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"... the FAA is announcing the availability of the ROD for streamlining the environmental review of experimental permit applications for the launch and/or reentry of reusable suborbital rockets. The Federal action selected in the ROD is the FAA's issuance of experimental permits for the launch and reentry of reusable suborbital rockets from both FAA-licensed and non-licensed launch sites using the Final Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement for Streamlining the Processing of Experimental Permit Applications (PEIS), to the maximum extent feasible, as the basis for determining the environmental consequences of issuing the permits."
The PDF for the PEIS is 443 pages long! I'm not even going to try to read all that. From the Executive Summary, it looks like the purpose is to provide a boilerplate Environmental Impact Statement. So, instead of doing a complete environmental review for each application, they can use the boilerplate analysis, and focus only on the unique environmental impacts, if any, for a particular application. The National Environmental Policy Act, which requires an environmental review for a broad range of federal activities, is the ultimate source for the environmental review requirements.
If this isn't challenged in court, I think it has the potential to save a lot of time. especially for applications not deemed to require any reviews beyond the PEIS.
I hope that's plain enough!
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Can anybody give us a summary in plain language as to the implications of this? The jargonese here is pretty impenetrable.
Eschew Obfuscation!!