The Importance of Resilient Launch Infrastructure
March 3, 2025
Watch the Video
Read the Transcript
This transcript was generated with the assistance of AI. Please report inconsistencies to comms@afa.org.
Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant:
Good afternoon everyone. Thanks for joining us and thanks for joining these esteemed gentlemen that are on stage. I’m going to do a brief introduction and we’re going to get right to some really hard questions and we’ll finish with each of them having some time for some closing comments. My left from this side to the end, Mr. Tory Bruno, the president and CEO of United Launch Alliance, over 35 years of delivering national security and commercial space. In the center, Mr. Jon Edwards from SpaceX, the vice president for launch vehicles and Dragon a little bit distracted at the moment. We’re at T minus four.
Jon Edwards:
I don’t know, I’m just going to rely on people in the crowd.
Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant:
All right, we’re going to want some cheering. Starship eight is-
Jon Edwards:
Cheers, boo, I don’t know.
Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant:
… imminent. And then Mr. Dave Limp, CEO of Blue Origin, joined Blue in December of ’23, a private space company founded by Mr. Bezos. A vision of millions of people living and working in space for the benefit of earth. The format that we’ve decided on is I’m going to ask the same question about each gentleman with the potential for some follow up and then I’ll save some time at the very end to allow them to have some closing comments. The first question, should spaceports be purely commercial entities or federal ranges? And we’ll just go right down the line.
Tory Bruno:
It’s a hybrid, so the ranges should be run by the federal government but performing only uniquely government functions, safety, security, manifest deconfliction, but the infrastructure itself that should be commercial.
Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant:
Jon.
Jon Edwards:
Yes, similar answer. I really think it needs to be both. They both have their advantages, disadvantages. SpaceX is in a unique position on this topic because we’ve got launch sites at three major federal ranges, KSC, 30th, 45th, but we also operate Starbase, which is commercial. It’s our own commercial launch site so we can basically compare and contrast our experiences across both. Fundamentally if we’re talking about resilient launch infrastructure, I think what we will want to achieve is an abundance and a diversity of options and spaceports.
Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant:
Thanks. Dave.
Dave Limp:
Well, I think we’re all sort of praying the choir here because similar we have a commercial launch facility on Jeff’s ranch in Texas. That’s for our tourism business and then obviously we’re at the Cape, but I would caveat a little bit by there’s not enough perfect places to launch so we do have to effectively manage the places that we do have. Because it’s not as if I could throw a billion dollars at a new commercial launch facility and find the perfect piece of land. The perfect pieces of land have been found and we need to make sure that we treasure those in the appropriate way.
Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant:
Some follow-ups and we’ll come back this way. Realizing the upgrades to Spaceport capacity and capability requires significant additional investment from both the public and private sectors. What’s the right balance of funding sources for common support infrastructure?
Dave Limp:
Well, I would first say that I think the mental model of the government on how it funds infrastructure for space has to be flipped on its head a bit. It has traditionally been part of the acquisition process and almost nowhere else in business or government is that how you think about managing your infrastructure. If so, your runways would be full potholes on an air force base and so we need to figure out how the everyday funding of the maintenance at the Cape or Vandenberg, the upgrades to the pipeline, that that has a different funding mechanism such that it can be relied upon, it can go up with inflation like other acquisition vehicles and that we know it’s predictable because you don’t want to cut off funding and all of a sudden stop launching.
That being said, and I think many of us here, commercial dollars, we are willing to put it in infrastructure. We have hundreds of millions of dollars into our pad at the Cape and we did $100 million dollars to upgrade the test stand at 4670 in Huntsville. We’re willing to put our money where our mouth is too, but we need the government acquisition to step up as well.
Jon Edwards:
It’s hard to say what the right balance is exactly, but I do think that whoever’s benefiting from the federal ranges should pitch in. It should be fair. Clearly launch companies benefit, so we should pay our fair share and obviously we pay for commodities and assets that we’re using on the range, so clearly launch companies need to pitch in. There’s obviously a huge benefit to the country, what we’re doing, the capabilities that we’re providing for the country. I think that there is, the federal government should pitch in, even states to some extent attracting high-tech, high-paying jobs to these spaceports that exists with Space Florida and stuff like that. I’m not exactly sure what the perfect balance is, but I do think it’s worth revisiting and consider modifying so it’s fair and it’s transparent and communication is important too. We need to know what bills are we going to get so we got to know up front. I think there’s a lot of work that can be done to find that right balance.
Tory Bruno:
I like to see the government focus. MILCON’s too slow and I think industry is already partially answering your question. We can’t rely on commodities. The government has fallen behind when we need them. These companies here are putting in their own infrastructure for many of those items, so what I’d like to see is the government focus on those government inherent functions, range safety, range control, spend your money there so you can keep up with us. We’ll build the pads, we’ll put in that infrastructure that’s unique to each space launch complex, but you also got to change your business model. Dave mentioned he’s put in hundreds of millions of bucks. I put in a better part of a billion. A three-year lease is not going to cut it. You should own the ground like you do because this is a federal facility, but if industry is going to put in that kind of money, we need to be able to tell our investors, our bankers, “Well, thank you for the massive investment and I promise it’s good for more than one or three years.”
That’s how I would do it. The other thing I would invest in if I were the government is decongestion. You will not be able to keep up with the increase in launch rate from the three of us with the model we have now. We need to be able to have concurrent operations. When you are fueling on your pad, I need to be able to work on my own. When you’re launching in the morning, I got to be able to launch right afterwards. And the reason we can’t are because of our rules and they’re not necessarily physics-based. Natural gas is not TNT. That’s one of the things for example that keeps us off. If natural gas were TNT, there would be no TNT industry. That would be an investment I would love to see the government make so that operations could be simultaneous for all three of us.
Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant:
A final follow up, and you’ve all touched on this briefly, what do you see as the risks of getting funding from other sources, whether it’s a bonding authority or private investment?
Tory Bruno:
This way again?
Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant:
Yeah.
Tory Bruno:
It’s predictability. Continue to do the block buys that’s key to that. I already touched on leases. You spend a billion dollars improving a pad, you better be able to be there for a while to recoup that investment. Be careful where the investment comes from. I know there’s been a lot of talk about investments into the range infrastructure. I think the commercial industries are willing to contribute. Private equity is not your source, neither is venture capital. The reason we have national ranges is not just to stimulate commercial industry but also because of the critical national security aspects of space. You need to be able to control the priority for national security. You need to have contractors that are committed to that. Other sources of pure investment capital are not going to have that in mind and you’re not going to be able to influence that to the degree that you need to.
Jon Edwards:
And I think that’s exactly right when we’re talking about federal ranges. I do think that there’s lots of opportunity when you’re talking maybe about commercial spaceports. It costs a lot of money to put in all the infrastructure and everything you need for a commercial spaceport, so that might lead to… If we’re talking about again resilient launch infrastructure, we obviously want to use the federal ranges quite a bit, but with more commercial spaceports out there, that gives us other options. I think in that case there’ll be quite a bit of private investment.
Dave Limp:
I think I’d be cautious to not spread the peanut butter too thin. Take the Cape or Vandenberg as an example. There is a limited amount of real estate there and adding to it is a regulatory nightmare as it relates to a yellow torn newt that we won’t want to argue with somewhere in the Everglades. What we really want to do is if I were in your seat and you want to minimize risk, it’s a little bit back to Tory’s mental model around funding is you can’t give a storied old pad to any company that comes by.
You should compete them, but you should compete them against companies that have the funding and the time and the wherewithal to go the long game. Because investing in a pad, upgrading it to only find that venture-backed company is not the… I’m all for venture capital by the way. I’m a product of that, but that industry ebbs and flows and this year space might be hot and in 10 years space might not be hot and it takes a long time to cycle that infrastructure, so you have to make sure that you’re prioritizing these national treasured assets in the right way.
Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant:
Thanks.
Tory Bruno:
I want to clarify one thing.
Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant:
Sure.
Tory Bruno:
It’s okay for private investment to invest in the commercial companies occupying the pads, the government should not be seeking it for their part of that infrastructure.
Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant:
Dave, we’ll start with you. Are your companies considering or pursuing plans to invest in developing international spaceports to increase launch capacity?
Dave Limp:
We certainly look at it. We don’t have anything announced, but the issue is even internationally finding the perfect location, there’s a few places you want to be close to the equator to get the help of this beautiful earth spinning. You don’t want to overfly a lot of land, especially earlier in your flight. And so when you start down selecting to those kinds of things and then you put a high pass filter on it, where can you get enough helium and enough nitrogen and enough liquid oxygen and methane is pretty easy but there’s not a lot of spaces even internationally. And then you overlay the potential regulatory issues of that and moving these big rockets around. These rockets are ever getting larger and larger, hopefully about to launch. Moving them around is not simple. There’s a reason we put our factory at the Cape, it’s because I just don’t want to move a 300-foot tall thing very far, so those are all calculations. I think we will figure a way to get international over time, but it comes with the complexities I just mentioned.
Jon Edwards:
We have some experience at SpaceX. We just recently landed a rocket in The Bahamas. We thought that would be a pretty simple process to get that through and it took us three and a half years, so that wasn’t a great experience. We’re there now, we’ve landed one booster in The Bahamas and it went well, but there can be a lot of challenges and hoops and red tape and all sorts of stuff that you got to jump through to achieve that. Other quick anecdote, we used to launch Falcon 1s out of Kwajalein and I personally had to hand carry bolts from LA to Hawaii, spend the night, get up at 5:00 in the morning to fly to the Marshall Islands to deliver a bolt, so depending on where you’re putting your launch pad, logistics can be a real nightmare.
One time we sent locks out to Kwaj and by the time it got there, half of it was gone, so there’s a lot of challenges trying to operate overseas or somewhere remote. That said, I think in the future where we all want… What we want the future to be, lots of space activity requiring lots of space launches. I think we’re going to need to, so we got to figure out how to do it, do it right and get through some of the red tape and that kind of thing.
Tory Bruno:
Again, we’re all in violent agreement. I too have traveled to Kwajalein and to carry hardware. Dave is right, the tyranny of orbital mechanics dictate where you get to launch from. There will be a point in the future where the few other suitable launch sites are attractive to us, but that’s not now. Now our investments are better spent in improving the sites we already have. And logistics is a giant challenge, it is for our friends over in Europe when they come over here to launch out of their facilities near the equator, so no, I would not do it now. That’s a 10 years or more problem from now.
Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant:
Do you see a business case for U.S. sea-based launch in the next five to 10 years?
Tory Bruno:
Well, that’s different.
Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant:
New question.
Tory Bruno:
I think so. The launch rate here in the U.S. is growing. It’s growing for all of us. We are going to be straining in the near term as we try and figure out how to be operationally simultaneous at the Cape and at Vandenberg. A sea base frees you from a little bit of that. We get to choose our location as if there were land there. We can still be in the ideal locations from the standpoint of Kepler. I think it’s been tried before. It was a little ahead of its time. I think that time is swinging around.
Jon Edwards:
Again, totally agree. I think maybe another thing to consider, the rockets are getting bigger, they’re getting louder. In some cases they return from space back to the launch pad and there’s a sonic boom associated with that. That can be kind of cool the first time for the people that live nearby. But the hundredth time, the thousandth time, that’s not going to be so cool anymore. I think noise is going to become a bigger problem in the next five to 10 years and being able to be 20 miles out or whatever would be great. Now, sea-based obviously you got to have a huge vessel. You have to have maybe a rig. We all know sea launch and all that. Islands could be another option where you could actually set up some permanent infrastructure, something else to look at.
Dave Limp:
I would say that there’s all those advantages. I think it also has a big national security advantage too. As much as we’re going to have to rely on the Cape and try to defend it, if anything ever bad it did happen it is vulnerable. There’s just no question about it. And so having maneuverability even slow but that… And having multiple places, I think that you all are much better at wargaming than I will ever be but I think it’s a good vector to think about sea launch in that respect.
Tory Bruno:
And it doesn’t always have to look like a boat. In a past responsibility I had, I had a lot to do with the X-band radar that MDA utilizes, a rather large floating movable what would’ve looked like an oil platform is also suitable for this function.
Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant:
All right. New question, Dave we’ll start with you. From a capacity and resilience perspective, and all three of you have touched on this briefly, what do you believe is the most consequential spaceport limitation in the next 10 years that you would want to get addressed?
Dave Limp:
I don’t think that people realize how many rockets are going to be launching five or eight years from now. SpaceX has shown the way, and I am happy to plagiarize from their book, but we’re going to launch a lot and we’re going to recover our boosters and we’re going to rinse and repeat. And I am very bullish on the commercial launch, how much commercial launch there is needed. I worked on it at Kuiper. I see the success of Starlink. There are going to be other mega constellations. The government’s going to need more, civil’s going to need more, and I envision a world in the not-so-distant future that there are multiple launches every single day off these paths.
And I just don’t think we’re thinking about the infrastructure big enough. We’re not planning for that world. We’re still planning for a world that was four or five years ago when I look at the master plans. And so if I could wave my magic wand, I would say, okay, the rate is going to be two or three launches a day. What do we have to change regulatorily, infrastructure-wise, policy, investment such that that can become true? China is going to launch that often, trust me. I’ve competed in China for a long time. They’re going to figure it out and we have to get out in front of this.
Jon Edwards:
Again, totally agree. We are seeing it already and Tory was talking about we don’t want to shut them down when we’re doing an operation and vice versa. The biggest challenge is going to be just the amount of activity and being able to manage that with the current infrastructure. There’s just no way with the current infrastructure that’s going to work. We need roads. We get our commodities often through the pipeline, the range assets, the flight hazard areas, the exercise that Dave was mentioning about what would it take to launch two, three times a day.
That’s the same exercise we went through at SpaceX, I think it was like five or six years ago, Elon was, we were launching maybe 18, 20 times a year and he was like, “What would it take to launch 100 times just as a thought experiment?” And we really took it seriously and tried to think about all the bottlenecks and the challenges associated with doing that. And then lo and behold, here we are. The federal ranges, they need to go through that same exercise and do something about it because we’re just going to keep getting in each other’s ways and America’s going to lose, not lose. But America’s going to not have the full potential of what we’re capable of if that’s still a problem five years from now.
Tory Bruno:
I agree with everything my colleagues have said, so I’ll come back to the thing I said earlier and just hit it again. We can solve the infrastructure activities, we know how. We’ll take a little bit of investment. We have a lot of rules. We need to go back and we need to invest in that. Sometimes we have a rule because it was easy when it didn’t matter. Sometimes we have a rule because we haven’t spent the money on the modeling or the testing in order to be able to relax that rule, so let’s spend some there so that we can all operate at the same time.
Jon Edwards:
You’ve got to question the requirements.
Tory Bruno:
You got it.
Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant:
All right. This will probably be our last question. With the recent changes to Title 10, United States Code section 2276a, the federal ranges implemented indirect charging policies last year to help reduce the strain on government operating budgets and address commercial spaceport capacity, agility, responsiveness and resilience. What improvements would you like to see those charges be invested in?
Tory Bruno:
I’ll give you an answer, but also a process. We’re paying fees and we should. I think we’ve all said, “Hey, we ought to contribute to that common infrastructure we use.” I’ve already talked about range assets, the things that only the government can do, but I’d like to suggest also that since we’re paying for this, we ought to have a say in a formal way of recommending what it gets spent on. There ought to be a joint government and user board that oversees and can agilely prioritize those investments year to year as the needs change, so I’d also recommend that.
Jon Edwards:
I’ll say two things. I think that’s a great idea. We should go after the bottlenecks, go after the things that are limiting the overall rate of launch at any given federal range. Not a very challenging exercise really, but we should be doing that. The second thing is I think as far as what the charges are, we just got to make sure it’s fair. Maybe this board, we could have debates about that and make sure it’s fair, make sure it’s transparent and well communicated.
Dave Limp:
I think we’re all willing to invest up front. We’ve all put our money where our mouth is and the wallets where it has hit the road. And so I do worry about… And so we’re happy to do this, but I worry about the bureaucracy that might be added because of this, that we’d spend more time debating where N plus $1 would be spent versus just getting and doing it. If you held my feet to the fire, I would do things that unblock regulatory things, flight planning.
It is taking nothing away from the good people at Space Force and FAA that do this, but they have tools that were built in I think, they feel like me, in 1975. They’re so old and compared to the world I came from, I spent the last 15 years at Amazon, we can modernize that flight planning and the risk assessment and we could do in an hour what takes 60 days right now. And I would start with those kinds of things because back to the bottlenecks, if we’re going to fly three times a day, you don’t get 60 days to plan a flight. If you need rapid response to get a rocket cargo somewhere, you have to plan that mission in 20 minutes, but the tools exist. And so I would probably start there with spend monies on those kinds of things that unblock. I’m kind of parroting back what others have said.
Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant:
Awesome. Thank you gentlemen for answering these questions and the conversation. An opportunity for closing comments. Dave, we’ll start with you.
Dave Limp:
Yeah. First of all, thanks for having us. Compared to my colleagues here, we’re the newbies to orbital flight. We just did it, but we are very committed. I would tell you that both first of all in the long-term mission of making space a place where millions of people can live, but also I firmly believe Blue Origin believes that our job is to give you the best technology tools for our war fighters to make American or our allies strong. And not every company has that at their core philosophy, but we do and we believe that’s super important and of our mission. And so we want to hear from you, what do you need? We do have nice big factories. We are going to be launching a lot and we want to meet your needs. So thanks for having us. Appreciate it. I think we have a short video on the new Glenn Flight. Again, it was just our first, we’re going to do it a lot more, but maybe they could roll the video.
Video:
This is our first flight and our key objective today is to reach orbit safely.
Three, two, one. We have lift off.
Separation confirmed.
GS2 is now orbital.
We got to orbit safely. Congratulations, Blue Origin.
Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant:
Thanks, Dave. Jon.
Jon Edwards:
I love those videos.
Dave Limp:
Never get old.
Jon Edwards:
We’ve all experienced a first launch before and there’s no feeling like it in the world, so congratulations.
Dave Limp:
Thanks.
Jon Edwards:
I have a video as well. You can play it while I’m talking if you want. This is an animation just showing the rate of our launches over time, going all the way back to the first successful Falcon 1. And I think the thing that you’ll notice is that it’s accelerating. I wanted to show this for a couple of reasons. One, it’s kind of bragging, but that’s not the main thing. That’s not the main thing.
Dave Limp:
You can just drop the mic.
Jon Edwards:
The thing I wanted to point out here is that this was only possible, not just because of the hard work the people at SpaceX did, but because of the partnerships we had with the federal ranges. They really leaned into this. They helped enable this by getting more efficient. And that’s something I think… I threw out a challenge the requirement as an example, but SpaceX, Blue Origin, ULA, we are obsessed with efficiency. We’re always trying to get more efficient and we really just need more of that, especially with the government side of things, the regulations, the rules.
We don’t want to throw the baby out with the bath water, but there’s probably some bath water that we can get rid of and still maintain the intent of keeping the public and people safe. We need more of that, questioning the requirements, a sense of urgency. But I did want to give major kudos to the ranges that we operate at for leaning into this and partnering with us and buying into this crazy idea that someday we’ll be launching 100 times a year, and now we got to go beyond that. We got to think about a thousand times a year, maybe more. The earlier you start that process, the sooner we’ll actually be able to get there. Thanks.
Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant:
Thanks, Jon. Tory.
Tory Bruno:
I’ve done over three dozen first launches. It never gets old or less terrifying. Go ahead and run the video. I’ll talk after.
Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant:
Okay.
Video:
ULA is proud to serve our country and honored to launch our hundredth national security mission. The importance of reliably delivering these missions to orbit is never lost on us. They keep our people safe by keeping an eye on our adversaries, delivering critical information to decision makers, providing communication capabilities across battlefields, on land, at sea, in air, and in space. Helping warfighters find their way on the front line and the home front. Monitoring for missile threats and testing and implementing new technologies that protect our country and our people. One hundred national security launches. One hundred missions we proudly enabled. And we look forward to the next era of national security missions launching atop ULA’s high-performance Falcon rocket.
Tory Bruno:
We’re going to do a good job on Kuiper because I promised Dave and his old job we would. And it is important not just to Amazon, but I think to our nation’s overall national security posture. It brings a democratization of information to the globe. You cannot be free until you are first free in your mind. Having said that, we retired the majestic Delta IV Heavy on our hundredth national security space mission. It was a fitting mission to finish that rocket on. National security is personally important to me. I made the big gamble in the decision to design and optimize Vulcan for that mission for the most exotic orbits that are flown and flown only by the United States government. And I’m very much looking forward to being certified momentarily and to begin resuming that mission for all of you with this brand new beautiful rocket. Thank you.
Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant:
Thanks Tory. Gentlemen, again, thank you for spending a little bit of time with us. Ladies and gentlemen, please, let’s thank our panel.