Small Space News Story Roundup 84

Just because they're small stories doesn't mean they aren't interesting

Europe's Ariane Group completes test of reusable Themis booster

The Ariane Group announced yesterday that they had completed something resembling a WDR - Wet Dress Rehearsal - of their Themis booster. The test itself was actually on July 23rd.

During the test, the 28-meter-tall demonstrator underwent a simulated pre-flight sequence under cryogenic conditions. The test did not use the liquid oxygen and liquid methane that will be used during powered testing. Instead, liquid nitrogen was circulated through the vehicle’s cryogenic tanks and lines.

This may not seem super exciting, but… The wet dress rehearsal represents the most significant publicly announced milestone in the Themis test campaign since September 2025, when the T1H demonstrator was erected on its four landing legs at Esrange, marking the start of combined testing. In January 2026, then-director of ESA’s space transportation program Toni Tolker-Nielsen explained that Kiruna, where Esrange is located, was under snow and that they were “waiting for spring.” It is not yet clear when the next milestone in the test campaign will take place.

I've been covering whatever I could find about Themis since it was announced in March of 2019, so over seven years ago, and it has generally been the story that they will go months or years without releasing a word about it, then something like this comes along. 

This image was first posted here in that March 7, 2019 article. And, yes, it sure does look like a Falcon 9 from this angle - although grid fins either aren't there or aren't visible.  

A current photo from this test site is on the European Spaceflight page, linked at the top of this section. It's obvious from that photo that this pad isn't a launch pad and couldn't survive engines firing on it for any length of time.

In keeping with their history of "they will go months or years without releasing a word about it, then something like this comes along", there is no mention of what the next testing will be or when to expect it to happen.

The big, surprising, out-of-nowhere story though was:

The DOT is looking to exempt some launches from environmental regulations

The Department of Transportation is proposing to exempt commercial space launch licensing from many environmental regulations, a move praised by industry but (of course) criticized by environmental groups. This week, the DOT said it intends to file a proposed rule for public comment (I assume they're referring to an NPR or Notice of Proposed Rulemaking) that would exempt Federal Aviation Administration licenses for commercial launches and reentries, as well as launch sites, from 13 federal laws and associated regulations. If the NPR is the way they're doing this, it will be open for public comments for a period defined by the laws. You can be sure the greenies will attack this plan.

Environmental concerns raised… Among the laws that would be waived in the proposed rule is the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, which requires environmental reviews for “major federal actions” that include licenses. “America won the first Space Race, and we can do it again, but only if we get government red tape out of the way,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said about the proposed rule. Environmental groups, though, strongly oppose the proposal, noting it would waive not just NEPA but other environmental laws, including the Endangered Species Act, Clean Water Act, and Clean Air Act.

If you saw the post before Flight Test 13, it was full of environmentalist complaints about using the Texas Starbase to launch anything. As I've said many times, reading Michael Shellenberger's Apocalypse Never showed me in more detail than anything I've come across how modern environmentalism is basically the result of rich, or "well to do" people who want a pretty place to go on vacation. 

Is that Hunga Tonga volcano still affecting the world?

In his daily posting over at Virtual Mirage, "Bad Moon Rising," Larry Lambert mentioned the incredible volcanic eruption of Hunga Tonga, more properly Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai, that erupted in January of '22. I've written about the eruption and its effects several times and by coincidence had recently been thinking that we're closing in on five years since that eruption. Shortly after the eruption, reports began appearing that the "experts" were saying this was the most violent explosion ever recorded by the worldwide network that monitors for nuclear explosions:

Titled “A nuclear-test monitor calls Tonga volcano blast 'biggest thing that we've ever seen',” it reports that an international group that monitors for likely atomic detonations has reported that at every one of their sites around the world - 53 of them - the infrasonic wave from the Tongan volcano is the largest thing they've ever measured, even bigger than the Soviet Union's Tsar Bomba, the biggest nuclear detonation in history. [BOLD added - SiG] 

It absolutely wasn't just another volcano going off. Hunga Tonga injected three times more water into the upper stratosphere than was originally estimated. It injected 150-million metric tons or almost 40 Trillion gallons of water vapor into the atmosphere. The concern expressed at the time of the eruptions was that water vapor is a potent greenhouse gas and it was going to affect the weather for years. How big an effect and for how long?

The problem with answering that is hidden in the part about "most violent eruptions ever seen" - nobody had any real experience to base calculations on. How can anyone trust a model that has never been verified to properly model this sort of input? 

For what it's worth, after about a year, a consensus began to circulate that it would cause warming for five years. It took perhaps a whole minute to get this copy of the University of Alabama Huntsville plot of global temperatures as reported by the experts, and draw a vertical line on it to show the eruption of Hunga Tonga. (On the right at 2022 and a black line)

It's a busy plot. When the volcano blew at the start of 2022, the running average temperature in red was cooler than the prediction dotted line, and it started warming noticeably by the beginning of 2023. As of the end of the red line at the beginning of year four, the red line is still above the predicted temperature's dotted line, which includes the modeled global warming. You'll note that the peak temperature in early '24 is the highest temperature on the entire chart.

The right side of this plot is the beginning of 2027, and I think the current shape of the plot looks like the temperature will be close to the predicted, dotted line by the start of next year. 

Hunga Tonga was a very different event than people are used to even for big volcanic eruptions. Typically, volcanic eruptions cause cooling because they're a source of sulfur dioxide, SO₂. Instead, Hunga Tonga injected the trillions of gallons of seawater which causes warming. 

It's practically a running joke that people think whatever weather they had when they were five years old is the way it always was and always should be. They don't recognize that changes happen both over short and long time intervals; basically "the only thing that's constant is change". Look at the plots I posted in my Earf Day piece and tell me what the temperature should be to within a tenth of a degree.

It's My Favorite Fake Holiday - It's Earf Day 2026

Yes, it's time for our annual bacchanalia of the made-up holiday they call Earth Day, my very favorite holiday to make fun of. Even more than Kwanzaa. 

As befitting the environmental movement, my tribute to Earth Day is almost entirely recycled, and is almost entirely useless. The only way it could fit the environmental movement better would be if everything I said was factually wrong. Everything here is factually correct. 

I've posted on Earf Day so many times that it's hard not to be repetitive, even if I was trying not to be. So nothing this time about Ira Einhorn murdering his girlfriend or the completely discredited book, The Population Bomb.  No, wait.  I just mentioned them both.  Rats! 

The simple truth is that virtually everything about the holiday and the environmental movement is crap. The modern green movement is simply about rich, privileged people wanting to have places to visit that they think are pretty; and especially unspoiled.  They want pretty, natural, wild-looking places to visit on vacations. If that means the people who are living in or near those places have to live lives that range from austere to practically unsurvivable, the greenies think that's just wonderful.  

When you think of it that way, it's easy to realize that the greenies care only about themselves and their enjoyments of life. Of course we should all protect the wilderness! It's theirs! That was never as clear to me as it was while reading Apocalypse Never by Michael Shellenberger a couple of years ago. He vividly talks about people in the wilds of Africa who desperately need better ways to grow food, get water and most desperately need electricity. Instead they're kept in a life of desperation by the environmentalists.

Probably the worst example is the one that we get beat up about every day: climate change. Notice they don't mention "global warming" any more. It's just "change." As if the worldwide climate has always been the same. Let's start with that simple observation. They scream that the temperature has gone up since 1850! We're all going to die! What they don't tell you is that the temperature in 1850 was among coldest periods in the last 10,000 years. 

That's Indonesia. How about if we reconstruct the temperature half a world away? North Atlantic instead of south Pacific; Greenland instead of Indonesia (the scale is different, but 10,000 years ago is 7975 BC).

Sorry. The temperature has gone up not just from 1850 but from from one of the half-dozen coldest periods in the last half billion years.  

The closer you look, the worse the picture is. Borepatch ran a piece in 2024 about one of the more insidious things they do: they change the historical records to make the older temperatures look cooler and the newer ones look hotter. That's right; they're lying in all the official documents and have been for as long as this Con has been going on. One of the things that convinced me that skepticism was proper was the Surface Stations Project that Watts Up With That? started back in the '00s and was closed a few years ago. Their final product was a report on the official stations that create the weather record and how large percentages of them weren't sited properly; over 62% were incapable of accuracy better than 2 degrees C. Another 6% couldn't measure within 5 degrees C. They're too close to roads, too close to sources of heat like air conditioner outputs, even airport runways, and more problems. Then there was outright fraud in editing records. 

And this isn't even going near things like how bad their models are. They still basically can't handle clouds properly. Virtually none of their predictions ever actually prove to be the case. Instead we get useful idiot celebrities who are too young to understand that both weather and climate change (to be charitable). If a 20 or a 40 year old can't remember similar weather, it doesn't mean anything. 

You know the current fuss about the temperature by 2100 isn't supposed to go up more than 1 degree or "we all gonna die"? (say that like Jasmine Crockett saying "we done pickin' cotton"). In these two plots the one on the left is the prediction they push on us; the one on right is shows the error expected in yellow.  For example, at the right end of the plot on the left, it shows their global temperature as increasing by 3.75 degrees by 2100.   The uncertainty shown on the right is +22.5 / -15 degrees.  That's over 37 degrees uncertainty out of 4?  In the kind of simulations I'm used to that's so bad it's unusable.  The remarkable part is how bad the people who released this plot were at doing this math (read this). They're an embarrassment to people who can do this math, and the ones who can should get listened to far more than they do. 

Maybe if the people pushing this climate change stuff could do this math they wouldn't have their morons burning down cities. If the people burning down cities or ruining their lives by getting upset by this could understand the papers referenced, the world would be safe from them. 

I Done Learnt Somethin New Today

With thanks to Angus McThag at The Abode of McThag, because he posted a piece that made me aware of something called Earth Hour (or Urf Ower as he called it). In short, Earth Hour is just as stupid and useless as Earth Day which happens on April 22 ever year, except it's one hour long on the night of March 28th from 8:30 to 9:30. I feel it's not important for me to check the accuracy of this statement, but I think I've written some post about the stupidity of Earf day every year since I started the blog in 2010. 

Earf Ower started 22 years ago, and a website called Holiday Today describes it this way:

Earth Hour is observed on the last Saturday of March each year as a global grassroots movement for the environment. In 2026, the specific date for the event is March 28. During this hour, millions of people, businesses, and landmarks across more than 190 countries and territories switch off non-essential electric lights from 8:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. local time. This symbolic act is organized by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) to raise awareness about the dual crises of climate change and nature loss. Beyond the simple flick of a switch, the initiative encourages participants to “Give an Hour for Earth” by spending 60 minutes doing something positive for the planet, such as learning about biodiversity or adopting sustainable daily habits.

It'll probably be over by the time I post this. 

I'm torn between making fun of this "holiday" and just ignoring it. Compared to the pages of text I've dedicated to Earth Day, it doesn't seem worth it to make fun of an hour. Many times I've said Earth Day is my very favorite holiday to make fun of. Even more than Kwanzaa. This has some of the smell of Earth Day, but nowhere near as much of it. So since it's in the same spirit as Earth Day, but only 1/24 as long, I'll just borrow a couple of paragraphs I've used for the longer "holiday".

The simple truth is that virtually everything about the holiday and the environmental movement is crap. The modern green movement is simply about rich, privileged people wanting to have places to visit that they think are pretty; and unspoiled. They want pretty, natural, wild-looking places to visit on vacations. If that means the people who are living in or near those places have to live lives that range from austere to practically unsurvivable, the greenies think that's just wonderful. 

When you think of it that way, it's easy to realize that the greenies care only about themselves and their enjoyments of life. Of course we should all protect the wilderness! It's theirs! That was never as clear to me as it was while reading Apocalypse Never by Michael Shellenberger a couple of years ago. He vividly talks about people in the wilds of Africa who desperately need better ways to grow food, get water and need electricity. Instead they're kept in a life of desperation by the environmentalists.

Gee, it's after 9:30. Earf Ower is over in the Eastern time zone.

Earf Ower symbol borrowed from Holiday Today. 

Trump Admin orders review of environmental rules for rocket launches

The administration has ordered a review of rules intended to protect the public and environment during rocket launches, according to a report by Propublica published on Ars Technica yesterday. 

A draft executive order being circulated among federal agencies, and viewed by ProPublica, directs Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy to “use all available authorities to eliminate or expedite” environmental reviews for launch licenses. It could also, in time, require states to allow more launches or even more launch sites—known as spaceports—along their coastlines.

The order is a step toward the rollback of federal oversight that Musk, who has fought bitterly with the Federal Aviation Administration over his space operations, and others have pushed for.  Commercial rocket launches have grown exponentially more frequent in recent years.

This is undoubtedly going to "trigger" the people opposed to launches essentially anytime or anywhere because Secretary of Transportation Duffy is also serving as NASA administrator and critics would argue that he has a conflict of interest. 

Because they fly so much more than any other launch service provider, SpaceX and Elon Musk have been at the center of this storm.  Musk has fought bitterly with the Federal Aviation Administration over his space operations, as well as the things other launch providers have pushed for. 

As you'd expect the advocates for fewer launches have started showing up.  

Critics warn such a move could have dangerous consequences.

“It would not be reasonable for them to be rescinding regulations that are there to protect the public interest, and the public, from harm,” said Jared Margolis, a senior attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit that works to protect animals and the environment. “And that’s my fear here: Are they going to change things in a way that puts people at risk, that puts habitats and wildlife at risk?”

Naturally, that's assuming the regulations are properly constructed with no mistakes either in creating or implementing them, and are written in a perfect compromise between the desire to do no damage to anything and the need get things into space. 

It's reported that documents show the draft order also seeks to restrict the authority of state coastal officials who have challenged commercial launch companies.  It could lead to federal officials interfering with state efforts to enforce their environmental rules when they conflict with the construction or operation of spaceports.  They seem to be afraid the Federal government will order states or territories to build spaceports instead of whatever the states want to build.  I'm fairly certain that has never happened and it seems hard to think it would happen now. 

The changes outlined in the order would greatly benefit SpaceX, which launches far more rockets into space than any other company in the US. But it would also help rivals such as Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and California-based Rocket Lab. The companies have been pushing to pare down oversight for years, warning that the US is racing with China to return to the moon—in hopes of mining resources like water and rare earth metals and using it as a stepping stone to Mars—and could lose if regulations don’t allow US companies to move faster, said Dave Cavossa, president of the Commercial Space Federation, a trade group that represents eight launch companies, including SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Rocket Lab.

“It sounds like they’ve been listening to industry, because all of those things are things that we’ve been advocating for strongly,” Cavossa said when asked about the contents of the draft order.

I hope the author at Pro Publica understands the talk about mining water on the moon, is for use on the moon, not to send back down to Earth.  Same with rare earth metals - they're for use on the moon.  

Currently, the FAA’s environmental reviews look at 14 types of potential impacts that include air and water quality, noise pollution, and land use, and provide details about the launches that are not otherwise available. They have at times drawn big responses from the public.

When SpaceX sought to increase its Starship launches in Texas from five to 25 a year, residents and government agencies submitted thousands of comments. Most of the nearly 11,400 publicly posted comments opposed the increase, a ProPublica analysis found. The FAA approved the increase anyway earlier this year. After conducting an environmental assessment for the May launch of SpaceX’s Starship Flight 9 from Texas, the FAA released documents that revealed as many as 175 airline flights could be disrupted and Turks and Caicos’ Providenciales International Airport would need to close during the launch.

Since SpaceX is launching more than anyone on Earth, it seems fitting to leave the closing comments to him.

Musk helped lead the charge. Last September, he told attendees at a conference in Los Angeles, “It really should not be possible to build a giant rocket faster than paper can move from one desk to another.” 

In the background, a Falcon 9 rocket climbs away from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, while in the foreground another Falcon 9 stands on Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center awaiting its opportunity to fly.

Johnson Atoll becomes a "do not use" land preserve

Johnson Atoll is an unincorporated US territory and Pacific island wildlife refuge located about 860 miles southwest of Hawaii, which has been used for many military projects of different types over the last 90 years.  

[T]he island hosted an airfield during World War II before operating as a launch site for atmospheric nuclear tests during the 1950s and 1960s, some of which resulted in plutonium contamination at the atoll. The US government then requisitioned the area for chemical weapons experiments with similar consequences before ultimately cordoning it as a remote storage depot for the same deadly biological agents.

This year, the Atoll was announced as being under consideration for testing the elements of a new military cargo system based around the idea of shipping tons of cargo anywhere quickly.  

Those decades of progress appeared in jeopardy earlier this year. In March, the Air Force first announced intentions to once again requisition the unincorporated US territory, this time for its Research Laboratory’s Rocket Cargo Vanguard Program. The US Space Force-affiliated endeavor aims to establish a system to deliver as much as 100 tons of cargo to anywhere on Earth in less than 90 minutes.

“In the event of conflict or humanitarian crisis, the Space Force will be able to provide our national leadership with an independent option to achieve strategic objectives from space,” Chief of Space Operations Gen. John W. “Jay ” Raymond said during the program’s announcement. 

SpaceX is the only launch provider mentioned, presumably for Starship and SuperHeavy which SpaceX has talked about as launching suborbital flights like this: that is, trips between any two points on Earth in 90 minutes.  Another possibility is that linked story is published in Popular Science and it must be considered that SpaceX is mentioned because they don't expect their readers to know Blue Origin's New Glenn, or ULA's Vulcan by name and they're using SpaceX to get more clicks.  

The Department of the Air Force’s confirmation, first provided to Stars and Stripes, came ahead of a planned environment assessment and amid mounting pressure from conservationists.

“The Department of the Air Force has elected to hold the preparation of the Johnston Atoll Environmental Assessment for a proposed rocket cargo landing demonstration on Johnston Atoll in abeyance while the service explores alternative options for implementation,” Air Force spokesperson Laurel Falls said in the email.

The article explains the situation in language you see regularly when conservation groups don't want a particular place to become environmentally spoiled - that is, made less pretty to them.  The big story is the place being ruined by the new controllers of the now-spoiled island, and a "noble savage" hurt by the new users.  

Johnson Atoll is home to 14 different species of tropical birds.  Image credit: Credit: USFWS / Tor Johnson

SpaceX Tries something new with Falcon 9

That statement is hard to wrap your head around.  With the 500th launch of a Falcon booster just last week,  the concept of doing something new with a Falcon 9 is a bit hard to grasp.   Haven't they done pretty much everything that can be done with a Falcon?  

Not according to this week's Rocket Report from Ars Technica.  

[T]he company tried something new following a launch on June 7 with a radio broadcasting satellite for SiriusXM. The Falcon 9's upper stage placed the SXM-10 satellite into an elongated, high-altitude transfer orbit, as is typical for payloads destined to operate in geosynchronous orbit more than 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) over the equator. When a rocket releases a satellite in this type of high-energy orbit, the upper stage has usually burned almost all of its propellant, leaving little fuel to steer itself back into Earth's atmosphere for a destructive reentry. This means these upper stages often remain in space for decades, becoming a piece of space junk that transits across the orbits of many other satellites.

Now, a solution ... SpaceX usually deorbits rockets after they deploy payloads like Starlink satellites into low-Earth orbit, but deorbiting a rocket from a much higher geosynchronous transfer orbit is a different matter. "Last week, SpaceX successfully completed a controlled deorbit of the SiriusXM-10 upper stage after GTO payload deployment," wrote Jon Edwards, SpaceX's vice president of Falcon and Dragon programs. "While we routinely do controlled deorbits for LEO stages (e.g., Starlink), deorbiting from GTO is extremely difficult due to the high energy needed to alter the orbit, making this a rare and remarkable first for us. This was only made possible due to the hard work and brilliance of the Falcon GNC (guidance, navigation, and control) team and exemplifies SpaceX's commitment to leading in both space exploration and public safety."

This graphic illustrates the elliptical shape of a geosynchronous transfer orbit in green, and the circular shape of a geosynchronous orbit in blue. In a first, SpaceX recently de-orbited a Falcon 9 upper stage from GTO after deploying a communications satellite.  Image credit: European Space Agency

Over the course of the last few years, you've probably noticed a bit of an emphasis on trying to keep Earth orbit cleaner and less cluttered.  This is a topic I've devoted column space to over the years - another example.  I guess it's attractive to the greenies. 

It's My Favorite Fake Holiday - It's Earf Day!

From a very important holiday from a historical viewpoint on Sunday to a totally made-up fest for Tuesday, it's a holiday start to the week. 

Yes, it's time for our annual bacchanalia of the made-up holiday they call Earth Day, my very favorite holiday to make fun of.   Even more than Kwanzaa.  

As befitting the environmental movement, my tribute to Earth Day is almost entirely recycled, and is almost entirely useless. Plus, it's late. The only way it could fit the environmental movement better would be if everything I said was factually wrong. Everything here is factually correct. 

I've posted on Earf Day so many times that it's hard not to be repetitive, even if I was trying not to be. So nothing this time about Ira Einhorn murdering his girlfriend or the completely discredited book, The Population Bomb.  No, wait.  I just mentioned them both.  Rats! 

The simple truth is that virtually everything about the holiday and the environmental movement is crap. The modern green movement is simply about rich, privileged people wanting to have places to visit that they think are pretty; and unspoiled.  They want pretty, natural, wild-looking places to visit on vacations. If that means the people who are living in or near those places have to live lives that range from austere to practically unsurvivable, the greenies think that's just wonderful.  

When you think of it that way, it's easy to realize that the greenies care only about themselves and their enjoyments of life.  Of course we should all protect the wilderness!  It's theirs!  That was never as clear to me as it was while reading Apocalypse Never by Michael Shellenberger a couple of years ago.  He vividly talks about people in the wilds of Africa who desperately need better ways to grow food, get water and need electricity.  Instead they're kept in a life of desperation by the environmentalists.

Probably the worst example is the one that we get beat up about every day: climate change.  Notice they don't mention "global warming" any more.  It's just "change."  As if the worldwide climate has always been the same. Let's start with that simple observation. They scream that the temperature has gone up since 1850! We're all going to die!  What they don't tell you is that the temperature in 1850 was among coldest periods in the last 10,000 years. 

That's Indonesia. How about if we reconstruct the temperature half a world away? North Atlantic instead of south Pacific; Greenland instead of Indonesia.

Those match fairly well but 1200 years ago was colder than the little ice age, while not as cold as about 8300 years ago.

Sorry. The temperature has gone up from one of the coldest periods in the last half billion years.  

 

The closer you look, the worse the picture is. Borepatch ran a piece last year about one of the more insidious things they do: they change the historical records to make the older temperatures look cooler and the newer ones look hotter. That's right; they're lying in all the official documents and have been for as long as this Con has been going on. One of the things that convinced me that skepticism was proper was the Surface Stations Project that Watts Up With That? started back in the '00s. It was a report on the official stations that create the weather record and how large percentages of them weren't sited properly; over 62% were incapable of accuracy better than 2 degrees C. Another 6% couldn't measure within 5 degrees C. They're too close to roads, too close to sources of heat like air conditioner outputs, even airport runways, and more problems. Then there was outright fraud in editing records. 

I'm old enough to remember when the fear was a coming ice age. Anything to scare you into compliance. 

 

And this isn't even going near things like how bad their models are. They still basically can't handle clouds properly. Virtually none of their predictions ever actually prove to be the case. Instead we get useful idiot celebrities who are too young to understand weather and climate both change (to be charitable). If a 20 or a 40 year old can't remember similar weather, it doesn't mean anything. 

You know the current fuss about the temperature by 2100 isn't supposed to go up more than 1 degree or "we all gonna die"?   (say that like Jasmin Crocket saying "we done pickin' cotton)  In these two plots the one on the left is the prediction they push on us; the one on right is shows the error bands expected.  For example, at the right end of the plot on the left, it shows their global temperature as increasing by 3.75 degrees by 2100.   The uncertainty is +25 / -15 degrees.  That's 40 degrees uncertainty out of 4?  In the kind of simulations I'm used to that's so bad it's unusable.  The remarkable part is how bad the people who released this plot are at (I'll just call it) math (read this).

Maybe if the people pushing this climate change stuff could do this math they wouldn't have their morons burning down stuff.  Like Teslas, for example.

Maybe I've Been Triggered

Maybe I've been triggered because I'm sensitive to the topic, maybe I'm sick of the same old ... stuff, but I saw something supposedly coming from Bobby Kennedy and the MAHA folks.  I've spent hours looking for it between yesterday and today but couldn't find it again.  Which makes me doubt talking about this, but it's a slow news day.  

What I'd swear I saw was a list of things that they're supposedly interested in looking into the health effects of the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP).  Coming from a career in radio design - transmitters, receivers and all the major subsystems in them - I've heard absurd fear of radio signals for so long, I start subconsciously twitching when I come across a new story.  

Let's start here.  Most people don't think this way but every minute of every day you live immersed in a constant soup of radio signals.  Forget about your phone or your home WiFi router, the things you usually think of, there are sources from almost audio frequencies through broadcast radio, shortwave broadcasters, TV over the air, police radios, taxi radios, weather radios and on and on up into the microwave spectrum and beyond that into what are called millimeter waves that you're exposed to every day.  Some of them all day, some of them irregularly or intermittently.  Unless you take absurd steps to prevent this - forget the tin foil hat, it's more like a tin foil 100% cover - you live in this every day.  If you turn off your phone, you turn off what it produces; the signals from every other phone and every cell tower are still there.  

So let's think of it in another way the most people won't.  The first law of Toxicology - the study of toxins or poisons is "The Dose Makes the Poison" and the guy who started the field said a big enough dose makes something toxic that isn't usually thought of that way.  The classic example is oxygen; not just nontoxic but essential to life, as in without it we die.  At a high enough partial pressure, it's toxic.  That's why really deep sea diving doesn't use compressed air but exotic mixes of other gases and oxygen.  

A big enough "dose" of radio will burn you.  Since radio is just very, very far infrared light, it immediately brings to mind a laser.  Lasers are high power lights and dose is the power.  Can high power radio hurt you?  Absolutely!  That's why there are limits imposed on the power that systems can produce that people can be exposed to.  The power required to hurt someone depends somewhat on the physical size of the radio waves; the allowable power for a system to expose the general public to is lowest around the FM broadcast band because people are similar in size to 1/4 wavelength at some point in the FM band, depending on how they're sitting; 234/freq. in MHz gives 1/4 wave, so 2.66 ft @ 88 MHz and 2.17 ft @ 108 MHz.  

The saving grace of all that radio soup we live in is that it's all low power by the time it gets to us.  Radio signals drop off in power very fast.  It drops to 1/4 of the power every time you double the distance from the transmitter.  A relationship I've shown many times here is a bit less accurate than the fully rigorous calculations, but it's easy to stick in a spreadsheet somewhere and use it when you need it.  

Path loss in dB = 37 dB + 20log(f) + 20log(d)  where f is the frequency in MHz and d is the distance in miles.  

What's a dB?  It's a decibel, a power ratio.  A loss of 3 dB is 1/2 the power, -6 dB is 1/4, -9 dB is 1/8.  So imagine you're calculating how much power you're exposed to from an FM broadcaster in town. 

Path loss in dB = 37 dB + 20log(100) + 20log(10)  where f 100 MHz and d is 10 miles

Path loss is 97 dB

Now 97 dB is a lot of loss, but FM broadcasters often start out with high powers.  I have a local FM station here in town that says they start out at 1000 watts.  Us Receiver guys refer to that as 60 dB more than 1.00 milliwatt or +60 dBm transmit power (dB is ratio, dBm is a power ratio to 1 milliwatt).  Taking away 97 dB of that gives me -37 dBm.  That's a perfectly usable signal to a radio receiver, but it's 3.2 millivolts RMS or .0032V on digital voltmeter. That's not going to hurt anybody or anything.  

So let's do the same thing with HAARP, according to their documents.  The frequency is 2.7 to 10 MHz, and the distance depends on where you are with respect to the transmitter.  Essentially the distance is up to the ionosphere and out to your location.  The ionosphere covers a fairly wide range of altitudes, but at most is in the "couple of hundred miles" range (photo below) and the altitude will drop out of the equations for a path to the center of the country.  Some web searches show the center of the US is just outside of Lebanon, Kansas, and that it's close enough to say 3300 miles from HAARP.

Path loss in dB = 37 dB + 20log(10) + 20log(3300)  where f 100 MHz and d is 10 miles

Path loss is 127 dB

The power of HAARP is variable, the antenna pattern can change plus there are other differences depending on what the experiment is. That said, 3.6 Million Watts is 95.6 dBm and after the path loss the level is close to previous example - a bit stronger at -31.4 dBm or closer to 6mV, .006V.  

Atmospheric layer heights from Wikipedia

I tried to pick numbers for the distance that weren't too far from or too close to Alaska to be reasonable, but it's a bit surprising that these numbers ended up being within a couple of dB for a local, low power FM station and HAARP.  Bottom line is I still see nothing about that situation that's remotely scary.  As a general rule, the only time a radio signal can be dangerous is if you're close enough to touch the transmitter. 

Wandering Weekend

Yesterday got away from me but not in the usual way, which is that I'm here working on various things including finding something that I think is worth posting but can't really find anything.  Sometimes I start down a path and either mess it up or can't find a piece of information I want.  Sometimes I get distracted by a different project or something to play with. 

The big difference was that yesterday was entirely family-centered and hours away from home.  Mrs. Graybeard and I don't have much family left to interact with, so the events of the last year have changed that in a remarkable way.  I've mentioned son, DDL (Dear Daughter in Law) and PGD (Precious Grand Daughter), and long time readers might even remember those acronyms.  Unfortunately, they live over a thousand miles away so they're difficult to visit with.

The changes have come from my older brother's son and daughter.  Nephew got married well over a year ago, and had their first baby around a year ago.  They were living out of state until summer of '23, and we met niece-in-law on last Thanksgiving.  I have no idea what to call my relationship with the baby.  Not to be outdone, my niece got married in mid-'23, and while she lost one pregnancy, she delivered her first back in December.  I neglected to mention that niece-in-law is expecting their second in March. 

All of which sets up where we were all day yesterday.  Actual niece decided to throw a baby shower for niece-in-law at nephew and niece-in-law's house over on the west side of the state.  They're in location that's just hard to get to from here. As the crow flies, it's around 65 miles, but any route the map programs give me are in the vicinity of 120 miles. So two hours driving instead of one, each way. 

That's awfully long; I just don't see much of a way of shortening it.  The setup is part of the story because it illustrates that both of these women, 30-ish year old millennials, are playing the role that seems to be called "trad-wife" - a disparaging term to the screaming liberal girls that we see on the 'net in a never-ending series of memes.  

It was great visiting with the two couples, along with the rest of the family. 

And for something completely different...

To begin with, Mike Myles at 90 Miles from Tyranny has a clip from a Tucker Carlson video that is a good intro to this.  

The topic isn't RFK Jr. or autism that he's talking about, but it kind of leads to what I'm thinking of.  

I certainly don't agree with everything I've heard him talking about but if the numbers he throws around have truth behind them something is seriously messed up in our health care, especially with the dramatically higher rates of many conditions.  Another line of evidence shows up in this video, also from 90 Miles. 

The fundamental issue is that in virtually every instance the science behind public health questions is poor quality - and that's because higher quality studies are inherently difficult and expensive to conduct.  The study run by the doctor in that second video may be about as good as the studies get.  Until the Covid era, I was one who pretty much swallowed all the crap on vaccines.  Then I started learning more about how little they test things like the recommended series of vaccines for children, and I'm really unsettled about that now.  The tests I'd like to see are in the category of “inherently difficult and expensive.”

Let me add two buzzwords I keep seeing and I have no idea how important they are in terms of health. They’re clearly important to get people talking and selling newspapers, online reading or something, but what little “science” I can find is even lower quality than usual for this sort of the stuff.

The buzzwords are “microplastics” and “forever chemicals”.

When I first heard of microplastics it sounded like a good thing. Everyone was worrying about plastics in the ocean and talking about the great Pacific Garbage patch when all of a sudden (that link is dated '17) it turned out that the plastics were being partially dissolved or even digested by some sort of bacteria or maybe a critter. That meant the big pieces of plastic were becoming small pieces of plastic, and if it’s a surface area phenomenon, smaller pieces have a higher surface area to mass ratio (very little mass) so they disappear faster.

In the last year or two, it has turned into people saying we have microplastics everywhere, and it’s getting talked about as something to be alarmed about.  I have yet to see any explanation of why we should be alarmed.

The second term, “forever chemicals,” seems almost self-contradictory. I’ll borrow a quote from a news article that came out recently.  

PFAS are aptly named “forever chemicals” because of their nearly indestructible chemical structure, which prevents them from breaking down in the environment. These chemicals build up in soil, water, and even the human body over time.

Exposure to PFAS has been linked to various health issues, including cancer, hormonal disruptions, developmental delays in children, and weakened immune systems.

My issues here are both different than usual and the same as usual. The different thing is that a “nearly indestructible chemical structure, which prevents them from breaking down in the environment” means these chemicals don’t react strongly with other chemicals (and everything, is a chemical).  I read that as saying if they don’t react with other chemicals, or only react very weakly, they'll react the same way with the chemicals in our bodies.  So how can they be "linked to various health issues, including cancer, hormonal disruptions, developmental delays in children, and weakened immune systems?"  It has to be another “correlation versus causation” trap that so many of these studies fall into.  It sorta works like this: a researcher notices an increase in these “various health issues” and compares the rate of increase with various things until they get something with a similar rate (yeah, that's the same as usual part).

The same article states “Among the most troubling effects is the potential for hormonal disruption, particularly in men, where PFAS exposure has been associated with plummeting testosterone levels.”  Again: chemicals that don’t react much if at all with other chemicals are breaking down a select group of chemical pathways?  If they’re not reacting, how are they doing that? 

An editorial cartoon from Rubbernews - found by web search for "forever chemicals."  

FAA Just Gave SpaceX a Big One

The day after SpaceX launched Flight Test 6, they received a long awaited approval from the Federal Aviation Administration. 

In a draft version of what is known as an "Environmental Assessment," the FAA indicated that it will grant SpaceX permission to increase the number of Starship launches in South Texas to 25 per year from the current limit of five. Additionally, the company will likely be allowed to continue increasing the size and power of the Super Heavy booster stage and Starship upper stage.

"FAA has concluded that the modification of SpaceX’s existing vehicle operator license for Starship/Super Heavy operations conforms to the prior environmental documentation, consistent with the data contained in the 2022 PEA, that there are no significant environmental changes, and all pertinent conditions and requirements of the prior approval have been met or will be met in the current action," the federal agency stated in its conclusion.

This isn't final. As always, the FAA is required to open this up for public comment, a period which will end on January 17th, eight weeks from now.  In addition to that, the agency will hold five public meetings to solicit feedback from the local community and other stakeholders to get input on expected impacts of the increased launch cadence. 

And there will be significant impacts. For example, the number of large trucks that deliver water, liquid oxygen, methane, and other commodities will increase substantially. According to the FAA document, the vehicle presence will grow from an estimated 6,000 trucks a year to 23,771 trucks annually. This number could be reduced by running a water line along State Highway 4 to supply the launch site's water deluge system.

SpaceX has reduced the duration of closures of State Road 4 through the area by 85%, by moving launch preparations that could be moved to the "Massey's Test Site," a former gun range they added in 2023. SpaceX is now expected to need less than 20 hours of access restrictions per launch campaign, including landings.  

Contrast the approval for 25 launches per year, pretty much one every other week, with Gwynne Shotwell's statement that she expects them to do 400 Starship launches in the next four years and you see the pretty obvious problem. Doing 25 in the first year turns the next three years to 375 launches and so on. At some point, there are too many launches at the end of the four years to be realistic. SpaceX has a pad on the Kennedy Space Center that has never actually held a vehicle or done any of the things they need the ground infrastructure to do; it's part of Launch complex 39. Plus, there has been talk about building a second launch pad on the KSC to handle Starship launches, Launch Complex 49 (last story of three), but there's talk about the impact of so many launches on the KSC, too. 

All that aside, notice that in the first paragraph quoted above the FAA said, "the company will likely be allowed to continue increasing the size and power of the Super Heavy booster stage and Starship upper stage." 

... SpaceX founder Elon Musk has said the company intends to move to a larger and more powerful version of the Starship and Super Heavy rocket about a year from now. This version, dubbed Starship 3, would double the thrust of the upper stage and increase the thrust of the booster stage from about 74 meganewtons to about 100 meganewtons. If that number seems a little abstract, another way to think about it is that Starship would have a thrust at liftoff three times as powerful as NASA's Saturn V rocket that launched humans to the Moon decades ago. The draft environmental assessment permits this as well.
...
For the time being, SpaceX will still need to receive a launch license from the FAA for individual flights and landings.

Will this quiet the groups trying to kick SpaceX off of South Padre Island, and restore it to being the pretty, unspoiled place they want it to be (but probably never was)? I seriously doubt it. I expect them to hit back with more and even less likely arguments. 

Integrated Flight Test 6, seconds after launch. Image credit: SpaceX

Now imagine looking at this and saying, "400 feet tall and twice the thrust of the Saturn V? I remember when Starships were that small."

It's Time to Celebrate Earf Day 2024!

It's time for our annual bacchanalia of the made-up holiday they call Earth Day, my very favorite holiday to make fun of.  Yes, even more than Kwanzaa.

As befitting the environmental movement, my tribute to Earth Day is almost entirely recycled, and is almost entirely useless. Plus, it's late. The only way it could fit the environmental movement better would be if everything I said was factually wrong. Everything here is factually correct. 

I've posted on Earf Day so many times that it's hard not to be repetitive, even if I was trying not to. So nothing this time about Ira Einhorn murdering his girlfriend or the almost completely discredited book, The Population Bomb. No, wait. I just did. Rats! 

The simple truth is that virtually everything about the holiday and the environmental movement is crap. The modern green movement is simply about rich, privileged people wanting to have places to visit that they consider to be unspoiled. They want pretty, natural, wild-looking places to visit on vacations. If that means the people who are living in or near those places have to live lives that range from austere to practically unsurvivable, that's fine. 

Under that picture, it's easy to realize that the greenies care only about themselves and their enjoyments of life. Of course we should all protect the wilderness! It's theirs! That was never as clear to me as it was while reading Apocalypse Never by Michael Shellenberger a couple of years ago. He vividly talks about people in the wilds of Africa who desperately need better ways to grow food, get water and need electricity. Instead they're kept in a life of desperation by the environmentalists.

Probably the worst example is the on that we get beat up about every day: climate change. Notice they don't mention "global warming" any more. It just change. As if the worldwide climate has always been the same. Let's start with that simple observation. They scream that the temperature has gone up since 1850! We're all going to die! Phrased a little differently, the temperature has gone up compared to the coldest period in the last 10,000 years.

That's Indonesia. How about if we reconstruct the temperature half a world away? North Atlantic instead of south Pacific; Greenland instead of Indonesia.

Those match fairly well but 1200 years ago was colder than the little ice age, while not as cold as about 8300 years ago.

Sorry. The temperature has gone up from one of the coldest periods in the last 500 million years. 

The closer you look, the worse the picture is. Borepatch ran a piece a little over a week ago about one of the more insidious things they do: they change the historical records to make the older temperatures look cooler and the newer ones look hotter. That's right; they're lying in all the official documents and have been for as long as this Con has been going on. One of the things that convinced me that skepticism was proper was the Surface Stations Project that Watts Up With That? started back in the '00s. It was a report on the official stations that create the weather record and how large percentages of them weren't sited properly; over 62% were incapable of accuracy better than 2 degrees C. Another 6% couldn't measure within 5 degrees C. They're too close to roads, too close to sources of heat like air conditioner outputs, even airport runways, and more problems. Then there was outright fraud in editing records. 

I'm old enough to remember when the fear was a coming ice age. Anything to scare you into compliance. 

And this isn't even going near things like how bad their models are. They still basically can't handle clouds properly. Virtually none of their predictions ever actually prove to be the case. Instead we get useful idiot celebrities who are too young to understand weather and climate both change (to be charitable). If a 20 or a 40 year old can't remember similar weather, it doesn't mean anything.

SpaceX Expansion at Boca Chica Just Got More Likely

The Texas Tribune reports that at Monday's meeting of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission they voted unanimously to pursue an exchange that would give 43 acres of Boca Chica State Park in Cameron County, Texas, to SpaceX.  In exchange, the state park land would be swapped for 477 acres adjacent to Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge, an area the agency has been interested in for many years because it’s “one of the most biologically diverse regions in North America” and provides habitat for endangered species and migratory birds. It's also reportedly an excellent area for fishing, kayaking, hiking, camping, and birding.

SpaceX appears to be swapping the 477-acre plot through an affiliate company.

SpaceX hasn't said how it will use the 43 acres it will receive in the deal, but the land is located near existing launch and rocket manufacturing infrastructure at Starbase. TPWD will now begin negotiations with SpaceX for the land swap, including environmental assessments that could take up to 18 months.

It shouldn't be a surprise that the people who oppose any sort of development would be out in protest about this.  According to the Texas Tribune story, people want to swim at that beach in Boca Chica without interruption or having to share the area in any way, so the opposition to this move has been big despite the gain of 11 acres at Atascosa for every acre given up at Boca Chica. 

At Monday’s TPWD meeting in Austin — the last opportunity for people to give feedback on the land swap — almost all chairs were occupied and people stood in the back. During nearly four hours of public testimony, most speakers opposed the exchange, including some who drove more than 300 miles to Austin from Brownsville in three minivans.

“Boca Chica Beach is the first place that my little brother went to a beach. I went there the day my sister was born and most recently I spread my uncle’s ashes there. Please do not give SpaceX an inch because they will take a mile,” said Emma Guevara, who grew up in Brownsville and is now a member of South Texas Environmental Justice Network and a field organizer in Brownsville for the Sierra Club.

TPWD spokesperson Stephanie Garcia said that public access to the public beach through the park or along State Highway 4 would remain as it is now, only interrupted for tests or launches that might endanger travelers along the road. She went on to say the 477 acres the state would receive is located along the Lower Laguna Madre — the shallow bay between the coast and South Padre Island — and would increase public water access.

Kathy Lueders, SpaceX's general manager at Starbase, spoke at Monday's meeting. "Those launches are exciting the young minds that are watching them … children become what they see," Lueders said as people booed behind her, according to the Texas Tribune. "Today it is not an aspiration to be a rocket scientist and work in the Rio Grande Valley. It is a reality. And one day we hope those kids that are following the launches are seeing themselves and a future spacecraft launching."

I was interested in the size and placement of the Laguna Atascosa NWR, so I asked Bing maps to show me and then did a screen capture.  The NWR is getting is the white outlined area at the top and the little ellipse in the lower right is the entire area of SpaceX Starbase, Boca Chica Village and everything else.  The white outlined area is the entire NWR, not just the 477 acres they're trading, and the oval is far more than just the 23 acres.  Just to see where they are on a satellite picture. 

SpaceX Moving to Take Over Another Cape Launch Complex

Sometime "No Later Than this summer" United Launch Alliance will launch the last Delta IV Heavy mission from Cape Canaveral's Space Launch Complex 37 (SLC-37).  This is one of the largest launch pads on the Cape - which it needs to be to handle Delta IVs - originally built to handle the Saturn 1 and 1B back in the 1960s.  After eight flights of those rockets, it sat unused until the 1990s when Boeing converted it to handle the Delta IV.  That was before Boeing merged with Lockheed Martin to form ULA and the Delta IV became a ULA vehicle.

An interesting alliance seems to be forming to try to get SpaceX to take over the complex and modify it to launch Starships.  The obvious one is SpaceX themselves; they're in the process of building a second Starship launch facility at Boca Chica. This would give them two launch pads here in Florida; the current one at Pad 39A and SLC-37.  The one you might not expect is that the Department of Defense and the US Air Force apparently want this, too.  

The environmental review for SpaceX's proposal to take over Space Launch Complex 37 (SLC-37) at Cape Canaveral is getting underway now, with three in-person public meetings and one virtual meeting scheduled for March to collect comments from local residents, according to a new website describing the plan.

Then, federal agencies, led by the Department of the Air Force, will develop an environmental impact statement to evaluate how Starship launch and landing operations will affect the land, air, and water around SLC-37, which sits on Space Force property on the Atlantic coastline.

It's worth noting that an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) is a tougher hurdle than the "Environmental Assessment" SpaceX went through to obtain the rights to launch in Texas. It's possible that the EIS could take years to complete.  According to a source at the Orlando Sentinel, republished at Phys.org, 

So the EIC is considering three options.

One is to transition Space Launch Complex 37 after it supports the final United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy rocket mission, expected to fly this summer.

The second is to construct a new launch pad called Space Launch Complex 50 that would be located between SLC 40 and SLC 37 on currently undeveloped land.

The final option is to do nothing.

The next steps in the EIS process will be a series of four public meetings around the Merritt Island home of the CCSFS in the cities of Cocoa, Titusville and Port Canaveral along with an online virtual meeting, according to the EIS website. These meetings are already scheduled for March 5-7 and 12.

With the understanding that the EIS could take years to complete, this has to be regarded as something interesting we can't do much about.  We don't - can't - know if or when this could happen, but it's looking increasingly likely we will see the world's most powerful rocket launch from the Cape.  For the first time since Apollo 17's Saturn V in December of 1972. 

This 2014 photo shows a Delta IV Heavy being readied for launch at SLC-37, Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.  NASA Photo by Kim Shiflett.

And the Starship-Spawned Lawsuits Begin

It was announced today that several environmental groups filed a lawsuit against the Federal Aviation Administration, arguing that the FAA improperly carried out the environmental review of SpaceX Starship launches from Boca Chica, Texas.  SpaceX was not listed as a defendant, nor did the suit demand that any future launches be halted. 

The lead plaintiff in the suit is the Center for Biological Diversity, joined by the American Bird Conservancy, Surfrider Foundation, Save RGV and the Carrizo/Comecrudo Nation of Texas, Inc., an organization which represents local Native American groups.  The FAA and its acting administrator, Billy Nolen, are listed as defendants.  

The suit argues that the FAA failed to fully assess the impacts on the environment from launches, as well as launch failures, by the Starship/Super Heavy vehicle, clearly motivated by the April 20 integrated flight test.  The suit adds that the FAA also did not take into account extended closures of the highway that leads to both the Starbase site and the neighboring public beach, which the groups argue is counter to Texas state laws that guarantees free access to such beaches.  Since SpaceX avoids road closures on weekends, when traffic is most likely, and seemingly does their best to only close the highway when needed, this seems spurious to me.   

It also argues that the agency did not adequately examine alternatives to launching from Boca Chica, such as launching from the Kennedy Space Center.  That sounds to me like the classic NIMBY argument, to which they added:

“Federal officials should defend vulnerable wildlife and frontline communities, not give a pass to corporate interests that want to use treasured coastal landscapes as a dumping ground for space waste,” said Jared Margolis, senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, the lead plaintiff in the suit.

As I've come to expect in these things, the plaintiffs exaggerate in their claims.  For example, they said the April 20th launch ended in “a fiery explosion of the rocket just after liftoff.” In reality, the self-destruct was carried out over four minutes after liftoff, and four minutes matters with a vehicle going, well, as fast as a rocket.  The vehicle was at an altitude of more than 18 miles above the Gulf of Mexico and 25 miles east of the launch complex.  There were no reports of rocket debris falling back on land, and as mentioned last Thursday (4/27), initial surveys by the US Fish and Wildlife service reported there was no evidence that the launch or its debris harmed wildlife. “At this time, no dead birds or wildlife have been found on refuge-owned or managed lands,” the agency said.

Since there was no evidence of wildlife being harmed the complaint focused on the launch hardware. 

The April 20 launch did cause damage to the launch site itself, “spewing chunks of concrete and metal, as well as ash and sand, over a large area,” the complaint stated, including nearby habitats used by protected migratory bird species.
...
A photo included in an American Bird Conservancy statement about the lawsuit showed a nest of eggs that appeared to have been burned, but the organization did not state when the photo was taken or what species of bird the eggs belonged to.

I notice that while they point out the area is used by "protected migratory bird species" they don't say that those birds are there now and therefore susceptible to being injured. 

Since my knowledge of legal process is so small as to approach being negative, while it seems to be a good thing that SpaceX isn't being sued, we know that the courts have a way of tying things up and expanding their control.  It's part of the saying, "the process is the punishment."  As reported yesterday, Musk says the company could be ready to fly again within a couple of months.  The potential holdup is that the FAA will need to sign off on those plans. The license it awarded SpaceX was originally valid for a single launch and would have to be amended by the agency before SpaceX could launch again.

Conceivably, the whole process of going through the courts could start and unfold while SpaceX repairs and rebuilds their "stage zero" hardware, improving it greatly.  Remember, the plaintiffs haven't filed to prevent future launches - although the by withholding the license, the FAA is doing it by default.  

It wouldn't be a Greenie lawsuit without invoking gloom and doom, though.

“At what point do we say ‘Space exploration is great, but we need to save habitats here on Earth as a top priority?’” said Mike Parr, president of the American Bird Conservancy, in the statement announcing the suit. “For the sake of future generations, let’s protect the healthy habitats we have left instead of treating them as wasteplaces for pollution and fuselage.”

Gee, Mr. Parr, the Fish and Wildlife Service's and SpaceX's own reports from the area say the habitat is pretty much unaffected.  All we know that happened was some sand got moved from an original spot to a different spot.  Oh, yeah; it had some concrete dust mixed in.  Is that a big deal?  

A golden moment during liftoff of the Starship flight test, captured by Trevor Mahlmann.  Yes, he says those colors are real.

Special Note: In that last paragraph from Mike Parr of the American Bird Conservatory, he has a sentence that means nothing to me.  “For the sake of future generations, let’s protect the healthy habitats we have left instead of treating them as wasteplaces for pollution and fuselage.”  First, I've never seen the word wasteplaces but I can make that into two words and have it make sense: maybe a waste place is a garbage dump.  Second, I can find no definition for fuselage that makes any sense here.  They all are pretty much the body of an aircraft (rarely, a submarine), derived from the word for "spindle-shaped".  Does that sentence make sense to anybody?  Is he saying a garbage dump for pollution and rocket bodies?