This month, Congress and President Donald Trump committed nearly $25 billion to develop a missile defense system to shield North America.Alaska's top aerospace official says that means huge business opportunities are coming for the state’s two rocket launch sites on Kodiak Island and Fairbanks.
John Oberst, the CEO and president of the Alaska Aerospace Corporation, said a multi-layered defense system that can intercept hypersonic missiles will require lots of test launches to develop.
“You have to launch targets for other things to test against," he said. "And in some cases, there may be some communications or sensors related to that that needs to be spread out in the United States, and spaceports are good places to host that.”
There are only a handful of spaceports around the country. And the main ones, like at Cape Canaveral in Florida or Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, are already backed up. Another main spaceport in the U.S. is Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starbase on the southern tip of Texas, which is currently focused on launching its own Starship rockets.
Oberst said that makes the Pacific Spaceport Complex-Alaska on Kodiak Island near Narrow Cape attractive. Also, unlike Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg, Kodiak’s space port is commercial, not federal.
“It’s getting very complicated to launch in federal spaceports. The bureaucracy alone is challenging for commercial launch providers," Oberst explained. "So if they come out here to us, we have a very few layers of decision-makers that’s needed to get a launch up because we’re not on federal land. It doesn’t change the policy or the regulations that we have to follow with the FAA, it’s just fewer people to deal with to accomplish the same task.”
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