Report: Government Documents Allege SpaceX has Violated FAA Permit, Encroached on Boca Chica National Wildlife Refuge
60 Minutes+ reports that government documents back up allegations that SpaceX’s Starbase test facility in Texas has violated its federal permit through excessive road closings and has encroached and trespassed on the protected Boca Chica National Wildlife Refuge.
The documents back up a claim by the environmental group Save Rio Grande Valley (Save RGV) that SpaceX has been closing the Texas state highway that runs through its operation for more than the 300 hours per year allowed under the permit from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The organization sent a letter to the local district attorney outlining its concerns.
SpaceX responded to the district attorney with a letter saying they take the matter seriously, and that they are “committed to working cooperatively” to resolve it. They say they are honoring their agreement with the FAA, and by their count, they’ve only closed down the highway for “226 hours and 9 minutes.” SpaceX referred to the allegations brought by Save RGV as “not accurate.”
But in documents obtained by 60 Minutes+, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service communicated to the FAA that they also believe SpaceX has been exceeding their assigned hours. They calculated disruption to public access in “excess of 1,000 hours in 2019.”
Fish and Wildlife told 60 Minutes+ they estimate SpaceX also exceeded their closure hours in 2020 and 2021….
Government documents reveal officials’ frustration over SpaceX’s actions, which they claim include illegal use of the neighboring Boca Chica National Wildlife Refuge.
In one letter to the FAA’s environmental protection specialist, written in April of 2019, Fish and Wildlife asked for closures and testing to stop until, “noncompliance issues are resolved.”
A refuge manager expressed his frustration in an internal email to a Fish and Wildlife biologist. They wrote, “this is totally unacceptable. If we don’t stop this now, we’ll never be able to reel it back in.” They added, “how do we stop this thing in its tracks and start over?”
In a letter to SpaceX’s director of starship operations dated June 21, 2021, a Fish and Wildlife complex refuge manager described, “unauthorized encroachments and trespass on the refuge.” He attached photographs that he said shows SpaceX’s employees using refuge lands as a parking lot and, in another one, a drainage ditch on protected land.
In March, a prototype of the Starship rocket exploded during a flight test, sending debris into the wildlife refuge. It took more than three months to clean up the debris.
SpaceX didn’t respond when 60 Minutes+ asked for comment on the story.
SpaceX originally planned 12 launches annually of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets from the Boca Chica facility, which sits just north of the Mexican border. The company abandoned that plan and has instead been conducting tests on its much larger Super Heavy/Starship launch system.
A new environmental review is underway to determine whether SpaceX can use the site for operation of these larger rockets. The company is looking to expand the footprint of its Starbase site.
62 responses to “Report: Government Documents Allege SpaceX has Violated FAA Permit, Encroached on Boca Chica National Wildlife Refuge”
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I am sure Elon took the news calmly 🙂
Elon knows eternal truth #1, the FAA isn’t going to shiv NASA. They will blow a lot of smoke around, throw a tantrum and in the end come to an agreement.
curious to see how this turns out
Yes, with its implications for the future of how the FAA AST regulates space launch sites.
In my opinion they have been way too lax allowing locations like Georgia, or even Mojave, where it’s not safe to third parties to do testing to get licenses.
In the case of the Boca Chica site I really wondered about them even granting the original license for the Falcon 9 flights given the location. The FAA AST allowing SpaceX to put so much infrastructure in over the last three years without giving any indication they needed new permits puts the FAA AST in a delicate legal and political situation if they block SpaceX from launching.
as you and I have talked over the past XX months or Y years…I agree completely.
I would make three points.
first in terms of environmental studies…and performance. Musk in my view needs to be very very careful as he could find the entire show grinding to a halt. my experience with this is maintaining a WW2 emergency strip next to our farm, that we rent from the federal government for 10 dollars a year (where they came up with that in 55 I have no idea) and I own the ATT tower site now in RedFern Park/wetlands area which got put there in 62
now both these “lands are grandfathered into agreements that the federal government and ATT cut with either itself or the federal government…but they are pretty firm and the EPA is pretty firm about them.
And we are on good terms with the EPA…we cleaned up with out them telling us to the rather leaky diesel oil tanks and a site where ATT had simply dumped old batteries (oddly enough some of them still worked, these are the 6 foot 2 volt wet cells)
but Musk problems (second point) go well beyond this…
I really dont think that the place can survive without a lot of damage to musk world and to the surrounding eco system including human houses…a massive RUD of a Starship platform
and they will get there at some point…and then all heck will break lose
finally from just an orbital launch standpoint I dont understand why he is there…as you (and I ) have pointed out the matagorda airport is not that far up the coast and well within barge range
MY GUESS but its only that is that Musk is “at BC” simply because he is out of sight and out of mind…but if one RUDS that wont last long
I think this is a major issue coming
Robert, if you use the “Nukemap” nuclear attack tool, you’ll see that SS/SH can detonate at 4.5 kT as a small nuclear bomb, and just squeak in with breaking the windows in Boca Chica village. They’re close, really close to going over the edge, not a lot of margin. But they do have margin here. I think the real problem will be if they go off course and have to blow shrapnel over spectators on the beach, that’s going to be a nightmare.
The beach at Boca Chica will be closed, but the beach by South Padre Island will be at risk, along with all the windows in the condos and hotels.
Then on the other side of the eye of the needle is Mexico.
But that probably wouldn’t be as bad as it wouldn’t be the first rocket to enter Mexico as a result of a test flight. The folks who were part of the Mexico Club at WSMR had a couple of good stories of their rockets literally going south to share at the meetings of the spaceport task force.?
Tom and Andrew
what I guess Elon has not “aspirationalized” is what happens to 1) most of his facility if the thing goes boom on the pad and 2) what the political blowback is going to be if the thing goes boom in the region much less if it gets out of control and well lands in an oppsy
County judges and DA’s are elected in this state (as Tom points out) but thats a two edge sword. what seems “stand by the community” is less if the thing starts killing people…and worse the feds simply dont care about all this
My view is that the FAA (and I dont have any inside information I just know how they feel about things) is starting to “not like” Musk. its seems on the face of it, he has lied some here…and they are trying to figure out who gets left without a chair when the big thing blows up
which honest to the creator in my view is likely at some point. Musk has had an amazing run of it…but really when you get down to it, he has flown a lot of vehicles there and been sort of successful with what? two
we are going for the serious stuff here soon…and well he really is going to have to act like it 🙂 fly safe
If you have not read the book “Liftoff” by Eric Berger I would recommend it. This is looking like VAFB and Falcon I all over again.
He basically scared the safety office there with his procedures and they just put him on hold until they figured out what they should do. He got tired of the wait and went to the U.S. Army’s test site on Kwajalien Atoll where no one cared what he did because there was nothing to damage.
And he promptly lost …. what, two launch vehicles? VAFB is not a test rocket range. I look at SS/SH, and Musk is right in his Tim Dodd Interview, you have to blow up a few of these things to really understand them. I totally get that, and I’m ready for it. LIke you, I don’t think this is the right place. I just hope they can start operating off shore soon.
“VAFB is not a test rocket range”
That would be news to all the engineers who developed and tested rockets at VAFB since the 1950’s.
so OK what does a 4.5 kiloton like blast do to the rest of the “facility” I would guess it takes it off the map?
For a ground burst it would all lie in the heavy to moderate blast damage. An airburst will totally cover the production area in the heavy blast zone and cover Boca Chica Village in moderate blast damage.
this seems foolish except for just a developmental thing
Unless they can chase out the nature preserve and Boca Chica Villiage that’s all it’s going to be. I think The Cape is a better place. Lot’s of land sitting fallow from the Cold War. Once the failure rate and mode become better known, I think The Cape makes more sense. That said, the burst model is predicated on a nuclear explosion which has a much sharper shock profile. The conflagration of a SS/SH stack will be fairly weaker. But I think it’s fair to say a failure in the first 2000 ft AGL will probably destroy the production area.
I think that is about correct…I have no idea what the “strength” of the blockhouse areas are.
Yes. I suspect he just selected the site by looking at Google Earth to see what the southern most point was in Texas he could launch from without getting any advice from those who knew the area. Now those chickens are coming home to roost.
The good thing is he has the money, and stubbornness to start over somewhere better, just as he did when he was invited to leave VAFB.
The problem is no one around him is willing to have the “Emperor has no clothes” talk with him.
I’m sure he did. This is far from the first time he’s had to face down arrogant local bureaucrats.
Also he isn’t worried about SpaceX property being damaged. He will just rebuild it bigger and better if it is. He has the old pioneer spirit that has been forgotten by most folks in today’s world.
The County Judge posts notices of road closures and any cancellations (weather, winds…) Other closures were shortened. The only way to get as many closure hours being claimed is to ignore the cancellations etc.
Also; if there were 1,000 hours of closures in 2019 that would mean Route 4 was closed for 8.76 hours every single day of the year, which is ridiculous.365*24 = 8,760 hours. 8,760÷1000 = 8.76 hours a day.1,000 hours divided by 365 days is under 3 hours per day average.
Arrrghhh.brain fawg. Slept in. Jeezzz…
But, we both may be wrong. They usually don’t close roads on weekends, so subtract 104 days from the 365.
260 days gets it to a little under four hours a day average. I haven’t paid enough attention to know if that is a major problem or not.
Road closures only occur when they’re moving vehicles, large parts, or testing. There may have been 1000 hours of scheduled road closures, but most of them get cancelled for winds, weather, or are mooted by early completion. SpaceX says <300 and that seems correct.
Might want to recheck your math there. Less than 3 hrs per day. Redneck is right.
I’m sure Road Closures are like a NOTAM.
Just because SpaceX didn’t need the road closed for the entire duration, it was still closed and that entire time counts. Just because SpaceX didn’t use the time, the “ROAD CLOSED” signs were still up.
What is overlooked is the usage of the beach. When I went there in 2019 there was nobody on it, other than a Border Patrol SUV parked near the location where the beach crosses into Mexico.
Why use it when you have the great beaches at South Padre Island a short drive away?
I don’t think that’s actually how it works.
Yikes. Looks like that environmental review might not go as well as they might hope, or take longer.
1. Get the Boring Company in there. A tunnel bypassing the 1.5 miles of road that connects the production facility to the launch site will reduce the need for road closures.
2. Get SpaceX employees designated as “wildlife” and Starbase as their “natural habitat.” The rocket building and launching activities are “courting displays” meant to attract mates.
Heh.
You dont understand whats going on. Its way more than just the roads. This site was never authorized to do what its doing. The area is to small to launch these large Rockets it is to close to protected ares and homes. they lied on the original authorizations. They never said they would do landings and they were only to do the original small rockets, They are going to get kicked out .
You just replied to a little joke I posted 2 months ago.
We’ll should see some sort of resolution in the next few months. The comment period is open now through the end of the month should you care to make your position known.
SpaceX Starship Super Heavy Project at the Boca Chica Launch Site [FAA site]
Hopefully Elon Musk has a plan “B” in case he has to close down Boca Chica. Offshore might be an option. The old Matagorda Island AFB, property of the State of Texas, is still there, ideally suited, just up the Intercoastal Water Way. It will be easy to barge rockets up from Starbase.
Of course he would have do another Environmental Impact Review, but it should be a lot easier to get approval.
If they follow this path, the bureaucrats will end up expelling SpaceX from the US. ?
No, U.S. Space Force would step in. They need SpaceX for their future.
A quick solution would be for them to have the DOD do an reactivation of Matagorda Island AFB as a U.S. Space Force Base and invite SpaceX to test there. He could eventually reassemble Starbase on the adjoining mainland and even have room to build his Raptors, testing them at the base. Plenty of room on the North side of the island to do so.
I am sure Elon took the news calmly. if he has misstated things to the FAA this could be quite serious. but he really needs a plan B…as you point out
County Judges and District Attorneys are elected in Texas and I wonder what their future political prospects will be if they cost Brownsville thousands of good jobs. SpaceX brings in a lot more revenue to the Brownsville region than the handful of folks who actually use that beach.
Also SpaceX has basically closed off that route for undocumented immigrants and smugglers as there is too much activity going on. And they probably did a lot more damage to the wildlife refuge.
Your second point has some merit, but your first point is only a self centered moral argument. So you value jobs over wildlife refuges. Other people disagree, and the refuge has the law on its side.
I can easily see this turning into a battle that would have been better avoided if Space X had had just put the money and foresight into operating within lawful limits. I suppose remote parking lots and shuttle buses constitute too much socialism to avoid the need for people to use the refuge as a parking lot.
Unlike California, most of the south coastal area of Texas consists of wildlife refuges and ranges. Padre Island National Seashore stretches some 150 miles from South Padre to Corpus Christi, all protected, while the mainland across is protected within the King Ranch which is managed as much for wildlife as for cattle raising.
There really isn’t anything special about Boca Chica other than it’s on the Mexican border. It was only set up to protect the nesting sites of sea turtles on the beach, away from where they are working, and parking.
Plus you forget this is hurricane country. A huge hurricane in the 1930’s wiped out the resort that was located where the refuge is now. Another wiped out the community that existed before Boca Chica Village about 40 years ago. It is still debatable if Starbase will survive the next big hurricane that will bury everything under a storm surge. Which is why most of the southern Texas Gulf Coast has been turned into wildlife areas…
Actually a bigger problem for FWA is that Starbase means that Boca Chica is probably off limits now for hunting waterfowl.
I wonder what would be more difficult. Bending the current situation to your will with politics, or getting the nature preserves redone? Space X know’s the real solution. Going offshore.
The next hurricane will redo the nature center, just as past ones have. But yes, the solution is to either go offshore or go to Matagorda Island AFB.
As you lefties ceaselessly remind us, the actual letter of the law is unimportant as the law is a “living document” subject to “interpretation” blah blah, “nuance” blah blah, “penumbras” blah blah blah.
The left? More like LAWYERS. Look I see the failures on this subject too, but the reality is no legal system in history has ever been self consistent enough to really try going with the absolute letter of the law. A legal system that’s self consistent enough to be predicted only on the letter of the saw would be very mathematical, every word would have words with ironclad definitions, grammar would be very Russian like, and the roles of judges and lawyers would be minimized. The power would lie mainly in the police, who would have to have the legal education of a lawyer. Likely only computers could handle it.
The vast majority of lawyers are lefties so that’s a distinction without a consequential difference. My point was that lefties routinely violate the letter of the law, especially the parts forbidding unequal application, when elected to office or appointed to the bench. They’re proud of this. George Soros has paid to elect over two dozen DAs who do exactly that in major urban jurisdictions, one of which is L.A. County. I get more than a little weary of people who defend flagrant election theft, the non-prosecution of violent rioters of their own political persuasion and the arrest and incarceration of people who object to any of this and then get bent out of shape because some minor and inconsequential environmental regulation is bent a bit. You don’t get to burn down the house then complain because someone else is roasting marshmallows.
That’s not just a problem of the left. The political right loves to invoke federalism and local rule when they’re not in executive office, but look at mask mandates, social distancing rules, and vaccinations, all of the sudden local efforts independent and divergent from GOP set rules are null and void and the Governors office reaches down like a puppeteer all the way down to school principle. The US legal system is nowhere near ready to be a system predicated on only the direct parsing text. For that matter, neither is the English language. It’s MADE for human judges. Any system predicated on a judiciary will be after some time evolving. Your point about the left becoming ‘letter of the law times’ when it fits their talking points, that’s human nature. All sides do it, it’s an important tool of politics. I don’t find it very endearing either no matter who it comes from, but there it is. I think where we would diverge on the subject is my belief that our system is not a one axis system, it has multiple axes and has to react from the influences from all axes all the time, but is predicated on far fewer than actually feed back into the system. It’s bound to be messy. And that mess was written in by the architects and is fed by the practitioners. That multi axis mess has one very important quality to it, the system can react and evolve to the complications of real life very fast compared to other systems, it can turn on a dime.
Yes, that is one of the strengths of the American legal system, it’s flexibility to evolved and adapt, along with the economy.
I would argue that the only reason the economy can adapt so quickly is because the legal system can too. With that fast evolution comes capabilities and problems and malfunctions. It’s a tough, messy, real world problem.
Yes, they both are intertwined. The Industrial Revolution started in the U.K. instead of France because of the flexibility of the English Common Law.
The appropriate path for legal adaptation is legislation. Giving every local hack official the idea they can suspend any part of the Constitution or the statute law for any reason or no reason is pretty much the polar opposite of this.
The left didn’t raise any stink when Andrew Cuomo was busily turning NY nursing homes into little Mauthausens and Treblinkas. It’s only Republican governors seeking to end the Covid Reich in their states that draw their ire.
Laws are open to interpretation, but not to systemically arbitrary modification. Language has meaning – unless you’re a lefty deconstructionist.
The Supreme law of the land is the Constitution. It is not subject to arbitrary suspension by pissant school principals and other petty officials wishing to indulge their hatred of the opposing political party or their irrational fear of a particular disease pathogen.
Local people are fed up with the lies they dont want these launches of the falcon. Its over The locals want them out. This area is to small for safe launches they are going to be shut down
Full court press on SpaceX…STARSHIP MUST BE STOPPED!!!
As predicted in “Destination Moon” by Robert Heinlein, where they launch just a few minutes before a injection is being served to prevent them from launching.
Must have been one hell of an injection.
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Sorry, autocorrect. It should be injunction.
1) Starship is not a nuclear weapon. If one blows up, the damage will be entirely to SpaceX property.
2) Boca Chica Village is not a consideration. It has a grand total of two permanent residents these days. Both are now full-time videographers of the activities at Starbase. Every house in the Village, except their two, is the property of SpaceX.
3) Tree-huggers and park rangers are always annoyed by the intrusion of progress into their “preserves.” If most of the TX Gulf Coast is “preserves” already, a slight amputation at Starbase isn’t going to matter a damn.
4) The seeming certitude of certain commenters here that a major disaster at Starbase is simply a matter of when and not of if sound very reminiscent of those who predicted similar disasters anent Falcon 9 and, especially, Falcon Heavy. Bringing up the initial Falcon 1 flight is pretty much bonkers as an “argument.” There was no launch site damage in that case anyway. There was with AMOS-6, but the affected radius was fairly small. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that some among you want there to be a major disaster at Starbase so Elon Musk will – you think – be forced to cease demonstrating daily that some aspect of your sacred ideologies is garbage. I don’t think you’ll be getting your wish.
My worry is not Boca Chica, that place gets wiped clean every few decades by hurricanes, nothing there is permanent. That is why “damage” to that wildlife refuge is not the same risk as in other protected areas as the ecological system is adapted to rapidly restoring itself after a hurricane.
My worry is that an explosion during launch will break lots and lots of windows on South Padre Island, which would result in some really bad press and politicians doing their best to capitalize on it.
And that is a possibility given that when the Soviet N1 rocket blew up it reportedly shattered windows 40 Kilometers away.
The N-1 had no flights during which it did not blow up. That is largely because the Soviets “economized” by not building a static test facility for it. That isn’t an issue at Starbase. SpaceX has been flying multi-engined rockets for over a decade without any explosive failures of 1st stages. I don’t rate the odds of Super Heavy serving one such up very high. In any case, the FAA certainly makes no demands that airports and their surroundings be proof against any possible damage accruing from a “worst case” air accident. I see no reason why it should apply such a standard to Starbase.
Doesn’t matter the original permits dont allow what they are doing.
You were wrong.