Indonesia wants Elon Musk to build a ‘space island’ on Biak – but why are Papuan residents against President Joko Widodo’s SpaceX launch pad idea?

Mar 12 , 2021

Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, and Biak, an island in Indonesia’s Papua province, slated to be home to a launch site against the wishes of its islanders. Photo: TNS, @visitbiak/Instagram

Musk’s other company Tesla is also discussing investments with Indonesian officials aimed at securing supplies of valuable copper and nickel

SpaceX’s Starship and Starlink projects currently use US launch sites, but Russia’s aerospace agency, Roscosmos, is also sizing up a launch pad on Biak island

Residents of a small Indonesian island have said that a new SpaceX launch pad on their land would devastate the environment and threaten their livelihoods, The Guardian has reported.

Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, at Satellite 2020 at the Washington Convention Centre in March 2020. Photo: AFP

In December 2020, the Indonesian government offered SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, known for his bold and unconventional thinking, a rocket launch site on the island of Biak, in Papua province in the far east of the country.

Musk and the Indonesian president Joko Widodo discussed plans over the phone in December and Musk was planning to send a team to the island in January to look at potential investments, the country’s coordinating ministry for maritime and investment affairs said in December.

Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo attends an Asean leaders’ summit in Bangkok, Thailand in November 2019. Photo: Reuters

But Manfun Sroyer, a tribal chief on the island, told The Guardian he was worried Papuans would be forced to leave their homes.

“This spaceport will cost us our traditional hunting grounds, damaging the nature our way of life depends on. But, if we protest, we’ll be arrested immediately,” Sroyer said.

This isn’t the only rocket launch site that may be built on Biak. Russia’s aerospace agency, Roscosmos, wants to develop a launch pad on the island by 2024.

“In 2002, Russians wanted our land for satellite launches. We protested and many were arrested and interrogated … Now they’ve brought it back, and this harassment and intimidation is still going on,” Sroyer told The Guardian.