Elon Musk, as part of his jihad against FAA red tape, has been telling this story lately:
SpaceX had to do a study to see if Starship would hit a shark. I'm like "It's a big ocean, there's a lot of sharks. It's not impossible, but it's very unlikely." OK fine, we'll do it, but we need the data, can you give us the shark data?... Eventually we got the data, and the sharks were going to be fine. We thought we were done.
But then they hit us with: 'Well, what about whales?" When you look at the Pacific, how many whales do you see? Honestly, if we did hit a whale, the whale had it coming, because the odds are so low.
Is this story true? It's very hard to check. Is Musk talking about Starship launches, which happen in Texas, or booster splashdowns, which are typically in the Indian Ocean? It's vanishingly unlikely that any US agency would be worried about a splashdown in international waters 10,000 miles away. On the other hand, hitting stuff in the water isn't a big concern during launches. Trying to figure out this story is made all the harder by Musk's reference to the Pacific Ocean. Starship launches go out over the Gulf of Mexico and splashdowns are in the Indian Ocean, so what is he talking about?
I'm assuming that Musk is talking about Starship launches from his Starbase facility in Boca Chica at the southern tip of Texas. The first thing you need to know is what this looks like:
As you can see, Starbase is neighboring three different protected areas in the middle of a vast network of wetlands. Ecological concerns have obviously been top of mind since the very start.
The second thing you need to know is that SpaceX has broken or skirted FAA rules for its launches constantly since the first launch:
On at least 19 occasions since 2019, SpaceX operations have caused fires, leaks, explosions or other problems associated with the rapid growth of Mr. Musk’s complex in Boca Chica. These incidents have caused environmental damage and reflect a broader debate over how to balance technological and economic progress against protections of delicate ecosystems and local communities.
....Mr. Musk and the company had pledged a different sensibility when setting up operations in Boca Chica. The project, SpaceX told local officials, would have a “small, eco-friendly footprint” and “surrounding area is left untouched,” meaning it “provides for an excellent wildlife habitat.”
A small facility was never Musk's plan. He intended to build a gigantic facility. The FAA mostly let him get away with this because they were sympathetic to SpaceX and its importance to the US space program. This is the irony: far from burying Musk in red tape, the FAA has been mostly in his pocket for years. What's more, the FAA is always under considerable pressure to approve Musk's plans from friendly members of Congress. Because of this, Musk was routinely able to carry out launches without full approval or without carrying out all of the FAA's orders.
This all came to a head after Starship's first test launch, in April 2023, which ended four minutes later in a huge fireball and the destruction of the launchpad, sending steel sheets, concrete chunks, and shrapnel thousands of feet into the air. What made it worse was that Musk had gone ahead with the launch despite explicit orders from the FAA not to. The FAA apparently treated this like a "boys will be boys" incident, while officials at the Fish and Wildlife Service were furious.
In any case, this naturally got everyone's attention and the FAA demanded a lengthy investigation along with lots of changes to the rocket assembly—which included adding a "deluge" system that dumped millions of gallons of water on the launchpad during takeoffs. This didn't make Musk happy. Then, in October, the FAA began working to gain approval from the Fish and Wildlife Service, which capitulated and gave its full blessing on November 15. Starship's second launch was scheduled for three days later.
Here's where things get tricky. I assume this is the sequence of events Musk is talking about, and I assume it's the Fish and Wildlife Service that allegedly asked for the shark and whale studies. But did they?
If they did, it was almost certainly not because they were afraid of sharks being hit by falling debris. Rather, they were concerned about runoff from the deluge system and how it might affect endangered species. For your edification, here is their final determination:
They also concluded that metals released into the water from launches was minimal and would have "no long-term negative effects to ecological communities."
Now, if you've actually read all the way to here, you may notice that we have information about plovers and ocelots and turtles, but we still don't really know if sharks or whales were involved in any of this. If they're not endangered they won't show up in the table above, so that doesn't tell us anything. What would tell us something is the final report from the Fish and Wildlife Service, but this doesn't appear to be public. So we don't know.
Still, what really seems to have happened is this: Musk eventually burned through his goodwill even with the FAA, which was tired of his antics and his refusal to follow orders. For that reason—and because his rocket exploded—they started clamping down a bit. Musk can't abide that, and that's what prompted his recent attacks against supposed government red tape.
But sharks and whales? I dunno.
I get it: Trump is famous for long, meandering paragraphs of word salad that are sometimes incomprehensible. But even if Peters is wrong in a technical sense, he's right in every practical sense that matters. Trump is crystal clear that:
