tater

So the impact question is literally not the couple hundred acres of facility (which is a given), but the added impact of SS/SH launches. Every car in the parking lot drips, and the runoff moves oil into that wetland. There is no mitigating that if they allow the 10k employees to drive to work. There's a reasonable chance that impact alone exceeds Boca Chica. 200 acres is tiny. Actively mitigating an impact that starts out orders of magnitude greater still results in more absolute impact. The BO facility at KSC is actually pretty large—scraping away all that wetland, then building a few huge buildings, a rocket testing area, and large parking lots around them—is actually larger, just measured it. 250 acres. I didn't measure the launch pad area, however, so maybe closer to 300+. If BO comes up with a New Armstrong, then presumably they have to resubmit as well due to the impact of a yet larger rocket in the same way.

Meh. Not seeing it, though I suppose you are right that the public can be easily confused by their innumeracy. The total environmental impact of Boca Chica is certainly lower than just a tiny fraction of the built area at KSC—a very similar coastal wetland region, so very much comparable. So we have daily traffic at KSC (which aside from air pollution also has huge runoff issues (oil, rubber, etc from all the cars)). Huge numbers of people working at KSC (10K+ just KSC, and added visitors), with related waste issues. Many launch pads, and LVs using RP-1, and many with hypergolics aboard. Loads of impacts routinely, and more if accidents. SpaceX meeting whatever EIS requirements they have to meet is fine, and they should do that—but even if they did almost nothing, it's noise compared to KSC impact doing all they can, just because merely being there at all is doing most of the impact. As for PR, people seem to think carbon credits somehow buy off damage, so SpaceX can make their own LOX, split some C and water to make CH4, and claim they are neutral to the public for PR—all done with solar panels. Actual impact is basically nil compared to all kinds of other coastal business, and their impact will be thus mitigated (on paper).

The KSC visitor area parking lot? 2X the Boca Chica launch facility area.

Real estate here in NM used to be super cheap, not any more. People are buying land and building in places that used to be empty. Beach is incredibly finite, it wasn't built up yet, but it will be in time. I was at South Padre for spring break decades ago, the pictures I saw of it recently make it unrecognizable to me, it seems covered with high rise buildings that were not there 35 years ago. The bottom line is that the entire facility at Boca Chica is literally smaller than the part of KSC right near the VAB and KSC offices, and the paved roads to 39A/B (plus the pads, obviously). The build site is about 184 acres. I overestimated the launch site by a factor of 2. Using RGV photos and google earth, it's 21 acres. "Starbase" is a little over 205 acres, total. Literally the entire place is the size of pad 39B, and the crawler road as far as the Y where it branches to 39A. I outlined 39B (bottom center, everything inside the ring road around it), plus the crawlerway to the Y. That's how big the entire SpaceX Boca Chica facility is combined. If 39A or B is not a grave environmental threat, neither is Boca Chica. The Disney World and Epcot parking lots combined are 20 acres bigger than SpaceX Boca Chica.

It doesn't sound like that at all. Littering has no positives. Building houses/apartments/hotels has positive benefit, building a spaceport has positive benefit. Both have externalities that potentially affect the environment. One or the other is going to happen at that site, and if not that site, if a spaceport is desired an area already covered with houses/apartments/hotels must be demolished to make way for the spaceport. That solution might mitigate the environmental concern since the destruction is already factored in—the existing structures already wrecked the place, so wrecking those to build something else is no big deal. 100% of the couple hundred acres controlled by SpaceX would have eventually have been at the very least little houses. People would plant stuff (likely invasive), and otherwise "wreck the place" from an environmental standpoint. SpaceX building in the same land is not that much different, and rocket operations are not all that frequent. I'm not seeing a big issue, and again, unless all space operations are to be in the place already ruined—the KSC area, which is vastly larger than Boca Chica, both in total area, and simply in paved/built area—then we might as well stop being interested in spaceflight, we're stuck with the sort of pace we've had in the past, and we'll all die before we see humans walk on Mars. I lived through nothing changing during the entire Shuttle era—lunar bases and Mars were "20 years off" literally every single year of the Shuttle era. I'm willing to roll the dice on that tiny sliver of coastline. Quick check of Google Earth: The launch area is about 40 acres. I just measured a tiny contiguous area of built up/pave/etc area at the southern tip of the Cape, and it's 333 acres, about the entire size of Boca Chica's facilities. Just the VAB and related buildings and roads connecting VAB, office facilities, and 39A/B is 3-4 times the total area of Boca Chica (1200 acres)—including areas that they don't look to ever build on at Boca Chica. I didn't even count the Shuttle runway, that alone is probably bigger than the entire SpaceX facility in TX.

Unsurprising as he runs businesses in CA and TX.

I'm sure that's not for each, obviously, it's gotta be the required lead time. It's still absurd. Bruno said a while ago that engines were the long lead time item (and he wasn't even talking about delayed engines) at ~36 months. This was around the same time Musk was saying that they were down to a little over 48 hours per Raptor, working their way down to 1/day. Literally 48 hours right now, vs >48 months for RS-25 right now.

Well, the components likely come from... dunno 50 States? or maybe they made sure to have more than 435 components so at least 1 from every unique Congressional district?

Under 3 years—for a disposable engine in the complexity ballpark of Be-4 and Raptor. I guess $100M each doesn't buy "expedited shipping."

Updated SLS thread link (had been the closed thread).

Wonder what a rocket from 2050 s supposed to look like if it also cannot look like F9 or SS/SH? maybe also something from the 50s? Von Braun winged rocket?

Looks like Boca Chica:

The above goes to the other thread and concerns about Boca Chica. In short, if we ever want to see anything interesting happen in space while any of us are still alive (barring a cure for aging), we need someplace like Boca Chica to work. If we were stuck with "not SpaceX" dev speed, we might as well pick something else to be interested in, nothing will happen—least not in the US. I'm entirely selfish here. I want to actually personally see space exploration progress. IMO the Shuttle era was almost entirely wasted. (wasted from my personal standpoint, the ball barely moved down the field in 30 years)

A leap backwards in harvesting pork, maybe. I saw that yesterday on NSF and decided it: 1. was not really verified. 2. even if it was, the authors are motivated, and clueless. <shrug>

https://spacenews.com/firefly-aerospaces-alpha-rocket-ready-for-first-launch/ Amazing how all kinds of contracting is the same. One component being behind can really throw a monkey wrench into things.

I forgot the quote in the bizjournal article where he said he'd not get them. Maybe BO saw that and told him they'd deliver this year?

Presumably SpaceX has been buying up private land. Had they not bought it, it would be covered eventually with little houses like Boca Chica Village, and should anyone else decide later it was a valuable place for tourists at some point in the future, it would then get covered with highrise hotels, condos, etc (like much of the rest of the Gulf Coast). The same few hundred acres would be buildings or paved over. The cars in the parking lots would drop oil that would run off the parking lots, people would have trash blow away (or scumbags would just litter), and the impact is the same, minus the occasional explosion for the SpaceX case (controlled or otherwise).

What % of US coast in the south is either refuge, or covered with beach houses? Assume SpaceX spent a decade slowly buying up a few hundred contiguous acres worth of beach houses, bars and restaurants on South Padre Island, as an example. Wait, they'd then have to buy every property within a few miles for hazard area (or make those people evacuate). Then the beach... also always open to the public except for specific, allowed closures by law (you can own a beach house, the beach in front is still public). They have traded one set of problems for a worse one. Maybe when investigating the state might have suggested the barely inhabited area as preferable?

I think their tunnels are closer to F9 diameter, though. (because tunneling machines also travel by road)