Launch Site Underworlds: Chumash History, Archaeology, and SpaceX Operations at the Vandenberg Space Force Base

• In Event: The New Space Era and American Empire: SpaceX, Satellite Launching, and Local Community Responses

Abstract

The Vandenberg Space Force Base (VSFB) occupies lands that were once home to historic Chumash villages. During the mid-20th century, in the midst of the Cold War, the US government expropriated some of these lands to build space launch complexes on the base. Despite the identification of culturally significant Chumash sites, Vandenberg proceeded with the construction of launch complexes, drawing criticism from Chumash community members. Federally contracted archaeologists worked concurrently with these launch complex constructions, unearthing and cataloging Chumash artifacts and remains from these sites. Chumash belongings were removed from the sites, stored in nearby anthropological collections, and recently have been inventoried in compliance with NAGPRA regulations. This history of launch complexes and the Chumash serves as vital context for more recent activity at the VSFB.

During the past fifteen years, Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX, has overhauled two of VSFB launch complexes (SLC-4 and SLC-6) resulting in additional digging and disturbances. SpaceX is currently using these complexes to dramatically accelerate its launch cadences and expand its massive Starlink and Starshield satellite constellations in orbit. These conditions raise key questions about the relationship between satellite technology, Indigeneity, and late-stage American empire. What does it mean for US commercial and military satellites to be launched from the ancestral grounds of the Chumash people? How are SpaceX’s orbital occupations predicated on and sanctioned by historical colonizations of Indigenous sites on earth? How can space histories and operations be challenged and re-imagined by learning from Indigenous communities and cosmologies?

Engaging with scholarship in American Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Science and Technology Studies, this paper investigates the local histories and impacts of VSFB launch infrastructure and analyzes power dynamics between commercial space operators, like SpaceX, and Chumash communities. Drawing on collaborative research with Chumash groups, archival research, site visits, and critical mapping, this paper retells the history of aerospace in California from Indigenous perspectives. The paper’s first section details launch complex construction at VSFB from the 1960s to the 1990s, and engages with environmental impact assessments, Chumash testimony, and the archeological records of anthropologists who participated in excavations. The second section considers the political reverberations and imperial aspirations of these projects, and investigates SpaceX’s recent overhauling of space launch complexes 4 and 6 to intensify its launch cadences and dominate the orbital economy. We also investigate how Chumash peoples who live near the VSFB experience and think about intensified satellite launches from their ancestral lands. Ultimately, the paper analyzes how launch infrastructure rockets satellites into space in the name of national security and space commercialization while deeply unsettling sacred Chumash underworlds. These disturbances continue to happen, according to Chumash cosmology, with each and every launch. Given this, we try to think more relationally and reflexively about US launch infrastructure, Indigeneity, and techno-adjacency. We also seek to learn from Chumash perspectives as they complicate and alter foundational assumptions in multiple scholarly fields.

Authors

• Lisa Parks

• Sophia Abbey, University of California - Santa Barbara