I can already see his fanboys doing mental gymnastics to justify this one.
It’s all coming together. He’s already indicated that his Mars settlement plan is company towns and indentured servitude. In Texas he’s already functionally taken over the ostensibly environmentally protected area in order to expand his military contracting gig. Company towns are definitely coming back if we let the robber barons keep on with business as usual.
taken over the ostensibly environmentally protected area
This sounds interesting, do you have any reading material on it?
This Guardian article (archive link) does a pretty good job of summarizing the issues. It is over a year old though, and SpaceX activities have only ramped up since then with, as far as I can tell, no consideration to the environment or the community. Indeed the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) finally finished an environmental impact review/approval in June 2022 with a 75 point list which SpaceX needs to take action on. To date (nine months later) SpaceX have not indicated how they will take action on any of these items. The relevant regulatory agencies (FAA as well as Fish and Wildlife primarily) aren’t doing a whole lot to keep SpaceX in check, and it’s not like SpaceX are operating in good faith either. As we know, one of Musk’s favourite things to do is act publicly belligerent towards regulators, including going ahead with a launch in December 2020 even after the FAA reminded SpaceX that the launch wasn’t approved.
For further reading the references in the Impacts section of the Wikipedia page on Starbase (yes the pretentious [removed] named it Starbase) aren’t a bad place to start on not just the environmental impacts but the economic and human effects as well.
