Histories and Speculative Futures of Vandenberg Space Force Base and Lompoc Federal Prison

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

Abstract

This paper explores the adjacency of Vandenberg Space Force Base (VSFB) and Lompoc Federal Correctional Complex (FCC Lompoc), and the juxtaposition of satellite launching and technologies of incarceration. There is a historical, as well as a spatial, relationship between these two federal institutions. The prison originated on the base as a prisoner of war camp (incarcerating German and Italian soldiers) during World War II, and carceral facilities were formally expanded in 1946 with the opening of a maximum-security disciplinary barracks to incarcerate up to 1,500 military offenders. In 1959, the Federal Bureau of Prisons took over the facilities with the aim of incarcerating civil offenders. Although scholars, including Angela Davis and Ruthie Wilson Gilmore have contributed crucial work to the understanding of carceral geographies, entwinement of these Lompoc federal institutions—the prison and the base—remains under-examined. Historically, individuals incarcerated on the base contributed significant labor to its operation and, currently, they remain connected to it due to frequent satellite launches felt and watched from the prison’s grounds.

While people who are incarcerated are objects/populations subjected to academic inquiry, scientific study, and testing, academia rarely conceives of individuals who are incarcerated as producers of knowledge and research collaborators with valuable expertise that is worthy of respect and from whom others can learn.

This paper examines the history of interconnection between the prison and the base, and the rapidly expanding industry of rocket launches and satellite deployments taking place on California’s central coast at VSFB, from the standpoint of individuals incarcerated nearby at FCC Lompoc. Through community-based research in collaboration with individuals who are currently incarcerated at FCC Lompoc and student leadership and advocacy groups led by systems-impacted individuals and individuals who were formerly incarcerated, this paper contributes to American Studies from elsewhere and insurgent knowledge formation.

The increasing launch frequency from Vandenberg, the public has been told, is connected to the goal of “universal connectivity”—universal internet service provision via private aerospace company SpaceX’s Starlink satellite constellation. While SpaceX’s rhetoric of idealized, seamless democratic and technological social inclusion promises “universal connectivity” and proclaims “connection means everything,” the prison is a form of punishment that attempts to separate people who are incarcerated from loved ones and deprive them of touch, sexual connection, and physical, intimate family relationships. This paper takes up abolitionist Frederick Douglass’s stunning query from his July 5, 1852, keynote address: “What, to the slave, is the fourth of July?” and asks: What, to the imprisoned, is universal connectivity?

By prioritizing a collaborative practice that centers the concerns and interests of those most impacted by systems violence, interrogating the archival history of interconnection between the prison and the base, and critically reflecting (as a collective) on the potentials, limits, and obstacles to community-based research in carceral and systems-impacted contexts, this paper reflects on processes of knowledge production and speculates futures in which the land on which POW camps, military offenders barracks, and sentenced civilian prison complexes are imagined otherwise.

Author

• Althea Wasow, University of California-Santa Barbara