Shana in Ojai measured a sonic boom at 114 decibels. Jean in Santa Barbara thought it was an earthquake at 5 AM. Sara’s children in Montecito wake up crying. Veterans, elderly residents, people with sensory disabilities, workers who can’t sleep. The Air Force modeled none of them. It used computer simulations and skipped the people.

This petition was first published in 2024. Everything it warned about has since come true. We said the environmental review was inadequate. The Air Force stripped the environmental justice analysis entirely. We said the regulatory agencies were compromised. Elon Musk spent five months running DOGE, which gutted the FAA. We said the state’s 9-0 rejection would be overridden. It was. We said launches would escalate. They went from 36 to 64, with 82 planned this year.

Everything described above is from the rocket they are already launching. Now the Space Force is soliciting bids for a launch pad at Vandenberg designed for Starship, the largest and most powerful rocket ever built. Its sonic booms would dwarf what is already cracking walls across the Central Coast. In June it detonated on the ground in Texas and scattered flaming debris across the Rio Grande into Mexico. The failure mode that caused it has not been resolved. And the federal government is evaluating whether to revoke California’s coastal authority to object to any of it.

Over 1,600 people from Lompoc to Ojai have signed. The full case with evidence, legal analysis, and specific demands is below. We were right the first time. Sign this. Then call your representatives. This coast is not for sale

Protect California's Central Coast: Demand That Our State Fight Back Against the Federal Override of Our Coastal Authority

To: California Attorney General Rob Bonta · Governor Gavin Newsom · Assemblymember Gregg Hart · Assemblymember Dawn Addis · Senator John Laird · Rep. Salud Carbajal

 
These are the voices of your constituents.

Shana in Ojai measured a sonic boom at 114 decibels outside her home. It set off car alarms across her neighborhood. For context, 114 decibels is louder than a chainsaw held at arm's length. Louder than a rock concert. Shana notes that it is not legal for private companies to generate sonic booms of this magnitude over populated land.

Jean in Santa Barbara was jolted awake at 5 AM on December 16th by the loudest boom yet. Her cottage shook so hard she thought it was an earthquake. She crawled out of bed and prepared to duck into the triangle of safety by her desk before she realized it was a Falcon 9 landing.

Sara in Montecito says the booms wake her family in a panic in the middle of the night and make her children cry. "It sounds like our windows are going to break."

Haylie has sensory processing issues and says she is regularly startled by the blasts, with shaking windows throughout her home. She can no longer feel safe in her own house.

Judith was woken at 3:45 AM by what sounded like a massive explosion in her backyard. Her entire home shook violently. "How can people, children, the elderly, those with PTSD, pets and livestock live in peace with these sonic booms happening so frequently?"

Christine and her elderly father both have trouble sleeping. "The loss of sleep due to the sonic booms is negatively impacting our health and quality of life, as well as my productivity at work."

Nikolette in Los Angeles says the last launch "sounded like a nuclear explosion." Her house was violently shaking. She went into a panic. Her dogs are petrified each time. "At first it wasn't so loud. It's been getting progressively worse."

Heath reports house movement and shaking windows at 5:15 AM, and names a harm that no environmental review has accounted for: "We have to disclose these occurrences when we sell our home... affecting our property value."

I am the creator of this petition. I live in Ojai. Sonic booms split the tape seal between two pieces of drywall in my dining room ceiling. I repaired it. The latest series of launches opened it again. 

From Lompoc to Ojai, across more than 100 miles, over 1,600 people have signed this petition. The pattern in their testimony is unwavering: shaking homes, affected structures, panicked children, traumatized pets, disrupted sleep, lost productivity, and the persistent dread that what already feels like an earthquake or an explosion that could lead to a serious fire is going to keep getting worse. It is getting worse. And for all of it, there is no claims process. No damage fund. No phone number to dial. There is not a single mechanism in place for any resident of this corridor to seek accountability from the company shaking their home or the government that authorized it. And it was supposed to be studied.

The Air Force's environmental review was required by law to assess these human impacts. It did not. It conducted no interviews with residents. It performed no surveys of affected households. It did not study what repeated sonic booms at 114 decibels do to a child on the autism spectrum whose neurology processes sound with magnified intensity, or to a combat veteran whose startle response can be dangerously activated by a blast that sounds like an explosion, or to an elderly resident on cardiac medication whose heart responds to sudden violent noise as if it were a physical threat, or to the homeowners throughout this corridor whose walls and ceilings are cracking with no structural assessment, no claims process, and no way to know what cumulative damage is being done to their homes. These are not hypothetical populations. They live in this corridor. The federal review that was supposed to protect them used computer models and skipped the people.

 
SpaceX launched a record 64 missions from Vandenberg in 2025. Eighty-two are planned for 2026. One hundred per year by 2027.

Most of these launches have nothing to do with national defense.

Of roughly 132 SpaceX launches from Vandenberg between 2018 and mid-2025, only about 30 carried government payloads, according to California Coastal Commission staff. The rest were commercial, predominantly launching Starlink internet satellites that generate billions in private revenue for SpaceX and its investors. This is not a national security program that asks communities to share in a public sacrifice. This is a commercial enterprise valued at over $350 billion whose profit model depends on launching as frequently as possible from a base surrounded by homes, schools, and some of the most ecologically sensitive coastline in North America.

The damage is socialized. The profit is private. And now, so is the financing. On July 4, 2025, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act authorized tax-exempt municipal bonds for spaceport infrastructure, with no statutory limit on the amount that can be issued. The federal government has created a mechanism for private commercial launch operations to be built and expanded using tax-advantaged public financing. The communities absorbing the sonic booms, the cracked walls, and the disruption are also subsidizing the construction of the facilities that produce them.

The Air Force's own environmental review acknowledged that launches "have the potential to cause damage to some structures depending on the overpressure levels." And then it established no mechanism whatsoever to address that damage. No monitoring. No claims process. No fund. People like the ones quoted above are left to pay for their own cracked ceilings, absorb their own lost sleep, aid their loved ones in sound related crises, disclose launch impacts to prospective buyers, and fear wildfire from a catastrophic SpaceX operation, all to subsidize a commercial operation that has never been required to compensate the communities it harms.

And even the workhorse rocket keeps failing.

On February 2, 2026, a Falcon 9 launched from Vandenberg suffered an upper-stage anomaly that prevented it from completing its deorbit burn. The spent rocket stage tumbled back to Earth in an uncontrolled reentry. The FAA grounded the entire Falcon 9 fleet. It was the fourth upper-stage failure in nineteen months and the third incident involving uncontrolled reentry, following a 2025 failure that scattered debris across Poland. This is the rocket they call reliable, launching from the base next door to our communities, with no independent safety oversight because the federal agencies responsible for providing it have been gutted.

Now it is about to get dramatically worse.

In January 2026, the Space Force quietly opened bidding for a new launch pad at Vandenberg designed for "super heavy" vehicles. Only one rocket fits that description: Starship, the largest and most powerful ever built. Its sonic booms would be an order of magnitude beyond what is already cracking walls and triggering panic across the Central Coast.

Starship's recent record should disqualify it from consideration anywhere near a populated coastline. Three consecutive flight failures in 2025 scattered debris across the Caribbean, the Bahamas, and the Indian Ocean. In June, a Starship detonated on the ground in Texas during fueling, before it ever left the pad. The resulting fireball scattered flaming wreckage, fuel tanks, plastic fragments, and aluminum debris across the Rio Grande and onto Mexican beaches, threatening endangered sea turtle nesting sites. Mexico's president publicly confirmed contamination and announced a review of international law violations. Five months later, the same type of pressure vessel failure destroyed a second vehicle on the ground. That failure mode remains unresolved.

This is the rocket they want to bring here. Adjacent to Lompoc, Buellton, and the Gaviota Coast. In one of the most wildfire-prone regions in America. Read the testimony above and understand: that is what Falcon 9 does at current levels. Starship is not an incremental increase. It is a different category of force, aimed at a community that is already sustaining damage with no recourse.

The federal agencies that should be protecting us have been compromised.

SpaceX's founder spent five months in 2025 running a government task force that targeted the very agencies responsible for regulating his rockets. During that period, the FAA lost hundreds of employees, including the environmental protection specialists who oversee commercial launches. The EPA's Office of Environmental Justice was formally eliminated. The EPA official assigned to approve SpaceX-related funding had spent eight years working at SpaceX. The Department of Justice quietly dropped its discrimination case against the company. As one signer of this petition, Carol, put it plainly: "It is high time we started caring more about our environment and those with whom we share it instead of catering to the wishes of billionaires."

We cannot rely on these agencies to protect us. That is why we are turning to our state.

 
California already said no. It was overruled by Elon Musk-owned Executive Branch. And the clock is running out to challenge it.

The California Coastal Commission, the body created by California voters in 1972 to protect this coast, heard thousands of public comments and voted 9-0 to reject this expansion. That vote was unanimous. It was not partisan. Commissioners appointed by both parties voted no. The objections were substantive: incomplete wildlife data, inadequate sonic boom modeling, no mitigation tracking, and the fundamental question of whether a predominantly commercial launch operation should be treated as a federal activity exempt from state review.

The Air Force overrode that vote. It signed the approval two months later, then stripped the environmental justice analysis from the final review entirely.

The executive order that enabled this override, EO 14335, was signed the day before the Commission's unanimous rejection. It did more than create a framework for bypassing the Commission on this one decision. It directed the Secretary of Commerce to evaluate whether California's authority under the Coastal Zone Management Act should be revoked entirely for impeding spaceport development. That evaluation was due by February 9, 2026. That deadline has passed. Whether the evaluation has been completed, what it concluded, and whether revocation proceedings are already underway is unknown to the public.

This is not a hypothetical future threat. It is an active federal process, already past its deadline, that could permanently strip California's legal authority to review any federal coastal project involving a launch site. If that authority is revoked, the Coastal Commission's objections will carry no legal weight at all, not just for Vandenberg, but for any future spaceport along California's entire coastline.

Attorney General Bonta: you are defending the Coastal Commission against SpaceX's retaliatory lawsuit. We are asking you to go further. We are asking you to challenge the override itself, and to act before the authority you are defending is revoked out from under you.

Your office filed 52 lawsuits against the Trump administration in 2025, with a 90% win rate on resolved cases. You secured more than $168 billion in restored federal funding for California. Right now, your office is actively fighting Sable Offshore on the Gaviota Coast, where an almost structurally identical pattern is playing out. A predominantly commercial oil operation sought to bypass California's regulatory authority. When state regulators objected, the company asked a federal agency to reclassify its pipeline and assert federal jurisdiction. The Trump administration obliged, invoking a "national energy emergency" to issue emergency permits that overrode state safety requirements. Your office sued Sable for state environmental violations. You represented the Coastal Commission in state court when Sable challenged the Commission's authority, and you won. But the direct challenge to the federal preemption itself, the argument that the Trump administration cannot use emergency powers to strip California's jurisdiction, is being made in the 9th Circuit by the Environmental Defense Center and the Center for Biological Diversity. Not by your office.

The pattern between Sable and Vandenberg is unmistakable. In both cases, a predominantly commercial operation claims federal status to bypass state environmental review. The state's coastal authority objects. The federal government overrides it. The companies profit. The communities absorb the damage. The question of whether these federal overrides are lawful has not been tested by the full weight of the Attorney General's office in either case. We are asking you to change that. The NGOs fighting the Sable preemption should not be carrying this fight alone, and no one is carrying it at all for Vandenberg.

Defending the Commission against SpaceX's lawsuit is necessary. But defense alone does not restore the authority that was taken. It does not challenge the executive order. It does not contest the FAA decision. It does not establish the precedent that California's coast cannot be turned into a sacrifice zone by federal decree. And it does not stop the CZMA revocation process that is already underway. Only an affirmative legal challenge does that.

 
The consequences extend beyond our homes. The same sonic booms cracking ceilings in Ojai and rattling windows in Santa Barbara are stampeding harbor seal mothers off beaches during pupping season, causing them to abandon or crush newborn pups at rookeries that Central Coast families have visited for generations. Wendi, another signer of this petition, wrote: "The seal population has shrunk due to the constant blasting. Please move these launches to a site that is not near populated area." Federal wildlife officials have admitted that impacts on protected coastal species have been "much more significant than what the Air Force predicted." The commercial fishing families and tourism operators whose livelihoods depend on a healthy marine ecosystem have no more information than the rest of us, because no one has studied what these booms do to whales or marine life in the Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary, a 4,543-square-mile haven of global biodiversity that spans the coastline directly adjacent to the base. It is the first Indigenous-nominated ocean sanctuary in U.S. history. The Coastal Commission has requested this data repeatedly. The Air Force has not provided it.

This base sits on unceded Chumash land, home to over 1,500 recorded cultural resources, including sacred rock art dating back 3,500 years. The tribal consultation process was closed before the tribe could complete a site visit. The people who have been stewards of this coast for ten thousand years were not meaningfully consulted about what is being done to it.

 
We support space exploration. We do not accept being designated a sacrifice zone for private profit. And we refuse to accept that California has no recourse when its own democratic institutions are overruled.

We are calling on our state leaders to act:

Attorney General Bonta:

1. Challenge the federal override. File an affirmative legal challenge to the Air Force's override of the Coastal Commission's unanimous objection, to the FAA's authorization of 100 annual launches without addressing the Commission's findings, and to Executive Order 14335's framework for revoking California's coastal authority over launch sites. 
2. Challenge the CZMA revocation process before it is finalized.
3. Join and amplify the federal preemption challenge that NGOs are already fighting in the Sable case, and open the same front for Vandenberg.

If a 9-0 rejection by the state's own coastal authority can be discarded without legal consequence, then the Coastal Act and the Coastal Zone Management Act are dead letters, and not just for rockets. Every environmental fight in California has a stake in this precedent.

Governor Newsom and the State Legislature:

1. Protect what the Commission cannot. Hold public hearings on the sonic boom damage corridor, the Starship solicitation, the removal of the environmental justice analysis from the federal review, and the CZMA revocation timeline.
2. Direct state agencies to refuse cooperation with any expansion that bypassed state environmental review.
3. Introduce legislation requiring independent sonic boom monitoring with publicly accessible data, a funded community claims process for documented property damage and health impacts, and mandatory state-level environmental review for any new launch complex capable of supporting super-heavy vehicles.

Rep. Salud Carbajal and the Central Coast federal delegation:

1. Demand that the Government Accountability Office investigate the conflicts of interest in the regulatory process, the removal of the environmental justice analysis, the adequacy of the FAA's environmental review, and the use of tax-exempt bond financing to subsidize spaceport expansion without community consent.
2. Introduce federal legislation requiring an independent safety and environmental review, with full community participation, before any Starship launch complex is approved at a site adjacent to civilian populations.

 
Every warning raised in this petition's original 2024 version has been confirmed. The environmental review was deficient. The regulatory agencies were compromised. The state's authority was overridden. The workhorse rocket failed from the base next door two weeks ago. The rocket that exploded in Texas is now being invited to California. And the federal government is actively evaluating whether to strip the state of its legal authority to object at all.

We are not petitioning Washington. We are demanding that California fight back with the legal tools it already has and is already using, before those tools are taken away. Every signature strengthens the legal, political, and moral case that this community did not consent and will not be silent.

Sign this petition. Then call your representatives. This coast belongs to all of us, and it is not for sale.