Elon Musk says US government forced SpaceX to study if starships will hit whales, sharks on return to earth

"SpaceX had to do this study to see if Starship would hit a shark, and I'm like, 'It’s a big ocean. There are a lot of sharks! It's not impossible, but it's very unlikely,'" Musk said, recalling the situation.

"So [SpaceX] said, 'Fine, we’ll do the analysis. Can you give us the shark data?’ They were like, 'No, we can’t give you the shark data.' Well, then, okay, we’re in a bit of a quandary. How do we solve this shark probability issue? They said, 'Well, we could give it to our western division, but we don’t trust them.' I’m like, 'Am I in a comedy sketch here?!'" the SpaceX CEO joked to the Pennsylvania audience who burst out laughing.

"So, eventually, we got the data and could run the analysis to say, 'Yeah, the sharks are going to be fine.' But they wouldn’t let us proceed with the launch until we did this crazy shark [analysis]. Then we thought, 'Okay, now we’re done.' But then they said, 'What about whales?'" Musk added, later saying that the company ran a whale analysis and determined that the "whales would be fine too."

Musk was campaigning for Donald Trump in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, where, according to the latest Trafalgar poll, the GOP nominee is up by three points. Musk has routinely expressed frustration with the accumulated regulatory agencies and laws that the government has imposed and echoed those sentiments in the speech on Saturday evening.

Musk has been touring around the state in order to do town hall events where he is speaking to Pennsylvania voters and has been defending free speech as well as gun rights as he stumps for Trump leading up to the 2024 election.