Environmental activists protesting in Gulf of Mexico waters off the coast of Tamaulipas state against Elon Musk’s rocket launches in south Texas allege that foreign helicopters tried to intimidate them on Monday, putting their lives in danger.
Musk’s aerospace company SpaceX, which had a Starship flight test scheduled for Sunday, has been threatened with a lawsuit by the Mexican government which claims that wreckage from exploding rockets is killing wildlife.
Multiple test launches have ended in explosions, causing debris to rain down on both countries and in the Gulf of Mexico.
Sunday’s launch plans prompted the protest led by the Mexican NGO Conibio Global, which champions conservation and protecting biodiversity. Also taking part were Selva Tenek, Iván Rescata and local fishermen.
The activists notified Mexico’s Naval Ministry of their plans, as required by law.
On Sunday evening, small boatloads of activists, one flying a flag calling for the defense of sea turtles, motored in Mexican waters between Playa Bagdad and the mouth of the Rio Grande.
The protesters took note of the presence of dolphins and the plethora of seafowl, including brown pelicans, royal terns and a variety of gulls, sandpipers and white ibis.
Two helicopters and a U.S. Coast Guard ship were in the vicinity while U.S. Border Patrol officers manned the northern shore of the Rio Grande. The protest ended without incident, and the launch was scrapped due to “an issue with ground systems.”
Monday’s protest prompted a more aggressive response, however. The boaters were harassed by two low-flying helicopters, their downdrafts causing dangerous waves.
“It was essentially an attack, our lives were at risk,” said Jesús Elías Ibarra, president of Conibio Global.
According to the newspaper El Sol de Tampico, one of the helicopters is registered in Brownsville, Texas, to the Bank of Utah Trustee, suggesting that it had been flying illegally above Mexican waters.
As it turned out, Monday’s scheduled Starship launch was also scrapped, this time due to weather. SpaceX succeeded in launching on Tuesday.
Ibarra defended his group’s protest on Sunday, describing it as part of an eight-year effort to protect the critically endangered Kemp’s Ridley sea turtles, which almost exclusively nest on the beaches of Tamaulipas, just south of the U.S.-Mexico border.
“There was an explosion in May, and … we found more than 40 kilometers of beach littered with space debris, much of it with SpaceX labels on it,” Ibarra said. “We also found tanks that are part of the propulsion system or the booster’s fire-fighting system.”
A June blast at Starbase lobbed wreckage across the Rio Grande and into Mexico, the first Starship mishap to send debris directly onto Mexican land. However, parts of the rockets have been washing up on the country’s beaches for the past several years.
The June explosion prompted Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum to order an investigation by the Environment Ministry while also threatening action against SpaceX.
With reports from El Sol de Tampico and Milenio
