You’re absolutely right, because nothing bad ever happened after dumping things in the sea.
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The Gulf of Mexico is part of the environment and is probably no better for having bits of rocket, large and small, dumped in it.
You want to make the argument that the benefits of the Falcon 9 program outweigh its liabilities, and that’s fine- I might even agree with you in a general way. But the argument that SpaceX is behaving responsibly or that their approach to the work they do has no negative environmental consequences is ridiculous.
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reminds me of the quote from rachel carson ( author of silent spring )
“Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself. We are challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.”
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Found it again.
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People used to tromp around in the aftermath of nuclear explosions with shorts and t-shirts… 
Environmental catastrophe can unfold over decades…
But hey… I did not write the headline, so I’m not sure why you’re bringing that up?
You’re argument was that it was “good” for the environment because there was no direct evidence of “brunt force trauma” on birds and it kept humans at bay… You seem to be searching for any excuse ot get a win out of this…
You know that his companies didn’t invent any of that, nor are they really all that into that stuff. they are into making Musk ever more wealthier. If they can do that with greenwashing, they certainly will… Edward Niedermeyer wrote a whole book about Tesla and Musk, and just how much of a scam it actually is…
Because explosions famously never spread debris over a much larger area than directly over where it happens… Also…
I look forward to an exploded rocket being resued… /s
Bingo! Our willful destruction of the environment stems from our mistaken notion that there are 2 things - nature and man, when in reality, we are part of nature.
Again… something not being killed in a brutal fashion doesn’t mean there is no damage done to local wildlife.
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People counting this as a “success”, none of the Saturn V tests failed. Just saying…
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“SpaceNews” might be a skosh biased in their editorial choices between environmental concerns and the speed and freedom of rocket development. To their credit, they do mention at the end that more reports are coming / needed. This initial report was very quickly published. It’s also a little weasely that they mentioned that dead fish and birds in the wildlife preserve were not found, but also that that debris mostly affected the Boca Chica park and private lands (not the preserve), where perhaps there was more immediate damage, but wasn’t within the purview of the agency . Hard to tell from the writing.
The commenters actually seemed pretty evenly split, with some weirdo libertarians spouting government conspiracies a bout ITAR to some Reason magazine style apologist-ing to a lot of head-shaking over Musks’ general irresponsibility.
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By this logic, once humans damage a natural area we should just continue the destruction. Effectively, “it’s ours now and we can do whatever we want without any care or concern”. Isn’t this how humankind has put the entire planet in peril; one ocean, one beach, one wetland, one forest at a time?
That is a lot less detailed than I might have hoped. No dead birds or wildlife noted, one fire, but no real idea of how much they checked. These are nesting areas, the sort of thing that people have been concerned could be disrupted by even noise…it feels hard to imagine spraying cement over the area would do nothing…but we’re not wading through dead plovers so it must be fine. 
You know, it’s cool to like space. Nature is important to some of us too. Right now as you said people have very casually been abusing it in countless ways…but that only makes it worse to ignore the preserves that are left. You could probably have your space stuff without adding more.
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Buried at the end, maybe? Seems like an industry booster website, not a hard science-based website…
Honestly, I think we can do both - both build an environmentally sustainable world and have a space program. However, rushing a launch to coincide with 420 and then pretending like an explosion is a huge victory isn’t it…
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Yeah, honestly I don’t get why more space fans aren’t furious about this. Engineers had made a prototype of the first fully reusable rocket, and it exploded because of something they already knew. They said the launchpad was inadequate, and they got overruled in favor of a played weed joke. What an incredible waste the whole thing is.
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I can imagine the internal debate goes something like: "NO! government waste! government bad! Private no waste! Elon no waste! Elon move fast! YOU WASTE! "
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Not to mention putting Artemis (which, let’s be real, is also a tremendous waste of resources) at risk of significant delays.
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Far too few people have bought Musk’s line about him being a genius… But our society and culture is deeply steeped in the mistaken “great man” theory, so it’s not surprising that he could hoodwink so many people…
Probably not from his POV, since the hope was for NASA to buy one and use it to get back to the moon… They’ll shovel more money at him, and he knows that…
It’ll be fine… he’ll just rush it… after all, who cares if some astronauts blow up? /s
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Of course not. And probably no living ones, either after a giant explosion in the middle of a wildlife refuge sent them fleeing in all directions.
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I think the launchpad failing and the rocket exploding might be unconnected, though I admit I’m not full bottle on this. I think its possible to consider them separately:
- The launch itself was a success, since the first time you hurl something towards space you expect it to explode a little. It did better than their minimum standards, but not dramatically better.
- They took a risk on the launchpad and misjudged, causing environmental damage. There should be penalties for this. It sounds like the steel plate is also a prototype and would not be guaranteed to work, but ‘we expected the launchpad to survive maybe one launch’ is an admission it was known to be insufficient, and they should have used thicker concrete at a minimum.
Does anybody know if the water-cooled steel launchpads have been used before? I haven’t heard about them until today
They are very probably connected. Debris can easily damage engines
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Nearly every analysis I’ve seen has concluded that they are connected.
The water isn’t necessarily for cooling, it’s more to absorb the incredible acoustic energy of the launch, and prevent the sound energy from reflecting back to damage the rocket. They’ve been around almost as long as NASA has, and the problem they solve has been well-undertood for just as long. Elon just decided that 60 years and thousands and thousands of man-hours of engineering experience was inferior to his superior intuition, and proceeded anyway without appropriate safeguards.
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