Environmental Group Sues Over Beach Closings for SpaceX’s Boca Chica Rocket Activities
by Douglas Messier
Managing Editor
The SaveRGV environmental group has filed a lawsuit alleging that repeated closures of an 8-mile stretch of beach adjacent to SpaceX’s Boca Chica facility violates Texas’ constitutionally guaranteed right to access public beaches.
“This isn’t rocket science. In Texas, access to public beaches cannot be restricted,” said Jim Chapman, a board member of SaveRGV.
The lawsuit said 2013 amendment to the Texas Open Beaches Act allowed the closing of public beaches for spaceflight activities. Cameron County, where SpaceX’s Boca Chica test facility is located, has allowed the company to close the beach and the highway leading to it for up to 450 hours annually to conduct testing activities.
SaveRGV wants the court to invalidate the portions of the Texas Open Beaches Act that allow for beach closings for spaceflight activities. It also wants the court to invalidate Cameron County’s order allowing a judge to close the beach and the highway that leads to it.
The lawsuit was filed in Cameron County. Defendants named in the lawsuit include Cameron County, Texas General Land Office, and George P. Bush in his official capacity as the Texas Land Commissioner. SaveRGV is being represented by the public interest environmental firm of Perales, Allmon & Ice.
SaveRGV and other local environmental groups have been critical of SpaceX’s operations at Boca Chica, which adjoins sensitive wetlands that support a variety of species. They have alleged that SpaceX has exceeded its annual cap on closing the beach and highway and damaged the wetlands.
SpaceX is seeking to expand its operations at Boca Chica to allow for launches of the company’s Super Heavy/Starship system. The Federal Aviation Administration recently extended the comments period on the project’s preliminary environmental assessment to Nov. 1.
12 responses to “Environmental Group Sues Over Beach Closings for SpaceX’s Boca Chica Rocket Activities”
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Bingo! The environmentalists attack!! And so continues the battle between those who hate human progress, technology, and science and those trying to give humanity a better future.
thats absurd. environmentalism is at the heart of progress
Not the radical version which emerged after the Anti-War folks took it over on “Earth Day” and refocused it against technology.
Or do you consider progress as going back to a sustainable lifestyle with no air travel except for emergencies and everyone returning to a low tech subsistence based agriculture (eat local movement).
I consider progress as something that takes the human race forward in a sustainable way that does minimal injury to where we live. I own a farm that sales cows that eat nothing but natural food. its some of the best beef in the industry. we take care of the land. its what keeps us going
I dont like nuclear power. its prob ably safe now with automation, but the storage issues of old plants is in my view not very safe
The technologies that will be needed for space settlement will do that, not the back to nature ones the environmentalists advocate.
I am curious, but you said you worry about nuclear power and yet you have a beach house at Matagorda Beach, which isn’t that far from the nuclear plant at Bay City. You do know that TEPCO owns part of it and they received approval to build two additional reactors on 2016 at the site.
You may thank the environmentalists for the storage issues by them blocking the waste from being safely stored at the Nuclear Test Site in Nevada where they used to test nuclear weapons.
Tom. I am pretty close to Bay City sitting on my Farm 🙂 I teach safety management at the reactors as part of my flight training business…which my wife now owns completly so there no conflict of interest
I use to bunk on top of one of BigE’s reactors. 🙂
Nothing wrong with nuclear power as long as it is safely run. the ones stopping Yucca flats are the folks in Nevada. they dont want it
RGO
They have been scared by the environmentalists. Really, what better place to store used fuel rods than underground near all the craters from the nuclear weapon tests? And if the folks at Los Alamos are right, we should be able to transmute it into safer isotopes in the future, if the research is funded.
Agreed. But it’s gotta be a balance. And SX’s tiny footprint at Starbase isn’t unbalancing anything. I’d argue that Cape Canaveral’s longstanding presence on the coast of Florida verifies that.
Odds are they’re following the standard green playbook of launching a lawsuit and getting paid off to go away. Officially, they’ll do some seemingly green task (like monitoring the Boca Chica beach in this example) but they’re just being paid to go away. I’ve seen this gambit many times. It’s like a protection racket.
If we are lucky a shakedown is all they are looking for. But it’s possible they are looking to block private space exploration so humans won’t “contaminate” other worlds with their presence.
A copy of the 10-11-2021 legal petition submitted to Cameron County 445th District Court is available at https://fingfx.thomsonreute….
I’ve heard that SpaceX is thinking about digging a tunnel to allow traffic during road closures.
What do you bet the Enviros will complain about that too?
I think the actual motive of the anti-SpaceX greenies is not damage they believe that SpaceX might do to the environment, but the threat that SpaceX poses to their utopian dream, a dream of humanity caged on Earth and controlled by greenie socialism.
SLS delenda est