In following SpaceX’s development of their new Booster-Starship system I’ve become well aware of the bureaucratic crap they’ve had to wade through with Federal authorities like the FAA and the Fish and Wildlife Service, for Flight Test #2 and the FAA and something called the National Marine Fisheries Service for Flight Test #5. All that was mentioned in the case of the non-FAA agencies was potential impacts on marine creatures.

But now Musk has talked in detail about these – and they’re at least as crazy as anything dreamed up by Yes Minister.

Musk said they told him SpaceX had to do a study to see if Starship would hit a shark and his response was: “It’s a big ocean, there’s a lot of sharks. It’s not impossible, but it’s very unlikely.”  But then they didn’t want to give him the shark data. Eventually, they got the data, and SpaceX was able to assure the government that the sharks were going to be fine. But then the government asked, “What about whales?”

Watch

I loved this bit:

And honestly, if the ship hit a whale, the whale had it coming, because the odds are so low…It’s like ‘Final Destination, the Whale Edition’, It’s like fate had it in for that whale.

That was for the Texas launches. It actually gets worse as he talks of what was happening with ordinary SpaceX Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches from Vandenburg Air Force Base (military contracts), which has launched rockets for decades.