The spectacular sight of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket streaking across the San Diego County sky may become much more familiar in the months ahead.

The U.S. Space Force and SpaceX have asked the California Coastal Commission to approve an increase to as many as 36 launches a year at Vandenberg Space Force Base on the state's Central Coast.

The Vandenberg launches have averaged six annually for the past five years, although the number steadily increased to a total of 28 in 2023.

SpaceX has been ramping up launches as it builds out a network of nearly 42,000 Starlink satellites to provide worldwide internet service. As of March, it had launched more than 5,500 satellites. The company has a roster of other launch customers, including NASA and the Pentagon.

The West Coast space base is one of four launch sites for Space X. The others are at Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center, both in Florida, and another in Brownsville, Texas.

Usually taking off near sunset, the rockets leave a long, undulating trail in the sky that draws widespread attention. Photos appear in the news and social media posts, although that could happen less frequently as the phenomenon becomes more common.

The Coastal Commission is expected to approve the expansion at a meeting Wednesday in Long Beach.

That will be good for the entire region, said Henrik Christensen, a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California San Diego, and the director of its Contextual Robotics Institute.

"The space industry benefits tremendously from seeing more activity in Southern California," Christensen said. "There are multiple companies that do consulting engineering for space."

UCSD students have designed and built rocket engines and satellites, he said. Some have gone on to work for NASA, or for the private companies SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk, and Blue Origin, founded by Jeff Bezos.

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