>That massive hole in the ground should not have happed, and I suspect that was not an expected possibility.

Interestingly, this post predicting exactly this kind of damage was flagged on HN just days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35590279

I think it's unlikely that SpaceX wasn't aware of the damage that would be caused. They have a pretty good engineering team, and that aspect didn't involve an anomaly, it was the vehicle operating as planned at launch. But admitting the inadequacy of the launch facility would've undoubtedly led to significant delays. Fortunately for SpaceX, the rocket blew up, which will draw media attention away from the damage on and around the launchpad.

>In Port Isabel, a city about six miles northwest where at least one window shattered, residents were alarmed.

>"There were bowling ball-sized pieces of concrete that came flying out of the launchpad area"

>In June, an environmental assessment by the Federal Aviation Administration concluded that SpaceX’s plans for orbital launches would have “no significant impact” on the region along the Gulf Coast.

There was a thread here [0] a few days ago of a blog post that raised some valid criticism to the way Starbase its conducting its ops and how the EPA is playing dumb around it.

Funny thing, it got flagged and hidden almost immediately, even though it was quite active and getting several comments per minute ...

What I've found particularly disturbing is how some commenters were dismissing the blog post as ignorant, misinformed, a "breathless doom mongering", etc. I wonder if they're on Musk's payroll or if they just shill for free.

I'd like to hear what they say about this but they're, conveniently, no longer around now. A classic.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35590279

One funny bit of context is that I remember I enjoyed reading this story linked from HN and then came back to read the comments only to find it was flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35590279

So uh, us-a culpa.

But yeah I assume that they can't actually correctly isolate the protected wildlife lands from the rockets even with the added protections on the launch site itself, just fundamental physical limitations of how quiet a rocket that size can be... I don't know whether that will actually invalidate their permitting etc. or not though.