Public, private, or both?
But there’s no firm plan yet for when the military might get moving on actually setting up a new launch base. “It’s going to take a strong partnership with local and state governments,” Garrant said. “As far as decision timelines, we don’t have anything yet.”
There were 175 orbital launch attempts last year from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and Kennedy Space Center in Florida and Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Space Force officials project the country’s established spaceports will need to support 700 launches per year by 2036.
A third launch site would offload some of the launch demand from limited real estate at Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg. It would also provide what Space Force leaders call “geographic resiliency” to mitigate the risk of a natural disaster or military attack knocking the Cape or Vandenberg offline.
The federal government already owns a third spaceport at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, used for suborbital rocket tests and small- and medium-class satellite launches. Small rockets can also launch from Pacific Spaceport Complex, owned by the state of Alaska.
There are also commercial options that might be available for a new military spaceport. Ars asked Garrant if the Space Force might consider leasing property from a privately owned launch base, such as the expansive spaceport SpaceX plans to build in southern Louisiana.
“We’ve discussed that we need to consider all of those opportunities: public-private partnership, new federal installation, state land, leveraging commercial land—all of those are possibilities. They all have pros and cons. We haven’t made that decision yet, but we’re not discounting any of those options.”