Re: Just one question
Musk likes to take credit for things and you let him. Since the beginning of the year Musk has been spending all his time supporting transphobes on Twitter. Starbase is run by Kathy Lueders. Putting Raptors on a Falcon is utterly stupid from two different directions.
Falcon tooling is set up for 3.7m diameter aluminium tanks. Keep that or you are doing a new rocket. The propellant is different so you need to upgrade ground support equipment and move to common dome to get the right mixture ratio (liquid methane is less dense than kerosine so the methane takes up a higher proportion of the rocket. The engines are more efficient so the over all height may not need to change much). Tank pressurisation is different so you have to rip out the helium system out for the top of the tanks and route new pipes from the engines for the autogenous system. Raptors are bigger than Merlins so you cannot fit 9 on stage one. Luckily they are so powerful you only need three. The thrust structure and plumbing under the rocket need a complete redesign. There won't be a central engine, so you cannot land with just one - which would be equivalent two a three Merlin engine landing. Three raptors are far too powerful to land a Falcon, so throw away the grid fins, landing legs and any opportunity to inspect a used engine to improve design. A single raptor on stage two would create enough acceleration to crush the payload.
At $40M each I can understand why throwing away 36 SLS engines would cause horror. With a promised production rate of 8 per year I can understand why throwing away 36 sounds crazy. With a production rate of 30/month and an incremental cost of $250,000 each raptors get scrapped all the time. Blowing up 36 really is not an issue.
Check out the Centre for Biological Diversity. Not the environment group in Scotland, but the law firm from Washington suing the FAA. Read their complaint. It is like 'election fraud' litigation, not intended for use in a court room but instead for getting donations from the public. If anyone is getting into trouble for CBD vs FAA it is the CBD lawyers for wasting the court's time. Please go to the CBD website and look at who they say they are (lawyers), what they say they do (start litigation) and what they want (your money).
All large rocket launch sites in the US are surrounded by wildlife reserves. Any construction work done on the reserves has to be carried out by the Army Corp of Engineers. Getting that done is an organisational nightmare. Look at the satellite imagery: you will find catch ponds on the Starbase sites dug on SpaceX land. Digging them can be done by SpaceX without waiting for the corps to get their act together. Instead of fresh water quickly running off concrete it leaks slowly from the ponds like rain water into sand - as required by the mitigated finding of no significant impact for the programmatic environmental assessment. The deluge system has two giant concrete catchment pools so the water trucked in for the deluge system can be recycled. When half a dozen agencies do not slap SpaceX with fines and lawsuits will you admit that you are wrong or say it is a deep state conspiracy? There is some youtuber currently cashing in by creating environmental outrage among the credulous. Please apply a little critical thinking and fact checking - and that goes double for the Elon Stans being first up with the wrong answers that makes debunking clickbait twice as hard.
The consequences of an experimental rocket taking out 39a would be NASA having to buy rides to the ISS from Roscosmos. I thoroughly understand NASA being protective of 39a. SpaceX are adding crew access to SLC-40 to address this issue. Work on Starship launches from Florida slowed before the first Starship orbital launch test crater and has essentially stopped. This has happened before - and for the same reason: the mathematical models predicting the scale of ground support equipment capable of surviving an orbital launch were wrong. From a SpaceX point of view, the risk wasting time and money on early construction work that gets demolished is smaller than the potential benefit of having a launch tower ready when Starship is. The biggest cost in bringing something new to market is time. You really do not want everyone waiting around because one part of the system is later than the rest.