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This is the best summary I could come up with:
As Elon Musk’s Starship — the largest rocket ever manufactured — successfully blasted toward the sky last month, the launch was hailed as a giant leap for SpaceX and the United States’ civilian space program.
Members of Congress and senior officials in the Biden administration have fretted privately and publicly about the extent of Mr. Musk’s power as the U.S. government increasingly relies on SpaceX for commercial space operations and for its plans to travel to the moon and even Mars.
The sun was preparing to set on a late autumn afternoon in Boca Chica nearly four years ago, when SpaceX began the countdown for Serial Number 8, a Starship prototype ready for its first high-altitude launch.
as it negotiated with SpaceX, said the company initially agreed to a number of conditions, including limiting the height of its buildings, painting them in natural colors and curbing nighttime light that might distract hatching turtles.
Stacey Zee, an environmental protection specialist at the F.A.A., wrote in a 2021 email to officials at Fish and Wildlife and the state parks department who asked to see the results that the agency was precluded from passing them along because they contained sensitive commercial information about SpaceX.
“SpaceX has been waiting to work with the Interior Department and some of the environmental concerns associated with launching there,” the Air Force secretary, Frank Kendall, told a House committee in April soon after a visit to Boca Chica.
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Brunbrun6766@lemmy.world 4 months ago
They have since the moment they chose boca chico as their launch site. The nearby bird sanctuary has been largely ignored every time they’ve complained about Space X’s launches, let alone the residents of the town, the people who owned beach homes that are now mostly worthless (surprise surprise, no one wants to live next to a launch site, they only drive in to watch and then leave)