“As we prepare to go back to the Moon under Artemis, continued testing will prepare us for the bold missions that lie ahead.”
— NASA Administrator Bill Nelson on X after a successful SpaceX test flight
The commissioners sat at a half-circle dais, all facing a nearly empty room. Because they weren’t looking at each other, they sometimes got confused about when it was their turn to speak. “I can’t tell who’s talking,” a commissioner said at one point.
Three hours into its October 10 meeting, the California Coastal Commission came to an unusual agenda item: The U.S. Space Force wanted to allow SpaceX, the private space exploration company owned by Elon Musk, to increase its rocket launches at Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara from 36 launches per year to 50.
Commissioner Dayna Bochco—a television producer who has been on the Commission for 14 years—was immediately annoyed that SpaceX hadn’t come to ask permission from the Commission directly. There were no SpaceX representatives in the room, only U.S. Space Force and Air Force officials. Bochco speculated about “what legal mechanisms we have to get [SpaceX] in front of us.” She wanted a chance to talk to SpaceX face-to-face.
“You know, we’ve had other people who didn’t want to get a coastal permit,” she pointed out, thinking out loud about how the Commission could compel SpaceX to show up. “And they usually end up having to do it.”
The power dynamics of the room were complicated: The Coastal Commission controls the shoreline but not the stars. Its dominion doesn’t even stretch over Vandenberg, which is federal property and the world’s second-busiest spaceport. Technically U.S. Space Force officials were just looking for a “consistency determination” from the Commission—essentially a rubber stamp acknowledging the agency’s plan didn’t violate state coastal regulations.
We are talking about SpaceX in this.
Commissioner Mike Wilson at the October 10 California Coastal Commission hearing
But the California Coastal Commission had a dais and a camera, and they were eager to talk about Elon Musk. What they were about to say would cause a national firestorm, earn a rebuke from the governor, and spark a First Amendment lawsuit.
When the Coastal Commission Doesn’t Like You
For the Coastal Commission, what matters isn’t always what you do on the coast but who you are: what you believe, how much money you have, and your attitude about the Coastal Commission’s power.
You can see it in the way commissioners talk about people and the punishments they mete out. When Malibu homeowner (and Pacific Legal Foundation client) Warren Lent was before the Commission to defend a gate on his beachfront property, it didn’t help that he worked as a plastic surgeon or that he tried to negotiate with the Commission instead of immediately removing the gate. “This represents an attitude we often see in Malibu—that the shore is our private backyard,” one commissioner complained. The Commission’s staff recommended a fine of $950,000. Not high enough for this particular homeowner, the commissioners decided: They increased it to $4.185 million.
And then there are people the Commission sees as political enemies. In 1982, the Coastal Commission’s executive director openly campaigned against the Republican candidate for governor, telling Californians in radio ads to “vote as if the future of the coast is at stake, because it is!”
If the Coastal Commission decides it doesn’t like you, it’ll use what power it can against you—even when it crosses the line.
The SpaceX Meeting
“We are talking about SpaceX in this,” Commissioner Mike Wilson emphasized at the October 10 meeting.
Wilson—a county supervisor who’s been on the Commission for six years—clearly wanted to make a point about the company who’d be launching the rockets in question. But he danced around his point over the next couple of minutes:
Politics, policy, science, they mix in these spaces. It’s real. This company is owned by the richest person in the world. With direct control over what could be the most extensive global communications system on the planet. And just last week that person was speaking about political retribution on a national stage. And it was very glib. But yet he was standing next to a person, a candidate, who openly promotes and is working to normalize that language. Right? And the reason I bring that up is because everyone feels that. And so I just want to make sure that we don’t normalize that. And I’m hoping that—it even makes me nervous by bringing it up, because I feel like I’m promoting it by bringing it up. But I’m trying not to—I’m trying to say we can’t hide from that and we have to push back against that. And we’re talking about the promotion of this technology. And a human being that has so much power over that. And I just want to acknowledge that.
It was easier to understand what Commissioner Gretchen Newsom was saying because she’d written it out in a pre-planned speech that she asked permission to read. Newsom (no relation to the governor) isn’t one of the twelve main commissioners; she’s an alternate. She also serves as political director for an International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers local.
“My viewpoints are strongly linked to my background as a labor leader and advocate of working families,” Newsom said at the beginning of her speech. She accused SpaceX of having a “toxic workplace culture” and of suing “against the very existence of the NLRB.” Elon Musk, she said, had “bigoted beliefs” and was “hopping about the country, spewing and tweeting political falsehoods and attacking FEMA while claiming his desire to help the hurricane victims with free Starlink access to the internet.”
Commissioner Justin Cummings claimed the commissioners were “all trying to operate in this apolitical space,” but “we do know that the person who controls these companies has enough power to not work in the best interest, when they feel like it, of our allies.”
“The concern is with SpaceX increasing its launches, not with the other companies increasing their launches,” said Commissioner Caryl Hart, an attorney and the wife of Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart. “We’re talking about a company, the head of which has aggressively injected himself into the presidential race and made it clear what his point of view is.”
The vote was 6-4. The answer was no. The Commission would not approve the increase of SpaceX rocket launches at Vandenberg.
The Lawsuit
Three days after the meeting, a SpaceX rocket shot across the sky—not above California, but above Texas, where SpaceX was conducting a test flight of its Starship rocket. The rocket’s 20-foot booster successfully returned to the launch tower as the rocket hurtled toward space, where it would travel half-way around the world. On a webcast, a SpaceX communications manager said it “looked like magic.”
Around the same time, back on Earth, the Coastal Commission’s comments at their October 10 meeting were beginning to get attention.
“California officials cite Elon Musk’s politics in rejecting SpaceX launches,” Politico reported. The headline of The Orange County Register editorial was sharper: “Coastal czars’ launch denial targets speech.”
Musk, for his part, shot back at the Commission on X: “The Coastal Commission has one job—take care of the California coast. It is illegal for them to make decisions based on what they (mostly wrongly) think are my politics.”
On October 16, Musk filed a federal lawsuit against the Commission. The complaint argued that
the Commission has engaged in naked political discrimination against Plaintiff Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) in violation of the rights of free speech and due process enshrined in the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution. Rarely has a government agency made so clear that it was exceeding its authorized mandate to punish a company for the political views and statements of its largest shareholder and CEO.
Even Governor Gavin Newsom agreed with Musk: The Commission’s comments were “unacceptable,” Newsom said.
In a tentative order in March, a judge dismissed Musk’s lawsuit for a simple reason: The Air Force (which oversees the Space Force) decided to proceed with the increased SpaceX launches anyway, overruling the Coastal Commission. SpaceX hadn’t been harmed by the Commission, the judge reasoned, because the company was getting its rocket launches.
But the judge left the door open for SpaceX to amend their complaint, telling the company’s attorney at a hearing that “the concern is legitimate when a local body injects politics in its decision-making.”
The episode was concerning—but not surprising—for people who closely follow the California Coastal Commission. This time, the commissioners’ comments were about one of the most famous men in the country. They drew a national spotlight. But usually, the Commission’s target is just a homeowner or coastal farmer, and any unfair comments, denials, or punishments will fly without the world’s notice, just a quiet blip on most people’s radar, a far-away rocket blinking in the dark.
