HONOLULU– Local officials on the Hawaiian island of Maui voted Wednesday to oppose a U.S. military proposal to build new telescopes at the top of the Haleakala volcano, the latest observatory project to address objections on the islands.
The U.S. Space Force and Air Force want to build a new facility at the summit of Haleakala, Maui’s highest peak, to track objects in space.
The Maui County Council voted 9-0 in favor of a resolution opposing the project. Under the measure, Haleakala’s summit was a sacred site used for religious ceremonies, prayer and connection with ancestors.
“Haleakala is more than just a mountain; “The summit is considered wao akua, or ‘realm of the gods,’ and remains a place of deep spirituality for Native Hawaiians to engage in some of these traditional practices,” the resolution said.
It said the Space Force isn’t ready yet to clean a 700 gallon (2,650 liter) diesel fuel leakage at the site of one of its existing Haleakala telescopes. The spill occurred last year when a pump that supplies fuel to a backup generator failed to shut off during a thunderstorm.
The proposed new facility is called AMOS STAR, an acronym for Air Force Maui Optical and Supercomputing Site Small Telescope Advanced Research. It would contain six telescopes enclosed in ground-mounted domes and a roof-mounted dome telescope.
The province’s resolution urged the military to heed community calls to halt their development efforts. It urged the National Park Service, the Federal Aviation Administration and the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources to deny the project permits.
The clear skies and dry air at the summit of Haleakala provide some of the world’s best viewing space conditions, comparable to the summit of Mauna Kea on the Big Island, where there are about a dozen telescopes.
Haleakala rises to 3,055 meters. It already houses several University of Hawaii observatories and an existing collection of Space Force telescopes, the Maui Space Surveillance Complex. Protesters tried to block construction of a new observatory on Haleakala in 2017, but construction continued and the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope released its first images in 2020.
A proposal by a consortium of universities to build a new observatory Mauna Kea called the Thirty meter telescope causes mass protests in 2019. The TMT project is currently on hold while planners look to the National Science Foundation financing.