One does not have to work in the space industry to know that the Eastern Range is a very busy place these days. Less than ten years ago, the gaps between rocket launches were often measured in weeks or months. For example, in 2016, there were 23 launches from the Space Coast, and only 16 in 2017.

Today, in 2024, there are often two or more orbital launches per week and sometimes as many as two in one day from the combined facilities of Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. There were 73 launches from here in 2023, and as many as 111 could happen this year. As such, bottlenecks and competing priorities for launch times and resources are rising, leading Congress to possibly instruct the US Space Force to consider offloading some national security launches to other sites.

The House Armed Services Committee’s draft fiscal 2025 defense policy bill has an interesting requirement: to study the possibility of launching NSSL (national security) payloads from other ranges than Vandenberg SFB and Cape Canaveral SFS as soon as 2025. Remember that this is a draft of the bill in committee and that it has a long way to go before it becomes law if, indeed, Congress and the current Administration can agree on a budget in the first place.

Spaceports in the United States

There are some twenty spaceport-designated facilities in the US today. Only five of them are capable of supporting vertical rocket launches: the Eastern (Cape Canaveral / KSC) and Western (Vandenberg SFB) Ranges, Alaska’s Pacific Spaceport Complex, Spaceport America near southeast of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, and the combined areas of Wallops Island — Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport and Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. That in mind, the House committee’s draft bill says those sites must be considered for additional NSSL launches.

Western Range / Vandenberg SFB

SpaceX and United Launch Alliance already use this facility for many launches, with the frequency of those launches expected to rise drastically over the next few years. SpaceX plans to launch 90 rockets into space from the Western Range by 2026, while ULA is working towards certification of the once-launched Vulcan for national security payloads that would include the Western Range as a launch point.

According to many reports, those plans—especially the SpaceX plans—are running into local opposition. The California Coastal Commission, a powerful agency in the State of California, and other environmental groups have questioned whether the planned increase should be allowed. This is an ongoing issue with no resolution in the foreseeable future.

Wallops Island

Wallops Island is an active spaceport where Rocket Lab and Northrup Grumman have conducted orbital launches in recent years. Rocket Lab is building a new launch pad for its future Neutron reusable rocket. NG is working with Firefly Aerospace to create a new variant of the Antares rocket it inherited from its acquisition of Orbital Sciences in 2018. That rocket is set to fly as soon as 2025.

Wallops makes logical sense for additional NSSL work, especially when Neutron and Antares enter service. They also have the land to develop new launch pads for new customers, giving that site great growth potential.

Pacific Spaceport Complex, Alaska

Despite PSCA having the largest launch azimuth range of any spaceport in the US that can access high-inclination, polar, and sun-synchronous orbits between 59° and 110° inclination, the Pacific Spaceport Complex has been mainly a development site for startups — ABL and Astra have been its main users the past few years, to mixed results. Previous users have included Northrup Grumman, but the aerospace giant has not launched from the facility since 2011.

The site opened in 1998 and has hosted 31 launches. It has hosted Athena I, Minotaur IV, Astra Rocket, and the RS1 rockets, with one successfully orbiting: on 19 November 2021, Astra’s LV0007 rocket achieved orbit.

That may be partly due to the facility being in Alaska and the cool local climate: located near the Bering Sea, Kodiak summers are short and mostly cloudy, and winters are long, very cold, wet, windy, and partly cloudy. Rocket launches depend on calm weather with no rain or high winds at launch time, and there, PCSA may struggle even compared to the infamously capricious weather on the Eastern Range.

Adding to PCSA’s difficulties is its remote nature with little infrastructure in the region. No rail service connected to the mainland or interstate highways leaves air shipment and the seaport at Kodiak as the major shipping options available to PCSA.

Nevertheless, Kodiak could easily become an area that supports NSSL launches during seasons when the weather allows for them. The Alaska Aerospace Corporation, a corporation owned by the state Government of Alaska, has been working diligently to attract new clients to its facilities, and in many ways, PCSA ticks many boxes for becoming a larger player in the launch business.

Spaceport America

Spaceport America is interesting because it has not been the launch site for any orbital attempts since its inception in 2011. The site in southern New Mexico is landlocked, meaning that early flight would be over land and possibly people and populated areas, leaving persons and property potentially exposed to the aftermath of a launch failure—namely, components from the rocket crashing down on them or potentially unburned toxic propellants descending from a failed rocket.

“I’m disappointed in is that the Space Force and others are very focused on the Cape and Vandenberg and Wallops,” said Scott McLaughlin, executive director of Spaceport America, in an interview published in February 24th by spacenews.com. “There’s no emphasis on making launches safe enough to fly over humans. I think that’s a natural progression and it just doesn’t seem to be on anybody’s radar right now.”

Currently, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 has 99.4% success rate, with 343 full successes out of 345 launches over 14 years of service. One failure was during static fire testing, and probably should not be counted, given the rocket never left the launch pad. The one in-flight failure Falcon 9 did have was explosive, meaning that shrapnel and uncombusted fuel from the second stage and payload were not contained and fell into the sea after the launch failure.

That would naturally be a major concern for everyone downrange, and while the chances of another failure happening are quite remote, clearing Falcon 9 for overland flight would be a major political sticking point with an uncertain path to approval — especially when safer areas like the Eastern Range, Western Range, Kodiak and Wallops do not have those worries.

Other rockets, like the soon-to-be-retired Atlas V and the once-flown Vulcan (both United Launch Alliance products), also do not have any contingencies for launch failures over populated areas other than to self-destruct before such an event occurs. The same is true for Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha rocket. Nor does New Glenn, Blue Origin’s long-awaited orbital rocket.

In short, no modern rocket in the West is designed to have the capability to fly over populated areas safely, meaning that barring a political sea change or technological advances not yet on the drawing boards, Spaceport America is likely to be many years, if not a decade or more, away from supporting orbital flight.

RIP Spaceport Camden

Camden, Georgia, was an area considered by NASA in the late 1950s and early 1960s when it sought to build the facility that eventually became the Kennedy Space Center, and civic boosters and entrepreneurs have worked to make Camden a working launch site since that time.

After it accepted an Environmental Impact Statement, the Federal Aviation Administration issued a launch site operator license for Spaceport Camden with a flight trajectory limited to a 100-degree azimuth. It was planned to be a vertical launch facility, but voters scuttled the idea in 2022 in a spending referendum, effectively ending the current efforts to bring the area only as a potential orbital rocket spaceport. For now, Spaceport Camden as an option is dead.

The “800 Lb. Gorilla” Not Mentioned

Interestingly, the House committee did not mention another active spaceport as a potential site for NSSL launches: SpaceX’s facility at Boca Chica, Texas, where it is currently building and testing its huge Starship Heavy rocket.

SpaceX has conducted suborbital test launches from Boca Chica, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Once Starship becomes operational, it could easily support NSSL launches from Boca Chica, so long as the supported azimuths from the facility match the mission profile of the payload. SpaceX could even add a Falcon 9 / Falcon Heavy launch pad to the site if it had the mind to and enough land to work with. This does not appear to be the case at this time, and perhaps that is the reason the House committee did not mention Boca Chica.