It's a case of bureaucracy gone wild. SpaceX founder Elon Musk says he is “really feeling the pain of overregulation,” after his rocket mission was delayed multiple times over concern for marine life.The Starship rocket, which had its first successful soft landing in the Indian Ocean in June, is designed to land in the ocean after its space mission.US government agencies however have continuously delayed Musk’s rocket ambitions on account of sharks, whales and seals..WATCH: Musk estimates 'humanoid' robots will outnumber humans within a decade. “I’ve got a bunch of nutty stories, some of them are I guess kind of funny,” said Musk while campaigning in Pennsylvania over the weekend for Republican candidate and former President Donald Trump.“SpaceX had to do this study to see if Starship would hit a shark. And I’m like, it’s a big ocean, you know. There’s a lot of sharks. It’s not impossible, but it’s very unlikely.”“This is I think from National Marine Fisheries (NMF).”SpaceX agreed to do the analysis, and asked NMF for shark data, but they refused.“Well then we were in a bit of a quandary. How do we solve this shark probability issue?”“They were worried about the people who hunt sharks for shark fins somehow getting their hands on this shark data.”“Eventually we got the data and we could run the analysis to say, ‘yeah, the sharks are going to be fine.’ But they wouldn’t let us proceed with launch until we did this crazy shark data.”“And we thought okay we’re done —- but they said, ‘what about whales? What is the rocket goes underwater and explodes and gives whales hearing damage?’”.Elon Musk criticizes Trudeau for ‘trying to crush free speech in Canada’.In a 2023 interview with Lex Fridman, Musk recounted how the bureaucracy required SpaceX to “kidnap a seal and put headphones on it to play sonic booms.”At the time, his company was waiting on regulatory approval from the Fish and Wildlife Agency. “We effectively need a fish licence to launch a rocket,” he said..TRUDEAU: Conservatives 'Called their friend Elon Musk'. “Launching out of Vandenberg in California, they were worried about seal procreation, whether the seals would be dismayed by the sonic booms,” said Musk. “Now, there have been a lot of rockets launched out of Vandenberg, and the seal population has steadily increased. So, if anything, rocket booms are an aphrodisiac — based on the evidence, if you correlate rocket launchers with seal population.”“Nonetheless, we were forced to kidnap a seal, strap it to a board, put headphones on the seal, and play sonic boom sounds to it to see if it would be distressed. This is an actual thing that happened. This is actually real. I have pictures. It's a seal with headphones strapped to a board.”“I don't think the public is quite aware of the madness that goes on.”
