Opponents continue to characterize Stratos as a billionaire vanity project to loot Utah’s vast natural resources with little consideration for how it will affect residents.

Utah State University physics professor Robert Davies told Fox 13 that the Great Salt Lake “is occupied by amazing living systems” and that “projects like this go into environments like this and scrape the living systems right off the face of the Earth.”

He said, “This is a private enterprise that is coming in to extract from our natural wealth and pipe it out of the state… and leave us with a few crumbs.”