Spectacular video of a comet fragment exploding in the nighttime skies over Spain and Portugal made me think of America’s environmental review process. This bureaucratic procedure usually makes news when it involves some sort of infrastructure project, such as expanding an interstate highway or building an electrical transmission line. But as space enthusiasts know, these reviews are playing a big role in America’s New Space Age. 

In a new Ars Technica piece looking at SpaceX’s latest launch plans for its powerful Starship rocket, reporter Stephen Clark points out that the environmental reviews demanded by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) significantly impact SpaceX’s Florida plans. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and US Space Force are conducting these reviews for two Cape Canaveral launch sites in response to SpaceX’s updated plans, which include higher launch rates and infrastructure changes not covered by previous assessments. (Currently, Starship launches happen at SpaceX Stabase in south Texas.) The environmental impact statement process, the most thorough review under NEPA, can take a long time and potentially delay SpaceX’s goal of having Florida launch sites ready by 2025. George Nield, an aerospace industry consultant and former head of the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, states in the piece that “a couple of years would not be a surprise” for these environmental reviews.

That’s an unacceptable pace of regulatory review given Earth’s continued vulnerability to comet and meteor strikes. As I write in my 2023 book The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised,

Humanity is living on borrowed time. How much time, exactly, no one knows. But eventually, another very big hunk of rock or chunk of ice will slam into the third planet from the sun. Earth is immersed in a swarm of such objects.

SpaceX’s groundbreaking Starship rocket could be a game-changer for planetary defense. With rapid response capabilities, heavy payload capacity, and cost-effective reusable technology, Starship has the potential to launch quickly or create off-planet, defense infrastructure. And, of course, colonization of the Moon, Mars, and beyond would further ensure humanity’s long-term survival, as Elon Musk has noted. This from a 2021 article in MIT Tech Review:

Philip Lubin, a physicist from the University of California, Santa Barbara, calculated that a large enough rocket, such as Starship, could be used to prevent an asteroid from hitting Earth. Such a mission could carry enough explosives to rip apart an asteroid as large as the 10-kilometer-wide rock that wiped out the dinosaurs. Its fragments would harmlessly burn up in the atmosphere before it had a chance to reach our planet. 

In my book, I recommend full NEPA repeal, but there are ideas out there for various reforms. Eli Dourado, a NEPA expert and critic, suggests a) trusting federal agencies to determine significant impacts without formal environmental assessments, b) informing the public but not requiring their involvement in the NEPA process, c) disallowing most judicial injunctions of agency decisions, and d) allowing presidential exemptions from NEPA for projects of highest national interest. I can think of some projects in Florida that may be worthy of an exemption or two.

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