Maine Child Woken By Rocket Test In Brunswick, Many More To Come

Illustration of a rocket being launched with graphics indicating extreme noise levels.
Source: Popular Mechanics “How The Noise Of Big Rockets Breaks Apart Buildings”

A friend of mine received an email from a friend of his in Brunswick, Maine this week:

Did you hear this last night? I thought of you when my 8 year old came running into my room terrified and crying after they woke him up.

https://www.wmtw.com/article/maine-company-successfully-test-fires-rocket/41347930

If you can imagine being 8 years old again, you are probably aware of the threat of war breaking out. (At least I was at that age.) Even if you are not, a terribly loud industrial sound — loud enough to wake you up — could send you running in tears to your parents to ask them what’s going on. 

The parents were alarmed by the loud noise also, but didn’t find out until the following day that it was bluShift Aerospace testing one of the rockets it intends to launch from the Maine coast at Steuben, near Acadia National Park. The company’s headquarters, however, is in Brunswick, a heavily populated area where they plan several more tests.

Photo from Twitter user Scott Gustin showing a fireball and black smoke at a rocket launch site in Florida.
Explosion rocks SpaceX test launch site during test

Brunswick already gets hit hard by excessive noise every time a military air show comes to town. Last time the Blue Angels performed, a sonic boom cracked the sliding glass doors of another friend of mine, a woman in her 90’s. Her daughter contacted the Brunswick Landing folks who hosted the airshow, but no compensation for the damage was offered.

I continue to be mystified about two things:

  • What democratic process was used in Steuben to determine that rocket launches would be allowed there? Or in Brunswick to determine if the public wants to endure this level of noise pollution?
  • When will environmental groups and activists in Maine wake up to the environmental harms of a rocket launch site on the coast? BluShift plans up to 35 launches per year from the Steuben site! I’ve reached out to Sierra Club of Maine, 350 Maine, and several other groups. But if they are beholden to the Democratic Party, they will likely continue to look the other way.

According to her recent newsletter to constituents, Brunswick’s Senator Mattie Daughtry (a Democrat) is full of self-congratulation over her authorship of this bill. Clearly she is representing moneyed interests in Maine, not schoolchildren who deserve not to be terrified awake on a school night.

Sand beach with large piece of twisted metal and a local bird in Texas.
Wilson’s Plover with debris from SpaceX operations in Boca Chica, Texas. Image credit: Coastal Bend Bays & Estuaries Program (CBBEP)

Those of us in Maine who are paying attention have a website, NoToxicRockets4ME.org, where you can find out more about this environmental issue plus the experiences of other places (Kodiak, New Zealand) where rocket launch sites have been built. Locals are promised that what they will get in return for the industrialization of a pristine coastal spot is jobs (which don’t materialize) and no military use (which does materialize).

Map of Maine coast showing close proximity of Acadia National Park to Steuben.
Steuben, Maine is outlined in red

I hope Mainers wake up before campers in Acadia are awakened by loud noises scaring children and disrupting wildlife in what was once a peaceful spot.

Militarization Of Fragile Pacific Leaves Destruction And Death

“MUTUAL AID FOR RESIDENTS OF KAPILINA, whose drinking water was contaminated by the US military’s jet fuel into the Oahu aquifer!!” Source: Ann Wright

Today I am reposting a great op-ed which ran on July 4 in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser (emphasis and photos added by me). 

I met the author when we collaborated on a webinar during the COP26 Peoples Summit exposing the role of the U.S. military in driving climate crisis.

Militarization Of Fragile Pacific Leaves Destruction And Death

by Koohan Paik-Mander, Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power In Space board member

While recently visiting Honolulu, I attended two events: the congressional town hall meeting about Red Hill, and sign-holding at Pearl Harbor (my sign read, “CLEAN UP RED HILL NOW!”).

I have to admit, the experience of being on Oahu was chilling.

Because, it is here that toxic decisions are made that impact our beautiful Pacific for generations. You see it all around you. Just pause, look behind the edifices, adjust your eyes to the shadows, read between the lines. This is how to glean clues on the classified plans now underway for war with China. They are affecting us all.

They say the Red Hill tanks can’t begin draining until the end of 2023 at the earliest. Congressman Kai Kahele pointed out a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act that says that drainage depends upon the military’s ability to provide fuel for war by alternative means.

In other words, the purity of our drinking water is not as important as the Pentagon’s assessment of warfighting capabilities.

Right now, two alternative fuel storage facilities are being built. One of them is on pristine Larrakia land in northern Australia. The other is on Tinian, one of the lovely northern Mariana Islands.

We never hear about opposition overseas to construct these fuel tanks, nor the grievous cultural and environmental impacts, nor the fact that during any conflict, it is the fuel storage facility that is targeted by the enemy first, filling the skies with billows of black smoke for days.

Holding my sign at the Pearl Harbor base gate, I notice a Korean flag in the distance. My first thought was that it must be a Korean restaurant. Then, I saw shimmering water beyond. Apparently, I was on the harbor banks and the flag was actually attached to a docked warship. Its steel radar equipment peeked up from behind buildings.

South Korean government photo of the Marado


It was the Marado, the gigantic amphibious assault ship — as large as an aircraft carrier — but even more treacherous, because when a vessel that gargantuan plows into a reef, crushing everything on its path before lumbering onto shore to release battalions of troops, robots and vehicles, it is simply stomach-turning.

It is here for RIMPAC to enact the next world war, along with militaries from 26 other countries.

 They will sink ships, blast torpedoes, drop bombs, launch missiles, and activate whale-killing sonar. They will wreak havoc on the well-being of our ocean, hobbling its capacity as the single most important mitigating force to climate catastrophe.

I thought of the Marado berthed, just last month, at the new navy base on Jeju Island, Korea. The base is built atop a wetland, once bubbling with pure, freshwater springs — home to 86 species of seaweeds and over 500 species of shellfish, many endangered. Now paved over with concrete.

I thought of the Marado conducting “amphibious exercises by forcible entry” at Kaneohe Bay, on Oahu.

screenshot from video Valiant Shield 16 shared by Pentagon on Facebook in 2016

I thought of it ravaging Chulu Bay on Tinian, where, in 2016, environmentalists forced the cancellation of a Valiant Shield war maneuver because it coincided with the nesting of endangered turtles. When I visited Chulu Bay, it reminded me very much of Anini Beach on Kauai, except that, unlike Anini, it was wild and biodiverse and without multimilliondollar beachfront homes.

No one would allow such a thing on Anini where celebrities live. But because Chulu is invisible — which is also why it has continued until now to be so kaleidoscopically wild — it and so much of the Pacific have become fair game for unbridled military ecocide.

A weaponized Pacific is a dead Pacific.

And a dead Pacific is a dead planet.