Elon Musk is again telling the story of what he says it took to get a rocket launch approved by wildlife regulators, and it is as strange as it sounds. He says SpaceX was required to take a seal, strap it to a board, put headphones on it and play sonic boom sounds to see whether it became distressed. Musk insists the episode is real, says he has pictures, and adds that it was done twice. The test was tied to launches from Vandenberg in California, where regulators were concerned about how sonic booms might affect seals. Musk says the seal stayed remarkably calm, and he joked that its seal friends would never believe what happened to it.

That was not the only wildlife worry he describes. Musk says regulators first raised the risk of a rocket hitting a shark, but would not hand over the data he needed to calculate the odds because they feared shark hunters might get it. He says he was then told another part of the same department could do the analysis, which he found baffling. A second agency then brought up whales, and Musk joked that any whale hit by a rocket would be the unluckiest whale ever, since the chance is extremely small. He also points out that the Vandenberg seal population has been rising for years and joked that rocket booms might even be an aphrodisiac. Musk used the stories to argue that the public does not see how much red tape surrounds launches, though regulators say these environmental reviews exist to protect wildlife, and reports note that earlier testing found no hearing changes in seals and that decades of monitoring found launch noise effects were generally minimal and temporary.