Things are about to get worse in California. The Air Force approved a plan late last year to launch 100 SpaceX rockets annually from Vandenberg Space Force Base. As many feared, the latest expansion likely won’t be the last. The Department of Defense, as the old generals dreamed, is making space the new medium of war.
Under the banner of national security interests, the Air Force has ignored strident opposition from Central Coast Californians. Three counties are united by a hatred for the sonic booms generated by Falcon 9 rocket launches.
Joy Downing Riley, an organizer with the Surfrider Foundation’s Ventura chapter, lives over an hour away from Vandenberg, but the sonic booms are so powerful that it feels like someone has crashed a car into her house. “People’s everyday lives, sleep, mental and physical health are disrupted,” she told Inkstick.
The sonic booms are often the first issue locals take with the launches, but wider concerns about the expansion of the war industry, government transparency, human health hazards, and international law were vocalized during local meetings about the SpaceX expansion.
Marcy Winograd, a member of the Central Coast Anti-War Coalition, wants to open up public discourse beyond the individual and immediate harms of the launches.
“Instead of retracting and moving in the direction of a peace economy, we are expanding into the surveillance and war industries for billionaires to profit,” Winograd said.
SpaceX earned $24 billion in government contracts since 2008, most of those awarded by NASA and the DOD. SpaceX launches the National Reconnaissance Office’s surveillance satellites. SpaceX is currently launching satellites for the Space Force’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, a test run for the Golden Dome. It also launches spy satellites for Israel — internet access can be given and refused in war and crisis.
SpaceX has more than 8,000 active satellites in low-Earth orbit. The rest of the world combined has around 4,000. Starlink satellites have a lifespan of five years. The fate of dead or dying satellites — burning holes in the ozone layer or joining a dangerously crowded junkyard — does not concern agencies that are now able to quadruple their spying capabilities. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets are the workhorses of the second space race.
It’s a bad time for nostalgia. The Mitchell Institute, a military think tank, has described the need for hundreds of annual rocket launches in existential terms. Like the first space race, there would be a great but necessary cost.
“While the United States will steadfastly pursue the safety of astronauts and citizens on the ground, the recognition that some satellites and missions can accept a higher level of risk is transformative,” a retired Space Force colonel wrote, later adding that “the consequence of ceding space superiority is catastrophic.” If the US doesn’t beat China in space, “the basic fabric of 21st-century life begins to unravel.”
Sonic booms reverberated across the US during the first space race. During the Oklahoma City sonic boom experiments of 1964, the city was subjected to eight each day in an effort from the Air Force and the FAA to gauge public acceptance of supersonic aviation. Historian David Suisman argues that “within the political economy of the Cold War, sonic booms became a new kind of state power, grounded in both civilian and military authority, with deep implications” for the emerging modern national security state and its ability to infiltrate and injure all aspects of American life. Residents were outraged at what they experienced as a profound violation of their bodies, homes, and rights.
“People’s everyday lives, sleep, mental and physical health are disrupted.” – Joy Downing Riley
Then, as now, the flights producing sonic booms were presented to the public as a necessity for national security and an economic windfall.
Vandenberg is, as it’s always been mythologized, uniquely positioned for military launches. It’s at the right location to launch into polar orbit — ideal for spy satellites — with no time spent flying over populated land masses. Debris strike risks are lower, the company claims. You can’t get that on the East Coast.
But the Central Coast has its own temperament: high winds, thick fogs, and wildfires delay flights.
The Air Force bet billions of dollars on Vandenberg’s SLC-6 (pronounced slick six), a launch pad first built for the Manned Orbiting Laboratory, and then renovated for the West Coast Space Shuttle. Both were cancelled before a single flight. In 2024, Congress allocated more than $1 billion to improve the Space Force’s launch infrastructure. Vandenberg is currently dipping into that fund to accommodate commercial space launches.
SpaceX started renovating SLC-6 to achieve their doubled launch cadence and launches of the Falcon Heavy rocket. Starship launches may be in the near future for Vandenberg, too, according to a request for information issued by the base in December. Starship, which is supposed to take us to the moon and Mars in the very near future, often explodes. SpaceX’s latest scheme, AI data centers in space, would rely on Starships to ferry the proposed one million satellites to orbit.
SpaceX did not respond to Inkstick’s requests for comment, including questions about its future plans at Vandenberg.
The California Coastal Commission has found that SpaceX launches mostly commercial payloads at Vandenberg — less than a quarter, according to some estimates, are for the US government. The Air Force has made private-public partnerships the model for space launches. Vandenberg, once called the “Cape Canaveral of the West” and the missile capital of the free world, has a new moniker to live up to: the “LAX of orbital launches.”
SpaceX sold itself to the DOD as the cheaper launch option and did front the cost for early construction at its Vandenberg launch site. It later recouped that investment, charging north of $300 million for a single launch, more than double the usual price. The difference, SpaceX said, would compensate the company for infrastructure improvements at Vandenberg.
The US government pays SpaceX double what commercial clients pay. The broad regulatory cover provided by the Air Force is priceless.
What recourse do dissenters have? The decision to expand satellite launches at Vandenberg was not moved by popular will.
The public also lacked political allies. Mayors, county supervisors, members of congress and the state assembly, and even Governor Newsom have thrown their weight behind Vandenberg’s military and commercial development.
Though it moved its headquarters to Texas, SpaceX has a neat assembly line looping through Southern California. In Hawthorne, Lompoc, and Long Beach — workers build rockets, launch them, and recover them from the Pacific.
“Our own Congressman Salud Carbajal accepts tens of thousands of dollars from weapons contractors in the area,” Winograd said. “One has to ask: Who does Congressman Carbajal work for? Does he work for his constituents or does he work for the weapons industry?”
Over the course of his congressional career, Representative Salud Carbajal received a quarter of a million dollars from defense contractor employee PACs, including $27,500 from SpaceX. The same can be said for many of the other California representatives who wrote in support of SpaceX launches. Representative Ken Calvert oversees military contracting on the defense appropriations committee. Defense contractors have contributed more than $2 million to Calvert’s reelection campaigns. In just a few campaign cycles, the SpaceX PAC became one of his top contributors.
Representative Carbajal has introduced legislation that would require the Air Force to study the effect of sonic booms on local communities and recently penned a letter expressing unease with the plan to bring super-heavy launches to the Space Force base. It’s nowhere near enough, Winograd said.
REACH, an economic think tank on California’s Military Council, stumped for the expansion at Vandenberg: “Today’s efforts hold the potential to uplift the livelihoods of the region’s residents, which is crucial as nearly half of families on the Central Coast are struggling economically.”
Prosperity hasn’t yet followed the SpaceX launches, which really picked up in 2023. A quarter of the children in Lompoc live below the poverty line. Median household earnings decrease the closer one lives to Vandenberg. The city has little to work with – SpaceX doesn’t pay taxes there. The county’s only public hospital lost $21 million in federal funding last year.
The aerospace industry and its proponents have burned Lompoc before. For whatever the Air Force claims about space dominance as a national security imperative, it’s costly. Often, incoming administrations decide they would rather spend that money waging war on Earth.
According to the Air Force, SpaceX plans to gradually add 400 employees to its Vandenberg location as business increases, a “fraction of the civilian workforce.”
Then there’s the question, for the lucky prospective SpaceX employees, of the workplace itself. Reuters investigations in 2023 and 2024 found that SpaceX had four times as many workplace injuries as the aerospace industry on average. The workers that ran rocket recovery operations off the coast of California experienced injuries at nine times the industry rate. Former employees have alleged that the company knowingly endangers workers.
Former employees have also alleged gender discrimination and sexual harassment were the norm at SpaceX. Eight employees filed a lawsuit against SpaceX and Elon Musk in 2024 for subjecting workers to sexual harassment and retaliation for reporting it. Former employees, including one Vandenberg intern, told The Verge about the regular sexual harassment that HR failed to address.
The Wall Street Journal has investigated Elon Musk’s “boundary-blurring relationships” with women working at SpaceX and the “culture of sexism and harassment” inculcated by Musk and others in positions of authority.
SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell called the Journal’s reportage “revisionist history,” and denied allegations of HR malfeasance in investigating and responding to sexual harassment claims.
At the Port of Long Beach, where SpaceX leases properties for recovery operations, locals tried to sever ties with the company. Lara Foy, working with The Feminist Uprising Long Beach and other allied groups, started speaking to the city about kicking SpaceX out. Elon Musk’s role in the Trump administration made him ineligible for operating in a city that considered itself progressive, they said. If they could prove that SpaceX broke the terms of its lease with the Port of Long Beach, the port could evict.
When Foy and an improvised team of resident-researchers started looking, they say, they found the lawsuits and investigative reports alleging sexual harassment and sexual assault, which they thought broke the nondiscrimination clause in SpaceX’s lease. They presented their findings to the city council of Long Beach.
The Long Beach City Council directed them to the Long Beach Harbor Commission, who then directed them to a city attorney. The city attorney said they didn’t have a case, Foy explained, and to come back if they found a different angle. Since the lawsuits hadn’t been adjudicated — many had settled willingly or signed contracts where they waived the ability to have cases go to trial — there was no record of guilt. And, as Foy and her group were counseled, the eviction process could take years.
Foy felt like they were being actively discouraged. “It was crushing,” she said.
The whole process laid bare the “reality of the nastiness of institutionalized rape culture,” she added. “It was so dark.”
The activists have tabled this particular effort for now. There are other crises demanding attention, and this one has a built-in timeline. SpaceX’s lease expires in 2028. There is time, they understand, to strategize, regroup, and stop the port from renewing the lease in two years.
