Raining rockets Musk's space race risks devastating pristine waters of world heritage site

The north-west Hawaiian island of Mokumanamana is said to be touched by the gods. No humans have lived on it, but it has the world's highest density of ancient Hawaiian religious sites.

- Dara Kerr

The north-west Hawaiian island of Mokumanamana is said to be touched by the gods. No humans have lived on it, but it has the world's highest density of ancient Hawaiian religious sites. "It sits as a boundary between what Native Hawaiians refer to as 'po', the darkness, and 'au', the light," says William Aila, the former chair of Hawaii's department of land and natural resources. "When a Hawaiian passes, their soul makes its way from wherever it is in the main Hawaiian Islands, up to the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. And at that juncture, at po, they're met by their ancestors."

But the hundreds of miles of ocean that surround Mokumanamana and other Hawaiian islands are now under threat, according to environmentalists and scientists. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the agency that oversees air and space travel in the US, announced in May that it had given Elon Musk permission to detonate rocket ships from his company SpaceX over these protected waters.

SpaceX first brought its request, a proposal called the Starship super heavy project, to the FAA in 2022. In 2023, the company was given a licence to launch its massive Starship rocket five times a year. In 2024, Musk proposed multiplying that number to 25 a year. To date, 10 Starship rockets have attempted to take off from the current base, the majority of which have ended in scattershot explosions, blasting metal shrapnel and debris from the Gulf of Mexico to the Indian Ocean.

In conjunction with the increased number of launches, Musk proposed expanding the area in the Pacific Ocean where debris from his exploding Starships could fall by roughly 75 times its original scope. This new area encompasses vast regions throughout the Pacific, including around the eight main Hawaiian islands, Mokumanamana and the entire north-west Hawaiian chain of islands - which lie within the Papahānaumokuākea marine national monument, a Unesco world heritage site.