HWBRIEF
The National Space Transportation Policy directs DoD and NASA to expand capacity at the four federal launch ranges and publish launch schedules in advance.
The White House on Thursday set a 2030 target of more than 1,000 US space launches and reentries a year, nearly six times the 176 orbital attempts from US soil in 2025. President Trump signed NSPM-17, the National Space Transportation Policy, replacing the Obama-era framework that has guided federal launch policy since 2013.
The bottleneck is not rockets. It is the four federal launch and reentry ranges: Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, and NASA Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. Only the Florida and California sites are currently outfitted for heavy-lift.
The new memorandum directs the Pentagon and NASA to "prioritize and coordinate on infrastructure investments" at those ranges, and to "regularly publish range schedules" so commercial operators can plan around them. Today, federal-range launch slots are not public until days or weeks ahead.
Scale-up pressure is concentrated. SpaceX's Falcon 9 flew 165 of the 176 US orbital launches in 2025, plus five suborbital Starship tests. A Space Force-commissioned study has recommended a third heavy-lift site, and a July Federal Register RFI is testing demand for offshore launch.
The policy's 1,000+ number includes reentries, not just launches. Whether published schedules alone unlock that cadence, or whether new federal capacity has to be built first, remains the open question.