DID YOUR HOUSE SHAKE OR YOUR WINDOWS BREAK?

By ESG Hound

Special to El Rrun-Rrun

"This past Friday, the Federal Aviation Administration issued SpaceX the license to launch the first orbital test of Starship, the largest rocket in human history, as soon as the next Monday, and the launch was scrubbed until this past Thursday. I predicted that this was a foolish and reckless decision, and impacts from even a nominal launch could prove catastrophic and significantly worse than presented to the public.

SpaceX and the FAA submitted extensive data as part of the NEPA environmental permitting process that started in September 2020 to demonstrate the impacts launches and operations would have on the surrounding area.

In May of last year, I demonstrated that SpaceX used modeling data from early 2019 to seek approval for the launches; at that time in Starship’s development, the megarocket’s total thrust was estimated at 61.8 meganewtons (MN). The rocket that that was launched Thursday was rated at 74 MN, a 20 percent increase in size.

This past week, I received a Freedom of Information Act from the US Fish And Wildlife Service regarding information collected by US officials from the surrounding Lower Rio Grande VAlley National Wildlife Refuge. An FWS employee measured a sound intensity reading of 110 decibels (dB) three miles from the launch site during a static fire test conducted in February.

This is a concerning development because the existing noise surveys indicate that the maximum reading that should have been detectable at this point is between 90-100. Decibels are a logarithmic scale (by tens), meaning that the FWS employee measured sound that is between 10x and 100x more powerful than what was predicted by SpaceX’s models.

Further compounding the issue is that the February static test fire of Starship Superheavy’s 33 engines was done at just 50 percent of total thrust. A full-throttle test would have produced a significantly larger noise impact."

In fact, this past Thursday, the launch used 43 rocket engines at 100 percent throttel and the noise impact was felt as far as the City of Brownsville, some 25 miles away.
"I posted pictures of the broken windows," said a Brownsville resident who happened to be at Port Isabel at launch time. "The house was literally shaking there."
And a Brownsville resident who lives near the intersection of Paredes Line Road and Alton Gloor reported that she was lying on her living-room sofa when she felt the house shaking.

"I felt a steady rumble and wondered whether there was something wrong with me, " she said. "But then there was a strong rumble and then...nothing. I thought it was thundering and looked outside, but the sun was shining. I was the SpaceX rocket exploding."

"SpaceX convinced FAA to approve a site that would host launching the Largest Rocket in History under NEPA’s Environmental Assessment (EA) process, which is saved for projects that do not have a “significant impact” to the environment. 

"This action was and is eyebrow-raising, as no major spaceport has ever been authorized under this process, always requiring a full Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). An EIS is the default multi-year approval process specified under NEPA. The FAA piggybacked on an existing 2015 authorization for SpaceX’s operation of 2-3 annual launches of the much smaller Falcon 9 rockets to forward this streamlined Starship “low impact” approval process through the system."

"Here in Texas, SpaceX’s launch tower sits 500 feet away from the protected habitat owned by either the Fish And Wildlife Service or Texas Parks and Wildlife. All of the surrounding land, however, is considered protected wildlife habitat under the Endangered Species Act."

In addition to the siting and sizing of the pad, SpaceX does not have a flame trench, nor do they have a water deluge system used to suppress heat and sound energy from any launches, as the Army Corps of Engineering permitting required to add these civil engineering systems is itself a multi-year process.

No large rocket complex on the planet: not in Russia, nor China, and certainly not in the US, exists that doesn’t contain one or both of these energy suppression systems. SpaceX does not.

In short, the FAA approved that a rocket system, the largest in history, will be fired off, from an inadequate facility, in the middle of an endangered species habitat, by a company that revels in the beautiful failure of explosions with seemingly no guardrails and no respect for the real danger this operation presents to the public.

The harm from the full launches will undoubtedly be greater than what was disclosed to the public. These damages may show up as shattered windows and the corpses of hundreds of dead shorebirds; immediate and obvious. 

Or they may not be entirely clear until years from now when SpaceX eventually closes shop on the Texas coast for greener pastures. The scars on the land, the people, and the wildlife won’t just disappear. They’ll linger, and hopefully, by then people will be willing to listen to the story.

Can’t say we weren’t warned.