“It sits as a boundary between what Native Hawaiians refer to as ‘pō’, the darkness, and ‘au’, the light,” said 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 North-western Hawaiian Islands. And at that juncture, at pō, they’re met by their ancestors.” As Aila tells it, if a person has been good, they can pass into pō and be with their ancestors, who inhabit the Pacific waters west of Mokumanamana.

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 the protected waters of Mokumanamana.

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 license to launch its massive Starship rocket five times a year. In 2024, Musk proposed quintupling that number to 25 a year.

SpaceX’s launch base is located in Boca Chica, Texas, surrounded by a state park and federal wildlife refuge. To date, 10 Starship rockets have attempted to take off from there, the majority of which have ended in scattershot explosions, blasting metal shrapnel and debris from the Gulf of Mexico to the Indian Ocean.