WASHINGTON — If you live in the Florida Keys, the southern Bahamas, the Turks and Caicos, perhaps even Miami and Cuba, Elon Musk’s SpaceX appears intent on repeatedly — and needlessly ― endangering your life.
A decade ago, when choosing between Cape Canaveral, Florida, a launch site as old as the space program with thousands of miles of Atlantic Ocean to the east, and Brownsville, Texas, with all sorts of populated areas downrange on the other side of the Gulf of Mexico, Musk went with Texas.
Why?
First there was the money — some $20 million in cash incentives for his “Starbase” to build and launch his rockets from sparsely populated Boca Chica Beach. And second was the famously laissez-faire attitude Texas has regarding environmental and safety regulations — which also translated to money.
And for those reasons, Musk’s massive new “Starship” rockets fly – as two recent launch failures suggest ― recklessly close to teeming cities. The January accident rained debris over the Turks and Caicos; a second one earlier this month did so over the southern Bahamas.
That no one was killed was good fortune, as was the fact that the failed spacecraft continued down its planned trajectory, rather than veering slightly to the left or right. Just 60 miles to the south of the ground track sits Havana, a city of 2 million. Just 125 miles north is Miami, a metro area of 6 million.
That word, reckless, seems to be the through line for all things Musk. He made autonomous driving available to Tesla owners years before it was ready, to the sometimes fatal detriment of dozens. He is today gleefully slashing federal government programs and employees, apparently withoutbothering to understand what he is doing while simultaneously wildly overstating the savings.
In the case of SpaceX, as a 2023 Reuters investigation detailed, the company is notorious for sacrificing safety for the sake of speed, purportedly to meet Musk’s personal desire to put humans on Mars as fast as possible. That philosophy, combined with Texas’ lax regulations, led to 600 injuries, many of them serious, over 10 years. (SpaceX declined to respond to Reuters’ findings.)
The SpaceX approach to engineering seems eerily reminiscent of the shortcuts taken by space shuttle designers in the 1970s. As the late theoretical physicist Richard Feynman wrote in his excellent appendix to the report investigating the 1986 Challenger explosion, engineers were under schedule and budget pressure, and so cut corners on standard protocols. Instead of testing each component part for flaws one at a time, they skipped steps by running end-to-end tests on entire assemblies.
“Therefore, as expected, many different kinds of flaws and difficulties have turned up,” Feynman wrote about the shuttle’s main engines. “Because, unfortunately, it was built in the top-down manner, they are difficult to find and fix.”
One result of this approach was plumbing that leaked hydrogen fuel into the guts of the space shuttle engines, where it did not belong. But instead of pinning down the flaw and redesigning the motor, engineers “solved” the problem by simply blowing inert helium gas through the engine compartment to dissipate the leaking hydrogen.
Ironically, Musk’s Starship —engineered in a similar “top-down” manner — is also exhibiting a fuel leak into a section of the vehicle where fuel should not be. It has led to at least one, and possibly both, of the recent spectacular, and life-threatening, failures. SpaceX has nevertheless defended that approach.
In a Sept. 10, 2024, statement on its website, the company said: “Our approach of putting flight hardware in the flight environment as often as possible maximizes the pace at which we can learn recursively and operationalize the system.”
The statement went on to complain that regulators were not letting SpaceX fly frequently enough: “Unfortunately, we continue to be stuck in a reality where it takes longer to do the government paperwork to license a rocket launch than it does to design and build the actual hardware.”
That design strategy, which many engineers consider wasteful, would be of little concern if Musk’s rockets were blowing up over an empty Atlantic Ocean, rather than a patch of water and sky filled with shipping and airliners, surrounded by populated areas.
Indeed, one of the big reasons that NASA originally chose Cape Canaveral on Florida’s east coast in the 1950s was that a rocket taking off due east would travel thousands of miles before crossing the equator, well past all the inhabited islands of the West Indies.
Rockets that launch eastward take advantage of the Earth’s rotation, allowing more payload weight to orbit. The optimal launch site is on the equator itself, but the United States has no such suitable territory.
And while Brownsville is somewhat closer to the equator than Cape Canaveral, that advantage is largely negated by having to fly a few degrees south of east to remain in a narrow corridor between the Florida peninsula on the one side and Cuba on the other.
The potential problem of an accident in that area was predicted more than a decade ago. “If this occurs over certain areas of the Gulf of Mexico and with certain wind or uncontrolled propulsion conditions, the debris hazard could significantly affect the populated areas downrange,” two experts wrote in a paper presented at a 2014 conference. “Suitable analysis will be required to determine if the casualty probabilities for the area will be acceptable.”
Now that very scenario has come to pass. Twice.
As it happens, SpaceX has for years been planning to launch its Starship rocket from Cape Canaveral in addition to Texas. It could eliminate its debris-falling-on-people risk by only launching from Florida.
SpaceX did not respond to HuffPost queries for this story, nor did Musk himself. The Federal Aviation Administration, which has jurisdiction over commercial launches, said only that SpaceX had received the necessary permission to launch from Texas.
“SpaceX is all about moving fast, and in some cases seeking forgiveness rather than permission for doing what they want. And now we have a federal government that may be less inclined to challenge SpaceX,” said Edward Ellegood, a co-author of that 2014 paper and a former director of Spaceport Florida.
“Regarding the debris field across the Caribbean, I suspect there might be repercussions,” he added. “The threats posed by that debris would not have been an issue with launches from the Cape.”
When Musk appeared at the Conservative Political Action Conference last month, he cheerfully wielded a chainsaw on stage. It could not have been more appropriate.
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You can’t really build anything with a chainsaw. It is far too imprecise for carpentry. Rather, it is a tool of destruction, and putting one in the wrong hands is the height of recklessness.
Oh, and that next test flight for Starship? It’s once again set to launch from Texas, as soon as the FAA gives it the green light to fly again. As of right now, SpaceX is hoping permission comes soon enough to enable a launch next month.
Downrange residents in the Bahamas, the Turks and Caicos, Cuba and South Florida might want to invest in a hard hat. Or perhaps a bomb shelter.