Elon Musk Has a License to Crash Land & Sink SpaceX Starships off the Coast of Hawaii

Star Advertiser April 27 2023

Island Voices: Hawaii needs input on SpaceX ocean-landing plans

by Lynda Williams

Star Advertiser Article (Paywall)

Take away points:

• On April 14, 2023, Elon Musk's private spaceship company, SpaceX, was granted an experimental launch permit by the Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) to crash land the world's largest spacecraft, Starship, into the ocean 62 miles north of Kauai and a few hundred miles east of the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument.
• For the environmental review for the permit, the FAA did not require the more rigorous Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) but only a nominal Environmental Assessment (EA) that did not require consultation with stakeholders or input from Hawaiian residents or agencies like OHA. 
• The EA concluded that "less than one" of the more than 30 marine mammals protected by the Endangered Species Act would be harmed when the 100 ton steel ship explodes from 14 tons of rocket fuel onboard with a ton of TNT force or from the debris and shrapnel sinking or drifting in the ocean.
• It is recommended that Hawaii demand the FAA suspend the SpaceX license, conduct a full EIS and include the residents of Hawaii in the review process. 
• Starship is a spacecraft under development by Elon Musk's space company SpaceX, At 120 meters and a liftoff mass of 5000 metric tons, it is the largest & most powerful spacecraft ever built. It is intended to carry crew and cargo to Earth's orbit, the Moon and Mars. SpaceX has multi-billion dollar contracts with both NASA and the Pentagon for  civilian and military projects. 

Note: This is the original article I submitted. SA edited and omitted the photos. 

The world watched aghast as SpaceX blew up it’s own spaceship on April 20,  four minutes after launch due engine failure. Even though the mission was not completed, Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, claimed it was a success because the real goal was for the rocket to clear the launch pad at the spaceport in Boca Chica, Texas. 

What most folks don’t know realize is that Starship was always going to blow up when it crash landed in the Pacific Ocean, just 62 nautical miles north of Kauai and a few hundred miles east of the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument.

In the next test launch, which Musk boasted will happen in the next few months, the world’s largest spaceship will descend towards the Earth in free fall and blow up upon impact with a force of a ton of TNT as fuel ignites in a great explosion. On a second and third launch test, Starship will breakup in the atmosphere and tumble down and crash land in a debris field several hundred miles long Southwest of the island chain as shown in the red swath on the map. 

SpaceX obtained a Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) commercial space launch license rubber stamped by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) without any consultation of the Hawaiian people because according to an email I received from the FAA, “No in-person public outreach was conducted in Hawaii as the Starship vehicle was planned to land outside of range for impacts to the residents of Hawaii.”  

First of all, that is assuming everything goes exactly according to the plan, which we have all just witnessed doesn’t always happen. If the Starship goes off course by even a few degrees the consequences could be catastrophic to Hawaii. 

Secondly, I think most folks in Hawaii would agree that 62 miles north of Kauai is considered Hawaii culturally if not legally and that is way too close for what is essentially a rocket bomb to crash land.

SpaceX was not required to do a full EIS or Environmental Impact Study, only a much weaker Environmental Assessment (EA) that only requires the analysis of ‘nominal operations’ or best case scenarios. Why was that allowed when the worst case scenarios are so catastrophic? 

For example, rather than doing a detailed analysis of the potential impact to Marine Mammals protected by the Endangered Species Act, NOAA wrote a “Biological Opinion” for the EA that argued “less than one” animal would be harmed by a 100 metric ton steel rocket with the energy of a small nuclear bomb.

It came to that conclusion because they only one “nominal” scenario that the Starship would hit the water exactly horizontal to the surface with the fuel tanks orientated on the top, which is impossible to control or predict. If the explosion is above water, NOAA argues, only a fraction of the energy will be transmitted into the ocean travel 

deep enough to harm to any of the 30 endangered species of whale, shark, turtle, monk seal, dolphin and rays protected in Hawaii. 

The EA has many unsubstantiated claims, such as no animals would be near the surface of the water during the crash - even though most are mammals that surface to breather air. 

It ignored the fact that Humpback whales migrate through the “action area.” It assumed that most of the debris will be large enough to sink to the bottom of the ocean without encountering and injuring animals - but if it any does drift into the PapahanauMokuakea Marine National Monument, then the Coast Guard would be sent to clean it up.

This alone is reason to contest the EA and demand an EIS since NOAA and the Office of Hawaiian Affairs co -manage Papahanaumokuakea and OHA should have been consulted, but was not.

The FAA and NOAA analyses are flawed, and both are failing in the their duty to protect the people of Hawaii extreme corporate and federal abuse. 

Hawaii must not become collateral damage and a colonized sacrifice zone for the government’s privatization of teh space program and a billionaire’s personal ambition and corporate profits. 

 At minimum, the FAA must suspend the license, conduct a full EIS and include the residents of Hawaiian in the review process. The best plan is to ban SpaceX from trashing people and planet in Musk’s ego trip to Mars. 

References: Every document cited can be found on this FAA website: 

https://www.faa.gov/space/stakeholder_engagement/spacex_starship

Lynda Williams is an environmental activist and investigative science journalist living in Hilo.

Online Resume

Lynda Williams aka Lynda Lovon aka The Physics Chanteuse

Youtube Channel     Music Videos      Blog      Twitter       TikTok    

I am a science educator and communicator, performance media artist, singer songwriter, science writer, political activist and organizer. 

Education:  BS in Applied Math, MS in Physics, Post Graduate Research in Physics Pedagogy

Work:

Physics Faculty: Santa Rosa Junior College, San Francisco State University, 2000-2022

Media Production Instructor & Visiting Physics Faculty, San Francisco Art Institute

Selected Performance & Media Works:

   

The Physics Chanteuse: Science Cabaret
I produce and perform custom science cabaret shows for scientists at conferences and events. Past clients include: American Geophysical Union, Academy of Forensic Sciences, The National Association of Science Writers, Stephen Hawking Birthday Bash, Kip Thorne 60th Birthday “KipFest” at CalTech, American Physical Society Centennial Celebration, US Science Festival, Swedish Science Festival, CERN, IEEE, AAAS, AAS, INSAP, PBS. Featured in the NY Times, LA Times, Chronicle of Higher Education, Physics Today, People Magazine and on NPR, and featured guest on To Tell the Truth.  

Science Media Content Producer, Science Entertainment,1986- current. Produce and perform science multimedia content and performances for s stage, the internet, planetaria, CDs, and DVDs: Maxwell's Equations, Parody Violation and Cosmic Cabaret. Theater Projects include The Birth of Venus, UniLang, Cyberstein, The Physics Chanteuse and Cosmic Cabaret.

Starship Earth: The Search for Life, Santa Rosa Junior College Planetarium,   Produced, wrote and performed an original science musical planetarium show on the evolution and meaning of life in the cosmos. Film, slide and video projection combined with live music, spoken word and song. Funded in part by the Astrobiology and the Sacred project at the University of Arizona.

Starship Earth: Future Evolution, Santa Rosa Junior College Newman Theater, Produced, wrote and performed an original science musical one-woman show on the future evolution of life on Earth and the environmental impact of humans on the biosphere. Large screen slide and video projection combined with spoken word, music and song. Funded in part by the Astrobiology and the Sacred project at the University of Arizona, and the Arts and Lectures Series at SRJC. 

Star Compass: Polynesian Wayfinding: Santa Rosa Junior College Planetarium,   Produced, wrote and performed an original science musical planetarium show exploring and celebrating the science and art of Polynesian Wayfinding. Funded by a Newman Grant.

Sample Press Clippings

Political Activist and Organizer, Speaker and Writer

More posters, shows,  images, etc:

Original Art for first Cosmic Cabaret Show

Unilang with Pamela Consulo

The Cyberset: with Joel Kohn

The Birth of Venus with Marco Fuoco

 

SAY NO TO NUCLEAR POWER IN HAWAII!

HB927: Don’t Buy the Hype: Fusion is a Dangerous Delusion

By Lynda Williams

A bipartisan group of Hawaii legislators have submitted bill HB927 to create a task force to ‘determine the feasibility of amending the Hawaii State Constitution to include provisions to allow for fusion-powered reactors.” Everything in this Bill is wrong or a lie and it must be stopped in committee. Let me break it down line by line.

A nuclear fusion power plant is a giant facility that consumes tremendous amounts of energy and water and produces radioactive waste in the breeding of tritium fuel and in the reactor building. 

The legislature finds that in December 2022, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced that it had achieved fusion ignition, producing more energy from fusion than the laser energy used to initiate the ignition.

There was a lot of media hoopla about this ‘breakthrough’ but it is misleading propaganda. The nuclear fusion reaction lasted less than a billionth of a second and it took much more energy to make the laser beam and the tritium fuel source than was released. The term ‘ignition’ doesn’t mean efficient or self-sustaining – it’s a milestone word invented by the Fusion industry who have been in a failed business for over 70 years and have sucked nearly 50 billion dollars from US taxpayers to try to reproduce on Earth fusion that makes the Sun and stars shine. “Achieving ignition” is pure engineering hype and the Hawaii State Legislature should not be perpetuating such pseudoscience & misinformation.

The legislature recognizes that once fully realized as a source of power, fusion could allow the State to more efficiently meet the State's net-zero emission goals.

Being decades if not centuries away from being practical, efficient, and affordable, Nuclear Fusion Power cannot address the urgent clean energy needs of the world in time to mitigate the catastrophic consequences of Climate Change. Although fusion reactions do not release CO2, every aspect of the fuel cycle, from breeding tritium fuel with fission reactors at $30,000 per gram, to building the $30 billion football field sized reactor buildings, to decommissioning what will end up to be a highly radioactive building, produces tremendous amounts of greenhouse gases. Nuclear power, be it fission or fusion, is not a zero-emission power source. The Hawaii Legislature should not ‘recognize’ what are in fact, absolute lies.

 The legislature notes that, unlike fission reactors, fusion reactors produce shorter-lived radioactive byproducts and are a safer and cleaner alternative to nuclear-powered fission reactors.

The fusion reaction fuses deuterium and tritium into helium and releases radioactive neutrons that decay by beta emission and when absorbed by uranium produce Plutonium used in nuclear weapons.  

This is the biggest lie in the bill. As stated above, the fuel source for fusion reactions is the rare and short-lived radioactive isotope of hydrogen, tritium, which must be created or ‘bred’ in a fission reactor.  You cannot have fusion on Earth without fission to breed tritium. Tritium behaves chemically like atomic hydrogen and bonds with oxygen to form radioactive “tritiated water” and then decays to regular hydrogen by very dangerous beta emission so if it is ingested it is carcinogenic. Released or leaked into the environment, tritiated water is very dangerous because biologically it behaves like regular water. 

Power generated from fusion reactors still boil water to turn a turbine. Since it is hot power plant, the generator needs a lot of water to boil and to cool the plant. Hot water is released back into the environment. Tritiated water leaks and releases are common at fusion reactor sites. Hawaii is already facing severe droughts and water contamination from the military, does it really want to invest in and risk more contamination to the water and ecosystem?

Short lived radioactive atoms are MORE dangerous because they are more active and decay more often! The fusion reaction also releases neutrons which make everything they come into contact highly radioactive. If you put uranium inside the reactor building it will create plutonium, the main ingredient in nuclear bombs and the deadliest substance ever created by humans. Fusion reactors therefore have a very high risk of nuclear weapons proliferation and must be guarded by the US military. Because of this security risk, fusion power will never be distributed and democratized and must be operated by militarized corporate state control. There is nothing safe and clean about nuclear fusion or fission. Again, the Hawaii Legislature should not ‘note’ such dangerous lies.

 Accordingly, the purpose of this Act is to establish a future fusion task force to:

(1)  Determine the feasibility of amending the Hawaii State Constitution to include provisions to allow for fusion-powered reactors;

Why amend the Hawaii State Constitution? Because during the 1978 Constitutional Convention a provision prohibiting fission power or radioactive waste disposal in Hawaii was added to the constitution. The reactor and housing will become radioactive and would most likely have to remain & stored on site effectively forever. Fusion power produces radioactive waste and is therefore illegal in the state of Hawaii.

(2)  Evaluate potential sites that may be reserved for fusion reactors; and

(3)  Identify ways for the State to accelerate the progress of fusion development.

We should not waste a penny or an ounce of human energy establishing a ‘future fusion task force’ to evaluate potential sites or accelerate the progress of fusion technology when Nuclear Fusion Power is a dirty dangerous militarized expensive and unviable power source that cannot solve our energy needs or mitigate the climate crisis and is currently illegal in the state of Hawaii.

The Hawaii Legislature Energy & Environmental Protection (EPP) committee will hear testimony on February 14^th at 9:10 am.  Testimony can be submitted here by : https://www.capitol.hawaii.gov/session/measure_indiv.aspx?billtype=HB&billnumber=927

More info on Fusion Delusion:

https://thebulletin.org/2017/04/fusion-reactors-not-what-theyre-cracked-up-to-be

https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/opinion/nuclear-fusion-renewable-energy-climate-crisis-b2018073.html

Lynda Williams is a physicist and peace activist living in Hilo Hawaii.

 

Earth Day 2022 Stop The Homeland Defense Radar in Hawaii

 Here is a speech I wrote for the Earth Day LA HONUA 2022 in Kahuku. It was read by Lynell DaMate of the Koʻolau Waialua Alliance. 💓

Aloha Kahuku! Happy Earth Day! My name is Lynda Williams and I am a lifelong

activist for peace, social justice and the demilitarization of Planet Earth. I am sorry I cannot be with you today in person but I am with you in spirit and in the fight to protect Hawaii from US militant imperialism. By profession I am a physics professor but my passion is to empower people with scientific knowledge to save Planet Earth from the ravages of capitalism, imperialism and militarism. I have been working as a science advisor with the GLOBAL NETWORK for over 25 years and one of my areas of expertise is Nuclear Weapons, Missile Defense and Space Weapon systems. From my years of experience, I can assure you that it is a scientific fact the Missile Defense systems will not and cannot protect Hawaii or anyone, anywhere, from nuclear attack. That is why I VEHEMENTLY OPPOSE THE HOMELAND DEFENSE RADAR in Hawaii, Guam, Japan, Alaska – or anywhere on Earth or in Heaven – because the technology of WAR cannot protect us from WAR. The reasons are simple:   

First of all, the HDRH works with a ground-based interceptor system – that means that if an intercontinental ballistic missile or ICBM is launched from an ‘enemy” towards Hawaii, the HDRH would detect it and then interceptor missiles would be launched from California and Alaska to intercept and destroy the missiles before they hit their target. Sounds reasonable but it is insanely DIFFICULT – like hitting a bullet with a bullet moving at supersonic speeds! THE SYSTEM HAS NEVER BEEN PROVEN TO WORK OR ACTUALLY TESTED IN REAL WORD SCENARIOS! This is why scientific organizations such as the Union of Concerned Scientists oppose wasting hundreds of billions of dollars on missile defense systems – they will never work. It only provides a false hope of safety that prevents humans from resolving conflicts through peaceful means and bleeds money away from desperately needed social programs and restoring the Aina.

 Secondly, WE ONLY HAVE 44 INTERCEPTORS.  That’s it folks!  Russia alone has about 1000 ICBMS! China has about 100! And we have only 44 shots at intercepting them? This is what we have wasted a hundred billion dollars on? This is obscene waste and stupidity.

But what REALLY blows my mind is that the very GOAL of Missile Defense is to intercept and BLOW UP the nuclear missiles in SPACE while on their way to the target. Even if they were successful, which is highly unlikely, such an intercept would create so much radioactive space debris it would have a catastrophic snowball effect to ALL the satellites in space! HOW STUPID IS THAT? And that is the BEST PLAN they came up with?

If the interceptors don’t work, then they will launch interceptors from ships while the bombs are on the way down to the target – and if that were successful, which is highly unlikely, that would also have catastrophic effects to the region. How is that going to protect Hawaii? Furthermore, if HDRH is built in Hawaii then you can be sure interceptor systems like Aegis Ashore will be deployed in Kauai and Hawaii will then become an even greater target than it already is, if that is even possible!! 

There is no scenario in which HDRH or Missile Defense makes Hawaii or the world a safer place! HDRH will intensify an already out of control global arms race! Next its hypersonic missiles and space-based interceptors! And now the US is going to spend another hundred billion on NEXT GENERATION INTERCEPTORS that will also never work to protect us! This cycle of technological weapon war profiteering that is bleeding us and Mother Earth dry will never end unless we stop it!

HDRH will never work to protect or defend Hawaii because the Missile Defense system it is a part of is fundamentally flawed and will never work – except for the one goal it is really intended to serve – and that is to perpetuate endless weapon and war profiteering of the military industrial complex and the continued oppression of the people by the imperial capitalist patriarchy raping and pillaging Mother Earth!!!

 The ONLY way to protect Hawaii and Mother Earth from nuclear weapons is to ABOLISH nuclear weapons!  There is no other alternative. Nuclear weapons must go extinct or else humanity will. As Martin Luther King so wisely said long ago, “Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.” Instead of putting our precious resources and brainpower into new technologies of killing machines destroying Mother Earth, humanity must EVOLVE socially and culturally, and develop tools of restorative environmental justice to SAVE Mother Earth. That cultural knowledge exists and is called Aloha Aina.   

 Aloha Aina can save the world!

 Happy Earth Day!

 Mahalo! Aloha hui ho!

 Love, lynda

 More info:

My writings on HDRH:    

http://lyndalovon.blogspot.com/2020/06/homeland-defense-radar-system-will-not.html

http://lyndalovon.blogspot.com/2020/06/space-alert-article-on-homeland-defense.html

http://lyndalovon.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-pentagon-plans-to-build-billion.html

Brilliant Videos on HDRH:

https://vimeo.com/702025863/f96acfba08

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFuKr4ST0w8

The Department of Energy Should be Called the Department of Nuclear Weapons!

What we need now is a Department of Green Energy

by Lynda Williams

Much like how the “Department of Defense” sounds like an innocuous organization meant for the protection and safety of the US but is actually a Department of War, so too does the name “Department of Energy” grossly misrepresent the toxic business of the agency. The Department of Energy (DOE) is the great grandchild of the Manhattan Project that developed the first Atomic bomb and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) that inherited the nuclear weapons programs after World War 2. Back in 1977 during the oil crisis, the Carter administration consolidated several department via The Department of Energy Organization Act of 1977, into what is now the DOE including the AEC and other federal agencies that oversee oil, coal and power infrastructure such as the grid and pipelines. Perhaps surprisingly, the DOE also took on the responsibility of managing the entire national complex of Nuclear Weapons labs such as Los Alamos and Livermore which is responsible for maintaining the nuclear stockpile and now for executing the trillion dollar nuclear weapons upgrade mandated by the Obama administration. The DOE also manages the nations nuclear waste as well as the legacy nuclear weapons superfund sites. The DOE should really be called the Department of Nuclear Weapons, or better, for a more snazzy apropos acronym, the DONE: Department of Nuclear Energy.

A quick look at the proposed 2021 budget for the DOE clearly shows the projects and programs the DOE is mostly involved in managing. Of the $35.4 Billion dollar request, the majority of the money goes into maintaining nuclear weapons labs and to modernize the nuclear stockpile. $19.8 billion for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) which according to Wikipedia “is a United States federal agency responsible for safeguarding national security through the military application of nuclear science.”  The NNSA owns and operates the main nuclear weapons facilities such as the dangerous Pantex Plant which is the primary United States nuclear weapons assembly and disassembly facility, and the Y-12 National Security Complex, the ‘birthplace of the Atomic Bomb’ and a top secret nuclear weapons facility. The NNSA also own and operates Los Alamos and Livermore National Labs. These are not “ENERGY” laboratories – these are WEAPONS labs. There is even $1.7 billion allocated to maintain nuclear reactors on Navy ships. If these weapons and military expenditures are included in the Pentagon budget, it inflates it up towards a trillion dollars! The DOE is also developing directed energy weapons that would be used for space based weapons for the Space Force. Here is a list of all the nuclear weapons labs in the US complex: https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/us-nuclear-weapons-complex (Links to an external site.)

Six billion dollars is allocated to clean up nuclear weapons superfund sites like at Hanford, Oakridge and Savannah River Nuclear labs. (Here is an interactive map of the superfund nuclear weapons sites: https://www.energy.gov/em/mission/cleanup-sites (Links to an external site.) ) If the Pentagon made the mess then why are they not charged with cleaning up and paying for it within their budget? It is a shell game to cover up more taxpayer money being funneled into nuclear weapons programs and cleaning up their toxic radiating legacy.  

The DOE also subsidizes the private nuclear power industry under the guise of research and development. There is $1.3 billion allocated for the Office of Nuclear Energy, including $295 million in funding for the Versatile Advanced Test Reactor project and $150 million to establish a Uranium reserve to address challenges to the production of domestic uranium for nuclear power. This is a clearly a taxpayer subsidy for the corporate nuclear industry! There is also nearly a billion dollar investments in developing Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Quantum Computing for cybersecurity.  Where are the billions of dollars for developing new green and sustainable technologies to mitigate the Climate Crisis? There isn’t any. In fact, the 2021 funding request for renewables is down 74% from 2020! The Trump Administration cut the DOE’s budget – by 8 percent overall, and by an astounding 35 percent in non-defense programs. You can see the 2021 budget proposal here: https://www.energy.gov/cfo/downloads/fy-2021-budget-justification (Links to an external site.)

The Congressional Research Service recently did a study on the Research and Development (R&D) part of the DOE budget which is primarily ‘science’ for new energy technologies.  funding history of the DOE comparing funding for different energy sources. For the 71 year period from 1948 through 2018, nearly 13% went to renewables, compared with nearly 5% for electric systems, 11% for energy efficiency, 24% for fossil, and 48% for nuclear. The DOE is a department of nuclear energy, weapons and waste, not a Department of ENERGY.

Ref: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/RS/RS22858/17 (Links to an external site.)

What would an actual Department of Energy look like? We need a Department of Green Energy: DOGE! The DOGE would focus on developing green technologies to reduce Greenhouse gas emissions and toxic waste. It would work on rebuilding the electrical grid to prevent accidental fires during climate exasperated fire seasons. The DOGE would NOT be in the business of maintaining, modernizing and making nuclear weapons. That job needs to go back to the Department of War where it belongs out in the open for all to see, not hidden behind the innocuous name of a DOE like a sweet young deer in the woods. The current DOE is part of the war machine and it needs to be DONE.

uclear Weapons Complex the DOE manages: https://fas.org/sgp/crs/nuke/R45306.pdf