A few hundred yards from Haleakalā's true summit, on a separate cinder cone called Puʻu Kolekole, sits a cluster of buildings most sunrise visitors never notice: white domes, satellite dishes, and one very large telescope pointed permanently at the sun. Locally, it's been called Science City since the 1960s. It houses the largest solar telescope on Earth, and it's also the site of one of the longest-running land disputes in the state of Hawaii.
The observatories aren't inside a fence built to keep visitors out of a national park attraction. They're built on eighteen acres of what's known as ceded land, property whose title passed from the Hawaiian Kingdom to the territorial and then state government without the transfer most Native Hawaiians recognize as legitimate. That status is the real subject underneath every protest, lawsuit, and public hearing this summit has seen since the 1960s, including one that was still unfolding as this was written.
What's Actually Up There
The first observatory on the summit, the Mees Solar Observatory, was built in 1964. By 1977 six facilities shared the ridge, and today the cluster includes the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, the Pan-STARRS sky-survey telescope run by the University of Hawaiʻi, the Faulkes Telescope North used for student research, the Air Force's AEOS telescope and Maui Space Surveillance Complex for satellite tracking, a satellite and lunar laser-ranging station, and the university's Zodiacal Light Observatory. Some of it studies stars. Some of it studies orbiting hardware. All of it sits on the same eighteen acres.
The Inouye telescope is the newest and by far the largest instrument up there: a four-meter primary mirror, the biggest ever built for solar observation, collecting roughly seven times more sunlight than any solar telescope built before it. The National Science Foundation awarded the original construction contract in 2010 at two hundred ninety-eight million dollars, though total project cost estimates run somewhat higher depending on what's counted. The dome was finished in 2016, the mirror delivered in 2017, and the telescope captured its first engineering images in December 2019, the most detailed pictures of the sun's surface ever taken, before moving into full science operations by 2022. It's designed to keep observing for roughly forty-four years, long enough to watch four complete eleven-year solar cycles, studying the magnetic fields behind solar flares that can knock out power grids and satellites on Earth. It was renamed in 2013 for the late Hawaii senator Daniel K. Inouye.
The DKIST Protests
Hawaii's Department of Land and Natural Resources issued a permit for the telescope, then known as the Advanced Technology Solar Telescope, in 2010, then had it revoked for failing to hold a legally required contested-case hearing. Construction began anyway in 2012 while litigation continued. In June 2015, protesters physically blocked a construction convoy at the project's staging area and turned it back. On July 31, 2015, a larger blockade at the Maui baseyard ended in twenty arrests, ranging in age from nineteen to sixty, after demonstrators chained themselves to sections of PVC pipe. Kaleikoa Kaʻeo, a Hawaiian studies professor among those arrested, put it plainly afterward: "Fundamentally, we are asserting our human rights." Activist Trinette Furtado drew a distinction that came up again and again through the fight: "We are not anti-telescope, we are not anti-science... we stand for the mountain, we are for preserving our culture."
A second blockade that August drew roughly a hundred fifty protesters and eight more arrests, including Joshua Lanakila Mangauil, a name also tied to the parallel fight over the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea, the same dispute playing out on a different mountain at nearly the same moment. Hawaii's Supreme Court upheld the project's permit in October 2016. The following August, more than a hundred protesters blocked the highway convoy carrying the telescope's primary mirror to the summit, resulting in six more arrests. Construction finished regardless. Notably, a 2007 cultural impact assessment had already found what it called overwhelming evidence of significant adverse impact on Native Hawaiian traditional practices and beliefs, and Haleakalā National Park's own leadership at the time was on record opposing the project, saying the impact review fell short. The advocacy group Kilakila O Haleakalā summarized the stakes as they saw them: "Haleakala is precious, and it is an integral part to our identity."
Plan Your Haleakalā Visit
The observatory cluster sits near, but not at, Haleakalā's actual high point. The trip planner can help you route both into one summit visit.
Open the Trip PlannerSeven More Telescopes, and the Fight Isn't Over
In early 2026, the U.S. Air Force and Space Force proposed a project called AMOS STAR, short for the Air Force Maui Optical and Supercomputing Site Small Telescope Advanced Research Facility, adding up to seven new small telescopes to the existing cluster to help track roughly forty-eight thousand nine hundred objects orbiting over the Pacific. The stated footprint is modest, under one acre of already-disturbed ground, at an estimated cost near five point nine million dollars, with construction proposed to start in 2027 and run about two years.
The public response echoed 2015 almost exactly. At a February 18, 2026 hearing in Kīhei, more than forty people testified, nearly all in opposition, followed by a second hearing in Pukalani; written comments topped six hundred, with the comment period closing March 16, 2026. Maui's County Council had already voted unanimously against the project in June 2024, and Mayor Richard Bissen sent a formal letter of disapproval. Kiope Raymond, president of Kilakila O Haleakalā, described the toll in terms that reached back further than this one project: "The pain has become intergenerational... coming from the broken process." Kelia NeSmith, a Maui native who'd also protested the Inouye telescope a decade earlier, was back testifying again, a direct thread connecting both fights. Community members Mona Kea and Stephanie Musbach were blunter still, one saying "nobody believes you," the other telling the Space Force directly, "I'm embarrassed for you." Opponents also pointed to a documented seven hundred twenty gallon diesel fuel spill at the site in January 2023 as evidence of how the existing facilities are already being managed.
Not every voice at the hearings opposed the project. Sam King argued that Hawaii's astronomy sector benefits the state economically and culturally, that it isn't inherently at odds with Hawaiian celestial and navigational traditions, and that satellite tracking serves a real security purpose given current global tensions. A U.S. Space Force spokesperson said the environmental review process is designed to surface exactly this kind of public input and inform mitigation decisions. As of this writing, no final decision on the project had been announced.
Eighteen Acres, One Unresolved Question
The observatory parcel is ceded land, the term for roughly one point eight million acres statewide whose title moved from the Hawaiian Kingdom to the provisional government, then the Republic of Hawaii, then the territory and eventually the state, a chain of transfers many Native Hawaiians and legal scholars regard as never legitimately resolved. It's the same land-status question underneath the Mauna Kea telescope dispute on the Big Island, which is why organizers and specific individuals, Joshua Lanakila Mangauil and Kelia NeSmith among them, show up in the record of both fights. Every new proposal for this ridge, whether it's a four-meter solar telescope or seven small satellite-tracking scopes on less than an acre, restarts the same underlying argument about whose authority actually governs this ground.
- First observatory built 1964
- DKIST mirror diameter 4 METERS
- DKIST arrests, 2015-17 34 TOTAL
- Observatory parcel 18 ACRES, CEDED LAND
Facts and figures checked against the National Solar Observatory's DKIST fact sheets, the Wikipedia entries for Haleakalā Observatory and the Maui solar telescope protests (cross-referenced against news coverage cited there), and 2026 reporting from Honolulu Civil Beat and Hawaii News Now on the AMOS STAR proposal. Some figures, including the exact DKIST total project cost and the precise wording of a 2007 cultural impact assessment, vary slightly between sources; we've flagged those as approximate rather than state a single figure as certain. As of this writing, the AMOS STAR project's comment period had closed but no final decision had been reported.
Drive past Science City on the way to the true summit and it reads, at a glance, like infrastructure: domes, antennas, a chain-link fence. What actually happened to get each of those domes built, twenty arrests here, a highway blockade there, a Supreme Court ruling, a diesel spill cited a decade later at a hearing about entirely new telescopes, is the part that doesn't show up from the road. The argument over this ridge didn't end when the Inouye telescope's dome closed for the first time. It just moved on to the next acre.