NASA’s Artemis II mission got the limelight this week, but U.S. Space Force has an arsenal of other space-bound hardware muscling onto Florida’s launch pads this year.
This year’s schedule from either Kennedy Space Center or Cape Canaveral Space Force Station already features six different rockets. Vying for many of the same support assets are two from SpaceX, two from United Launch Alliance, one from Blue Origin plus NASA’s Space Launch System rocket.
Just this week, SpaceX tallied two Falcon 9 Starlink missions, NASA managed liftoff of Artemis II on Wednesday and a ULA Atlas V rocket shot to space early Saturday morning. A Blue Origin New Glenn is slated to launch as early as Wednesday and a SpaceX Falcon Heavy that could fly before the end of the month.
A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket launches on the Leo 5 mission with 29 Amazon satellites early Saturday, April 4, 2026 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 41. (Courtesy/ULA)
All of them fall under the Space Force’s responsibility over the Eastern Range, the area from the Florida coast out over the Atlantic over which the rockets take flight.
Earlier this year, ULA also launched its new Vulcan rocket, and in the coming years, rockets from Stoke Space, Relativity Space, Astra Space and others could join the launch party.
Those launches require a juggling act, as they all need some of the same supplies, facilities and staff, said Space Launch Delta 45 commander Col. Brian Chatman.
For example, many of the spacecraft operators want gaseous nitrogen (GN2) on hand during launches. The inert gas keeps their rocket hardware safe by pushing out more volatile propellants in the case of a scrub.
A lot of that comes from a plant on Merritt Island, and NASA got first dibs on it last week.
“The other launch service providers that require gaseous nitrogen to pull off of the pipeline have to wait until the pipeline is recharged,” Chapman said.
Some launch providers, knowing that they could be facing a waiting game at times, have built their own storage facilities for supplies like GN2, so they can keep up operations on their schedule. But that creates other challenges, with more delivery trucks causing logistical and scheduling challenges on a sensitive, controlled facility.
The KSC and Cape Canaveral launch pads hosted a record 109 orbital launches in 2025, with similar numbers if not more expected in 2026. That number has been projected to grow to 300 before the end of the decade.
Lt. Col. Gregory Allen, commander of the 1st Range Operations Squadron, said his group runs through hundreds of scenarios to avoid conflicts.
“You’ve got launch service providers that are at various different states of readiness, but they have to get dates on the calendar, sometimes seven to 10 days ahead of time to schedule things like airspace,” he said. “We have to sort of orchestrate that whole thing in the background. So there’s a whole dynamic piece to that that we could probably talk for hours on.”
A Blue Origin New Glenn rocket on the NG-2 mission carrying a a pair of Mars-bound satellites for NASA launches from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Launch Complex 36 on Thursday, Nov. 13, 2025. (Courtesy/Blue Origin)
A big change that has allowed for less staff support is the introduction of automated flight safety systems, as opposed to the self-destruct apparatus on older rockets that required more human monitoring during launch operations. Someone had to be on duty for every launch.
Col. Joyce Bulson, deputy commander of SLD 45 said all new commercial launch vehicles coming to the Space Coast will be required to have the automated flight safety system. It’s already used by SpaceX’s rockets, New Glenn and ULA’s Vulcan, but not on NASA’s SLS or the remaining Atlas V rockets of ULA.
“So that really allows us to go a lot faster. And the big limiter for current launch vehicles tends to be pad turn times,” she said. “That will be different in the future as you look to larger and larger launch vehicles.”
This rendering shows future Starship launch pads at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 37. (Courtesy/SpaceX)
That includes a more powerful version of New Glenn in the works and the massive SpaceX Starship and Super Heavy, which has three launch towers in the works at two launch sites at KSC and Cape Canaveral.
“Those will likely require more throughput from a power, water, wastewater perspective, but that’s that couple years out,” she said,
Another challenge in the works, and related to future Artemis launches, will be the need to get multiple rockets from multiple providers into space at the same time.
For the next several Artemis missions, NASA’s SLS will need to coordinate with one or several launches of SpaceX’s Starship and Blue Origin’s New Glenn. For Artemis III for instance, the Orion spacecraft atop SLS is tasked with rendezvousing in low-Earth orbit to try out docking with potentially both of those companies’ moon landers. For Artemis IV and V, those landers will need to launch at similar times with SLS as they head to the moon at the same time.
Getting rockets up at near the same time, though, is something Chapman said he’s prepared for.
“We did three launches in 24 hours, four launches in just over 36 hours. We did two launches in the same launch window last year,” he said.
The Space Force’s relationship with NASA and the commercial launch providers vying for slots has become tighter he said. Late last year, SLD 45 hosted a meeting with all of the launch providers to further nail down how things can run more smoothly.
“We have done some amazing things,” he added. “We still have challenges out there, work to go”