SpaceX Rocket Launches to Be Subjected to Public Review

Dawn hadn’t broken yet when the sky above Santa Barbara was hit with a muffled, shuddering thud. A rolling rumble followed suit. It would all pass by in less than 30 seconds. But for many, it would remain an unexplained and startling event.

It was 5:20 a.m.

Was that an earthquake, many wondered? 

It was, it turns out, yet another sonic boom, triggered like those that have come before  — and by those expected to follow with even greater frequency next year — by the launch of a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base. These booms are the sonic byproduct of a joint project between the Department of Defense and Elon Musk’s private spaceship company, SpaceX, to establish military and commercial saturation and dominance of low-orbit outer space. 

The military wants to get up there ahead of China, North Korea, Russia, or any other nation state capable of hurling nuclear warheads across the globe. Musk wants to achieve market saturation for his burgeoning commercial satellite delivery enterprise before any would-be competitors — like Jeff Bezos and his fledgling Blue Origin rocket ship company — manage to get off the ground. For both to achieve their respective goals, Musk and the military are now insisting they need to blast twice as many rockets into low orbit next year from Vandenberg than they do now. 

Tuesday morning’s event would mark the 47th SpaceX rocket to have been launched from Vandenberg this year. Of those, 42 have been Falcon 9s, the company’s reusable workhorse. Last year, by contrast, SpaceX had permits to launch just six. This year, the number of these permitted launches increased first to 36 and then jumped to 50. The Department of Defense has made clear it intends to increase that number to 100 very early next year. 

Of these launches, roughly 15 percent carry satellite payloads with immediate and obvious national security applications. The rest appear to be more commercial in scope. But the military and federal officials resist all efforts to make such distinctions. Anything that expands the understanding of how to conduct space launches in a safe, cost-effective manner, they insist, promotes national security interests.  

Initially, the SpaceX launches were a matter of minimal public notice, almost totally evading the radar screens of government functionaries whose job it is to track emerging hot-button issues. But as the number of launches has increased — not to mention Musk’s public profile as president-elect Donald Trump’s tech-bro political alter ego — those radar screens from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles, where the sonic booms can be heard, are starting to explode.

Last week, Congressmember Salud Carbajal — a senior member on the House Armed Services Committee — introduced language into the 2025  National Defense Authorization Act acknowledging that the noise create by sonic booms “can be disruptive.”  While Carbajal’s language stressed that the military mission is “vital,” it also stated the intrusion and disruption caused by sonic booms needed to be acknowledged. 

“Facilities like hospitals, daycares, schools, senior-living facilities and private residences can all be impacted by noise disturbances,” Carbajal wrote. The military currently has a noise-mitigation program for its fixed wing aircraft, he stated. “The committee recognizes that it could be beneficial to stand up a similar program to make grants to communities impacted by national security space launches for the purposes of installing noise mitigating insulation at nearby facilities.” 

How that would work has yet to be seen. No funding was set aside in the bill for that purpose or any other mitigation. If anything is to come from it, it would have to happen at a later date and in a subsequent appropriations bill. But it opens the door to possible such discussion. In a press release, Carbajal vowed to pursue “a win-win” that protects national security without compromising the “serenity of the South Coast.”

Perhaps more immediately, the U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife announced in the same week that it will be holding three public in-person meetings this January regarding the ever-expanding launch “cadences” now taking place at Vandenberg. These meetings will be held January 14-16, 5-8 p.m., first in Ventura, then at the Westside Neighborhood Committee in Santa Barbara, and last at the Dick DeWees Community Center in Lompoc. In addition, a fourth hearing will be held virtually on January 23. At issue is the scope of the environmental impact statement that Fish & Wildlife has taken upon itself to prepare: in other words, what issues need to be addressed and what impacts and mitigations should be considered.

However bureaucratic arcane this might sound, it qualifies as a big deal. It marks the first time, for example, that the local branch of the Department of Fish & Wildlife — which is charged with protecting about 100 endangered and threatened species along the Central Coast  — has reached out to the public about what’s now going on at Vandenberg. It also marks the first time the agency has determined that what’s happening is of such magnitude that a full environmental impact statement is necessary. Up till now, the agency has prepared a series of biological opinions, planning documents of lesser gravity, concluding that the impacts of the sonic booms to a host of threatened species falls within the parameters the “not likely to adversely affect determination sought by the Space Force Base commanders and Space X.”

According to informed sources, Fish & Wildlife biologists have felt both surprised and pressured by the aggressive rate of launch acceleration being pushed by base commanders and by SpaceX. By the time one biological opinion was complete, Fish & Wildlife staff would find themselves pushed to prepare the necessary analysis for an expanded launch schedule. The time deadlines, always, were tight. They still are. The expectation is that the first draft for the EIS will be complete by next December. Given that the swath of real estate — both onshore and offshore — over which the SpaceX rockets fly ranges from Santa Barbara County to Los Angeles, that’s an tall order. 

To date, the California Coastal Commission is the only agency to try to subject SpaceX’s  accelerated rocket cadence to some form of oversight, however circumscribed by law. But a handful of commissioners, all liberal Democrats, got off point and focused their ire on Musk’s extravagant financial support — $140 million — for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Musk retaliated by filing a free-speech lawsuit against the commission, which currently sits in procedural limbo. Even Governor Gavin Newsom, no friend of Musk or Trump, took the commission to task. Carbajal took care not to mention Musk as he inserted his language into the Armed Services Appropriations bill. 

The New York Times reported late Tuesday that the Department of Defense initiated an investigation into possible security breaches by Musk and SpaceX in the past month. Given the Pentagon’s reliance on Musk to provide essential national security functions, Musk himself must submit detailed information of his personal life — travel, drug use, and private conversations with foreign leaders like Vladimir Putin — to the Pentagon for continuous vetting. While Musk is not accused of releasing classified information, the allegation is that he and other high-ranking SpaceX officials have been less than forthcoming with the information he has released. The Wall Street Journal reported, for example, that Musk and Putin had engaged in private discussions over the span of several years.  It remains unknown what information Musk disclosed. That is the subject of the current investigation.