The spectacular sight of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket streaking across the San Diego County sky could become a lot more familiar in the months to come.
The U.S. Space Force and SpaceX have asked the California Coastal Commission to approve an increase of up to 36 launches per year at Vandenberg Space Station on the state’s central coast.
Vandenberg launches have averaged six per year over the past five years, although the number has steadily increased to a total of 28 in 2023.
SpaceX is ramping up its launches by building a network of nearly 42,000 Starlink satellites to provide global internet service. As of March, it had launched more than 5,500 satellites. The company has a list of other launch customers, including NASA and the Pentagon.
The West Coast Space Station is one of four Space X launch sites. The others are at Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center, both in Florida, and another in Brownsville, Texas.
Typically taking off at sunset, the rockets leave a long, undulating trail in the sky that attracts everyone’s attention. Photos appear in the news and in social media posts, although this may happen less frequently as the phenomenon becomes more common.
The Coastal Commission is expected to approve the expansion at a meeting Wednesday in Long Beach.
This will be beneficial for the entire region, said Henrik Christensen, a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California San Diego and director of its Contextual Robotics Institute.
“The space industry benefits enormously from increased activity in Southern California,” Christensen said. “There are several companies that do consulting engineering for space.”
UCSD students designed and built rocket engines and satellites, he said. Some then worked for NASA, or for the private companies SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk, and Blue Origin, founded by Jeff Bezos.
Rocket building skills are also being transferred to other areas such as undersea exploration and defense industries, Christensen said.
These launches could even boost local tourism, he said. People will travel many miles to see the launches, and they can see them anywhere along the Southern California coast.
“It’s another thing to see in San Diego,” he said.
SpaceX’s proposed expansion at Vandenberg includes additional landings of the rocket’s reusable first stage. The second stage, which is not reusable, places the payload into orbit, then falls back to Earth and burns up in the atmosphere.
Some of the landings would take place on a drone somewhere in the ocean, at least 31 miles from the coast and up to several hundred miles, anywhere between the latitudes of Los Angeles and mid-Baja California . Some of the first stages also land on a platform in Vandenberg.
SpaceX moved one of its drones, essentially a modified barge, from Port Canaveral in Florida to the Port of Long Beach in California in 2021. The platform is towed to and from a location close to landing, but once on site, it can remotely adjust its position.
Named “Of Course I Still Love You,” the drone was used as recently as January for a successful landing off the coast of Baja California. The journey to Earth’s orbit is rapid, and in this case the landing took place just 8.5 minutes after takeoff.
Coastal Commission staff determined the expansion qualified for a “negative declaration,” meaning they expect no significant environmental impact from the launches.
“The project could have a variety of effects on California’s coastal resources, including the release of debris into the ocean and the disruption of sensitive species due to elevated noise levels,” the commission report states.
“The primary purpose of the proposed launches would be to place thousands of small satellites into Earth orbit for SpaceX’s ‘Starlink’ commercial satellite internet business,” the report said. Each rocket can carry up to 22 satellites.
Air quality may be the first concern on the mind of anyone who saw the rocket’s long vapor trail in the evening sky, but reported emissions are below applicable state and federal standards.
“Exhaust gases from Falcon 9 rocket launches are fuel-rich and contain high concentrations of carbon monoxide (CO),” the commission report said. “The subsequent entrainment of ambient air results in complete conversion of CO to carbon dioxide (CO2) and oxidation of the soot from the exhaust gases.”
The rocket’s liquid fuel consists of rocket-grade kerosene combined with liquid oxygen. When it burns, it produces “a small amount of soot” and a small amount of nitrogen oxide (NO) in the exhaust gas. Emissions thus comply with the standards of the federal law on air quality.
Launch-related weather balloons are a significant source of marine debris, the report says.
“Up to 36 weather balloons would be released before each launch to measure conditions in the upper atmosphere and would then drop into the ocean below in state or federal waters,” it says. “Because of the height from which it would fall and the large ocean area in which it could land…it would not be possible to recover every weather balloon and associated instrument array.”
The payload includes a fairing or shield that is released into space and falls to earth, slowed by a parachute, but cannot be recovered. Additionally, in some cases, the rocket’s first stage may fall into the ocean and not be recovered.
As a result, SpaceX is required to make a monetary donation of $10 for every pound of ocean debris to the Lost Fishing Gear Recovery Project at the University of California, Davis.
The launches also expose wildlife to “high noise levels,” although so far no negative effects have been determined.
California Daily Newspapers
