New York Times gift articles

The first ift launch throwing concrete everywhere sucked for everyone involved, birds and spacex. They have a real working launch pad water deluge system now, and the second tower will have a flame trench.

I am not a fan of elon musk and his disregard for authority, but realistically, traditional aerospace companies (nasa, boeing, ula) have been slowly plodding towards the overbudget disposable mess that is SLS for the past 2 decades, while spacex has designed, built, and flown an entirely new and different rocket, with crazy (but potentially doable) goals, in the past couple of years. It's hard not to be excited for them, even though they really should care more about the state park they are next to.

Because we’ve learned nothing from anything.

Pass the oil, gramma.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

As Elon Musk’s Starship — the largest rocket ever manufactured — successfully blasted toward the sky last month, the launch was hailed as a giant leap for SpaceX and the United States’ civilian space program.

Members of Congress and senior officials in the Biden administration have fretted privately and publicly about the extent of Mr. Musk’s power as the U.S. government increasingly relies on SpaceX for commercial space operations and for its plans to travel to the moon and even Mars.

The sun was preparing to set on a late autumn afternoon in Boca Chica nearly four years ago, when SpaceX began the countdown for Serial Number 8, a Starship prototype ready for its first high-altitude launch.

as it negotiated with SpaceX, said the company initially agreed to a number of conditions, including limiting the height of its buildings, painting them in natural colors and curbing nighttime light that might distract hatching turtles.

Stacey Zee, an environmental protection specialist at the F.A.A., wrote in a 2021 email to officials at Fish and Wildlife and the state parks department who asked to see the results that the agency was precluded from passing them along because they contained sensitive commercial information about SpaceX.

“SpaceX has been waiting to work with the Interior Department and some of the environmental concerns associated with launching there,” the Air Force secretary, Frank Kendall, told a House committee in April soon after a visit to Boca Chica.

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