National Spaceport Policy Needs to Launch Now 

As Starship moves beyond R&D into operations, Falcon 9 launches are going to continue to increase pace with an anticipated average of a launch every 2.5 days in 2024.  Meanwhile, ULA’s Atlas, the workhorse of national defense, will close out its history by launching Kuiper satellites for Amazon while Vulcan starts its journey.  

Looming overhead are Russia’s near-term threat to satellite operations and China’s slow and steady progress to build a sustained presence beyond Earth orbit with the specter to conduct operations in cis-lunar orbit and on the surface of the Moon. Neither is to be trifled with despite the paradox between Russia’s potential to remove LEO for use in short order and China’s growing need of LEO for its military operations.  

Against this backdrop, federal spaceport policy continues to move at the speed of bureaucracy.

Something must give between the hockey-stick increase of commercial activity and the snail’s pace creation of a management and investment framework to support current manifests and future growth. Policy and funding must move faster or something, somewhere is going to break to the detriment of economic growth with a rippling impact on national security. DoD can’t get disaggregated space assets without commercial-esque production and launch costs.  

Numerous acts of Congress and executive branch policy statements have emphasized the importance of space transportation infrastructure over the past seven years, with policy papers such as The Aerospace Corporation’s “A National Spaceport Strategy” white paper and the Global Spaceport Alliance’s (GSA) “National Spaceport Network Development Plan” contributing to the discussion. But this effort has yet to result in standardizing operations on the federal side or securing ongoing investment into commercial spaceports. 

The “U.S. Space Force Commercial Space Strategy,” published on April 8, 2024, says a lot of the right things on purchasing services in a COTS fashion, but also doesn’t address the underlying industrial base issue on having robust spaceports capable of supporting high-flight rates with sufficient resilience and redundancy. Having a formalized Commercial Augmented Space Reserve (CASR) is a good thing, but the ports need to be open at all times and under all conditions, with apologies to Baltimore.  

What’s important for a spaceport policy?

Vertical launch clearly is based on current activity and future trends. Earlier this year, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) report to Congress on National Spaceports Policy noted increasing launch activity between 2019 and 2022, with a steady increase in both the total number of launches and vertical launches with federal operated ranges – the Cape and Vandenberg – supporting 72% of the activity. Calendar year 2024 is on pace to set new records, barring a launch mishap or logistical logjams emerging from increased commercial activities.  

One warning sign that things aren’t moving fast enough has already emerged from the largest U.S. spaceport user, SpaceX. In October 2023, company officials made a rare (for SpaceX) set of media outreach rounds prior to testifying before Congress that the FAA needed to double its licensing staff and claiming that the SpaceX Starship program is being hindered by competing with its launch reviews on its own manifest. Licensing delays on Starship could affect the Artemis III lunar landing timetable as well as SpaceX’s Starlink maturity for both commercial and military use.  

Adding more licensing staff competes with dollars for other types of spaceport investment, such as plans for a spaceport infrastructure grant program that GSA would like to advance commercial spaceports around the country, but the near-term need is to keep launches flowing out of the Cape and Vandenberg.  

Beyond the near term, a national spaceport policy needs to clarify and fund a policy of diversity and growth to reduce the dependence and choke points of the Cape and Vandenberg. This may include the Department of Defense formally supporting a third and fourth heavy launch site or fostering a network of smaller spaceports capable of delivering payloads into orbit. An embrace of disaggregation for in-space assets necessitates the same philosophy being applied to putting those assets into space in time of need.  

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