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The Space Force plans to spend billions of dollars to modernize its ranges on the East and West coasts.
In 2024, the U.S. broke the record for annual space launches for the second year in a row, and its Eastern Range was the busiest spaceport in the world.
A late January drive down Phillips Parkway at Cape Canaveral SFS in Florida puts those records on clear display. The air is charged with commercial and military space activity, from SpaceX’s busy Falcon 9 launch site at Space Launch Complex (SLC) 40 to United Launch Alliance’s expanding facilities for its new rocket at SLC-41. New space companies are building pads on historic sites—Stoke Space is constructing at SLC-14 and Relativity Space at SLC-16. Truck convoys shuttle ever larger rockets across the base from processing facilities to launchpads at 10 mph on one-lane roads.
- Facelifts will focus on road expansion, facility moves and system improvements
- The service had 33% more successful launches in 2024 than 2023
The Space Force is investing billions of dollars to modernize aging infrastructure at its two coastal ranges to support a growing appetite for rides to space on larger rockets from a greater number of providers. That includes facelifts to wastewater treatment facilities and HVAC systems, road expansions to support transport of larger rockets and relocating offices to operate outside designated safety zones during launches.
About $1.3 billion is slated to support 192 such projects in fiscal 2024-28, under what the service is calling the “spaceport of the future” program, Brig. Gen. Kristin Panzenhagen, program executive officer for Assured Access to Space and director of the Eastern Range, said at the Space Force Association’s Spacepower Conference held in Orlando, Florida, in December.
These investments are “maybe not as sexy as satellites on orbit but extremely important for spaceport operations,” Panzenhagen said.
Space Launch Delta 45—the unit responsible for all space launch operations from Cape Canaveral—supported 93 successful launches in 2024. Fifty-one took off successfully from Vandenberg SFB, California, for a total of 144 launches from U.S. soil that year—the most worldwide and a 33% increase from the 2023 total of 108 launches from the U.S.
The raised launch cadence for 2025 is already well underway. Between Jan. 1 and Feb. 25, 12 launches occurred at Cape Canaveral, including the first for Blue Origin’s New Glenn orbital-class rocket, 10 Falcon 9s to support SpaceX’s Starlink constellation and one Falcon 9 for the United Arab Emirates company Yahsat. Vandenberg supported seven launches.
The Space Force expects to launch 18 National Security Space Launch (NSSL) missions this year, Panzenhagen said on Jan. 28 at the Space Mobility Conference in Orlando. Five NSSL launches successfully occurred in 2024.
But the real driver of the surging launch cadence is activity by commercial space providers. Consultancy BryceTech reports that out of 873 spacecraft launched worldwide in the last quarter of 2024, 736—about 84%—were for commercial companies.
The service is looking for industry’s help to improve its site infrastructure. A new Space Force Range Contract would allocate up to $4 billion in the next decade through task orders under which vendors would provide engineering, operations and maintenance support through flexible contracting mechanisms, Panzenhagen said.
Launch providers are already investing in new infrastructure to support the explosion in commercial space interest. United Launch Alliance’s (ULA) new Vulcan rocket will support both NSSL missions and a multibillion-dollar contract to loft Amazon’s Kuiper constellation alongside the Atlas V launch vehicle. The Vulcan has completed the two flights required to receive NSSL certification, but ULA still awaits formal approval from the Space Force for the rocket to fly high-risk national security missions.
ULA has invested more than $1 billion in site upgrades, CEO Tory Bruno said at the Spacepower Conference. Cape Canaveral has seen “way more volume” than ever before, Bruno noted. “Far and away, the majority of these launches are private businesses—for commercial uses that will only grow.”
A number of those investments will support the Vulcan’s debut and enable quicker processing times. The company recently built a horizontal integration facility that will soon be capable of storing three Vulcan boosters and three Centaur V upper stages that are at various points of development, said Ron Fortson, ULA director and general manager of launch operations, during a Jan. 30 tour of the company’s facilities.
ULA’s production teams are building boosters ahead of time to support the higher launch cadence going forward. The company will also store four Atlas V boosters in its Advanced Space Operations Center high bay, up from the typical two, Fortson said.
ULA will soon have two vertical integration facilities (VIF) to support its national security space customers in tandem with Amazon. The existing VIF, known as VIF-G, will be dedicated to government missions, while the second building, VIF-A, will be for Kuiper missions. That work should be completed by midyear, along with a new ground support equipment facility, Fortson said.
In California, ULA is preparing the Vulcan’s West Coast home at Vandenberg. The company used SLC-3 to support Atlas V launches from 2006 until the rocket’s final launch from Vandenberg in November 2022. The pad should be ready in the first half of 2025 for the Vulcan to support two missions for the Space Force’s Space Development Agency.
The service is experiencing a bottleneck in spacecraft processing services as it competes with commercial providers, Panzenhagen said. Not only are more rockets launching more frequently, but the increasing use of multimanifest ride-shares to reach space means that payloads on the same manifest are often processed to different standards, she added.
California’s Western Range should soon see some relief. Congress allocated $80 million in the fiscal 2024 defense budget for commercial processing services at Vandenberg, and a contract award is expected very soon. The Space Force is seeking additional funds for a similar program at the Cape, Panzenhagen said.
The service is also developing its less used real estate to help providers continue to work amid the growing launch tempo, and it aims to reduce the size of the “clear zone,” where personnel must cease activities ahead of a launch.
ULA’s VIF and launchpad are situated in clear zones when SpaceX launches from SLC-40, and those pauses in operations have cost the company hundreds of hours of lost work since November, Fortson said. Of course, when ULA begins launching the Vulcan more frequently, it will contribute to that same issue, he noted.
In 2024, the Space Force invested about $110 million for 40 infrastructure improvement projects on both coasts to address those issues, and it expects to invest the same amount in 2025, Panzenhagen said. The service is exploring the viability of reactivating existing launch complexes on the Cape, although she said there are no current plans to do so.
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