SpaceX tries to wash away Texas pollution allegations Elon Musk's SpaceX is disputing claims that its rockets are polluting water in Texas from the deluge system used to stop Starship ripping up its launchpad on lift-off. Specifically, those claims are that SpaceX has been violating environmental regulations by discharging pollutants into or near bodies of water in Texas. The …
There have been notes that the minimum detectable level for mercury in the tests used is 0.113 ug/l and it is standard to list negligible mercury concentration as "> .113" in reports. This could mean it's just a typo no-one caught until now, and it's also somewhat puzzling where that amount of mercury could be coming from if it isn't a typo.
...and it's also somewhat puzzling where that amount of mercury could be coming from if it isn't a typo.
That's what I don't get. If it's taking potable water, storing it, then blowtorching it.. Where might the mercury be coming from? I guess being EPA-land, Space X would have to account for any mercury it might use on or around its launches that might be a source. I kinda wonder if when the report says it's fresh/potable water, it's being extracted from the wells around the Texas site where from memory, fraccing water had been dumped so if that's the source. If so, should be traceable.
<q>... I kinda wonder if when the report says it's fresh/potable water, it's being extracted from the wells around the Texas site where from memory, fraccing water had been dumped so if that's the source....</q>
All of the water is trucked in from Brownsville where it's taken directly from the potable water supply. This has been confirmed by the folks over at NSF, amongst many others, who've seen the trucks filling up and then heading off down Highway 4 to the Boca Chica launch site.
The plans for the water extraction on site was abandoned due to the high salt content and other contaminants that would definitely affect the environment, but also damage the equipment.
"However, the water is exposed to the exhaust from Starship's engines, among other contaminants
The byproducts of burning methane and oxygen are water and carbon dioxide, not exactly highly toxic. Not sure what the byproducts of TEA-TEB are, so might be a little bit of something from that.
The mercury contamination may be unintentional. It is very difficult to get perfectly pure chemicals. Indeed, when the US scientist Cameron Paterson ('Pat' to his friends) was tasked with determining the age of the Earth by checking lead isotopes all over the place he discovered that we had polluted the entire surface of the planet with lead, mostly from the burning of fossil fuels with added tetra-ethyl-lead. The Earth was so polluted that his equipment for measuring lead contamination was itself so contaminated as the invalidate the results, so he had first to refine the materials to make new detector, and then perform the analysis all over again. (Pretty everything you can see that is less than 5000 years old, or has not been specifically refined is contaminated with lead, as humans started heating metals about 7000 years ago, liberating all those lovely neuro-toxins like lead and mercury in vapour forms ready for inhalation. That is everything, you , me, my computer, your food, etc. etc. etc.)
It is quite possible that mercury contaminants are present in rocket fuel, concrete and elsewhere in the systems, and liberated by the heat of he rocket engines, the absorbed into water used for quenching.
Yet people STILL claim the risks are over egged and "nanny state gone mad" and "I grew up around it and it did me no harm"(though often these folks are often the less well educated in society.....hmmm wonder if there is a link there.......)
(Yes I know all about the intellectual impairments that exposure to lead can cause, not least due to poor kids in Baltimore who suffered due to the following study - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore_Lead_Paint_Study )
Is not only toxic in doses less than 1Kg through inhalation but is also a very powerful greenhhouse gas. There are far too many systems taking relatively innocuous methane (which has an upper atmospheric lifetime of a few years) and converting it to Dihydrogen Monoxide which has no measurable half life in the atmosphere). This must stop NOW!!!!!!! Please won't someone think of the children (who are already composed of about 60% by mass of this toxic chemical).
Please?
They were not forced to add it, it was planned to be added after the first launch.
The consultants who designed the pad said that it would survive one launch without significant damage, but that failed to correctly consider how the ground under the pad would react to the force exerted on it by the engines - resulting in buckling of the concrete and large chunks being "converted" into projectiles.
somewhere, I think I saw something that stated that SpaceX was somewhat surprised the first Starship launch went as well as it did -- there was some happy surprise it cleared the tower. IF true, I think that explains the seemingly obviously insufficient launch structure. If you are concerned there's a high possibility that the entire thing might go "BOOM"...why spend a lot of effort on the launch structure that is likely to be destroyed?
Also...ultimately, Starship is supposed to take off from unprepared sites (moon, Mars). We just don't have much experience with that. Yes, we've landed things, but in the case of Apollo, what took off basically used the landing stage as a launch platform. Might have been highly educational to find out how rocket exhaust tosses things around. Total speculation on my part.
"...somewhat surprised the first Starship launch went as well as it did..."
You mean the first launch of Starship Super Heavy, with the massive booster added.
"Starship is supposed to take off from unprepared sites (moon, Mars)."
Starship HLS will hopefully do that, but without the massive booster: it won't be Starship Super Heavy taking off from Moon/Mars.
Confusingly the StarShip/SuperHeavy stack is also called StarShip...
It's only that upper stage StarShip which will do landings/takeoffs from unprepared surfaces.
Given the lower gravity on the relevant bodies... it's probably an order of magnitude less thrust...
Mass of SS/SH at earth take off is ~5 million kg, so neutral thrust would be ~50 MN (actually does 74MN)
Mass of SH at lunar/martian take off is ~1.3 million kg, so neutral thrust of 2MN or 5M....
Yes - a full order of magnitude lower.
ALL the pollution comes from the Earth, and it all stays on the Earth. It's the consequence of manufacturing "purified" objects, the source material comes from the Earth, becomes "purified" into a finished good, and then all the non-desirable constituents get isolated and then somehow have to be put somewhere. "Where" do you put a substance that came from the Earth, I guess you could put it back where you got it from? Only now instead of a trace contaminant, your toxic waste has become highly concentrated...
As with Fukushima, just dump that radioactive coolant out at sea so it can disperse across the world's oceans where it might not even be detectable (after awhile).
... it's also difficult to find some place to even bury it since some substances are liable to poison the groundwater.
Hey this sounds like a complicated issue!
Instead of indulging in tit for tat riot/revolution comment with musk the uk gubbamint should gently pour could water on all the space exploration claims that make him look like some sort of visionary.
Nobodys going to mars,nobodys going to another solar system etc etc as its just the same old refried activity we have had since the 1960s.
Obviously if he agrees to pilot a mars mission himself next year I would hope we all make it happen.
Space exploration, for living creatures, is a futile exercise.
Yeah it's because "space" is completely barren and hostile environment where nothing that didn't evolutionarily adapt can survive!
There are some interesting experiments, like "suppose I sent a seed out into space and it floated around in space for awhile and then was gravitationally attracted to another planet and landed on that planet and then found some soil or something and then germinated or whatever, could that even happen?" yes, an interesting fantasy.
Or, "what if a bunch of really tough and hardy bacteria were blasted into space and floated through the galaxy and then landed on some other rocky watery planet that wasn't a gas giant or a star or a black hole or comet, could they colonize and become an extra-terrestrial algae bloom on the side of a rock?"
Or, "what if some rich a-holes in flying gas tank land empty on a barren dusty rock without water air gravity food sunlight magnetosphere and they got blasted by a coronal mass ejection, how miserably do they die?" Galileo called this "thought experimentation," because it's cheaper and less lethal than going to find out first-hand.
Yeah it's because "space" is completely barren and hostile environment where nothing that didn't evolutionarily adapt can survive!
Oh no it isn't. It's a lot like the way we can live on, or under the oceans. We can survive those and they're also 'barren' (ish) and hostile environments. Pressure differential is bass-ackwards between space and water, and it's equally difficult to go fish whilst submerged as it would be on a space craft or colony. But for a colony, we could export fish eggs so at some point, Martian salmon could compete with Scottish salmon. Note samon, not samlon. Finding those could be.. bad.
But space isn't completely barren. It has a carpton of resources floating around above our heads. Those could be exploited, along with the possibility of doing interesting things with zero or microgravity manufacturing. We're constantly told about 'peak <whatever>', but every mineral found down here can be found up there. Of course exploiting those have there own challenges, ie if we could go mine a few megatonnes of gold from the asteroid belt, it would trash the price of gold down here. Getting stuff into space is expensive, getting stuff back down is just a small matter of making sure it land where you want it. Gravity does the rest. But that then leads into interesting economic arguments that Tim Worstall used to write about here, and if manageable, could lead to concepts like a post-scarcity world. Or solar system.
We could carry on strip-mining the Earth, or we could look upwards and outwards. SF writers have been sharing these ideas for a long time, scientists and engineers have been slowly turning them into reality.
People were saying no one would ever go into space, and that putting men on the moon was just nutty science fiction.
And then we did it, and now we are working on going back.
Exploring new places is part of what makes us human, unless we do something stupid we will go to Mars, and then on to the asteroid belt and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn... and then who knows.
We DO have a theoretical design for something like Star Trek's warp drive...
Meanwhile, back on planet Earth (where all of us currently live) there is a very extensive ToDo list to enable our home world to continue to be habitable on into the foreseeable future, let alone the far future. Exploring the solar system and beyond is certainly an interesting exercise, but probably not an immediate priority when it comes to human well being, and the well being of life on earth generally.
"People were saying no one would ever go into space, and that putting men on the moon was just nutty science fiction."
That's a demonstration of how poor science was taught that many years ago. The depressing thing is that it hasn't become any better.
There are many things that don't violate the laws of physics (as we know them) but engineering art hasn't figured out a way to do them. It's important to break down what's truly impossible, what we don't know how to just yet and the things we can do but make no sense from an efficiency or financial standpoint. I enjoy studying engineering history and looking for things that would tossed on the junk heap and seeing if what was holding them back is a solved issue. Early in the days of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs, NASA was doing tons of pure research into materials and processes. Just like taking a look through mine tailings to find valuable minerals/metals, it can be useful to at least understand why something researched a long time ago was set aside.
We DO have a theoretical design for something like Star Trek's warp drive...
Sadly, I think the "theory" there boils down to, "first, we use magic to warp space...". It's in the same vein as "if we had material with negative mass, we could make a wormhole," in that it relies on "exotic" physics with no experimental basis to make it work. See also "if we could travel faster than light, we could go backwards in time," and "to an observer sitting outside the universe..."
It's all consistent with theoretical physics, it's just that nasty reality that keeps getting in the way.
""Nobodys going to mars,nobodys going to another solar system etc etc"
Not with that attitude."
Yes and no. The hurdles that we can identify might be higher than we can surmount. Humans on Mars? Certainly, with nuclear propulsion and shipping cheap and fast enough to preposition supplies is a likely requirement. Other solar systems? We might have to find some drugs that morph us into giant worms that can fold space.
Setting aside the highly plausible theories above that this is a simply typo in a report, on the (probably sound) assumption that SpaceX itself has no use for mercury, isn't buying any and so forth, it'd be a bit harsh to criticise them for releasing it. A fairly trivial materials audit for the rocket would show there's no mercury used in its construction or fuel or launch complex. I can't imagine where on earth it'd be useful in a methaLOX stainless steel rocket. If there's no mercury going in, then the mercury coming out ain't nothing to do with SpaceX.
It's possible that there is mercury in the environment that is being released because of SpaceX's operation. But then I imagine any pre-SpaceX survey should have already shown that, or (more likely) no one was looking and it's now being found.
Or, as others have suggested, it's a typo in the report.
It could just have been that, when all those engines lit up and everybody started yelling, somebody lost a filling.
About eighteen months ago I lost one. It had been there for more than fifty years, and then one day it just fell out.
At my next checkup I gave it to the dentist to dispose of.
If there's anything that these complaints prove it's that treehuggers prefer to get riled up over high profile cases, rather than face the real issues. I'll bet that each and every complainant drives a car, switches the lights on in the evening and owns plastic products. Which means that during 24 hours each and every one of them causes more pollution than the pad run-off of a dozen Starship launches will. But rather than to face the impact of their own lifestyle (not to mention the fact that in that respect they're no worse than any of us!) they get up in arms about the huge pollution that SpaceX represents.
Gimme a break.
I remember in the TV series Chernobyl there was a scene where the Politburo was discussing the radiation level as being at 4.7 RADs (or some such other value), and the expert piped up that it was actually the maximum value that Soviet Geiger counters could read. Probably this is the same situation, but in reverse.
Space-X has a business model based on re-usability, so the end of the process will probably be a better design for launch pads.
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