[rbetts]

A quick search finds the environmental impact report that is the basis of this story: https://www.faa.gov/media/76836. To land a spacecraft in the ocean required a certification by the FAA. That certification required an environmental impact assessment.

Perhaps you prefer a world in which corporations can dump (even more) waste in the ocean?

[somenameforme]

It has nothing to do with waste. It's about species impact. And it's done completely maliciously. You're splashing down in a relatively random area that's tens of trillions (for the Indian Ocean alone) of square meters large. Advanced life density near the surface is going to be very close to zero.

That is immediately obvious to just about anybody with a decent head on their shoulders. But now actually proving that takes what almost certainly amounted to thousands (if not tens of thousands) of manhours followed by months of review, and adversarial engagement. It was the outright weaponization of government.

This, btw, is what leads to extremist viewpoints on regulation. Regulations, done in good faith, are a very good thing. But they can easily be weaponized both by the government against enemies of the state, and by other companies, in the case of regulatory capture, to prevent competition. And there is no entirely clear way to prevent these sort of abuses.

[rbetts]

I'm unaware of ways to prevent abuse of the environment by corporations other than regulation. Do you have some evidence or documentation that these standards are applied differently to Space-X than other similar companies? Can you show some paper trail that the submission wasn't processed in good faith?

[somenameforme]

The reason toxic dumping is illegal is not because of the EPA or whatever but because there are laws against it. Laws are how you prevent specific abuses, without regulations. Of course in some cases you want a regulatory agency because actions or violations may need to change quickly and/or respond to emerging situations in a dynamic fashion, but there's at least a solution.

As for SpaceX, you're asking me to prove a negative which is impossible. But feel free to find a single-counter example to what I'm saying, as that would completely disprove it. The FAA suddenly decided to impose a 2 month delay to Starship on its 5th launch which was in no way fundamentally different than the priors besides a new splashdown location, and add a bunch of new 'concerns.' In another case the EPA came after SpaceX for "unpermitted discharges" of... oxygen.

And all of these new issues coincided exactly with the timing of the previous political administration defacto naming him an enemy of the state. There was nothing of a comparable scale in the past. Heck they even had a return-to-flight after a major mishap and mishap investigation that took less time than it took for the previous administration's FAA to determine if a shark might get hit by a rocket landing in the ocean...