Texas Homeowners Sue SpaceX For Damage From Rocket Launches

On April 30, dozens of homeowners who live near SpaceX's company town of Starbase, Texas sued the aerospace giant for damaging their property with sonic booms and other noise-related damage. The suit alleges that modern rocketry has blown past decades-old regulations regarding safe distances and zoning, and that instead of gathering new data, SpaceX "nevertheless proceeded with conscious indifference to the rights, safety, or welfare of others." Say, does Elon need a new motto?

You can read the whole suit here, but the main takeaway is that these folks went from living in a pretty quiet coastal community to living next to the most powerful vehicle ever created. Said vehicle is SpaceX's Starship rocket, which delivers more than 16 million pounds of thrust at launch. As the suit points out, that's nearly double the power of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket that just took astronauts back to the Moon for the first time in 50 years. Chat, is that loud? Yes, it turns out: researchers found that, in terms of noise and pressure, a single Starship launch was "equivalent to around 4-6 SLS launches and at least 10 Falcon 9 launches." And you think your neighbors make too much noise! But this is more than just nuisance: it's destruction.

Starbase is a strange little place. Nestled right where Texas, Mexico, and the Gulf of Mexico meet, it turned what had once been coastal wildlands into one of the biggest starports in the world. However, unlike other starports, this one is so far exclusive to just one rocket: Starship. Still in its prototype phase, Starship is a towering colossus at 480 feet, the largest rocket ever built. It is hugely ambitious: both its booster and its upper stage are designed to be fully reuseable, meaning they can land back at Starbase after their missions. It is big and powerful enough to land on the Moon, for which NASA has contracted it to do; one day, it should do the same on Mars.

Maybe, anyway. Starship has failed a good number of its test flights, NASA re-opened its Moon landing contract to other bidders (namely Blue Origin), and the whole interplanetary enterprise depends on being able to refuel in orbit, which it has yet to prove it can do. So Starbase is a massive construction endeavor to service a rocket that may or may not ever get to full production.

And in just the few years its been around, Starbase has already caused a lot of trouble. It somehow — here's a sentence you didn't know existed — ruined land owned by Cards Against Humanity. It has reshaped the communities around it. Now, the suit's plaintiffs allege that the Starship launches (and landings) are literally destroying their homes. In fact, all that bother is causing both economic and non-economic damage, according to the suit, "in an amount to be determined at trial." Well, when you're suing a company whose IPO could be the biggest in history, you don't want to put a ceiling on your payout, do you?

Starship steals the headlines because it's the loudest vehicle of all time, but as the planet Earth keeps setting record numbers of rocket launches, we're entering a whole new world of consequences. Emissions from those launches do a lot of environmental damage, and sonic booms can disrupt local wildlife. Even the Moon isn't safe: we're sending so much stuff into orbit that some of it is littering the lunar surface now.

On top of all that, rockets like Starship are starting to use new, less understood fuels such as liquid oxygen/methane (methalox). Safety regulations were written with other fuels in mind. SpaceX is just using the old handbook before it's determined if the new fuels should have new safety standards. The company dragged its feet on this so much that NASA just decided to blow up a bunch of methalox itself to find out.

Oh, did we mention the explosions? There are a lot of explosions at Starbase. So that's nice to live next to.

The suit has only just been filed, but it would be surprising if it actually reached trial. More than likely, SpaceX will quietly settle it for non-trivial (though not mind-blowing) sum and then just keep on doing what it's doing: going fast and breaking stuff, literally.

h/t Gizmodo