With this kind of massive conflicts of interests and the way the current administration behaves you have to assume that any kind of regulation on Musk's companies is effectively removed. Even if he does not intervene directly, every employee that acts against him must assume they'll lose their job over those actions. That's a fundamentally untenable situation, there can be no actual oversight and regulation under these circumstances.
Under the previous admin it took longer to get regulatory approval than it took to build it (the most advanced rocket in the world) and it involved insane things like strapping a pair of headphones onto a seal and playing rocket sounds to it.
We can only hope that the new administration will streamline the process and reduce the time needed to get regulatory approval.
> Under the previous admin it took longer to get regulatory approval than it took to build it (the most advanced rocket in the world)
Generally it does take awhile for a third party to understand the design decisions and their impacts then the designing person. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone working on software.
> it involved insane things like strapping a pair of headphones onto a seal and playing rocket sounds to it.
>nonetheless we were required to kidnap a seal, strap it to a board, and play sonic boom sounds to it to see if it would be distressed. This is an actual thing that happened. I have pictures.
Then shows a picture. It sounds like another commenter is saying that the pic displayed by the Lex podcast is not the exact pic from Elon, but instead a similar pic meant to illustrate.
Yes, I'm aware of that. My point was that SpaceX has said they've had to do this, and if it sounds so wacky that that's unbelievable, there are actually photos of the same thing happening with seals, so I feel very little need to doubt that SpaceX was held to the same standard if that's what they claim.
Not a "citation" as much as anecdotal evidence that dispels doubt.
They take a lot longer than 6 weeks to build a Starship. They can build a Starship a month, but that's because there is significant parallelism. My guess is that there are parts on a Starship that started assembly over 1 year before the Starship is complete.
I don't know if Elon Musk or SpaceX has ever kidnapped a seal and played headphones to it, but the photos that were going around the internet for the last few years (they made the rounds in 2017 in connection to SpaceX, before Musk began referencing it in 2023/2024) were from an unrelated study in 2006: https://x.com/mcrs987/status/1848070131781455911
I'm still looking or the original study to find out what the "larger study" was about [was it an impact study related to Vandenberg? Was it part of seal monitoring, and while they had the seals they did a bunch of other stuff?], so if someone else digs it up I'd be interested in a link.
I don't know exactly how often who puts headphones on seals yet, but it sounds like as part of operating at Vandenberg, it's routine to "haul out" (by which I assume they mean, capture and remove, releasing some time/distance away) harbor seals, so they aren't in the way; it sounds like they also (sometimes? always?) perform some amount of monitoring activities on the seals, since you've already got them captured.
Also, all of this activity is apparently termed "Level B harassment".
Yeah, I agree, fuck seals. The more we damage marine mammal life with loud sounds the better. If they didn’t want to get killed off in awful ways by our tech toys they should have evolved ear muffs.
Delta IV heavies also launched from Vandenburg since long before f9 existed, and is considerably louder than falcon 9. was there a need for that study?
Surely they mean pending regulatory capture