Trump's space transportation policy calls for new spaceport on federal land - Ars Technica
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A new national space transportation policy signed by President Donald Trump on Thursday calls for the development of more spaceports to support more than 1,000 launches and reentries per year by 2030.
The presidential memorandum replaces a 2013 policy signed by former President Barack Obama. Both policies share an emphasis on supporting the commercial space industry and underscore the importance of assured access to space. But the launch sector has changed immensely since then. There were 176 orbital launch attempts from US soil last year, nearly 10 times the number in 2013. SpaceX led the pack last year with 165 orbital launches of its Falcon 9 rocket, plus five suborbital test flights of the much larger Starship.
“By 2030, our space transportation ranges must grow to support more than 1,000 launches and reentries every year,” the policy says. “The policies set forth in this memorandum will secure America’s continued superiority in space.”
The projected surge is driven by commercial and military demand for communications services, overhead surveillance, space-based targeting, and orbital data centers.
Schedule transparency
The most notable updates to the national space transportation policy focus on increasing the country’s ability to enable those lofty forecasts. The Trump administration calls on the Pentagon and NASA to “prioritize and coordinate on infrastructure investments” to boost launch and reentry capacity and flexibility at federal launch and reentry ranges.
These federal spaceports include Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, which sit on adjoining property in Florida. The others are Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, and NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. Only the Florida and California spaceports are currently outfitted for heavy-lift launches.
The policy document supports more efficient range scheduling criteria at federally owned spaceports, balancing the needs of commercial users and US government missions. It also directs the military and NASA to “regularly publish range schedules to ensure transparent allocation of resources and optimize launch capacity.” Today, the schedules for most rocket launches are not public until a few days or weeks in advance.
The government will also identify potential locations for additional launch facilities in the United States, improve integration of space launch and reentry operations into airspace and air traffic control modernization efforts, and designate “priority airspace for critical space launch corridors.”
More specifically, the White House is directing the Department of the Interior to identify federal lands to serve as an additional designated federal land reentry site. This comes after the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management issued a request for public comment last month regarding the potential use of submerged lands and abandoned offshore oil rigs for sea-based space launches and reentry activities.
Geographic resiliency
This section of the directive appears to endorse the results of a recent Pentagon study that identified the need for the government to have a third heavy-lift launch site in the United States. The report hasn’t been released, but Air Force Secretary Troy Meink described the finding in a May hearing before the House Armed Services Committee.
“At a high level, what it says is we probably need another site that’s capable of heavy and super heavy launch capability, both from a resiliency perspective and just, even at the Cape, limitations on how much space we’ve got,” Meink said.
At that time, Space Force officials said they projected a combined 700 launches per year from Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg by 2036. Those numbers don’t include launches from private or state-owned spaceports, such as SpaceX’s Starbase facility in Texas or the company’s plan for another spaceport for Starship in Louisiana. SpaceX is also building launch pads for Starship on federal property at Cape Canaveral and Kennedy Space Center.
“We’re going to have to increase the capacity,” said Gen. Chance Saltzman, the Space Force’s top general, in the same hearing in May. “And then, maybe connected to that, is the geographic resiliency that you might need to have separate launch locations and not be so tied to just the two specific launch ports that we have.”
Another element of the new space transportation policy aims for more responsive launch...