SpaceX to Take Over Vandenberg SFB Complex 6,

The US Space Force unit that manages the West Coast launch ranges, announced April 24 that SpaceX has been granted approval to lease Space Launch Complex 6 (SLC-6) at Vandenberg Space Force Base.  The lease of the historic pad will give SpaceX its fifth launch pad; two at Vandenberg SFB, two at Cape Canaveral and one at Boca Chica, Texas.  Both the Starbase Boca Chica pad and SLC-6 will be unusable without a lot of construction work

SLC-6 has most recently been used by United Launch Alliance to launch the Delta IV, including the Heavy Lift version, primarily for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) national security missions.  The last Delta IV launch from California was September 24, 2022 and the contracting process has been ongoing.  ULA will consolidate West Coast launch operations for its new Vulcan Centaur at their other launch facility at Vandenberg: SLC-3.  The last Atlas 5 lifted off from SLC-3 in November.

Reports say that, like Florida, SpaceX will dedicate their current Vandenberg launch complex (SLC-4E) to Falcon 9 launches and SLC-6 will be shared between Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches. 

SLC-6 was initially built in 1966 to host the Titan III launch vehicle to launch the Manned Orbital Laboratory. The Manned Orbital Laboratory was subsequently canceled in 1969 before any launches occurred, and work was paused. It wasn’t until 1979 that work continued following SLC-6 being selected as one of the sites to host Space Shuttle launches for the U.S. Air Force. Construction on the pad for future Space Shuttle missions finished in 1986. However, the tragic accident that was the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster drastically changed the outlook for the Space Shuttle program and resulted in the cancellation of Space Shuttle launches from SLC-6.

In an interview last week at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Col. Robert Long, commander of Space Launch Delta 3, the group that oversees Vandenberg, said there were “many interested parties” competing for the SLC-6 lease.

He said the Space Force looks at many different factors when allocating launch facilities to commercial providers. “Anytime you take a launch site and you tie that up for years or decades, you want to make sure the government is getting value out of that launch property. And so we go through that entire assessment and then make a decision on who comes next.”

Col. James Horne, deputy director of launch and range operations at the Space Force’s Space Systems Command, said partnerships with commercial launch providers are a matter of national security because the military relies on these companies for access to space.

It seems hard to imagine that in the last couple of years, we're suddenly short of launch facilities in the US, between Kennedy Space Center/Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg SFB.  In 2021, China carried out more orbital launches than the US with 55 missions, compared to 43 by the U.S.  Last year, SpaceX alone did 61 launches and the US as a whole did 78.  This year, SpaceX has a goal of 100 launches with Space Force predicting 132 total launches.  I would guess that chances are good SLC-6 won't see a SpaceX launch this year. 

A SpaceX rendering of a Falcon Heavy on Vandenberg SFB.  Image credit to SpaceX