SpaceX wants to go to Mars. To get there, environmentalists say it’s trashing Texas

BROWNSVILLE, Texas — Standing before a crowd of onlookers and journalists in South Texas in February of 2022, Elon Musk made the case for going to Mars. His company SpaceX would build a rocket called Starship. It would be the largest ever built and it would launch frequently — as often as three times a day. The goal would be to stockpile enough fuel and oxygen in space to power a single Starship out toward the Red Planet.

Ultimately, Starships would deliver around a million tons of cargo on the Martian surface — enough to build a self-sustaining colony. Musk pitched the colony as a Plan B for humans, should anything happen to Earth.

It would protect other species from a catastrophe as well.

“We are life’s stewards, life’s guardians,” Musk told the crowd. “The creatures that we love, they can’t build spaceships, but we can, and we can bring them with us.”

Musk might see Starship as an ark for all God’s creatures, but environmentalists tell a different story. As Starship prototypes have begun flying from SpaceX’s launch pad in Boca Chica, Texas, they say the company has shown little regard for the wildlife Musk has said he wants to protect.

Now, a review of state and federal records by NPR, including some obtained through a freedom of information request, shows how SpaceX has sometimes ignored environmental regulations as it rushed to fulfill its founder’s vision. With each of its launches, records show, the company discharged tens of thousands of gallons of what regulators classify as industrial wastewater into the surrounding environment.

In response to the discharges of water from the pad, both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) have determined that SpaceX has violated the Clean Water Act. Both agencies levied fines totaling more than $150,000 against the company in September.

The consequences of actions like these are real, environmental groups say. SpaceX’s launch site is surrounded by a state park and federal wildlife refuge home to hundreds of of thousands of shorebirds, sea turtles and other species. Biologists say the company’s Starship launches are having a measurable impact. A recent report documented how SpaceX’s last launch destroyed nests of a vulnerable population of shorebirds.

Local environmental groups and members of the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe have filed a lawsuit demanding an extensive environmental review of Starship launches.

“This is the last untouched piece of the Texas coast, essentially,” says Joyce Hamilton, a member of the board of Save RGV, a local environmental group that is part of the lawsuit. For Save RGV, the wastewater issue has become emblematic of how SpaceX treats the environment. “This is potentially really damaging,” Hamilton says.

“Everything you see out here doesn’t exist on Mars,” adds Jim Chapman, another board member. Musk “seems to care a lot more about 100,000 years from now than now here on Earth.”

In fact, Save RGV filed a second lawsuit on Oct. 9 over the wastewater issue asking for an additional $56,460 in civil penalties per day of violation. In a post on the social media platform X, SpaceX described the suit as “unwarranted and frivolous.”

In response to NPR’s request for comment for this story, SpaceX referred to a lengthy post it put up Sept. 10. In the post, the company categorically denied that the water system it employs for launches was in any way hazardous.

“It uses literal drinking water,” the post read in part. “The subsequent fines levied on SpaceX by TCEQ and the EPA are entirely tied to disagreements over paperwork. We chose to settle so that we can focus our energy on completing the missions and commitments that we have made to the U.S. government, commercial customers, and ourselves.”

Experts contacted by NPR disagree with the company’s statement. The water is being used to cool the launch pad as Starship’s engines fire. While drinking water may be used in the system, after it comes into contact with the rocket exhaust, it contains high levels of dissolved solids and potentially toxic chemicals like zinc and hexavalent chromium, according to the license application submitted by SpaceX to Texas regulators.

“I would not feel comfortable drinking it as drinking water,” says Courtney Gardner, an assistant professor of environmental engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. “And I would not recommend that anybody else would drink it either.”

Despite the concerns over the water and other issues, SpaceX appears to be just days from launching again. The company says it could conduct its fifth test launch of Starship as soon as Oct. 13, “pending regulatory approval.”

Both the EPA and Texas regulators have agreed to allow the launch while SpaceX finalizes a permit for dealing with the wastewater. The Federal Aviation Administration, which grants permission for Starship’s test launches, said in a statement that “The FAA will make a licensing determination once SpaceX has met all licensing requirements.”

But environmental activists think the company needs to slow down. “They’re protecting their corporate interests by moving quickly and not following the law,” says Jared Margolis, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, which is leading the lawsuit to force a larger environmental review. “Following the law would take more time and money.”

Launch pad bust-up

Driving out to SpaceX’s launch pad takes about 30 minutes from the nearby city of Brownsville. The road is a tiny ribbon of highway that winds through coastal grasslands and tidal flats. Most of the land is part of Boca Chica State Park and federal wildlife refuge, but rising high above grasses and shallow pools of water are two launch towers and three large buildings where Starship and its boosters are built.

“The vast majority of the property out here is either state or federal, except for the patch that SpaceX is on and some other little holdings,” says Justin LeClaire, a conservation biologist with the Coastal Bend Bays & Estuaries Program, a nonprofit that studies South Texas’ coastline.

LeClaire says this area is a vital habitat for hundreds of species of birds. “All shorebirds are in somewhat of decline,” he says. Much of that decline has come as humans have built up homes and industry along the coast. The preserve is a stopover for many species as they migrate between North America and Central and South America.

“Boca Chica was a literal refuge and state park where these species could go and not have to deal with people,” he says.

Then came the first launch of Starship in April of 2023. The rocket’s booster, which the company refers to as “Super Heavy,” fired its 33 engines. The force and heat were so great that they vaporized parts of the launch site, including the toilets.

“The shockwave blast created by engine ignition and take-off destroyed the pad restroom … the building has been leveled and the system is non-existent,” SpaceX wrote Texas environmental regulators in an email shortly after the launch that was obtained by NPR through a freedom of information request.

Starship’s powerful engines also dug into the concrete launch pad, flinging debris like concrete and rebar into the dunes and marshes around the pad. In the weeks and months following the launch, SpaceX did clean up some of the debris, but chunks of concrete and rebar remain scattered throughout the area.

The damage was substantial, in part, because the company had opted not to install a system to spray water under the rocket as it lifted off. Such a system, known as a water deluge system, protects the concrete and steel of the launch pad from the intense heat of the rocket engines. It is standard equipment at launch sites elsewhere in the world.

“We wrongly thought, based on static fire data, that Fondag [concrete] would make it through 1 launch,” Musk said on X.

Following the launch, in the summer of 2023, the company installed tanks capable of spraying over 180,000 gallons of water beneath Starship as it lifted off from the pad.

But even with the new deluge system, SpaceX’s launch pad still lacked several other modifications designed to contain the power of the launch. Launch pads at locations like NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida and Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia have a “flame trench” — an excavated, concrete-reinforced chamber beneath the rocket shunts the flame out of the side of the launch pad.

The trench also serves as a way to contain water from the deluge system. At Wallops, for example, the water is sprayed under the rocket just above the trench. It either evaporates or is blasted downward along the flame trench and into a concrete basin where it’s allowed to cool. While it’s held in the basin, it’s tested for suspended solids, contaminants and pH level, in order to comply with environmental standards. Only after it’s tested is it allowed to flow into a network of retention ponds, before eventually being released into the environment. The entire process is dictated by a special wastewater permit issued by the state of Virginia. Kennedy Space Center follows a similar procedure and also has a permit to discharge its deluge water.

Starship’s launch pad is flat and level, allowing water from its deluge system to flow freely toward the sand flats. The pad does have a single retention pond, but the EPA says some 34,200 gallons end up directly in the wetlands after each launch.

Complaints come in

Local environmentalists and citizens quickly recognized the problem posed by the new deluge system. Texas regulators received around half-a-dozen complaints after the system’s installation.

“Why are not the same safety rules for launching heavy rockets such as this and followed by NASA in Florida not applicable in Texas?” read one complaint included in TCEQ’s investigation report, which NPR received as part of its request for records.

The Environmental Protection Agency launched its own investigation. On Aug. 23, 2023, EPA’s Region 6 sent a letter to SpaceX requesting additional details about the new deluge system.

Even as concerns were raised and investigations begun, SpaceX was making breathtaking progress in realizing Musk’s vision. It continued to make modifications to Starship, and by November of 2023, it was ready to launch again. Despite the concerns being raised, Starship rumbled into a clear blue Texas sky on Nov. 18. This time, the rocket flew significantly farther than it had before. Its engines fired and pushed Starship to the edge of space. Before it could complete its mission, the self-destruct system activated, destroying the rocket.

The mission was still hailed as a success, because it got farther than the first launch. But it also sparked a flurry of additional complaints to Texas regulators. “Deluge water is considered industrial wastewater and should not be allowed to be dumped into waters of Texas,” read one complaint.

SpaceX’s philosophy has always been to iterate designs quickly, and by March of 2024, the company was ready to try again. Then on March 13, the company received a letter from the EPA. It was a formal Administrative Order, and in it, the EPA told SpaceX that its water deluge system was in violation of the Clean Water Act.

“Violations were identified during a review,” the letter read in part. “The violations alleged are for discharges to waters of the United States without a permit.”

The EPA gave SpaceX 30 days to develop a plan to mitigate the water discharges and submit a permit to Texas regulators.

EPA didn’t have the authority to stop the launch. That was up to the FAA, which issued the launch license. But the FAA says neither SpaceX nor the EPA told them about the violations.

The agency had cleared the launch — so the next day, the company fired the engines on Starship for a third time, again discharging tens of thousands of gallons of water into the wetlands.

On April 4, SpaceX sent a letter to the EPA claiming the discharge system was covered under a general permit issued by Texas regulators. But the EPA rejected that claim: “Discharges from the water deluge system operations during rocket launching activities do not appear to be covered under [the permit],” the agency told SpaceX in an April 15 letter obtained by NPR through its records request.

Despite being told in both March and April that its launches were in violation of the Clean Water Act, SpaceX decided to launch again in June. As the company prepared for that fourth launch, Justin LeClaire set up automatic trail cameras near the nesting sites of around half-a-dozen snowy plovers and other shorebirds, which were tending eggs on the ground in sandy flats near the launch site.

The power of the launch on June 6 broke his cameras, and its effect on the birds' nests was just as severe. “At least one egg in every nest was either damaged or not there,” LeClaire says.

The June flight test was a smashing success for SpaceX. The rocket’s Super Heavy first stage performed exactly as hoped, and Starship circled partly around the Earth before reentering over the Indian Ocean. It was the first successful reentry of the spacecraft.

But with each launch, pressure was mounting, and SpaceX applied for a discharge permit in early July of 2024. “Despite our previous permitting, which was done in coordination with TCEQ, and our operation having little to nothing in common with industrial waste discharges covered by individual permits, we applied for an individual permit,” the company wrote in its Sept. 10 post.

The license application provided details about what was in water in the retention pond both before and after the June launch. “There are pollutants like aluminum, arsenic, zinc, and hexavalent chromium,” said Jen Duggan, executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit group that monitors water quality across the U.S., who evaluated the application for NPR.

While Duggan says the volume of water is relatively small compared to some industrial processes, she believes the water unequivocally requires SpaceX to have a wastewater permit. “These are discharges to a pretty ecologically sensitive area,” she says. “These are significant violations of the Clean Water Act.”

The next launch

In recent weeks, SpaceX has stacked another rocket on the launch pad and conducted fueling tests and other activities in preparation to launch again. The company now says a launch could come as soon as Sunday, though the wastewater permit is not yet approved.

Environmentalists say they expect the company’s wastewater discharge permit to be approved, though the exact time line for that approval remains unclear. As part of its settlement with the EPA and Texas regulators, SpaceX will be required to conduct tests of the discharge waters after each launch and submit them to regulators.

SpaceX has good reason to rapidly develop Starship. The rocket plays a key role in the company’s plans for the future. Ahead of its potential trip to Mars, it is supposed to first deliver a new generation of internet-transmitting satellites to orbit, allowing the company to greatly expand its Starlink network. And NASA has paid about $4 billion to use the rocket as part of its mission to return astronauts to the moon. The space agency hopes that by as soon as 2026, Starship will be able to deliver the first astronauts to the lunar surface since the Apollo missions of the 1960s and ’70s.

The arguments over the water discharges have caused a several-month delay, but they may lead to bigger headaches for the company. Right now, the only place SpaceX is allowed to test Starship is its launch pad in Boca Chica. To get it flying, SpaceX is hoping to more than double the number of orbital test launches it can do, from five to 25 per year — roughly every other week.

The lawsuit by Save RGV and other local groups hopes to block that plan to increase the number of launches until the FAA conducts a more extensive environmental review. The plaintiffs point to the water discharge issue as one example of why such a review is necessary.

“More needs to be done to analyze the impacts; more needs to be done to address those impacts and mitigate those impacts,” says environmental lawyer Jared Margolis.

After SpaceX’s violations of the Clean Water Act became publicly known in August, the FAA suddenly suspended its process for increasing the number of launches to 25 a year at Boca Chica. The agency is now reviewing the environmental assessment necessary to allow more launches.

That means, for now at least, the company must make due with five launches each year. Margolis says he hopes the lawsuit will force the FAA to do a more thorough environmental impact statement before the number of launches is allowed to increase.

On the mud flats beneath the giant rocket, biologist Justin LeClaire is worried. SpaceX’s presence is causing rapid shifts to this vital ecosystem. Trash from the worksite has attracted racoons and coyotes, which also prey on shorebird eggs, he says. Construction noise is a constant disruption.

“These birds need just under a month to hatch eggs and then another month to fledge their chicks,” he says. If SpaceX speeds up its development as planned, he says, “birds will not fledge chicks out of this habitat.” What else will happen, he wonders, if the launches become a biweekly event.