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.” The 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.