Welcome everyone to our monthly Space Policy edition of Planetary Radio.

I'm Sarah Alahmit, the host of Planetary Radio for the Planetary Society, and I'm joined

today by Casey Dreyer, our Chief of Space Policy.

Hey Sarah, happy to be back.

It has been a ridiculous month between our digital day of action, our campaign to try to say

Veritas, everything that went down with SpaceX's Starship, which you're going to get into today,

and everything that's going on in Washington, DC, with budget negotiations and the debt ceiling.

I'm sure it has been a ridiculous month for you, like how are you doing?

Good, exciting times. Let me tease the interview first because that's the big thing we want to

talk about today, which is with Eric Roche, who runs the substack called ESG Hunt. He's an

environmental regulations expert and background in science, and has been a noted critic of SpaceX's

environmental regulatory filings and FAA's approval of Starship was launched in this very kind of

delicate, eco habitat around Boca Chica in Texas. And we saw with Starship that it was a

surprisingly, let's say, energetic event launching from that pad without a flame trench or water

suppression system. And it looked pretty bad, I think, in terms of the destruction and also the

debris that it flew everywhere. And so, Eric, I wanted to have talk about because of this real

fascinating to me intersection of space with environmental policy and environmental regulations.

And when those two sometimes combust or are at tension, the awareness and the problems

that this could pose for our efforts to get into space in the long term by potentially alienating

parts of the public or creating environmental tensions or as what happened, they are getting now

sued by a consortium of environmental groups to ground the spacecraft. There are real consequences

here. If you don't follow the letter of the law very well, and Eric walks us through that,

...