In 1989, the U.S. Air Force and National Aeronautics and Space Administration, without prior notice to the state of Hawai’i, announced they would be taking comments on a plan to develop what was called an Advanced Launch System. The Big Island was one of the possible sites for launching the system’s super-huge, super-heavy rockets that were to carry military payloads into orbit.
Hawai’i’s space czar, Thomas B. Hayward, submitted testimony at one of the Washington hearings on the ALS. As reported in West Hawaii Today, Hayward scolded military officials for failing to let the state know of their plans. The state had its own plans for launching commercial and scientific satellites, Hayward’s written testimony reportedly said. The paper quoted him further: “Other endeavors, such as the ALS and ASAT (anti-satellite) programs must be officially coordinated with the governor, lest they jeopardize not only each other but the state’s plans as well.”
Turnabout
Many people in Ka’u might see rich irony in Hayward’s complaints of exclusion. The state has been spent millions of dollars over the last six years in pursuit of a space launch facility in that southernmost district of Hawai’i’s southernmost island. During that entire time, residents of Ka’u have been pressing for information on what precisely the state is planning. To the extent that the state has responded to their queries at all, responses have been vague and, some say, patronizing to boot.
The Office of Space Industry and more generally the Department of Business, Economic Development, and Tourism within which OSI is housed, do not seem able to get their message across to most of Ka’u’s 4,900 residents – this despite the most massive public-relations campaign the state has yet undertaken.
With the state withholding release of a master plan (prepared more than a year ago) and still not ready to go public with a draft environmental impact statement (the 10-volume document was delivered to DBEDT in May), people in Ka’u and throughout Hawai’i have been growing more and more skeptical about the state’s proposal to pave the way for private industry to develop a commercial rocket launch facility in the South Point area. No less a figure than the Big Island’s usually pro-development mayor, Steve Yamashiro, has been openly critical of the spaceport plan, telling reporters in March of this year that, as paraphrased in one newspaper account, “the state appears to just be spending a lot of money on the proposal.”
Back in Time
The idea to build a launch facility in Ka’u antedates the latest proposal by decades. In his history of the project, Dick Pratt, director of the Public Administration Program at the University of Hawai’i-Manoa, traces the first mention of a Hawai’i spaceport to April 1960. At that time, “just after statehood, the mainland firm of Ralph M. Parsons conducted a study for the state of Hawai’i Planning Office. The objective of the study was to determine whether there were places in Hawai’i suitable for rocket launching facilities, a matter very much on the minds of national policy-makers in the post-Sputnik period.” Parsons concluded that the Big Island would be ideal – not on the coast of Ka’u, but near the summit of Mauna Kea!1
The Parsons report languished. More than two decades later, the idea of a Big Island spaceport was dusted off again, this time in a proposal by the recently deceased Deke Slayton, who, in his post-astronaut days, became an executive with a private launch company called Space Services, Inc. Slayton visited Ka’u in 1982, hoping to win support for converting the site of the Air Force’s abandoned Pacific Missile Range facility (used for tracking, not launching) into a commercial launch facility.
His meeting with the community did not go well. As Lucy Jokiel described it some years later, “Nearly 400 Na’alehu residents were waiting… when he arrived at the community center in May 1982. But they weren’t there to cheer the man with the ‘right stuff’… Instead, they were there to ‘tar and feather him,’ remembers Jack Keppeler, former Big Island managing director under then-Mayor Herbert Matayoshi2…. ‘They didn’t come to listen to Slayton,’ recalls Keppeler. ‘They came to humiliate him and drive him out of town.”‘3
The idea did not die but it did fade briefly into the background. The Air Force turned the land SSI had coveted over to the Forest Service. SSI turned its attention to Bishop Estate land, although that – like the earlier parcel – would still require a buffer area of Hawaiian Homelands, to which many native Hawaiians objected. By December, Deke Slayton was quoted in the Hawai’i Tribune-Herald to the effect that SSI, though still interested in a Hawai’i launch facility, had given up trying to launch its first rocket from the site because of opposition from what he described as a “minority” group.
Slayton, the report went, said, “It’s a little startling to these people in Texas. In Texas they’re pro-development, pro-high technology.”
By April 1983, SSI, still saying South Point was its first choice for a facility, began looking elsewhere – starting at the Navy’s Barking Sands facility. (That effort, too, appears to have borne no fruit. Ultimately, SSI seems to have worked out an agreement with White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, allowing SSI use of military facilities there.)
Desultory efforts to put a spaceport in Ka’u continued over the next three years. In 1986, following the death of astronaut Ellison Onizuka in the space shuttle disaster, the Legislature considered a bill to designate South Point a “high tech district- which, some legislators claimed, would be a fitting tribute to the late Big Island native. The bill died, but not before critics brought up the point that three years earlier, Onizuka himself had told a reporter for the Hawai’i Tribune-Herald that while the spaceport “may create some jobs,” that benefit would not be “enough to pay for the penalties that such launchings would have on the environment.”
History Repeats
Still, by this time the notion of a spaceport in Ka’u – one that, alone among U.S. launch sites, could put satellites into both equatorial and polar orbits without flying overpopulated land – seems to have been planted firmly in the minds of at least some of the area’s major landowners – not least of them the C. Brewer Company, owner of Ka’u Agribusiness and the largest employer in the area.
Sugar was in decline during the mid-1980s. Brewer’s efforts to develop Sea Mountain resort at Punalu’u were spectacularly unsuccessful. (The resort eventually was sold to the Japanese firm of Sarale, which is mired in efforts to expand and upgrade the facilities.)
As Pratt describes it, “Doc” Buyers, who had recently taken control of C. Brewer, needed something in the Ka’u area that “the company could get into, or something someone else might start.” At the same time Buyers was embarking on his search, Pratt writes, John Waihe’e arrived at Washington Place. Pratt continues:
“The interests of Brewer and the state administration converged to produce a campaign for a spaceport in Ka’u. On December 14, 1986, Buyers announced he was donating 500 acres to anyone willing to build a rocket launching facility on it. He enthusiastically noted that it could bring in up to 10,000 jobs, and stipulated only that the port be named after Ellison Onizuka… A month later, in his inaugural address, Waihe’e expressed his wish for an operating spaceport within five years… In the meantime, (Senator) Spark Matsunaga had given his whole-hearted support to the development of ‘space industries’ in Hawai’i, including a spaceport, and revealed that he had been talking with the Japanese about their interest in a more equatorial site.”4
In 1987, state and private efforts to move forward on a spaceport began in earnest. The state commissioned Arthur D. Little, Inc., to report on space-related economic opportunities for Hawai’i. In spring of that year, C. Brewer hired Mufi Hannemann and moved him to Na’alehu, making no secret of Hannemann’s task: to sell the spaceport idea to the locals.5
No Demand
By August, the Arthur D. Little study was released. A number of promising areas for space-related endeavors were identified. Development of a commercial launch facility was not high on the list, however. The study found that “existing capacity can handle even the most optimistic forecast of demand for non-NASA, non-DoD payloads. It is likely that additional capacity will be added at existing facilities before a completely new (or ‘greenfield’) launch facility is built.”6 Still, the report recommended that the state take certain measures to prepare itself in the event that the market should change. Those steps included talks with promising commercial users, preparation of a master plan and environmental impact statement, and construction of the infrastructure that would be needed to support a launch facility.
Soon thereafter, the state commissioned Arthur D. Little to do a second study – this time to identify the most space-launch suitable sites on the island of Hawai’i. Areas considered were: along the remote and inaccessible Hamakua coastline (between Makapala, on the Hawi side, and Waipi’o Valley, on the Hilo side); three sites in Puna (Kea’au Ranch outside Kea’au; another area three miles north of Pahoa; and the area around Kumukahi, Hawai’i’s easternmost cape); and three sites in Ka’u (Palima Point near Pahala and just to the south of Hawai’i Volcano’s National Park; Kahilipali Point near Na’alehu; and an area along South Point Road).
Palima Point and Kahilipali Point were chosen as sites exceptionally well-suited to a launch facility. Either one could support equatorial- and polar-orbit launches, would accommodate up to four launch pads, and would minimize potential disruption of nearby populations.
Vanishing Master Plan
The state Legislature established the Office of Space Industry, an arm of DBED, in 1988. In May of that same year, the state advertised nationally for a prime contractor to undertake preparation of a “comprehensive master plan” and an environmental impact statement that would meet both state and federal requirements. (In what can only be described as an overabundance of optimism, the state’s advertisement put consultants on notice that the draft EIS was “to be completed in six months from time of award.”)
Ever since, the release date for the EIS has been, in the words of OSI staffer Richard Flagg, a “moving target.” Residents of Ka’u were told at first that it would be ready in mid-1989. The end of 1990 was the next estimated time of arrival. That was moved back another year, then another year. In June of 1993, Ken Munechika, OSI director, was saying it would probably be available for public review by the end of 1993.
The master plan is another story. Work on it has been finished since 1990, but the state is withholding its release. In response to requests by members of the public to review it, the state Office of Information Practices (within the Department of the Attorney General) has advised that “the draft of the master plan is not required to be disclosed under the [Uniform Information Practices Act] exception for ‘government records that, by their nature, must be confidential in order for the government to avoid the frustration of a legitimate government function.’”
Instead of the master plan, the OSI, in June 1991, released an “interim report” titled “Project Description and Conceptual Facilities Layouts for a Commercial Rocket Launching Facility in the State of Hawai’i.” According to that document, no longer was the master plan to be prepared alongside the EIS. Now, DBEDT was saying, there was a “three phase planning process.” First stage was the “project description.” Second phase is the EIS. The master plan would not be undertaken until after the first two were complete.
According to Munechika, the master plan cannot be undertaken until the state has found some entity – corporation or consortium – to develop the facility. Only at that stage, he said, would there be enough details to fill out a master plan.
Clear on the Concept
The final “Conceptual Plan and Project Description” was released by the OSI in February 1993. The first half of the 135-page document is given over to a discussion of the “Space Age.” Only in the second half are matters pertaining to Hawai’i introduced.
According to this document, between 150 and 325 people would be directly employed in spaceport operations, although the “most likely scenario” anticipates “a work force of between 150 and 170 persons performing range operations and other critical support activities” – a far cry from Buyers’ vision of 10,000 jobs.
Spaceport operations are expected to require about 7 megawatts of electrical power on average, with peak demand of up to 10 megawatts. Nowhere in the “Conceptual Plan” is mention made of how this power – which it states will be provided by the local utility, HELCO – will be generated on an island where even present demand frequently exceeds generating capacity.
From the outset, the state has insisted that it will not build or operate the $400 million launch facility – a position reaffirmed in the “Conceptual Plan.” The state would, however, “provide assistance to potential developers in the areas of land consolidation and control, land use permits and infrastructure improvements to roads and utilities.”
Additionally, the plan says, “the state would encourage the developer to adopt measures demonstrating sensitivity toward the lifestyles, cultural traditions and special rights of native Hawaiians.”
Turning Up the Heat
Release of the “Conceptual Plan” has not quieted critics. If anything, to judge by the letters to the editors of the Big Island papers, it has rekindled their energies. A report in the Hawai’i Tribune-Herald describing OSI expenditures totaling $7 million – most of it on spaceport-related activities – drew the wrath of Ken Munechika, who responded with a vigorous defense of his offices’ activities. Among the achievements he noted were that it helped “us remember that space remains an exciting and challenging frontier.”
When Munechika’s essay was itself ridiculed by, among others, a scientist on the staff of the University of Hawai’i-Hilo, DBEDT Director Hannemann weighed in with a letter that recited Munechika’s accomplishments and his “local roots” (Munechika is from Kaua’i). The critical comments of the faculty member, Hannemann said, were “especially disturbing because of his affiliation with the University of Hawai’i at Hilo.”
On May 26, 1993, the governor’s office announced “a breakthrough” in the spaceport development proposal. The state and Lockheed Missiles & Space Company, Inc., had exchanged letters of agreement “to cooperate on the development of the commercial spaceport project,” the governor’s press release said.
The “breakthrough” was front-page news across the state. Some days later, however, the Hawai’i Tribune-Herald reported that Lockheed had issued its own brief statement, “clarifying its agreement with the state.”
“Lockheed issued the statement,” according to reporter Jim Witty, “in response to a number of news accounts last week that left some believing a deal had been struck for the actual construction of the facility. Both the Office of Space Industry and governor’s spokeswoman Carolyn Tanaka acknowledged some of the accounts may have been misleading but said no clarification was in order.”
1 “Saving Ka`u,” published in Occasional Papers in Political Science (University of Hawai`i-Manoa, 1989), p. 95.
2 Before that, Keppler had been Puna district plantation manager for C. Brewer. Today he is a deputy director of the state Department of Land and Natural Resources.
3See “The Big Island’s Race for Space,” Hawai`i Business, November 1987.
4 “Saving Ka`u,” pp. 91-92. Pratt offers a detailed, well-documented account of the state’s efforts to “sell” the spaceport plan to Ka`u residents in the context of a larger scholarly thesis. To wit, that the “the struggle over a spaceport in Ka`u is being managed by a politics which gives sophisticated rhetorical flourish to consultative decision-making as a way of resolving the conflict between community integrity and economic development. The reality, however, is a tough manipulativeness which leaves residents – that is, citizens – feeling ignorant, fatalistic and cynical.” A slightly abridged version of Pratt’s article was reprinted in Ka`u Landing, November and December 1992 editions.
5 At the time Brewer hired him, Hannemann, a darling of the Democrats, had just been defeated by Republican Pat Saiki in the election for U.S. representative from Hawai`i’s Second District. Hannemann subsequently moved into state government as head of the Governor’s Office of International Relations. In 1992, he was appointed by Waihe`e to the position of director of DBEDT. On Hannemann’s move to Ka`u, see, for example, Susan Essoyan, “Rockets for Rural Ka`u?” Hawai`i Investor Journal, May 1989; Lucy Jokiel, “The Big Island’s Race for Space,” Hawai`i Business, November 1987.
6 See Arthur D. Little, Inc., “Evaluation of the Potential for Space-Related Activities in the State of Hawai`i,” Department of Business and Economic Development (August 1987), p. 1-13.
Volume 4, Number 1 July 1993
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