Since 2014, NASA has recycled over 75,000 tons of clean steel and asphalt from Santa Susana demolition. The cleanup has restored more than 22 acres to natural habitat

A block of land in the Simi Hills, just about 30 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles, has a backstory that was a key, even if little-known, part of American space history. For decades, engines that would be used for the Apollo missions and the Space Shuttle program were statically tested at a place called the Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL). The property's history isn't without its complexities, though: the ground has also been used for over 40 films, and a separate part of the site once housed a nuclear reactor (Sodium Reactor Experiment) with a partial meltdown in 1959, an event that was only fully revealed to the public some twenty years later.

The history is not incidental, but a key reason for the enduring public and regulatory interest in the site, extending beyond the county of Ventura. A 2007 report titled “Cancer Incidence in the Community Surrounding the Rocketdyne Facility in Southern California,” by epidemiologists from the University of Michigan School of Public Health, commissioned by the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, found slightly higher incidence rates for some types of cancer in residents living within two miles of SSFL during a portion of the study period. The authors of the study stated clearly the method's limitations and are not claiming that the site was “causing” these results. However, the results were substantial enough to warrant years of investigation by both the local area and the federal regulators, and help to put into perspective the cleanup efforts that have gone on since.

The unglamorous decade-long slog


Nowadays, though, Santa Susana isn't making headlines as it did in the late 1990s and 2000s when it was embroiled in lawsuits, or the 2010s when it was the subject of congressional letters. Rather, it's evolved into an excruciatingly dull clean-up narrative, one that doesn't usually get much attention, but should. NASA (which controls about 450 acres of the 2,850 acres) has been dismantling the old rocket-testing facilities that defined the site since 2014, when it finalized the federal environmental review and formally decided to move forward with demolishing NASA-administered structures (actual demolition work began the following year).

Boeing and the Department of Energy were not brought into the cleanup at that point, both had already been on the hook for their own separate portions of the site for years, under consent orders and agreements dating back to 2007 and 2010; Boeing's share traces to its earlier acquisition of Rocketdyne's assets, and DOE has long held responsibility for its leased Area IV, home to the former nuclear research area. All three parties continue to clean up their own areas in parallel today, under separate agreements, rather than NASA having taken over from the other two in 2014. During that demolition process, more than 75,000 tons of clean steel and asphalt have been recycled, almost 6,000 tons of hazardous waste removed, and over 22 acres of land returned to natural habitat, NASA's own FAQ page for the Santa Susana Field Laboratory project reports. That 75,000 tons is roughly equivalent, by weight, to about 6,000 fully loaded dump-truck loads hauled away instead of sent to a landfill, a solid haul for a cleanup effort now in its twelfth year.

So why isn't this "done" yet?

Dismantling old buildings is possibly the simple part. The actual chemical cleanup of soil and groundwater contaminated by the decades-long rocket-engine degreasing solvent trichloroethylene (TCE) proceeds far more slowly; it's subjected to a highly regulated federal process. EPA's overview of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act under which NASA is cleaning up hazardous-waste sites notes that many aspects of the cleanup process, including public review and regulatory approval, must be completed at each major phase before contaminated soil or groundwater can be treated.

NASA has been fielding cleanup guidelines with the California Department of Toxic Substances Control since at least 2010, and a more comprehensive final cleanup is yet to be fully completed. On the groundwater side, NASA has finished interim treatment of hundreds of millions of gallons of polluted groundwater, and full-scale, agency-wide treatment phases are just starting to come into formal compliance, more than 15 years after NASA's first Administrative Order on Consent with the state was signed in December 2010.

Why should this matter

Santa Susana is a necessary reminder of how America's renowned space program has a more troubled, dusty backstory, which it didn't begin cleaning up until decades later and which is still ongoing, ffor a generation that grew up streaming Space Shuttle and Artemis launches and would only expect to hear the term "toxic legacy site" applied to an abandoned factory somewhere else entirely. It is also a small example of what it means to be environmentally responsible in the real world, after all the news cameras have gone away: not one dramatic courtroom appearance, but years of incremental demolition permits, recycling tonnage records, and moderate, back-and-forth regulatory wrangling between an aerospace legacy and the communities that live in its shadow.

The 22 acres NASA has restored to date is a real, quantifiable success worth celebrating, though it's worth being clear-eyed that it represents a small slice of NASA's roughly 450 administered acres, and a smaller slice still of the 2,850-acre site overall, where Boeing and DOE's cleanups are proceeding on their own separate timelines. The rest of the acreage is still being cleaned up, and the phrase "restored to natural habitat" should be read with patience, especially given that "almost done" can last a long time here.