Saturday night. The Life Center Church in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, is packed with red hats and American flags. Elon Musk takes the stage at an event for America PAC, the pro-Trump committee to which he has donated tens of millions of dollars. And as if it were a comedy sketch with canned laughter, it tells some of the most absurd things that SpaceX has had to do to get environmental agencies to allow it to launch the Starship.
The feeling of watching a stand-up comedy monologue is totally intentional. Musk himself said on Lex Fridman’s podcast a year ago that he wanted to turn this story into a comedy sketch titled “This is all real.” Finally he did it, but without the sign and as part of a political rally to support Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
SpaceX against sharks, whales and seals
The story is the following. After Starship’s first launch, SpaceX began openly lobbying the US government to expedite the processing of flight licenses. The company had been fighting for months with multiple regulatory agencies for the exhaustive investigations of the rocket’s first flight, which had been a minor environmental disaster, as well as for the incorporation of a flame deflector that shoots jets of drinking water on the second flight.
To illustrate the extent of this scrutiny, Elon Musk revealed two of the strangest requests regulators have made to SpaceX in recent history. According to the businessman, the United States National Marine Fisheries Service was concerned that Starship will hit a shark when it fell into the ocean, so he asked SpaceX to calculate the probability of this happening.
To calculate the probability of hitting a shark, SpaceX asked the agency to provide it with the number of sharks in the areas where the rocket could fall. Musk said the agency refused, fearing the data would be leaked to “shark hunters,” so SpaceX asked why the West Coast division of the Fisheries Service wasn’t doing the calculations. The agents answered: “because we don’t trust them,” Musk said.
Somehow, SpaceX ended up convincing them to reveal the data and ended up doing the math. The company’s engineers concluded that the probability of hitting a shark was practically zero. Then, Musk said, the National Marine Fisheries Service replied: “What about the whales?”
The answer was again practically a 0% chance. “If a rocket hits a whale, it’s the unluckiest whale in the world,” Musk joked. And then he told a much crazier story.
According to the businessman’s account, the California government was concerned that the launches and landings of the Falcon 9 would stress the seal populations near Vandenberg Space Force Base. To verify this, they asked SpaceX “kidnap a seal, tie it to a board, put headphones on it and play sonic boom sounds” (the boom that rockets produce when traveling at supersonic speeds). In Musk’s words:
“We were forced to kidnap a seal, tie it to a board, put headphones on it and play sonic boom sounds to see if it would get stressed. This really happened, this was real, I have photos. A seal with headphones tied to a board. And the The most amazing part was how calm the seal was.
If I had been the seal, I would have thought ‘this is the end’. When the seal returned to his seal friends, he would think: how am I going to explain this to them, no one is going to believe me. It’s like if aliens kidnapped you and put an anal probe in you. “Your friends will never believe you.”
Musk said they had to do it twice, with two different seals, at the request of regulators. And the conclusion they came to was that not only were they not stressed, but seal populations had grown steadily as releases at Vandenberg increased. “If anything, sonic booms are aphrodisiacs,” Musk said ironically.
Why does all this count now?
Musk complains that there are “more than 100 regulatory agencies”, many of them “unnecessary”, hindering the progress of Tesla and SpaceX. But the businessman has a plan to solve it: he has just donated 75 million dollars to the Donald Trump campaign through the America PAC committee.
Musk has a lot to gain if Trump defeats Kamala Harris in the presidential election. His main interest: deregulate the automotive sector and the aerospace industry. It is still paradoxical, since one of Trump’s promises is to stop the electric car to save the combustion automobile industry, but the former president has played along.
Trump has announced that Elon Musk will chair a “government efficiency” commission if he wins the election. Musk has taken it as an opportunity to eliminate or reduce government agencies that, as he has tweeted nine times, are “slowly strangling” U.S. companies with their overregulation.
Images | SpaceX
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