Elon Musk’s rocket manufacturing company SpaceX on Wednesday slammed a recent media report on the negative environmental impact of its operations at Boca Chica, Texas as “super misleading.”
What Happened: SpaceX denied claims of its operations harming the environment, while focussing on the particular claims of its operations at Boca Chica threatening the piping plover population through 2021.
“The frequently cited study conducted by Newstead and Hill (2021) is outdated and unreliable for describing potential piping plover population trends over time,” SpaceX said in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
The company also alleged that the presence or absence of the birds during the study’s field visits may be due to a variety of factors besides changes in population size, such as migration.
Furthermore, Newstead and Hill reanalyzed their data and published a follow-up report in 2022 which found no changes in population abundance of the plovers at Boca Chica over time, SpaceX said.
The company also added that it conducted its monitoring for nine years using a protocol developed with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services to find no strong evidence of rising or falling trends in the population of piping plovers, among other target species, near its Starbase facility.
Why It Matters: SpaceX CEO Elon Musk also dismissed the allegations of environmental damage as just a few destroyed bird nests. "To make up for this heinous crime, I will refrain from having omelette for a week," Musk wrote in a post on Wednesday.
All development and manufacturing of SpaceX’s ambitious Starship launch vehicle currently takes place only at Starbase. The facility occupies over 350 acres of land and over 222,000 square feet of manufacturing.
All the past four test flights of the Starship were launched from Starbase. Earlier this month, Musk said that the fifth flight of the Starship will be in the next 4 weeks, pegging the next launch for around Aug. 2.
Starship is touted as the world's most powerful launch vehicle, standing 121 meters tall and weighing approximately 5,000 tonnes. SpaceX is expected to have at least six test flights of the Starship this year, according to Musk's latest estimate from March.
NASA is currently relying on the success of Starship to land humans back on the moon as part of its Artemis program. The last crewed lunar mission occurred in 1972 with Apollo 17. Since then, no crew has traveled beyond low-Earth orbit.
Musk, meanwhile, hopes to take humans to Mars with the vehicle.
Check out more of Benzinga’s Future Of Mobility coverage by following this link.
Read More:
Photo courtesy: SpaceX
© 2024 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.
Trade confidently with insights and alerts from analyst ratings, free reports and breaking news that affects the stocks you care about.
