The May 28 explosion of a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket at Cape Canaveral’s Launch Complex 36 did more than destroy a rocket and severely damage a launch pad. The event highlighted the fragility of launch in the United States today. The sharp increase in launches has strained existing spaceports to their breaking points, yet it seems harder than ever to get a launch as new vehicles suffer development delays or, like New Glenn, explosive setbacks.
Those concerns are not new. Both industry and government officials have warned for the last few years about the growing mismatch between spaceport capacity and launch demand, and between launch capacity and customer demand. That’s prompted a discussion of what more NASA, the U.S. Space Force and other federal agencies can do to solve those issues through some combination of funding and policies.
Here are four possible answers.
More money
The most straightforward solution is to provide more money, particularly for launch infrastructure. Officials have long said that Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and Kennedy Space Center in Florida, along with Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, need as much as several billion dollars in upgrades. Those improvements go beyond the launch sites themselves to roads, power systems and other basic infrastructure.
