Elon Musk and SpaceX have big plans for Florida. Here's why Floridians don't like them

This is such a breakable age. Things we thought would last are, to our surprise, now in danger of shattering.

You think our state parks will always be preserved? Nope, we’re going to try to put golf courses in them. Think the Everglades will be protected forever? Sorry, we’re building a prison camp there. Think our system for buying environmental land will be free of political influence? Too bad, here’s a shady campaign contributor getting $83 million for four acres in Destin.

Last week I heard about another target for breakage, one that I thought would never see a crack: The natural lands serving as a buffer around Cape Canaveral.

Space X, the aerospace company owned by Elon Musk, wants to make big changes at the Cape. It wants to boost the number of rockets it launches and lands there, as well as boosting the size of the rocket involved.

“SpaceX is seeking [federal] approval for up to 44 Starship-Super Heavy launches per year from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center,” Florida Today reported last month. The proposal has drawn opposition from residents and officials from Titusville, Cape Canaveral, and Brevard County, as well as environmental groups worried about the potential harm to nesting sea turtles, manatees, and endangered right whales.

They’re also concerned about increased pollution, rampant water waste, a huge loss of public access, lots more sonic booms and — not to be rude — the tendency of Space X rockets to blow up. There have been four explosions so far this year.

“Yes, we have seen those headlines,” said Katie Bauman of the Surfrider Foundation, one of the most vocal environmental groups challenging the expansion.

Space X called one of those explosions “a sudden energetic event.” That’s not the kind of energy folks on the Space Coast want to see in their backyard.

But it does give a fresh context to this comment about Space X’s impact on the region by Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Haridopolos: “We are booming, literally, right now.”

The water goes pfft!

“Starship-Super Heavy” sounds like the latest iteration of the “We Built This City” rock group that started as Jefferson Airplane, morphed into Jefferson Starship then became plain Starship.

Instead, it’s actually “the world’s most powerful launch vehicle ever developed,” according to the Space X website. It’s designed to take cargo or astronauts into Earth orbit, to the Moon or even Mars, yet be as reusable as Tupperware.

“Starship and Super Heavy are designed to return to the launch site and be caught following their flight, with the ability to rapidly turn around and launch again,” the company says.

For now, its launch operations have been confined to Texas. Although Musk has had successes, repeated explosions — like the one in March that Reuters reported left “fiery debris streaking through the dusk skies near South Florida” — are something Musk dismissed as “a minor setback.”

During an Aug. 22 Space Coast Symposium speech, SpaceX Vice President of Launch Kiko Dontchev told the crowd, “You’re going to get a vetted machine that shows up ready to party.”

Clearly his definition of “party” is different from mine, and from that of a lot of the people who live and work near the Kennedy Space Center.

“Constituents and businesses have expressed concern over the cumulative environmental effects of high frequency launches, including emissions, chemical runoff, and disturbances to protected coastal and marine habitats,” Brevard County Commissioner Katie Delaney wrote in a letter to federal officials.

The Federal Aviation Administration must decide whether to permit this, which requires an environmental impact statement. In a first draft, FAA officials determined the Starship liftoffs — punctuated by up to 152 sonic booms per year — would generate “few” significant environmental impacts at Launch Complex 37.

That’s not how Bill Fisk sees it.

Fisk, a Florida native who grew up watching the Apollo launches with his dad and grandfather, is both the president of the Space Coast Audubon Society and vice chair of the Turtle Coast Sierra Club. For my edification, he catalogued the biggest impacts.

Start with the water, which Bauman of Surfrider brought up as well.

Space X expects to use 400,000 gallons of water per launch and 68,000 gallons per landing, all to cool down hot equipment. That plus other uses for the site put the expected total water use for Space X at 50 million gallons per year.

Yet Brevard is already running low on potable water for residents and businesses, Fisk said.

“It’s getting worse as the developers get more leeway, so the water supply keeps going PFFFT!” he said.

After its use, the remaining Space X fresh water would flow into local waterways that are supposed to be brackish, messing up their salt content. That includes the struggling Indian River Lagoon, where there’s a need to bring back sea grass beds as a nursery for fish and a food source for manatees.

“There is a clear and direct negative impact to the physical environment of the area … by adding excessive amounts of fresh water into the pristine local estuary,” the Southeastern Fisheries Association said in a comment letter to the FAA.

Local fishermen are already complaining about falling space debris damaging their equipment, Fisk said. Crumbling local roads can’t handle the increase in fuel truck traffic, he said. Titusville is bringing in an engineer to examine its public buildings to see if they can handle the increased vibrations.

After all, Fisk said, when the early space program was being built, “everything was built fast and it was built cheap.”

Race to space

The waters off Cape Canaveral saw the last sea battle of the Revolutionary War (we won). That marked the last big news there for a couple of centuries.

But then a Mexican cemetery blew up.

In the 1940s, the American military tested missiles by firing them from New Mexico, but one went off course and blew up a Juarez graveyard. Mexican officials complained, so the military looked for a safer launch site.

They found it at in Florida at what was then known as the Banana River Naval Air Station. The place was isolated, the land already belonged to the government, and the location near the equator meant rockets got an extra boost when they took off. Everyone seemed happy.

Then, in 1957, Sputnik changed everything.

Suddenly, America was running second to the Soviets and the Space Race was on. Cape Canaveral became the focus of a U.S. space program playing catch-up.

Brevard’s population boomed as engineers, scientists, and construction crews poured into the once-sleepy towns.

“The beach mushroomed and became sheathed in schlock,” author Herb Hiller wrote. ”Everything was built quick and short-term. Motels in Cocoa Beach and Titusville flashed neon rockets and dancing girls. Inside, sequined cuties danced and did more. Motel Row became Sin Strip.”

In the run-up to the moon landing, the work force at Canaveral peaked at 26,500 in 1968. But then Space Coast residents found out what any coal miner could’ve told them: It’s no fun living in a company town when the company winds down.

A year after the historic Apollo 11 mission, the work force fell to 15,000. Rocket scientists were pumping gas. Families who couldn’t find a buyer left their keys in the front door of their houses as they left town.

Yet, during the boom and bust, one thing remained constant: the natural buffers around the cape, which preserved the Old Florida feel of a place jumping into the 21st century.

In 1963, the feds created the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, 140,000 acres with more endangered and threatened species than any other refuge in the continental U.S.

Then, a decade later, they set up Canaveral National Seashore — 58,000 acres of barrier island, open lagoon, coastal hammock, pine flatwoods, and offshore waters.

But Space X says every time there’s a takeoff or landing, both must shut down for safety. Even the nude beach.

The naked and the clothed

Florida is the state with the most nudist resorts — 29, compared to 14 for second-place California. Harder to find are Florida’s nude beaches. They exist, but most are not official.

One well-known example is in Canaveral National Seashore: the southern end of Playalinda Beach, accessed from Parking Lot 13.

“Not too many places can you get a full view of a rocket launch while giving a full view,” WKMG-TV noted in a story that reported Playalinda had been named the 20th best nude beach in the world.

One person who submitted a comment against the Space X plan identified himself as a member of the American Association for Nude Recreation. He told the feds, “I do not see the need for corporations to take away our public privileges to public and federal lands.”

Plenty of people who ARE wearing clothes use the rest of Playalinda for swimming, surfing, fishing, picnicking, and camping. After all, it’s the longest stretch of undeveloped Atlantic coastline in Florida.

Both the naked and the clothed are freaking out about the part of the Space X plan that calls for closing access to the beach for at least 60 days a year — maybe more.

Space program veterans call Musk “the Nibbler,” Fisk told me, because “he’ll say he wants 50 launches — no wait, make it 120 — oh no, we need to do 160 launches.” He keeps nibbling a little more each time.

Residents who love Playalinda don’t want to play Musk’s shutdown game. It’s a public beach that the public wants to use, not hand over to the world’s richest man whenever he wants.

“What we want is a fair middle ground — where launch activity can thrive without compromising the health, safety, and quality of life for our residents,” Commissioner Delaney said on her substack.

I haven’t even mentioned the other Space X threat, one that would affect more than just one region of Florida.

The company wants to launch its Starship-Super Heavy rocket from its existing base in Texas to attain a low-Earth orbit. It would soar over most of North and Central Florida in a way that would block at least 10 and as many as 200 commercial airline flights.

The big break

I was curious about what an actual scientist had to say about all this.

I got in touch with Ken Kremer, a Ph.D. with 17 patents who’s been writing about the space industry for two decades. He runs the website Space Upclose and boasts that he’s witnessed more than 100 launches.

He agreed with everyone else I talked to about how awful it would be for Space X to close off Playalinda Beach for 60 days minimum.

“That’s really terrible to cut that off for two months,” he said.

But he saw a reasonable alternative.

Space X wants to use Launch Complex 39A. That’s where a lot of American space history happened, including the launch of Apollo 11. An explosion there would wipe out all the historic structures.

Ten miles away is Launch Complex 37. Space X wants to use that one too. Why not require the company to use it exclusively? That way, he said, only minimal beach closures would be required.

“There have to be some reasonable compromises,” Kremer said.

Of course, just changing the launch site doesn’t solve the other problems with pollution, excess water usage, and so forth.

Space Coast residents used to be willing to give the space program the benefit of the doubt because they felt they were doing their patriotic duty. But it’s not like that anymore. Space X is not NASA. It’s just a for-profit business, putting more money into Musk’s already bulging pockets.

I think we should tell Space X that the only way it will be allowed to do everything it wants with Cape Canaveral is if every single launch or landing in Florida carries as a passenger someone named Musk.

It could be Elon. It could be his awful father. It could be one of his 14 kids.

Then, all the water that’s left afterward, they have to drink it. And if they complain about it, tell them, “Hey, those are the breaks.”

• Craig Pittman is a native Floridian. In 30 years at the Tampa Bay Times, he won numerous state and national awards for his environmental reporting. He is the author of six books. In 2020 the Florida Heritage Book Festival named him a Florida Literary Legend. Craig is co-host of the "Welcome to Florida" podcast. He lives in St. Petersburg with his wife and children.