An aerial view of a Starship prototype stacked on a Super Heavy booster at the corporate’s Starbase facility outside of Brownsville, Texas.
SpaceX
Elon Musk’s SpaceX is about to hitch the Federal Aviation Administration as a co-defendant to fight a lawsuit brought by environmental groups following the corporate’s first test flight of Starship, the world’s largest rocket, which led to a mid-flight explosion last month.
In a motion filed Friday in court, SpaceX requested that federal judge Carl Nichols allow the corporate to hitch the FAA as a defendant against environmental and cultural-heritage nonprofit groups that sued the aerospace regulator earlier this month.Â
The plaintiffs “don’t oppose” the corporate’s intervention, per the filings. Jared Margolis, a senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity and lead counsel for the plaintiffs, said it’s “standard and expected for the applicant to intervene in a case where their permit is at issue.” Â
The groups suing the FAA alleged that the agency must have conducted a more in-depth environmental study on the likely impacts of SpaceX activity before allowing the corporate to launch the world’s largest rocket, Starship, from its Starbase facility, a spaceport on the Gulf Coast near Brownsville, Texas.Â
The groups also alleged that the “mitigations” the agency required of SpaceX weren’t enough to avoid “significant opposed effects” to endangered species, their habitat and tribes in the world that count the land and wildlife sacred.
Friday’s SpaceX filing outlines the potential consequences for the corporate if the environmentalists win the lawsuit, noting implications for its business and funds — in addition to arguing there could be damage to the “substantial national interest” and possible scientific advantages of Starship.
“If the Court were to rule in Plaintiffs’ favor, the FAA’s decision might be put aside, and further licensing of the Starship/Super Heavy Program might be significantly delayed, causing severe injury to SpaceX’s business,” the corporate wrote.
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The lawsuit seeks for the FAA to conduct an environmental impact statement (EIS) — a lengthy and thorough procedure that might likely sideline SpaceX’s Starship work in Texas for years.
The corporate also wrote within the motion that “the FAA doesn’t adequately represent SpaceX’s interests” within the lawsuit, because it’s a government agency. It noted that the FAA “has a direct and substantial economic interest within the final result of this case that the federal government doesn’t share.”
The FAA in a press release to CNBC said it “doesn’t comment on ongoing litigation issues.”
At stake for SpaceX
SpaceX Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen submitted a declaration alongside the motion to further detail potential damages to the corporate if it lost the lawsuit. Within the statement, Johnsen wrote that “SpaceX has invested greater than $3 billion into developing” the Starbase facility and Starship system since July 2014.
This 12 months alone the corporate expects to spend about $2 billion on Starship development, in keeping with comments CEO Musk made following its first fully stacked launch attempt last month.
Johnsen also highlighted the pipeline of contracts that SpaceX is constructing for future Starship missions.
SpaceX currently has a significant NASA contract price as much as $4.2 billion to make use of the rocket to land astronauts on the moon. Moreover, the corporate has signed business customer contracts — including three separate missions for wealthy individuals Jared Isaacman, Yusaku Maezawa and Dennis Tito — for Starship that Johnsen wrote are “price a whole lot of thousands and thousands of dollars right now.”
Starship is also crucial to the longer term of the corporate’s Starlink satellite web business, which has over 1.5 million customers. Johnsen noted that “SpaceX has invested billions of dollars into Starlink” up to now.
Musk has previously highlighted the interdependence of those two businesses, with Johnsen further reiterating that SpaceX needs Starship flying with a view to launch its second generation, or “V2,” Starlink satellites.
“Without Starship … not only will SpaceX be harmed financially by its inability to launch v.2 satellites, but in addition a whole lot of hundreds of individuals … are waiting until the Starlink constellation is upgraded and might serve them,” Johnsen wrote.
Finally, Johnsen noted that losing the lawsuit would cause the corporate to “substantially reduce” investment in its Starbase facility, which might harm its interests, in addition to local employees and communities.
Fallout from first launch
Debris litters the launch pad and dmaged tanks (R rear) on April 22, 2023, after the SpaceX Starship lifted off on April 20 for a flight test from Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas.
Patrick T. Fallon | AFP | Getty Images
The dramatic and explosive first Starship launch saw the corporate achieve several milestones for the nearly 400-foot-tall rocket, which flew for greater than three minutes. Nevertheless it also lost multiple engines through the launch, caused severe damage to the bottom infrastructure and ultimately failed to achieve space after the rocket began to tumble and was intentionally destroyed within the air.
SpaceX is within the technique of cleansing up damage to the launch site, which carved a crater into the bottom and smashed debris into the tower, nearby tanks and other ground equipment. The launch also created a plume of dust and sand, with particulate matter reported so far as six miles from the launchpad.
The test flight also sparked a 3.5-acre forest fire.
Phil Metzger, a planetary scientist on research faculty on the University of Central Florida, is studying the substance of samples of the particulate matter. He thinks “SpaceX dodged a bullet” with the launch, telling CNBC that the quantity of “concrete blowing around” could have destroyed the rocket on the launchpad.
“It might have been much worse than it was. I feel they made a mistake by taking a risk and launching off the [concrete] surface, attempting to do it that way one time. Nevertheless it was like a 70% success. They cleared the tower, tested their first stage, got quite a lot of good data, found an issue with the staging and hopefully will find a way to have that fixed and have a greater final result in the subsequent test,” Metzger said.
Metzger didn’t assess the ecological impacts of the launchpad debris, and rocket explosion on endangered species that live in and migrate through the world. The Texas regional office of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and other independent researchers, are amongst those studying the environmental impacts of the Starship test flight and explosion.
SpaceX’s motion also made the case for why Starship is ultimately useful to scientific endeavors. The corporate wrote that the rocket’s unprecedented capabilities “will allow scientists to deal with previously unimaginable scientific missions and pursue the fastest, easiest technique to get their missions from concept to execution.”
“As an example, with its large capability, Starship could economically put large telescopes and heavy science experiments in orbit, and cargo, people, and even colonies on moons and other planets,” SpaceX wrote.
Read the corporate’s filing to determine itself as a defendant alongside the FAA:
