Will environmentalists derail the Artemis’ return to the moon?

Along with the technical challenges SpaceX’s Elon Musk faces getting his Starship rocket operational, he has to deal with the environmental regulators who must approve everything, since the Starbase launch facility sits in the middle of a wildlife preserve. Recently, the Federal Aviation Administration finally granted SpaceX a launch license.

But now, after the first test of the Starship, a coalition of environmental organizations has sued the FAA in a Washington D.C, district court to stop any subsequent launch tests, pending a full-scale environmental impact study, according to Ars Technica. The suit claims that the FAA, in granting SpaceX permission to launch the Starship, is in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), first passed in 1970. The potential disaster such a legal action would wreak against the Artemis return to the moon program cries out for a legislative solution.

Shortly after the SpaceX Starship/Super Heavy rocket soared into the skies over Texas, it encountered problems. Not only had several of the Super Heavy’s engines malfunctioned, but the Starship had failed to separate from the Super Heavy. The automatic self-destruct system destroyed the rocket in a spectacular explosion.

The launch also trashed the launch pad, sending dirt, debris, concrete chunks and metal across a wide area. A small fire started but was quickly extinguished. Despite the stunning look of the Starship test, no lasting harm occurred to the surrounding environment. The Fish and Wildlife Service determined that no wildlife was killed.

While SpaceX assesses the data derived from the test flight and seeks to repair the launch pad, buttressing it with a water-cooled, steel plate, it now has to worry about the environmental lawsuit. According to an article in Reason, the process would likely take just short of five years, delaying and perhaps even derailing the Artemis III moon landing. NASA is depending on a working Starship, outfitted as a lunar lander, to take astronauts to the lunar surface as soon as late 2025.

It’s not as if SpaceX was allowed to flagrantly endanger the environment by launching the Starship/Super Heavy stack. The FAA required the company to take 75 separate actions, including hiring a biologist to monitor the effects that its operations have on surrounding wildlife. In order to avoid triggering a full-blown environmental impact study, SpaceX “ditched proposals for an on-site fuel manufacturing facility, a desalination plant and a power plant.” 

Ironically, the fuel manufacturing facility would have included a direct air, carbon capture device to draw CO2 from the atmosphere to make methane, which SpaceX uses as rocket fuel. A desalination plant would certainly be useful in drought-prone Texas.

The idea that the future of human space exploration could be determined by the whim of the courts, egged on by environmental activists, is outrageous on its face. An opinion piece in the Washington Examiner suggests that had NEPA been passed in 1960, the Johnson Spaceflight Center and the Kennedy Space Center would never have been built and Americans would never have walked on the moon.

What can be done to avoid a lengthy court battle that would snarl the development of the SpaceX Starship in legal red tape for years?

One example of how Congress could step in involves a controversy during the 1970s over the building of the Tellico Dam and the endangered snail darter. Environmentalists successfully sued to stop the construction of the dam under the Endangered Species Act, claiming that it would wipe out the snail darter. Congress passed a law exempting the Tellico Dam from the act, allowing it to be finished. Ironically, because the snail darters were transplanted to safer streams and were found elsewhere, the Fish and Wildlife Service recently removed them from the list of endangered species. It was a win/win all around.

Congress should step in and exempt SpaceX’s launch operations at Boca Chica from the NEPA, codifying the FAA launch license into law. For good measure, it should also allow the construction of the fuel factory, the desalination plant and the power plant at the launch site. In the long term, Congress should amend NEPA to prevent it from being used as a cudgel to stop the construction of important infrastructure.

Mitigation of environmental harm is important. But the expansion of the human species beyond Earth is also important. The two can be accommodated without recourse to lengthy court battles or bureaucratic red tape.

Mark Whittington, who writes frequently about space policy, has published a political study of space exploration entitled “Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon?” as well as “The Moon, Mars and Beyond,” and, most recently, “Why is America Going Back to the Moon?” He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner. He is published in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The Hill, USA Today, the LA Times and the Washington Post, among other venues.