Space Force eyeing international launch sites to increase ‘resilience’

Rocket Lab Electron booster on the pad in New Zealand. (Rocket Lab)

WASHINGTON — The Space Force is talking to allies and partner nations about using their facilities to expand US options for national security launches, according to the senior service official responsible for launch programs.

“So we are looking at international partnerships as potential ways to get our satellites to orbit,” Brig. Gen. Kristin Panzenhagen, told the Mitchell Institute today.

“I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily near term,” she added, noting that the current US launch program is “meeting our needs.”

Panzenhagen is quad-hatted as the program executive officer at Space Systems Command for Assured Access to Space, commander of Space Launch Delta (SLD) 45, director of the Eastern Range, and director of Launch and Range Operations.

Up to now, the Defense Department has only launched small experiments, primarily for the DoD Space Test Program, from foreign spaceports. The National Security Space Launch program, the Space Force’s primary launch program, uses service ranges at Vandenberg SFB in California, and Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

Panzenhagen said as the Space Force is “looking at increasing the resiliency, increasing the ways that we have to get assured access to space, that’s where the these initial discussions with our international partners are coming in.”

She said that there “some good international partnership opportunities,” and that her shop has been in discussions with several countries that have existing launch capacity such as Japan, New Zealand and France, as well as those with “more emerging capability” such as Norway, the United Kingdom and Sweden.

Japan’s civil space agency, JAXA, operates out of the Tanegashima Space Center rocket launch complex, in the south of Kagoshima Prefecture along the southeast coast of Tanegashima.

Rocket Lab, a US-incorporated firm that was first founded in New Zealand and recently greenlighted for future Space Force launches, owns its own space port at Ahuriri Point on the southern tip of the Mahia Peninsula, on the east coast of New Zealand’s North Island.

France’s Arianespace operates out of the Guiana Space Center in French Guiana, which is owned by the European Space Agency and the French space agency, CNES.

With partners that already host launches on their soil, the service has started conversations to “see what we may be able to do for enhancing each other’s resiliency,” Panzenhagen elaborated.

For those that are developing space ports, early discussions are centered on how the facilities might be designed “so maybe it does become more interoperable in the future, like, can we design that in,” she said.

“So we’re at the very early stages of that, but I’m really excited about building those international partnerships,” Panzenhagen summed up.