THE SATELLITE COAST
The Satellite Coast research project (2024-2026) is funded by the National Science Foundation (ID 2420069) and explores the relationship between commercial satellite launching and underrepresented minority communities in California. Focusing on the central coast town of Lompoc, the study investigates how intensified commercial satellite launching is impacting Indigenous Chumash groups, farmworkers, and incarcerated persons who live and work adjacent to the Vandenberg Space Force Base. In the process, the project explores relations between aerospace, agriculture, and prison sectors in the community, local public education and workforce development, and environmental and public health effects of launch noise and emissions. The project’s significance is grounded in its integration of diverse community perspectives in understanding and evaluating the local effects of satellite launching. The study supports public knowledge of federally subsidized launch infrastructure and satellite technologies and provides collaborative research and educational opportunities for community members and university students. Reports, graphics, and publications from our study will be publicly available on our project website.
Leveraging partnerships with community organizations, the study uses ethnographic methods to conduct focus groups, interviews, and correspondence programs that convey how minority communities think about and perceive increasing satellite launches in their midst. What are the experiences of socially marginalized publics who live and work adjacent to launch infrastructure? The major goals of the project are to: 1) understand how satellite launching from Vandenberg impacts both the local community and the global satellite industry; 2) investigate the social, cultural, and environmental impacts of commercial satellite launching; 3) learn how members of minority communities think about the Vandenberg base, satellite launching, aerospace, and STEM education; and 4) draw on qualitative data to theorize how sociotechnical relations of adjacency, diversity, and cosmology alter understandings of launch infrastructure and satellite technology. The study will contribute to STS research on satellite technology and infrastructure, the aerospace sector, and race/ethnicity and technology.
Project Team, 2024-26
Lisa Parks (PI, UC Santa Barbara), Althea Wasow (co-PI, UC Santa Barbara), Carlos Jimenez (co-PI, University of Denver)
Ricardo Mata Vazquez, Grad Student Researcher. Sophia Abbey, Grad Student Researcher.
Chicano/a Studies Film and Media Studies
Project Gallery
Project team 2023-24: Lisa Parks, Ranna Zahabi, Kim Yasuda, Tara Plath
Our data visualizations reveal significant increases in rocket and satellite launches from Vandenberg Space Force Base
