SpaceX has significantly increased the frequency of its rocket launches from a Santa Barbara County military base, and its plans to add even more have raised concerns by the California Coastal Commission over the impacts on the environment and nearby communities.

The company, officially Space Exploration Technologies Corp., owned by billionaire Elon Musk, has already breached an agreement between base officials and the coastal commission that limited the yearly launches from Vandenberg Space Force Base to six.

SpaceX has asked the commission for permission to launch up to 36 times per year from Vandenberg, as well as to conduct up to 12 landings a year at a second launch complex and an offshore landing spot in the Pacific Ocean.

Visible for miles around, the launches can create awe-inspiring spectacles as the aircraft hurtle up through the atmosphere, leaving behind a streak tracing the path of the rocket.

But nearer the base, the launches can force the closure and evacuation of nearby beaches and campgrounds, and residents have reported their windows shaking and rattling from the apparent sonic booms.

"It's very stressful when you experience something like a sonic boom and you're not expecting it," said Phil Simon, a resident of Ojai for 25 years who spoke to the commission Wednesday.

During the Apollo missions of the 1970s, several seismometers were flown to the moon, where they collected data on lunar seismic trembling for eight years. The data showed some lunar quakes were as powerful as a magnitude 5.

Unlike the Earth, the moon is not tectonically active. Lunar quakes have different origins: Some are caused by day-to-night thermal differences as the surface varies in temperature, others that occur deeper may be caused by Earth's gravitational pull, and still others are caused by the moon slowly cooling and contracting over time. Understanding how, when, and where these quakes occur is critical for planning missions to the moon, especially if permanent structures like a lunar base are to be built on its surface.

A new study demonstrates that an emerging new seismological technology called distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) would be able to measure lunar quakes with unprecedented precision. As NASA's upcoming Artemis missions plan to return to the moon to, among other research aims, deploy new seismic sensors, the study makes a case for using DAS rather than conventional seismometers.

A paper, titled "Assessing the feasibility of Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) for moonquake detection," describing the research appears in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.