By: Yiling Sun

Everyone has, at this point, a general idea of who Elon Musk is — a billionaire who turned Twitter into X and claims to be the founder of Tesla. What you probably don’t know is he wasn’t actually the original founder of Tesla; the original founders, Marc Tarpenning and Martin Eberhard, both left the company in 2009, leaving Mr. Musk in control.

What you also probably don’t know is that Mr. Musk believes his starship exploration is more important than wildlife protection. Only thinking about his project, he and his team did manage to launch the largest rocket ever into the sky successfully on June 6th, 2024, benefiting SpaceX, and the United States’ civilian space program, providing them data for future space exploration. But does this launch benefit wildlife protection?

Of course it doesn’t.

Just a short distance of 10 miles away from the rocket launch lived some birds. These animals have a life too, just like us — but that starship completely ruined it.

Three teams went to investigate the damage that was done: one team from SpaceX, one team from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and another from a conservation group. What they found was the super-destruction of these birds and their environment. Poor guys.

The starship launch had caused mud, stones, and debris to fly everywhere. But that’s not all. The launch also spewed sheet metal into a nearby National Park, and in addition to all that pollution, it caused a fire, leaving burnt patches of once perfectly healthy grass. And it burned a huge amount of fuel: 7.5 million pounds of it, releasing a bunch of gas into the atmosphere. That’s even more pollution.

For better wildlife research, Coastal Bend Bays & Estuaries Program looked at nine bird nests before the launch so they could study post-launch impact. And guess what, none of those poor things survived! Plus, there were yellow smears on the ground where the nests used to be. No, it’s not the waste they excreted that’s smudged all over — it’s unborn eggs. The launch not only killed a whole generation of baby birds, it also endangered the species.

“The nests have all been messed up or have eggs missing,” said Justin LeClaire, a Coastal Bend wildlife biologist.

It’s not only this one launch, there’s many other pollutions caused by SpaceX. There have been explosions from past test launches, leaks, and obviously fires. These failures are essential for this type of research, of course, but it’s hard to balance the growth of technology and the economy with our obligation to the wildlife.

Despite this, we can’t deny the fact that Elon Musk’s ideas are pretty intriguing, such as setting up a civilization on Mars, traveling to the moon, and other cool stuff like that. These ideas influence many, many people. The influenced people get excited and listen to everything that Mr. Musk says, giving him support no matter what, and providing him power over lots of people. Members of Congress and some officials part of the Biden administration discussed Mr. Musk’s power. The U.S. government is relying more and more on SpaceX for further space exploration, prioritizing wildlife less and less.

As mentioned before, Mr. Musk doesn’t care much about wildlife protection. Studies of his progress in South Texas show that he ignored wildlife protection services and national parks to expand his Starbase. These wildlife services not only lost to Mr. Musk but lost to other agencies who had similar goals as Mr. Musk.

Wildlife services don’t give up easily, since our ecosystems are in grave danger with many, many species endangered because of human pollution. They sent repeated complaints and requests, some in person and some in emails to SpaceX. These are primarily ignored. Great news for wildlife though: Gary Henry, who serves as a SpaceX advisor, finally acknowledged these letters and said that he wanted to help.
A little bad news for wildlife now: Kelvin B. Coleman, the top FAA official, didn’t agree with these letters. He thought like Mr. Musk — technology beats nature.

“Blowing debris into state parks or national land is not what we prescribed, but the bottom line is no one got hurt, no one got injured,” Mr. Coleman said in an interview. “We certainly don’t want people to feel like they’re bulldozed. But it’s a really important operation that SpaceX is conducting down there. It is really important to our civilian space program.”

When SpaceX and Mr. Musk were still setting up for the project in Boca Chica, SpaceX said that the project would have a “small, eco-friendly footprint” and the “surrounding area is left untouched”. In conclusion, this project “provides for an excellent wildlife habitat”.

For wildlife, this is pretty bad, because we all know it doesn’t benefit wildlife in any way whatsoever. But do SpaceX and Mr. Musk care? Probably not.

“We’ve got a lot of land with nobody around and so if it blows up, it’s cool,” Mr. Musk said.
It’s not cool. A test flight of the starship exploded as it was descending to the ground. Mr. Musk was very happy about this and posted on Twitter about it.

“We got all the data we needed!” Mr. Musk tweeted. “Congrats SpaceX team hell yeah!! Mars, here we come!!”

The explosion gave SpaceX and Mr. Musk some data that helps them improve their huge ship. It also shows us that Mr. Musk doesn’t care about laws, since this launch violated a federal order. Even though the FAA had similar goals as Mr. Musk, it told SpaceX to not launch that test flight. It worried that if the starship exploded, a shock wave would not only damage homes closer to the explosion, but homes that are very far from the launch site as well.

If technology keeps going on like this, our ecosystems are going to be extremely polluted to the point that many, many animals will die out. Global warming is a big problem for us and all living things on Earth — when will space exploration teams as ambitious as Mr. Musk realize their research is killing life?

Image Credit by Pixabay