Earthwalk Day 1178 (14 April 2025), 11,786 km: Vandenberg Space Force Base

[Vandenberg] Space [Force Base] is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to [Vandenberg] Space [Force Base].

More quantitatively, Vandenberg is 40,104 ha (99,099 acres) in area. It’s been a military base since 1941, was an Air Force base from 1956 to 2021, and has been a Space Force base since then.

Early on the base was a center for ballistic missile testing. With the onset of the space age it became a launch site for both military and civilian satellites. The world’s first polar orbit satellite, Discoverer 1, launched from Vandenberg in 1959. Vandenberg was planned to be the west coast Space Shuttle launch and landing site, but the Challenger disaster led to the cancellation of that.

More recently it has been a SpaceX launch site for Falcon 9 rockets, and the X-37 uncrewed military spacecraft has landed multiple times at Vandenberg, most recently on March 7 of this year.

Okay, so the base isn’t so big that I didn’t enter it (virtually!), arrive at the airfield buildings, and leave the base again all in one day — today — but then, I was on my bike today, covering about four times my usual daily distance. The base, and specifically the airfield, was the terminus of Leg 39, and the 15 km I’ve covered since then, heading southeast, are the first 5.6% of Leg 40.

A map showing my progress is here, a spreadsheet with progress detail is here, and a Google Earth KMZ file is in this Google Drive folder. Present coordinates: 34.690°N, 120.459°W.