U.S. Government Accountability Office
America’s gateway to orbit is two stretches of coastline whose infrastructure was sized for a dozen launches a year - and now hosts hundreds. In June 2025 the Government Accountability Office published GAO-25-107228, the definitive public examination of the national security space launch ranges under commercial saturation: who pays, what is breaking, and what modernization will take. This volume reproduces it in full facsimile.The numbers tell the story the report documents. Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg supported launch cadences in 2024 that exceeded the busiest years of the space race, with a single commercial operator accounting for the overwhelming majority - yet the ranges remain Space Force installations, funded through defense appropriations, operating safety, weather, scheduling, and tracking infrastructure that every user consumes. GAO examines the Spaceport of the Future initiative and the unglamorous physical realities beneath it: roads, bridges, power, propellant farms, and instrumentation never designed for weekly operations. Its sharpest material concerns cost recovery - the statutory authorities, their limits, and the open question of how much of the burden commercial users whose business depends on the ranges should bear. The recommendations land in the middle of a live congressional debate over spaceport governance that the report itself helped shape.Launch is the chokepoint of every space ambition in this series - proliferated constellations, Golden Dome interceptors, lunar logistics all queue at the same two coastlines. This report is the audit of the queue.The official source document is reproduced in full facsimile, with separate editorial apparatus of the public document, produced under 17 U.S.C. §105. For launch industry strategists, range modernization planners, appropriations staff, and infrastructure investors, GAO-25-107228 is the essential brief on the bottleneck beneath the boom.The report also captures a structural transformation in real time: the moment America’s launch infrastructure stopped being a government facility that occasionally hosted commercial users and became commercial infrastructure that the government regulates, funds, and depends upon -- without the governance framework ever being redesigned for that inversion. GAO’s documentation of deferred maintenance, scheduling contention, and cost-recovery gaps is the evidentiary record of policy lagging reality, and the report’s recommendations frame the spaceport-governance legislation now working through Congress. Investors and operators planning against range capacity, and policymakers deciding who pays for the next generation of launch infrastructure, will be arguing from this document’s numbers for years.About this series: Nimble Ultra’s American Spacepower Documents collection puts the primary sources of the space age’s second great competition into durable, uniform print -- doctrine, strategy, intelligence, oversight, and exploration architecture, each volume an exact and complete facsimile of the official public release, with full bibliographic identification for citation. Government URLs break, documents are revised without notice, and libraries deserve stable copies; these editions fix the record as issued. Collect the doctrine shelf alongside the analytical flagship of the series, the RKHS-extended edition of Space Force Vector 2025.This Nimble Ultra paperback preserves the report as a durable print reference for research, teaching, professional consultation, and library use.
