with you a new program from my friends at the Planetary Society. It's called the Planetary Academy, and anyone can join. Designed for ages 5 through 9 by Bill Nye and the curriculum experts at the Planetary

Society, the Planetary Academy is a special membership subscription for kids and families who love space. Members get quarterly mail packages that take them on learning adventures through the many worlds of our solar system and beyond. Each package includes images and factoids, hands-on activities, experiments and games, and special surprises. A lifelong passion for space, science, and discovery starts when we're young. Give the gift of the cosmos to the explorer in your life. A lot seems to hinge on the interpretation of the word significant to me when I've been reading through this in terms of significant impact and SpaceX having to operate below this threshold of significant impact to the environment, or even find a way to mitigate significant impact. From, again, your past and working this in the regulatory perspective,

how do people interpret, how do you define significance for something so broad as the environment? And to say, do you accept the 100 birds killed a year, 1,000, or 10, or zero? What helps set those levels of performance? Well, there's 40, 50 years of case law that talks about some of these very specific issues. There is a advisory board that basically writes rules, I want to say. They more give guidance documents, and that's the CEQ, the Council on Environmental Quality. That's part of the executive branch. So the courts will look at those. They'll look at previous case law they'll also look at and the faa has their own guidebook for what they

consider significant so what they'll say is if if the air pollution is above this amount per year that that's a significant factor and some of them are much squishier and have interpretation but the agencies have they've figured out ways to kind of define them so that they don't, you don't want to get sued for every single NEPA project you put out. And so part of the, part of the issue here is that significance level, but on a more basic level, I think the big thing is, is that is the dust cloud we saw the actual spread of debris was not described really at all in the documents they did produce, even for an incident where the rocket itself blew up on the pad. And so I think if we're

talking about like illustration of, you know, kind of where the problem is, is again, NEPA says that you have to just describe the impacts. And especially if you're using this smaller approval, if we have evidence in hand that you've not foreseen a consequence that many people would say is kind of obvious, then that kind of itself demonstrates that there was a problem with the process. Yeah. Again, some of those, like the Washington Post had a great piece that showed the video of as the rocket was taking off, all these debris splashing into the ocean miles away. And it just was kind of a shock.

You know, it's just when you have that small of a footprint and let in terms of the actual land that they owns and the rocket is launching, quote unquote, successful. Right. It didn't explode until far out,'t explode until four minutes into the flight. What would a full explosion look like of something that large? I want to quote something here and kind of see your response to it. This is from someone called Elon Musk. And he was saying just the other day that the debris is basically just sand and rock and it's not toxic at all or anything.

He said, it's just like a sandstorm, essentially. Basically a human-made sandstorm. essentially, basically a human made sandstorm. We don't want to do that again. But he was, in a sense, downplaying that. Does that fly in terms of environmental? Is that is that is that an accurate way to describe this from the sense of the Clean Air Act or the NEPA review, or does this again come down to what significant means? Is it just rock and sand?

Is that accurate? Or is there real issues here to consider from a broader community health and environmental perspective? I think Musk's true genius is how he deploys language. And I think this is a perfect example of that, right? Because he chooses non-toxic. And I saw a bunch of people online, especially, they're like, oh, there's rocket fuel everywhere or whatever, because people have this idea that it's, you know, hydrazine or it's kerosene or whatever. And like, I think I think he mentioned specifically the plume and like, yes, the definitionally by hazard laws and how we think about toxicity. Yeah. Methane and oxygen combusted together is not that's not a toxic chemical. It's not biopersistent. It doesn't

bioaccumulate. It's not immediately carcinogenic. If you get stuck in the middle of a methane cloud, could you run out of oxygen and die? Yes. But that's not what we think of as toxic. And so there's some truth there to it. And I think that's kind of the genius portion of it. But the environmental impact, it isn't just whether something's toxic. It is whether you've altered an environment to an extent that it's causes, you know, more damage than, than either people would expect or is allowed. And so I think from just that standpoint alone, I think the thing that surprised me the most was that dust cloud coming in for me, like I, my background, I wrote my master's thesis

on like plume modeling like i love talking about like kind of air events and all this stuff and i was like well this is like you know a problem with anipa but i didn't think people would be kind of as viscerally struck by it as they were and this includes you know people i know who talk to locals because i think it was just that visual reminder that like this is something there that could cause a lot of problems. And so kind of going back to that, I think we could talk about debris or sand. We don't know what the actual chemical composition of different things that were shredded by 2400 degree Fahrenheit flame. I would say the characterization of just sand is at the minimum too early to tell. And I think it's pretty

disingenuous and again you know rocks being scattered on these pretty sensitive algal flats that i i just i i don't i don't think that that characterization is fair but but as as always with musk there's some there's some truth in there that i think is worth paying attention to right because when i talked to the New York Times for that first piece about the dust cloud, and for a few other journalists, they're like, what's the toxicity of this dust cloud? I'm not saying they were trying to sensationalize news, but the first thought is like, okay, is this another East Palestine? I said, no, no, hold up. Let's not go down that road because we don't know. And I wouldn't want to make that assumption

because it's patently unfair. Yeah. And East Palestine, that's the train derailment, the chemical train derailment that happened in Ohio. And I wonder, actually, if that was the predicate of why just the visual of the smoke cloud maybe resonated at a more visceral level than maybe it would have without that. That very well could be right. And the history of making environmental change is often really bad things happen, but it's until you get like that visual representation of, of kind of the things that I'm talking about is like,

I think that's what's, what's more powerful. I can write a billion words about how they did a bad job of assessing risk or predicting this, that, and the other, or not following this process. But when you see an image that kind of shows, even if someone doesn't understand the rules, there's kind of this intuitive feeling that doesn't quite look right.

And the kind of historical example that everyone mentions is that, you know, the Cuyahoga River that goes through Cleveland used to just catch on fire all the time. And that was really like those PR pictures were a huge driver for like, okay, we need the Clean Water Act now. And so I think just remembering that those, right, so the powerful images of rockets going off, right, that awe and wonder you feel that like, I get that. I love that. But just know that our emotional response to big things happen visually isn't always going to be on wonder. Sometimes it'll be horror or fear or disgust. And I think that's important to recognize. I think that's a really important point. Thank you for bringing that up. Because this is something

at the core, again, as people know, I am very pro-space. I want space to happen. I want Starship. NASA is going to land on the moon because of Starship. I want this to succeed. My frustration, let's put it this way, with SpaceX and Musk's approach to this was that they were taking, at best, cavalier attitude towards exactly what you just elucidated, right? This idea that if it blows up or something goes wrong, or if they kind of short skirted or shortcutted through a lot of the environmental review that if and when something does go wrong the visual when it

reaches that public consciousness level that of people who aren't big space fans like me they're not just going to innately see that as oh well you know like another rocket it was successful hurrah like let's do another one next week it will look ominous at best. And if there's a sense of, if there's a lack of trust, or if in Musk's case that he's gone and almost purposely cultivated a very polarizing public persona, that there's not going to be this deference to honest actions or mistakes or trying to do better. This is, to me, the core of this, is that by ignoring the environmental regulatory process or, let's say, dismissing it or not taking it seriously, they're running a huge risk in terms of overall public opinion that eventually will filter out

to political response. Yeah, I think that's an amazing point. And what I will illustrate to you is that when an oil company or a gas company wants to make a new pipeline, and this is not just in blue liberal states, this is everywhere. They know that there is a lot of very entrenched opposition, even if they're not opposed to that industry, they'll say, well, I don't want it in my backyard. And what people don't realize, and I think I wrote this, maybe it was on Twitter, I'm not sure, but it was, you know, when you're doing these types of projects, it is 50% knowing the rules, doing the work to get approval, and 50% of it is just PR. Oil companies go and they hire PR firms. They have community halls where they actually listen

to people. And I'm not saying I'm, I am certainly not forgiving the oil industry. I've, I've got, I'm, I'm currently out of that industry and I'm glad to be, but they also say, well, if you've got a problem with something, what can I, it's not necessarily bribing people. It's just like you tell people what we think the worst case scenario is. They've got a phone number that they can call. You know, one of the great branding examples is there's the, the 8-1 811 call before you dig number. That's part of that whole idea that you have to put in the effort and money and time to get buy-off.

And that happens through not just steamrolling your way through saying, I need to develop this rocket tomorrow. I need to have this pipeline tomorrow. And like I said, there's been plenty of PR snafus. But in general, these projects happen because they spend money on PR. They spend time on it. Good or bad, that's what you have to do. And it seems to me that Musk has kind of been able to get away with to an extent, regardless, not getting away with that.

But I think in particular with the current climate and how he's portraying himself to the public, that I think that helps those foibles or things you didn't deal with before catching up to you all at once. That's kind of my perception about it. Yeah. And again, I opened this comparing it to when Jeff Bezos went into space. And to me, at the end of the day, a lot of the, to the extent that there was public anger of people who saw that, is more angry about the fact that there are billionaires or with Jeff Bezos going into space. It's always still acting as a symbol. It's pointing towards something. And I wonder if we're seeing that here and that if there was an aspect of this response, and I question this about too, because I obviously with Elon Musk during COVID-19, I found some of his statements really irresponsible in terms of vaccinations and so

forth. And it's hard for me as a SpaceX fan, in a sense, to also hold into the fact that I personally don't necessarily like its leader. And I find myself hitting that kind of motivated reasoning in terms of, do I channel my emotions to this directed ends when I see them do something I don't like? Do I get extra worked up about it? And I was thinking about that again, because I was pretty seeing the visuals, what you were talking about of the Starship launch and some of the initial responses is like, oh, this seems really bad. But then, and I sent you this before we spoke today, the US Fish and Wildlife Service reported, maybe it doesn't look as bad from an environmental perspective as perhaps we all thought initially. How do you think about your own thinking in this?

Because you've had your very strong critiques of SpaceX, and do you feel you have to step back and try to remove your personal feelings from these kind of broader policy activities? How do we approach this, I guess, for those of us who have these kind of broad feelings? No, I think it's a really fair question because the nice thing about running a blog is that I can, as long as I don't make up slander about people, I can write whatever I want. And so I've been very upfront with my personal feelings about it. It's helped some. It's certainly pushed certain people away. And I'm okay with it because I'm figuring this out as I go as well. I'm kind of being someone that has thousands and thousands of subscribers now. It's a weird position to be in because I have to be careful. And I've tried to be a little bit less cavalier with my own words recently,

because I realized that with this broader audience, there comes some, if you want people to take you seriously, you have to talk differently. You have to be a little bit more neutral. And that's a learning process for me as well. And so, yeah, I think you really do have to distance yourself. I brought this up. People are like, oh, you hate SpaceX. And one thing I've done is I've, I've like pointed out over and over and over again, how incredible the Falcon nine program has been, how, how rock solid it's been. How many astronauts have they ferried up and down now? And just there's, there's never any drama with those launches.

And so for me, I just say, okay, look, I am like a total nerd about some of these environmental rules. I know like some civil construction stuff. That's what I've done for a living. I know some stuff about project management. But when it comes to the space stuff, even if I have an intuition that something might be kind of obviously nonsense, I still defer because it's easy to say I'm not a rocket scientist, right? And so there's a little bit that is just diffusing saying like, I'd love to watch a rocket go up in the sky. I actually was born in central Florida. So I used to go to see, you know, the shuttle launch. So like, I get that. And so I just say, well, I like the rockets for what they are. You know, here's my concerns, all that other stuff. You know, I'll let you guys debate it.

I'll read about it. I'll ask questions. But I just, I don't know. And I think sometimes just being like, I'm frankly an idiot in this area is really actually helpful because it just, it humbles yourself a little bit to the extent that I think it does maybe get some more trust that you're not, that I'm not just like some sort of like paid attack dog against SpaceX or whatever. I'm passionate about it and I think it shows through, but, but just kind of diffusing saying, I don't know every single thing. There are certain YouTubers on the internet that just make anti Elon Musk videos. And I think they act

like they know everything. And it's really off putting to me as someone who really dislikes Elon Musk and thinks he's full of it a lot of the time. So, so I, I guess, I guess I've kind of just calibrated myself to be like be passionate about the things you know and admit when you're wrong and then just say i honestly don't know about this other stuff and it's it's been i've had to calibrate myself a little bit and i think that's been helpful and and to tell you the truth the people i talk to you know via twitter interactions or whatever like most of them are actually like SpaceX fans who like thought I was full of it at first. We had these honest discussions and they may disagree. They may say like, I think you're overreacting about this, that, and the other, but

I have like tons of people that are huge fans of the company that I have ongoing conversations with that are civil and interesting and fun. So I feel a lot better about it than I did when kind of was first looking at this. Cause I was just so frustrated about some of the initial just ridiculousness in the submittal. And I've tried to get more nuanced, I guess, as time goes on with this whole thing. That's a good difference between a policy wonk and a partisan, I suppose, right? There's that nuance. But I mean, I think there's something that's an interesting process. nuance. But I mean, I think there's something that's an interesting process. And some of the way that you've characterized your experience really fascinates me too, because I've noticed

that people like to just kind of have a binary way of interpreting people either for or against a thing. And I think it's really important that if you're for a thing, you be able to critique it when they mess up or when something is wrong to make them better. And seeing this very, you know, you can look through some of the comments on those Twitter posts that you've done or others, even just reporters talking about some of the environmental issues. You know, we see a lot of just responses being like, I think I quote one here. I wrote it down from like, have people got nothing better to do than whine about progress? As if that's, it's like people just kind of, it's almost real.

And this is kind of my point of that. A lot of the argument is actually not necessarily arguing about Starship, but about the proper role of a regulatory environment and a society. I think that's almost like it's it's because i because i brought up the air pollution in houston it's almost like you're a victim of your own success right i mean there's plenty more stuff to get fixed but like people people don't remember why these things existed in the first place and california's implementation they're they're basically their state nepa ceqa really just is is basically a process that is designed to be

hotwired to prevent actual progress. I really do believe that. You will see people using that law to prevent low-income multifamily units from moving in. And you see that and you're like, well, this is what they're talking about. There's a lot of that. And that is very true. It stopped rail. It's done all sorts of things that probably are net not a good for society. So with that said, I think the real problem is, it sounds so corny, but I think we don't have a vision for this country, especially from an infrastructure standpoint. I have got my problems with the Green New Deal, but at least it was like, hey, this is what the future could look like. We need to have a multi-administration, multi-party, multi-decades long project to revitalize our infrastructure.

And some of that should involve overhauling regulatory statutes that are out of touch and out of date. And I get that. But people just pointing at like, oh, well, this law and it's tree huggers or whatever. No, I really think a lot of it is that we don't have kind of this vision. We're very, every two years when congressional elections come around, it's like, we have to forget these long-term projects. And I think I would just challenge people that just want to point at environmental rules, just me or how much I was critiquing this particular project. I agree with you on a lot of that stuff. And it's probably a factor.

But I think just pointing at that is lazy, and I don't think it's productive either. Do you think that the, you kind of highlighted this earlier, but this, a lot of what I kind of felt reading your prior work was also that we do have, and you said this earlier, we do have laws and either they apply or, I mean, and I think, and I wonder if this was kind of a motivator.

And I think this may also be what triggers or sort of not that maybe a loaded term, but just angers a lot of people is seeing that if you're wealthy enough, you can buy your way out of them. And I think Elon Musk certainly seems to, I think has acted in a variety of ways over the years that he does not think much of the regulatory structure that we've created in this country. And this kind of, you know, you could read it as some sort of like Ayn Randian approach to, you know, I know what I'm doing. I don't want the state slowing me down. But at the end of the day, these are the rules. And we're seeing a concerted effort to try to, at minimum,

manipulate them to avoid the consequences for their own advantage. And is that, in a sense, kind of the core of this as well for you? Yes, absolutely. I think it's the biggest problem. And I guess I would point at Dieselgate as EPA. That was the last time that EPA said, we will do something because this is so egregious where we could put one of the oldest and biggest car manufacturers in the world effectively out of business in North America. And they said, we're going to do that. It was kind of a shock because really, I would say, maybe the last few years of the George W. Bush administration, after we had jailed all those criminals from Enron and WorldCom, that there was this idea that we'd kind of solved some of these big corporate fraud issues. that we kind of solved some of these big corporate fraud issues. And since then,

I feel like we're so afraid to kill off a big company, to go after a very powerful person, because it requires a lot of political willpower. And I think it's gotten worse and worse for someone who graduated right before the Great Recession. You see bank execs, no one went to jail. I think kind of going to that, I think Musk is almost just like this very comical version of what came from that because he gets in trouble with the SEC. What he did with that tweeting, most other execs, especially from smaller companies, would have been barred from serving in that role anymore. This is for taking Tesla private. Yeah.

He said, yeah, but when he didn't have the money secured. Yeah. But then afterwards, I mean, he would just go and say, I don't respect them. I'm not doing he didn't comply with like several requirements. And the issue is, isn't that the laws exist or that most people like they comply with most laws, it's easier to do so. I think the unique thing about Musk, and this is the example I'd love to give, is that during the Trump administration, one of the

only National Labor Relations Board judgments was against Tesla for a tweet. And the punishment was a fine. I think it was like some HR procedure had to be updated and Musk had to delete a single tweet. And the judgment came down, and I want to say 2020 originally. This whole investigation happened during the Trump administration, which was not very labor supportive, I would say. It was basically a tweet saying like, oh, nothing's stopping them from joining a union. They can do whatever, but also it's better here. And it was kind of this egregious violation of law, right? And so if you have a normal person, including a CEO that maybe doesn't respect the rule of law, they would just delete the tweet because there's absolutely no harm to deleting that

tweet. That infringing tweet by Elon Musk is still on his Twitter feed today. I don't think the regulatory system is prepared to deal with someone that doesn't... People talk about, you brought up Ayn Rand, but it's almost like he's got this level of irrationalness. There's no rational reason to not delete the tweet. And people call him a madman or whatever, but I don't want to say he's special in that way.

But I think that's why he inspires so many people that really like him and dislike him is that kind of you know swashbuckler you know persona that just delete the tweet i think that's for me like that's what is so frustrating so i i guess that would be the example i would use with him why he kind of maybe perhaps gets away with more gets gets more adulation than maybe he deserves. But also, at times, he gets more critique than maybe he deserves if he was a normal, boring CEO. So I think that it's just this very strong binary with him. I've always thought this is one of the big long-term risks of privatization of space, actually, is that you start to have individuals and all their

idiosyncrasies and you know like strange character quirks and and so forth start to be associated with what had up until very recently been this stately government program that was publicly run and you would have names and faces to it but not an individual embodiment of it and with people like Musk and Jeff Bezos and others you start to carry the baggage of a single person representing this era with all of the attendant positives and negatives that come with it and that type of you know muskiness Musk especially is kind of really leaning into just being Twitter's character of the day over and over again. It has really been an interesting play for this.

So that's in a sense like one of my long-term fears is that he personally is polarizing the broader public's attitude about SpaceX's success or not. And I had, you know, one more just kind of question, man, before we kind of close this valorizing the broader public's attitude about SpaceX's success or not. And I had one more just kind of question before we kind of close this up here. We've talked about SpaceX. We've talked about the FAA. Where do you see NASA's responsibility?

In this whole situation, because you had Senator or Administrator Bill Nelson testifying before Congress, Oh, SpaceX will recover from this. They'll get going. They'll pick it up. And they're pouring billions of dollars into this program. Do you think that's good? Or what do you see as NASA's responsibility here? Like I said, and this is the example where I don't know about space development. It seems nice that they have a backup lander.

I guess that would be kind of the high level response. And what I would say is if you talk to NASA, one of the great tells is if you actually look at agencies for employees for how they donate money to which party do they do regular employees donate to, that the most democratic and in fact, progressive leading agency. And this is above the EPA is actually NASA. Most people don't realize that. And that that's because I think,

I think the main reason is that NASA has this, I mean like every other employee has a PhD and that demographic tends to line up with a certain type of social progressivism. And so I think given that what what's really interesting about NASA, and I think where Bill Nelson fits in, is that there's also kind of more towards the top. There's a very military-minded leadership in NASA, people that come from the Air Force Academy, people who are astronauts, people who are generals and that military crowd. And so I think if you talk to NASA employees, that seems to be one of the divides between how the agency itself views

things like privatization, views things like what risks we can or cannot take. I think that's a really interesting dynamic because I think leadership has been more in line with this militarized, fund it however you want approach. But I think if you dig deeper into the actual people that work in NASA, and I certainly don't want to speak for everyone because I know there are people that aren't exactly like that. I think there's some weird cultural divides that are both demographic and then also just what your background is right did you come from the military or did you come from a liberal arts school how old are you i think from nasa's standpoint like they make a lot of decisions they do consider science always they're they they just make incredible publications they're so technically sound but i think there's my suspicion is that there's some doing things the old way having this kind of

bureaucratic inertia which maybe keeps things steady but as vcs have kind of diverted more from it that there's a potential for more conflicts that will result in maybe projects not turning out as they would hope yeah i mean yeah it's an agency of 17 000 civil servants and 60 000 contractors but i guess do you think it's do you think they should impose more stringent environmental requirements on their contractors from the top do you think nasa has an ethical or just social responsibility here that they're not exercising and and maybe we're moving too far into the theoretical here but but I'm just, do you see it mainly as a failure of FAA or do you think that NASA has a responsibility here too? I think it's actually is more on NASA because I think they've got the ability to do it.

And the reason I bring up Kennedy Space Center is that if you talk to local biologists, if you talk to educators, look how many lawsuits get filed against Kennedy Space Center. Almost none, because they have a world-class environmental health and safety program. Their documentation is always up to date. You can go through their whole NEPA library going back decades. You can actually see every single project they made, every single decision they make, every single comment they make to a person complaining about, you know, what if this rocket lands and kills a blue whale, their culture at Kennedy Space Center, which is a huge part of NASA, it is perfect, for example,

keeping SpaceX in line, right? So if you mandated, right, we're FAA, we haven't really figured this out yet. Like if they were to mandate, right, this needs to go through some channel where we know we've got a bureaucracy that's pretty good at what they do. You just don't see complaints about NASA because they run a tight ship and they go above and beyond on an EH&S standpoint. And so I think that's certainly what I would suggest, right? That you bring in that I think NASA is more than equipped for it from a cultural standpoint, which is a huge part of complying with the laws, having the right culture. I would love to see them be a part of it. At the end of the day, the way the laws are set up, and because FAA does license commercial spaceports, it is on them, I guess,

is the best way to put it. Speaking of lawsuits, we have the very last question here. This happened right before we started recording. There is a new lawsuit now against the FAA by a coalition of groups, including the American Bird Conservancy, Center for Biological Diversity, the Carrizo Camaracrudo Nation of Texas, suing the FAA for licensing the Starship launch. I know it's very early. Neither of us are lawyers. But what's your first impressions of this lawsuit? My first impressions, and I know several of the people that filed them. So just so I'm, you know, my biases are clear. I've kept out of any sort of legal discussions they've had because I don't want to get sucked

into attorney-client privilege, that kind of stuff. There's some really interesting stuff in there. A lot of it is the stuff we've seen before about beach access. That's really one of the ways they got standing to be able to sue. They used the local Save Our GV group, Rio Grande Valley. I would say the most important thing to watch, if you're watching one thing, if you're saying, what do I need to look for? This lawsuit was filed in the DC court. And they used the justification. I don't know the exact justification, but basically,

they're like, we're suing the FAA. They're based out of DC. This is like a national policy because it affects Florida and Hawaii. That's the reason we didn't file suit in the Fifth Circuit in Texas. I would say if you're watching one thing for kind of on a high level, I think the case has some really interesting points, including what I brought up, that these impacts were not disclosed, therefore it was inadequate. The mitigations were inadequate. There's some interesting legal arguments in there. I am not a lawyer, as you pointed out, thank God. But the one thing I would look for is that if that lawsuit remains in DC, that would be a tell that they take it seriously because they think it's an interesting enough case. And I would not feel great if I'm making just initial kind of magic eight ball

guesses. If it stays in DC, given the makeup of that court, even though they tend to rule for the agencies in NEPA cases, but even then, if they take that, then I would be very concerned if I was a SpaceX fan for what the result would be, which is you have to start a new EIS, which would take years probably before they could launch again. That is what FAA will request. I would feel pretty okay about my odds, although knowing that even the Fifth Circuit may put some additional mitigations on it. That's kind of my first take, is I would look anything else just on a really high level. What venue is it being heard in?

And not to worry about those details until we figure that part out. Fifth Circuit being in Texas, and notably more conservative than some of the other circuit federal courts. It has a reputation, yes. Yeah. Eric Roche, I want to thank you for joining us again on this really interesting and again, just fascinating kind of diversion into environmental policy. You can read Eric's work on ESG Hound on Substack. We will include a link in the show notes.

And Eric, if anything happens with this lawsuit, we'll be sure to ping you again for your insights and expertise in environmental policy as it comes to Starbase. Thank you for being here. Anytime. I enjoyed that conversation. That was awesome, Casey. Yeah, I learned a lot.

So much going on in there. Eric was very generous with his time. And I recommend reading his blog, ESG Hound on in there. Eric was very generous with his time. And I recommend reading his blog, ESG Hound on Substack. It's a very fascinating and critical but important perspective on what SpaceX is doing down in Boca Chica. As much as we all want to go to space, we have time to think about these things. And we want to protect our planet as much as we can while we're doing this. So it's important. Yeah. Yes. That's yeah. I think it's one thing space teaches us is that earth is pretty damn nice compared to the rest of the cosmos out there, at least the accessible part

portions and preserving this little Edenic spot of the cosmos is, is pretty important and, you know, kind of ironically it's what Elon Musk is all about too. Right. With, with Tesla and electric cars and climate change. important. And, you know, kind of ironically, it's what Elon Musk is all about too, right? With Tesla and electric cars and climate change. And, you know, so it makes sense to think about that and just do things. I think the key word here is responsibly. And finding that balance between progress and conservation and respect for the environment we live in and still, but it's still enabling, you know, this wild opportunities that we have before us. I mean, this is why we have policy.

This is where we have friction in societies. This is why we have policies to help deal with those. And why we have people like you and our space policy team to help us shape policy for this in the future so that we can do this responsibly. Send everyone to space and also protect our world. So thanks, Casey. Do what I can. All right, everyone. Thanks for joining us for this month's Space Policy Edition.

We'll be back again next month. And if you'd like, in the meantime, you can sign up for our Space Advocate newsletter. How can they do that, Casey? Planetary.org slash Space Advocate will take you to the newsletter and you can read every month my free hot take on space policy

and highlights about important events that have happened in the past month. Yeah, you won't want to miss the tea on what's going on in space policy right now because it's intense. Busy time. Busy time. All right, Casey, I'll talk to you again next month. We'll see you then. Thank you.