Elon Musk Wants to Shoot More Rockets over Santa Barbara

LOOK UP:  About once every two months, a solitary giant sperm shoots across Santa Barbara’s night sky, emitting a magical otherworldly glow that makes people basking in its eerie light feel — maybe just for that moment — like they just fell in love.  

Accompanied by a sonic boom loud enough to be felt — and heard — 80 miles away, this is as close to the Big Bang as Elon Musk — who otherwise plays God with a terminal case of Toxic Bro Syndrome — is going to get. 

That squiggly effervescent sperm is a reusable Falcon 9 rocket ship launched by Musk’s company SpaceX from Vandenberg Space Force Base. Each of these rockets comes armed with a payload of 22 space satellites that are shot into outer space, where they circle the globe in low-hanging polar orbit to provide service for millions of T-Mobile phone subscribers.  

Each load of satellites, we are told, is worth about $10 billion. Two weeks ago, one blew up shortly after launch, an occurrence so rare SpaceX created a brand-new acronym to obscure its true meaning: RUD. That stands for “Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly,” the sort of euphemism that only a true, off-the-charts rage-aholic would feel the need to conjure.

Yes, Musk is one of those rare visionary über-alpha male geniuses that grace the planet once every other millennium. But his mood swings have seismic reverberations, and I’m not just talking about the $45 million a month he’s vowed to give Donald Trump. Right now, Musk — furious over a trans protection bill Governor Gavin Newsom just signed into law — is threatening to move his California headquarters to Texas.  

I get it. Musk has a trans daughter whose name used to begin with X, which I’m guessing might explain Musk’s fixation on the letter X. His daughter, now known as Vivian, has also become a Marxist and, as such, has disowned Musk in the most scathing of terms imaginable.

But Musk is also seeking the green light from the California Coastal Commission to expand the number of launches from Vandenberg each year from six to 36; in 2026, that number will expand to anywhere from 90 to 120.

Whatever it is, it’s a lot. 

All those sonic booms piled on top of each other will become a perpetual drum roll pounded out on the heavens. With each new beat, harbor seals within earshot flee for their lives. (This is documented fact, not poetic license.) Any pups they might be nursing at the time are at risk of getting squashed and trampled in the stampede. (This too has been documented by the carcasses of four pups found after one lift-off.) Red-legged frogs — otherwise known as the jumping frogs of Calaveras County and a federally endangered species — tend to seize up and freeze at the sound of sudden loud noises. This makes them imminently snackable for any foxes or other opportunistic predators who may be nearby. And by the time we figure out the impact of all the additional emissions these rockets will be spewing forth at very high altitudes — on temperature, ozone layers, weather patterns — it will already be too late. 

In the first seven months of 2023, campers at the county’s public camp site at Jalama Beach were forced to evacuate 15 times because of SpaceX rocket launches. The maximum allowed was supposed to be 12 in a year. Each launch, it should be noted, is accompanied by six large plastic weather balloons, and each balloon comes accompanied by a battery-powered, shoe-box-sized contraption that sends signals to command control. All this flotsam and jetsam drops into the ocean, where who the hell knows what happens next. 

If you’re not supposed to put batteries in the garbage, maybe the ocean isn’t a good place either. And yes, I love getting cellphone selfies from grinning loved ones as they endure their latest round of chemotherapy. Yes, we should all pretend to laugh at death whenever possible. But there are downstream consequences for all the techno whiz-bang magic we’ve come to take for granted. 

The Coastal Commission is being asked to sign a piece of paper saying this dramatic increase in “the cadence” of launches — I love the language here — conforms with the state’s Coastal Zone Management Act. Musk is not asking; the Department of the Air Force is. 

Actually, they’re not asking either. They’re telling. In as nice a way as possible, Air Force brass put the Coastal Commission on notice that the state has no say and no jurisdiction. These launches are part of a federal military program that has national security implications. The state needs to sign on the dotted line or the Air Force will regretfully be forced to get in their steamrollers and run us over.

But here’s the rub. And it’s a big one. Coastal Commission staff and many commissioners point out that only a very small fraction of the rockets Elon Musk sends into space are military in origin or function. All the others are commercial. 

Of the 71 Falcon 9s blasted off from Vandenberg since 2018 and this June, only nine to 14 were of military origin. All the rest were T-Mobile. Of the 8,400 satellites orbiting earth, 5,800 are SpaceX’s. Why should California write a blank environmental check to Elon Musk and his exceptionally lucrative commercial satellite enterprise because a handful of launches are military in application? 

Musk, the commissioners, argue, should be forced to go through all the environmental hoops that any other commercial operator would have to. Instead, the Air Force is shielding him with their national security considerations. 

This showdown will play out — yet again — on August 8, in beautiful downtown Calabasas. You might want to be there. If past hearings offer any indication, Elon Musk will not be. He’s letting the colonels carry his water. I’m not sure I can make it. My head might explode. No, let me rephrase that: I will experience a Rapid Unscheduled
Disassembly.