SpaceX’s Starship launches at the company’s Starbase facility near Boca Chica, Texas, have allegedly been contaminating local bodies of water with mercury for years. The news arrives in an exclusive CNBCreport on August 12, which cites internal documents and communications between local Texas regulators and the Environmental Protection Agency.
SpaceX’s fourth Starship test launch in June was its most successful so far—but the world’s largest and most powerful rocket ever built continues to wreak havoc on nearby Texas communities, wildlife, and ecosystems. But after repeated admonishments, reviews, and ignored requests, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) have had enough.
I would be exactly 0% shocked to learn this was true.
I’d be shocked if Abbott didn’t try to give them a Texas Medal of Freedom award for doing this.
And for removing water breaks for workers when it’s really hot out
Or… I could see him mandating more water breaks… provided it comes from the test area. People in the biz refer to that as remediation.
And with Chevron ruling they wont face any repercussions!
Isnt crony capitalism great!?!?!?!
Ok so, going to the CNBC article and my own memory, as charitably summarized as I can:
Boca Chica is originally built with certain parameters and specifications, before Musk announced they would be doing all of the testing for Starship at that location.
Then, SpaceX just started doing so, and then asked for permission from relevant regulatory bodies … later.
At this point, Common Sense Skeptic on YouTube did a video or two specifically going into the details of exactly how bonkers it is to do huge scale rocket testing basically half a kilometer away from protected nature zones.
Then, one of the Starship tests blew apart huge parts of the launch pad after Elon had said that would not be a problem.
Then, Elon folded on that notion, and built the water deluge system and modified the launching configuration, without getting any permits beforehand from relevant regulatory agencies.
So the run off from all that water has been going into a protected natural environment for… about a year now.
The EPA began investigating this in August of 2023, and informed SpaceX they were in violation in March of 2024.
Literally the day after SpaceX was formally notified their water deluge system was in violation, SpaceX did its third Starship test, again using the water deluge system.
Now, cue SpaceX lying all over the place, saying that they’ve been told they were allowed to do this the whole time, and that there were no detectable levels of mercury in the discharge, even though their own permit that they belatedly filed indicates the detectable level of mercury in the discharge were about 50x the safe level.
SpaceX said in its response on X that there were “no detectable levels of mercury” found in its samples. But SpaceX wrote in its permit application that its mercury concentration at one outfall location was 113 micrograms per liter. Water quality criteria in the state calls for levels no higher than 2.1 micrograms per liter for acute aquatic toxicity and much lower levels for human health.
To conclude:
“Further wastewater discharges could trigger more investigations and criminal charges for the company or any of the people involved in authorizing the launches,” he said.
- Eric Roesch, Environmental Engineer
Basically, the environmental aspects of this have been a known and ongoing shit show for over a year, but have only been covered by a few YouTube channels and blogs, vastly drowned out by the cacophony of SpaceX fans.
I highly suggest every one check out Common Sense Skeptic on YouTube, they have been calling bullshit on SpaceX for a while now.
In particular, one interesting vid they did shows that a former NASA administrator bullshitted her own request for project process to get it awarded to SpaceX, using blatant double standards.
I say former NASA admin because quite quickly after rubber stamping a huge amount of taxpayer money toward Starship development, she now works for SpaceX.
Good thing the supreme Court expects companies to not do this shit
Thank you very much for the synopsis. I am disgusted and unsurprised.
I’m very curious as to who this NASA admin is…no name comes to mind?
Kathy Lueders
Ah you beat me to it, I stepped away for dinner =P
Thank you!
Just a small correction about the pad exploding/water deluge system.
They were already working on the water deluge system before the pad blew up. They simply didn’t think it was going to explode like that since it worked as expected during the half thrust test, and the water system wasn’t ready yet.
Maybe they should have had the water system ready before the full test just in case.
Like someone concerned about health and safety would do.
Why would you wait to have something else ready if you think what you have is going to work?
All the physics modeling they did and live tests showed that the concrete should work.
When it looks like something should work, you test it. They had approval to test it after showing it should work.
These people are launching and landing rockets at a pace never done before, they know how to model these kind of things. Now obviously something went very wrong here, but it wasn’t just a willy nilly choice.
You test the things that you think will work, otherwise you never know if they’ll work.
While the concrete may not have been their final decision for Boca Chica, it doesn’t mean it wasn’t a possible solution for other location where a large quantity of potable water isn’t available.
Edit: just further to possible other locations, the concrete if it worked, wouldn’t allow the rapid turn around time they want as they’d need to set new concrete vs piped water ready to go. But for a launch location that maybe wouldn’t need the rapid cadence, maybe it’d be perfect and cheaper if it’d work.
Standard for engineers is to have backup systems to your backup systems.
Especially for something as important as a rocket that will someday have astronauts on it.
This was cost cutting and rushing which is bullshit pushed by management, not engineers who know what they’re doing.
This is a TEST rocket program.
The goal of the program is to figure out what does and doesn’t work.
There are numerous
zerosingle failure points all over the ship currently as they figure things out.Using the concrete was a way to test if they could set up a launch pad easier. ALL their tests and modeling proved it should work.
Tests and modeling aren’t the end all be all though and sometimes things you don’t or can’t anticipate happen and then you remodel with the new info. This isn’t a high school project, it’s rocket science.
There was nothing bullshit about testing it out.
The goal of IFT1 was don’t blow up the entire stage 0. They didn’t blow up the entire stage 0. They learned the concrete doesn’t work, but also hopefully they were able to learn WHY. And if they found a why that why may lead to it being attempted again in the future maybe even by someone else.
You’re not an engineer, are you?
No, I’m not an engineer (and that’s an Ad Hominem fallacy). But for the love of god, SpaceX is a terrible company because they launched a rocket with INTENTIONALLY missing heat shield points to see what would happen (edit: all while knowing if certain heat shield tiles failed it would guarantee the complete destruction of the ship, that would obliterate any crew you’re oh so concerned about in this test phase!), and even launched their rocket with wing flaps that they suspected would be destroyed by the hot plasma and had already made changes in future designs! God forbid they test a ablative concrete launch pad that survived all their real world tests and showed it should work in models.
Don’t worry, with the Chevron ruling out of the way, this can be thrown out in court and promptly swept under the rug. 💪🇺🇲🦅
Thanks for the summary! Very easy to follow.
Sorry if this is a stupid question, but wouldn’t diluting the runoff with more than 1:50 ratio with fresh water fix this problem? If it’s joining a large body of water down the line, wouldn’t that effectively negate the problem?
I don’t know anything about the area or it’s ecosystem. But it seems like being close to protected wilderness is kind of a prerequisite for this kind of thing, because you can’t have human inhabitants nearby. And it seems that logically, large swaths of unoccupied land would be zoned as such until there was a need for some kind of development.
I am far from an expert on the toxicity of mercury (and that’s nearly certainly just one kind of pollutant in this scenario), but it seems unlikely this would solve the problem.
The same amount of mercury is still being emitted, it just might lessen the amount that gets absorbed by immediately local soil… and just disperse it a bit more evenly over a longer range eventually mostly pooling along the shores of the Gulf of Mexico.
Which… is still part of a protected natural environment with endangered species living in it. As I recall, there is specifically a species of endangered turtles that live in this area, so, they’re still fucked, along with I think some other endangered birds, reptile and small mammals.
What they should have is a proper method of containing this dirty water, filtering and extracting dangerous chemicals, and a proper way of disposing those.
But that would require foresight and planning, which is anathema to Musk’s ‘move fast and break stuff’ style of ‘rapid iteration’.
Also, It is not true that large sections of uninhabited land are necessarily zoned as some kind of protected habitat. It is true there are lots of areas of the US where this is the case, but not totally.
Musk was trying desperately to get NASA to let him use Cape Canaveral for Starship, but they viewed this (correctly, in hindsight) as too risky.
So, when they said no, and he had deadlines to meet, basically said ‘fuck it’, took his existing facility and massively illegally upgraded it far beyond what was legally allowed by initial use permits, and just did everything Starship there, generally completely ignoring any concept of ‘regulations’ that might apply to this.
He could have actually given investors and NASA themselves more realistic budget and timeframe ideas for how expensive and time consuming it would be to do this properly, but he did not.
One of the fundamental principals of the RCRA is that dilution is not an allowable solution to pollution. Otherwise, you could just say that any amount of pollution is below applicable concentrations after it mixed into the oceans, atmosphere, whatever. And any company could emit as much as they wanted as long as they diluted it. Oil spills could simply be left alone because they’d eventually distribute throughout the earth.
Concentrations must be considered as they occur in their process streams. The process stream must meet certain requirements first and foremost, and it must be further checked to see if that could significantly affect the air or water in which it is emitted, just to make sure its good to go since water flow, temperature, and wildlife migration change throughout the year. The same is true for air emissions as well.
Thank you for some more specific commentary on this.
I had a gut feeling that uh… reverse homeopathy probably is not a legitimate methodology to approach environmental toxins with.
When sending probes to Mars or other rocky bidies, NASA is very careful about biological contamination. They don’t want to seed the planet with some extremophile, or contaminate their own samples and mistakenly think it’s native life.
When SpaceX wants to go to Mars and is also doing this shit, why should we trust them to take the same care?
What would they even be using mercury for?
Dumping into the water. It is an overall expense, and not related to the business interests. They just needed some evil villain stuff going on because Elon really wants to meet Captain Planet.
Elon probably picked up old timey hat making during one of his ketamine binges or something.
That would mean that Elon has any amount of skill.
I very much doubt it.
Oh it just means he acquired a servant that has 30+ years experience in old timey hat making. But he’s rich, so we speak as if it’s him that’s doing it.
If you make earth unlivable you can sell 8 billion tickets to Mars.
Where did Captain Planet go when he wasn’t summoned?
Sawcon.
Elon’s daily dose. It takes a lot to get on his level.
Just kidding, but it seems like something to do with the fuel/exhaust.
I’ve read multiple articles and the most I’ve gotten is that their first launch didn’t have the cleaner fuel that future launches did. I am not sure how that would cause repeated incidents… perhaps it’s from metal parts in the rockets? 🤔 I could have missed something as I was reading but hopefully someone else will know the answer.
Cleaner fuel? It’s oxygen and methane. Carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, no mercury. Still I can’t think of a source.
The article I read said they didn’t use that until after the first launch. I did not look into it further.
I couldn’t think of a source either. Upon closer inspection, it seems possible that this entire story is based on two typos in the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality report.
If that kind of shit gets released on the ground, what gets released into the upper atmosphere?
CO2 and water. The rocket fuel is not the source of the mercury.
The pumps need to be running full bore before ignition and keep running after cut off. Watch a video of shut off and tell me where they’re keeping all that CO^2 and water on the rocket.
What?
At shut off and start up the rocket pumps methane and oxygen into the atmosphere before ignition. The Falcon 9 pumps kerosene and oxygen. Watch the live streams and look at the engines at meco.
Pretty annoying the article doesn’t even explain.
It is possible that this entire story is based on two typos in the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality report.
Texas government probably requires you poison people to operate in the State.
Naturally. If people forget to turn off the poison sockets before bed, that’s their own problem!
This confused me as well. Upon closer inspection, it seems possible that this entire story is based on two typos in the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality report.
Slippery consistency helps the highest bidder to slide up Elon’s bumhole more easily and efficiently. What you really want in this situation is a low energy threshold for financial turnover - in this case the point at which dollar bills are more than 50% up musks arse. Mercury gets that done, and Elon likes the taste, but unfortunately on this occasion it got into the water supply which is sad to see.
Don’t just blame Elon/ SpaSex, blame Texas republicans for allowing this “California Elite” to poison Texas water
Maybe people will finally stop praising SpaceX?
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SpaceX is cool, Elon is the world’s most colossal asshole. Some people won’t separate the two because they rightfully don’t want to enable him.
Shotwell could run the whole thing herself, I wish the government would step in and cut Musk out of it entirely.
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I’d rather NASA be funded well enough to not need private, profit-driven, corporations dictating how we explore space. That and Musk’s stench sticks to all his companies, for good or bad.
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SLS does it the old way, with NASA contracting work out to the old school companies.
The Commercial Crew and Supply contracts are there to try it a different way. And they’re accomplishing their goals much more quickly and at a fraction of the cost.
There’s a great synopsis of the situation further up the thread, but the short is:
SpaceX originally wasn’t going to launch rockets from this facility… until they announced that they were, then asked for permission from the regulatory bodies after their first launch.
When concerns were raised about the rockets being launched half a kilometer from nature preservation land, and specifically in regard to the possibility of failed launches damaging the launchpad, Elon assured them that no such thing could happen… and then a quarter of the launchpad was destroyed by a failed launch.
So they installed the water deluge system, again asking for permission after they had already installed and used it.
Within their permit application for the system - which, again, was installed and used before the application was even submitted - are mercury measurements 50x higher than the Texas maximum threshold for acute mercury toxicity, and far higher than the thresholds for human safety.
The Elon hate is one thing, and I believe much of the hate for SpaceX is because of how he handles himself and his companies. But the general assurance has largely been that SpaceX has a team of handlers to keep him from screwing things up, and it sounds more like Boeing over there every day.
They may have Elon on a leash, but they seem to be running his playbook anyway.
They got approval from the fish and wildlife agency before launching with the deluge system
Published November 16, 2023 at 9:00 AM CST
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has approved SpaceX’s next Starship launch, just hours after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) concluded its assessment of the rocket’s launch infrastructure.
The FAA gave the company a launch license Wednesday afternoon, saying Starship and its new launch infrastructure would have “no significant environmental changes” for its second launch.
FWS stated that SpaceX’s water deluge system, meant to suppress the flames and sound from the rocket’s 33 engines, would produce the same amount of water from an average rainfall. The agency does not expect the water to change the mud flats’ salinity or affect shorebird habitat.
*emphasis mine.
Flight 2 was on November 18th, 2 days after they get approval for the deluge system.
Edit: further, spacex has replied to this and said the following (among other things as well)
https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1823080774012481862
SpaceX worked with the Texas Commission of Environmental Quality (TCEQ) throughout the build and test of the water deluge system at Starbase to identify a permit approach. TCEQ personnel were onsite at Starbase to observe the initial tests of the system in July 2023, and TCEQ’s website shows that SpaceX is covered by the Texas Multi-Sector General Permit.
We only use potable (drinking) water in the system’s operation. At no time during the operation of the deluge system is the potable water used in an industrial process, nor is the water exposed to industrial processes before or during operation of the system.
We send samples of the soil, air, and water around the pad to an independent, accredited laboratory after every use of the deluge system, which have consistently shown negligible traces of any contaminants. Importantly, while CNBC’s story claims there are “very large exceedances of the mercury” as part of the wastewater discharged at the site, all samples to-date have in fact shown either no detectable levels of mercury whatsoever or found in very few cases levels significantly below the limit the EPA maintains for drinking water.
Heavy metals are some of the worst things to dump into the environment, and I’m curious to see where the mercury is coming from, why they’re using it, and how they’re going to address it, but it really feels like you’re blowing up a relatively small issue into a massive one.
They had one launch where they blew up the launch pad accidentally, so they added a deluge system to cope. Now there’s mercury toxicity downstream of the site, but it’s not clear it has anything to do with the deluge system.
The Elon hate is one thing, and I believe much of the hate for SpaceX is because of how he handles himself and his companies.
That absolutely is where most of it comes from. Articles that hate on Elon get clicks, so for every actual thoughtful nuanced critique of SpaceX, there’s two dozen click bait articles written by glorified bloggers that will look for any flaw because critiques of Musk’s space company drives traffic.
But the general assurance has largely been that SpaceX has a team of handlers to keep him from screwing things up, and it sounds more like Boeing over there every day.
Boeing is failing to do what they used to do 50 years ago. SpaceX is successfully doing things that no one has ever done. Yes the wreckless rule breaking is trademark Elon, but let’s not be hyperbolic.
Elon sucks, but for the same amount of money, NASA can either launch 150 tons of science missions 1 per year on SLS, or they can launch 170 tons of science missions every 2 weeks on Starship.
Maybe the latter is like, bad for the planet?
Hmm, did you read that article before posting it?
Because Im struggling to see how Starship, a fully reusable spaceship made out of stainless steel, is going to deplete the ozone the way that aluminum satellites do when they are deorbited and burned up…
What exactly do you think SpaceX is regularly launching into space? Because it isn’t Starship.
You literally quoted me talking about Starship, and the article OP linked is about Starship.
SpaceX is going to launch the ~4000 satellites it has permits for, starship doesn’t change that in any way shape or form.
or they can launch 170 tons of science missions every 2 weeks on Starship.
Your words? Because, again, it’s not Starship they’re launching every two weeks.
Yes, it is. That is using their projected budget and the launch cadence that’s possible with both SLS and Starship. SLS can at most launch twice a year, Starship will be able to launch every two weeks, and costs orders of magnitude less.
Do you know what the clouds coming out of the engines at shut down and start up are? Methane and oxygen. Do you think injecting methane into the upper atmosphere does the earth any favours?
Huh, if only NASA Earth’s science budget could stretch farther somehow so they could better monitor and tell us… now I wonder how they could reduce their mission costs by orders of magnitude…
SpaceX fans have known about this for a long time now, and they just don’t care. They’ve shouted down anyone who has pointed it out for well over a year now
I wish some good old boys would force musk and his lackeys to drink and swim in that water, it’s the right thing to do and rase them much higher in my eyes
Why is there mercury in the deluge water? Where is it coming from? It’s not ‘regular water’ somehow?
That confused me as well. It seems possible that this entire story is based on two typos in the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality report.
It’s what they voted for.
Can we revoke his government contracts now?
And to think it took this much self-inflicted falling from grace before it became admissible to point that “boy genius”'s enterprises should be prosecuted as much as anybody else for wrongdoing.
Drop the hammer on them.
That explains a lot.
The article has no details about the mercury beyond what is in the title. The specific issues it does talk about are things like water runoff, noise that frightens animals, and even “proximity to indigenous sacred lands” which are all, to be frank, trivial. Mercury (in significant amounts) is a problem. But a rocket making noise? Yeah, they do that.
The original cnbc report linked in the article posted states their application asked for 113 micrograms per liter of mercury for discharge. Texas considers 2.1 to be toxic to aquatic life and less than that for human life.
They also mention their application didn’t mention the temperature of the water discharge which could also be a problem if we are trying not to boil the wildlife near the pad.
113 micrograms per liter of mercury
This may have been a typo in the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality report.
They also do that in Florida. Where many of the pads are in a conservation area. Launching from those types of areas isn’t new, rocket launches are a well known impact.
Don’t ever see anyone talking about the NASA launch sites when these things are brought up. Always seems to be articles where the SpaceX stuff is in a vacuum and no one else launches or has launch pads to compare against.
Not saying that contamination shouldn’t be researched, just that much of the reporting seems to have a motivation behind it that isn’t what it claims to be.
Because NASA treats its waste water like every other sane responsible rocket company or government agency.
What about the uproar between native Hawaiians and Nasa over observatories being built on sacred native land? It’s not launch pads but Nasa has definitely pissed ppl off
So your defense is that what they are doing, someone else may have done or done something you consider equally as wrong? I don’t need to make a strawman/example/anything for you, I think you already know it is morally/ethically wrong.
I never said they didn’t piss people off. But we’re talking about concerns at a launch site. An observatory and a launch site have nearly zero in common.
I can see why Elon hates government regulatory bodies.
How dare they stop him poisoning millions of people and entire ecosystems, causing irreparable damage just so he can save a few bucks on waste disposal fees? This is so unfair!
If we are going to say that foreign members can’t own large media companies aka Tiktok, maybe we could expand it to all media companies to ensure a certain Australian has to sell his, and government contracts all be required to be owned by naturalized americans as well. Seems like they have proven are a huge threat and have violated multiple factors of our government/ laws
