SpaceX's Starship explosion leads to lawsuit against FAA over environmental concerns

Environmental groups are suing the Federal Aviation Administration over the explosion of SpaceX's massive new rocket, saying that the agency allowed Elon Musk's company to bypass important environmental reviews because of political and financial influence.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., on Monday, says the case boils down to "a question with national, global, and even interstellar implications."

"It is also about whether regulators will hold powerful corporations accountable or allow them to disregard environmental laws," the lawsuit continues. "We must decide whether we will protect the wildlife and frontline communities that can be adversely affected by our desire to reach the stars, or whether we will leave a legacy of needless destruction in the scorching wake of rocket plumes."

SpaceX's Starship rocket exploded minutes after takeoff on its first test flight on April 20, crashing into the Gulf of Mexico, blowing up the company's launch pad, hurling chunks of metal and concrete into a national wildlife refuge and sending particulate matter miles from the launch pad in Boca Chica, Texas.

FAA spokesman Steve Kulm said that the agency "does not comment on ongoing litigation matters."

SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment, though Musk said the scattered debris "was not toxic at all," comparing it to a "human-made sandstorm."

"It did scatter a lot of dust," he said on a Twitter Spaces event. "But to the best of our knowledge, there has not been any meaningful damage to the environment that we’re aware of."

'Dumping ground'

The lawsuit was filed by five groups including the Center for Biological Diversity and the American Bird Conservancy.

They say that the FAA failed to conduct an in-depth environmental review before allowing SpaceX to launch its Starship program, which is hoped to send people and cargo to the moon and one day, Mars.

The lawsuit says that the FAA needed to conduct a so-called environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act. Instead, the FAA conducted a much less stringent assessment and concluded there wouldn't be a significant environmental impact to allowing SpaceX to run the Starship program.

Given that the program involves launching "the largest rockets known to human kind," it should have been subject to a thorough environmental analysis, the lawsuit argues.

"The FAA failed to take a hard look at the environmental impacts of the SpaceX launch program ... including increased light, heat, and environmental pollution, as well as risk of wildfires, damage to critical habitat, and the launch program's contribution to climate change," the lawsuit says.

Jared Margolis, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement that "it’s vital that we protect life on Earth even as we look to the stars in this modern era of spaceflight.”

“Federal officials should defend vulnerable wildlife and frontline communities, not give a pass to corporate interests that want to use treasured coastal landscapes as a dumping ground for space waste," he said.

The area where SpaceX is running its Starship program is "one of the most biologically diverse regions in North America" and essential to the safety of a number of birds and the most critically endangered sea turtle in the world, according to the Center for Biological Diversity.

SpaceX says that Starship will be able to carry up to 100 people on long-duration, interplanetary flights.

"At SpaceX, we are actively developing technologies with the potential to change the course of life on Earth and beyond," the company says in a promotional video of the program.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: SpaceX: Lawsuit filed against FAA by environmentalists over Starship