A Coast Guard HC-130 Hercules aircrew from Air Station Barbers Point successfully evacuated four Fish and Wildlife personnel off Johnston Atoll, Oct. 1, 2018. While Hurricane Walaka is far removed from large population centers it has become necessary to evacuate U.S. Fish and Wildlife personnel. (Michael Griffin/Coast Guard )
The U.S. military is seeking to turn a remote Pacific wildlife refuge into a landing site for SpaceX rockets, a move that could ultimately advance military capabilities but could also threaten a rare sanctuary for 1.5 million birds.
The U.S. Space Force last month announced its intention to build two landing pads on Johnston Atoll, an unincorporated U.S. territory consisting of four tiny islands about 800 miles southwest of Honolulu.
The Space Force wants to use the site to test the Rocket Cargo Vanguard program, which aims to expedite the movement of military cargo around the globe by deploying large commercial rockets.
Although the notice of intent did not mention SpaceX, vehicles from Elon Musk’s rocket company would be used for the project, according to a government official familiar with the proposal who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it.
SpaceX did not reply to a request for comment.
The company signed a $102 million contract with the government in 2022 and has been working toward a demonstration of the point-to-point transport concept.
Several other companies have research-and-development agreements with the U.S. Transportation Command related to rocket cargo transportation. Among them is Blue Origin, whose owner, Jeff Bezos, also owns The Washington Post.
But SpaceX is far ahead of the pack, and its Starship rocket offers far more payload capacity than any other rocket capable of reentry.
In November, Space Force Gen. Chance Saltzman, chief of space operations, joined Musk and the newly elected Donald Trump to watch a Starship test flight out of Texas. Although Musk often talks up the potential for Starship to fly to Mars, he has also said, “I think there’s a pretty good chance that it does Earth-to-Earth transport, as well. … It’s the fastest way to get somewhere.”
SpaceX’s Texas launches have damaged nearby bird nests and eggs, according local environmentalists. But the Space Force said in its notice of intent that it expects the construction and operation of the demonstration project on Johnston to have no significant environmental impact.
In a statement to The Post on Thursday, the Department of the Air Force, which includes the Space Force, said it was exploring different launch systems and working with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration “to develop meaningful measures, as appropriate, to avoid, minimize, and mitigate potential impacts to the migratory bird populations on Johnston Island.”
But scientists and conservationists familiar with Johnston are highly concerned.
“Johnston Atoll, for some of these species, will be the only land these birds ever know,” said Brad Keitt, a marine ornithologist with the nonprofit American Bird Conservancy who has monitored birds there. “If we scare them off of this island, they don’t have another place to go.”
This remote island cluster has been subject to political winds blowing from Washington before. In 1926, President Calvin Coolidge designated the islands as a federal refuge for seabirds. Eight years later, with World War II on the horizon, President Franklin D. Roosevelt placed the atoll under military control.
During the Cold War, the U.S. government conducted high-altitude nuclear tests on Johnston and later stockpiled Agent Orange and incinerated chemical weapons on the atoll.
But in 2004, the military once again returned Johnston to the birds. The atoll is part of the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument, created by George W. Bush in 2009 and expanded by Barack Obama five years later.
Today, tens of thousands of red-tailed tropicbirds, red-footed boobies and sooty terns build nests and lay eggs on the atoll, the only specks of land for hundreds of miles.
Johnston is part of “one of the last wild and intact ocean ecosystems that we have on Earth,” said Jonee Peters, head of the Conservation Council for Hawaii, which opposes the rocket project.
“It is a seabird paradise,” Keitt said. “There are just not that many habitats like this left in the world.”
Birds seek out the atoll as a place to build their nests far away from people, predators and pests. But, after the military left, it took work to restore that habitat.
The human presence had led to an infestation of yellow crazy ants, one of the world’s worst invasive insects. The ants spray acid that can cause deformities in birds and in some cases deadly infections.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service spent a decade eradicating the ants - sending strike teams to poison them with bait, search for them by hand and sniff them out with trained dogs.
The effort helped the birds rebound. Between 2012 and 2021, the number of active red-tailed tropicbird nests more than doubled, jumping from about 5,200 to 13,000.
Now, biologists are concerned that rocket noise - even if initially limited to landings - will spook birds from their nests, leading some to abandon their clutches of eggs.
“Landings still emit a sonic boom which would be greatly disturbing to a bunch of nesting birds,” said biologist Ryan Rash, who volunteered on Johnston twice to confirm the success of ant eradication efforts.
“Just us riding our bikes around the island would flush birds off their nests,” he said. Keitt said reopening runways for airplanes to run the program could also disturb the birds and risk the introduction of other pests.
“New invasive species brought to the island as part of this effort could last long beyond any of the activities that they’re proposing,” he said.
The Space Force will release an environmental assessment, a concise review of the project’s potential impacts, sometime this month, according to a Federal Register notice.
Desirée Sorenson-Groves, head of the National Wildlife Refuge Association, criticized the administration for not conducting a more comprehensive type of evaluation - called an environmental-impact statement - given the sensitivity of the bird sanctuary.
“Anytime you’re looking at something as monumental as landing rockets on a small place with millions of birds, you have to wonder if it’s a really good idea,” she said. “The impacts to birds are clearly enormous.”
In an email, the Fish and Wildlife Service said it is “still in the process” of working with the Department of the Air Force “on identifying mitigation measures to minimize the range of impacts to seabirds and other wildlife,” including accidentally bringing in invasive species.
The rocket cargo program is also still in the process of proving its feasibility.
Using current modes of transport, it can take two to three weeks to resupply forces in the Western Pacific, a delay that raises questions about whether the Pentagon could come to the aid of Taiwan if China invaded. Delivery by plane might be difficult or impossible if hostile forces denied access to the area.
One potential solution would be launching a rocket with the necessary equipment and munitions, and then landing it where supplies are needed. Such a system could also be used to quickly drop supplies for humanitarian aid, according to the Air Force Research Laboratory.
But there are also concerns such a system could create confusion, as a U.S.-launched rocket falling into a conflict zone might look like a ballistic missile.
Some in the scientific community have dismissed point-to-point delivery as impractical.
“These are old ideas and they have been rejected time and time again because there isn’t a great need for them, they would be an expensive option, and because ‘point to point’ delivery looks a lot like a nuclear delivery system, and it’s just too risky,” Laura Grego, a senior scientist and research director with the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in a December email.
Keitt noted that Johnston was meant to be a bird haven before the arrival of the military.
“There was incredible damage associated with the initial military buildup. I see no reason to have that damage happen again,” he said. “I would hope that we are better than that now.”
