There are environmental concerns, I get it, but this feels a little bit like delaying the Manhattan project for a year because the test detonation would endanger some birds in the desert.
The environmental concerns are illegitimate though, the probability of hitting a sea creature is so vanishingly small.
Where's the outrage around the thousands of container ships that burn the dirtiest crude oil and dump their waste into the ocean? Or all the airliners killing birds?
Let's be real, this isn't environmental concerns, it's a way to punish Musk for his political stance.
Absolutely. Being able to get mass to orbit at orders of magnitude less cost than competing nations (China, Russia, India, ...) is of paramount strategic importance. This touches communications, intelligence, space exploration, orbital resource extraction, moon bases and all sorts of other things that have tremendous economic, military and societal impact.
China is second in mass to orbit after SpaceX. All others amount to a rounding error. There are currently a couple dozen Chinese startups working to build reusable orbital class rockets. Launches or test fires every week. No other country has an active program to build a reusable launch stage. It's not a hot war... yet. One might call it a cold war.
The most obvious pressure would be China's space exploration program. If it turns out that there's useful stuff outside our atmosphere, America doesn't want their economic rival in control of it.
Also - if our species doesn't make it off-planet before the current one is rendered uninhabitable, it's curtains for us all. So that's a pressure of a sort.
There's nothing useful out there, except for the high ground and vantage point. All satellites that make money or have military value are pointed at Earth.
If you're right, we're all dead. Maybe within a few hundred years, probably under a thousand.
If you're wrong, but enough people believe you're right in the spirit of maximising quarterly returns, then we're all dead on the same timeline.
The only path to survival as a species is to work out how to do space exploration. I'm hoping to find water on the moon and mars as the next step, and to find it within the next few years.
Columbus thought he could find a fast route to Asia because he grossly underestimated the circumference of the Earth. Spain was advised of this (the more correct circumference derived by Eratosthenes was commonly known), and only funded Columbus on the off chance that if he might stumble across something of value, they would rather that belong to Spain than a rival power. It was a cheap gamble for Spain at the time.
We're in a very small window in the battle against climate change where people are even allowed to spend money on space programs.
In a few decades at our current rate we're going to see so many natural disasters and mass migrations that the general populace will be far more concerned about food and water for the populace than wasting it on extravagances like space, and then we may end up all dying on this rock.
Once we're able to successfully mine minerals from space and have some hope for colonizing other planets the game changes, because people could see it as a lifeline rather than a waste.
