Does the US have too many spaceports, or too few?

There are more licensed private spaceports in the United States than you might guess — but depending on who you ask, there aren’t nearly enough.

Last year saw new records set regarding the size and number of investments in space tech, and a fair amount of those funds went to launch startups. There are more still coming online, including more than a few that plan to begin flight testing this year, which begs the question: Where will these spacecraft and launch vehicles take off from?

At the 23rd annual FAA Commercial Space Transportation Conference, a group of spaceport operators gathered to discuss their role in the space economy. Topics included regulation, different models that exist and public/private partnerships and the potential conflicts they create. But one of the more interesting subjects focused on whether we’re already spaceport-saturated — or, conversely, in urgent need of more.

“The key for moving spaceports forward is developing a robust network of spaceports across the nation,” said Alaska Aerospace President and CEO Mark Lester. “There are a handful, say 11 licensed spaceports right now, and only four with vertical orbital capabilities. That’s just not going to be enough — not for assured access to space.”

Lester said that in terms of locations that best suit the needs of commercial, civil science and government agencies, the U.S. lacks good coverage. Funding in the form of federal grants would help support development in a way that’s similar to what’s available for traditional aviation, he said, suggesting that it would also help “normalize what a spaceport is.”

“We’ve got a lot of different types of spaceports,” he said. “Some don’t fly at all right now, some are looking in the future to fly, some are actively launching. [We should be] trying to figure out what that looks like and for everyone. When you when you go to an airport, we know exactly what an airport is and what to expect as pilots and aviators. We know when we’re going to a Class D airport, what type of services we’re expected to see and how they interact with that airport. And it doesn’t matter if you go into Denver, or Boston or Miami, you know what is expected. Right now, we just don’t have that yet on spaceports.”

“We’re already seeing customers coming and working at multiple spaceports, and it’s all different, so being able to kind of get into a normalized way of doing business is I think really going to help us across the network,” he added.

Mojave Air & Space Port CEO and General Manager Karina Drees had a slightly different take, focusing on the work still needed from the FAA itself in order to help push the spaceport industry forward.

“I think having advocacy within the FAA is going to be really important for spaceports going forward,” she said. “We’re kind of a different animal because we’re a general aviation airport and a spaceport, so we essentially answer to two different branches of FAA. But interestingly, when I got to Mojave back in 2012, when we started ramping up for the Space Operations and our main point of contact was the airport district office down in Los Angeles, they would ask a lot of questions […] and my response is always, ‘don’t worry about it, we’re working directly with the AST on these issues.’ ”

Drees said Los Angeles airport officials wouldn’t know what the AST was — it’s the Office of Commercial Space Transportation, a branch of the FAA that oversees and regulates commercial space transportation activity within the U.S. Drees said she was amazed at how many people within the FAA didn’t know what the AST was, though she said it’s “understandable,” given how much the part of the agency that deals with aviation outnumbers the small part that addresses commercial spaceflight. But education can help turn that around, she says, and is required for a mature spaceport system.

The panel was also asked if perhaps criticism that there are actually too many spaceports already in existence, which has been voiced by some in the community, might not be merited. This year there are roughly 60 launches scheduled to fly from the U.S., and most of those are large rockets that will be launched from government-owned ranges. The pace of operations doesn’t seem to currently justify even the existing facilities on paper, but Lester says that’s not a good indicator of where things are headed.

“We’re still kind of waiting for that ops tempo, and ops tempo, especially when we’re running this without subsidies, it’s like any business, you gotta have enough customers,” Lester said. “We’re anxious and eager to get to the point where we’re launching 36 launches a year — it’s our current target and we think it’s a good pace. We’re not there. We’re doing one or two.”

That might be the case today, with spaceports like Lester’s operating very much under their target capacity, but it’s likely to change quickly. Lester cites as proof the examples of existing commercial launch providers that are already operating.

“I think we need to really force ourselves to have the courage to look down the road 10 or 20 years,” he said. “I think this is going to start to take off exponentially here as we start to turn the corner on the number of commercial companies starting to launch more regularly. We could go from one to two a year to 12 a year very, very quickly […] So I would say now’s the time to go invest looking forward, because we need a broader, more diverse network — having all of our low-inclination equatorial capabilities on the East Coast right now makes it vulnerable to hurricanes […] We need to be thinking about how we continue to have that assured access and strategically plan for the future.”

Spaceport America Director of Business Development Scott McLaughlin returned to the point Lester raised earlier about the considerable variety in what defines a spaceport in the current market landscape as an answer to the question of whether there are too many or not enough.

“… Spaceports are different things to different operators, so to say there’s too many implies that they’re all doing the same thing,” he said. “So to say there’s too many is not really the right way to ask the question. The question is, ‘what do you need to move industry forward?’ and we basically need to build spaceports. We need people to be able to launch over water, over land or, in our case, next to a test range […] I don’t think there’s too many, but there is an argument to be made that capital improvements or money from the FAA could be diluted in a way that doesn’t help move the spaceport industry forward in a way that’s productive, and I think that has to be factored in somehow.”

Drees generally agreed, but like McLaughlin, sounded a note of caution when it comes to how a proliferation of spaceports might impact availability or distribution of resources.

“I don’t think you can have, necessarily, too many spaceports,” she said. “I think it’s up to every state to decide, do they want to make the investment today or do they want to wait until they have more operators. The reality is, companies are innovating all the time all over the country and they need a place to test their equipment, so I think having a spaceport available is really beneficial. But the one thing I would say is, as long as it doesn’t take resources away from AST, where they can otherwise apply to current needs, or licensing actual operations, so that’s the only caveat I would throw in there.”

Asking whether the spaceport industry needs to accelerate its pace of growth is clearly not a cut-and-dry question. It’s a bit like asking if we have too many or not enough “stores,” because of the far-ranging definition of what constitutes a “spaceport” to begin with. But it seems clear that this key piece of infrastructure needs smart investment and growth along the lines of anticipating operator needs, in order to support new and unique models of launch-focused companies as they come online.