State of Play in the Southeast

In 2025, the United States hosted 181 orbital launches, 179 of which were successful. 109 came from Florida, which means that if it was its own sovereign state, Florida would be the most prolific space-faring nation in the world.

However, despite this overwhelming success rate and constant increase in accommodated volume, last year’s most viewed launch was the one that failed most explosively.

On May 28, a New Glenn booster exploded during a static-fire test at Cape Canaveral Launch Complex 36, destroying the vehicle and severely damaging the pad. The lightning tower and transporter-erector were both lost, now believed to have stemmed from a faulty liquid oxygen valve.

Cape Canaveral has 6 primary active launch complexes, meaning that the loss of LC-36A is a substantive but not fatal blow to the site. Many leveraged the story to highlight the need for more redundancy in the space industry, both in terms of providers and pads. Further, in the case of a major natural disaster or national security event that would compromise the whole site, developing vertical-launch sites in other states seems increasingly necessary. Some like Tom Marotta at the Spaceport Company believe the answer lies in sea-based platforms, which would all be built and deployed in and around waters in the Southeast.

Blue Origin’s response is to get back on track as soon as possible, learn from the mistake, and look to be more efficient in the future. Company executives recently announced the development of a second launch complex to accommodate the larger New Glenn 9x4, in no doubt motivated by a desire for greater resiliency and ability to sustain high-cadence operations.

Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp has announced that the company plans to fly again before the end of 2026, an aggressive target but one that has shown no initial sign of faltering. Nevertheless, the 2027 outlook for the region’s launch activity heavily depends on them hitting that mark.

Beyond the activities of Blue Origin, Florida’s industry is largely driven by the continued success of SpaceX, even as the Space Force seeks to avoid dependency on any one provider. Because of that federal directive, new entrants like United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur continue to scale, striving for 18 to 22 launches this year.

That certainly doesn’t mean that the region’s faith in SpaceX has wavered in any way. Just this past February, the FAA cleared LC-39A for Starship operations, increasing SpaceX’s launch cap to 44 at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida (to contextualize that, the previous cap for Starbase in Texas was 5). However, this new capacity requires the development of two additional Starship pads, the outfitting of launch towers with the chopstick arms required for their re-launch operations, and the completion of the Florida Gigabay processing facility - all of which will likely prevent the first Starship from launching from the Cape until 2027.

So long as everything remains on-schedule, Starship will make up at least a fifth of SpaceX’s annual launches within the next two years. Until then, Falcon 9 will continue providing the vast majority of launch volume.

Outside of the Cape, Virginia’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) located on Wallops Island is the only Eastern Seaboard site adding new vertical-launch capacity. Rocket Lab finished construction of Launch Complex 3 at MARS in August 2025, built specifically for the medium-lift, reusable Neutron rocket, with a debut currently targeted for Q4 2026.

The main limitation of Wallops Island is the shallow channels that surround the site, meaning that the transportation of oversized rocket structures depends on temporary approvals until a permanent dredged channel is cleared federally. While MARS will in no way be wanting for small-lift rocket launches from Electron in the near-term, its future traffic will be capped until this new infrastructure can accommodate larger rocket bodies.

Separately, horizontal launch sites in the region continue to develop as they gain more economic viability with time. Horizontal launch sites require specialized infrastructure like 10,000-15,000 foot runways and propellant storage facilities that are unavailable to most commercial airports, although are more affordable than vertical launch counterparts. The main use case for these sites over the next decade will likely be tactical response and high-value microgravity products, industries that have yet to fully mature, but are valuable enough to justify proactive investment.

Cecil Spaceport is one example, based in Jacksonville and the first FAA-licensed horizontal-launch commercial spaceport on the East Coast, dating to 2010. The spaceport is pursuing an FAA reentry license after the Jacksonville Aviation Authority board unanimously backed the effort in August 2025, aiming to capture time-sensitive biomedical-research reentry missions. Space Coast Regional, another horizontal-lunch site in Titusville, Florida, will likely pursue similar licensing if Cecil succeeds.

As framed by Space Florida, these sites should be understood as part of an integrated system, eventually capturing the volume of horizontal launch so that the Cape can focus solely on vertical.

Elsewhere, Oklahoma and Alabama provide the region with diverse assets. Oklahoma's Clinton-Sherman facility near Burns Flat is the first inland FAA-licensed spaceport, home to the 152-mile-by-50-mile Infinity Spaceflight Corridor. It was rebranded Infinity One Oklahoma Spaceport in April 2026, following a July 2025 merger of the Oklahoma Space Industry Development Authority with the state's aerospace department.

The site landed its first tenant commitment in May 2026, a colocation deal bringing New Zealand's Dawn Aerospace suborbital program to Burns Flat, backed by a $7.5 million state appropriation. Burns Flat has never hosted an orbital or suborbital launch since its 2006 license was first issued, but is marketing its protection from the coastal climate as a valuable hedge for future providers.

Meanwhile, Alabama is focused on the Huntsville Reentry Site, awarded to Huntsville International Airport in May 2022 and built around future ISS resupply missions run on Sierra Space’s re-usable Dream Chaser vehicle. Given Huntsville’s well-developed propulsion and systems-engineering base, this should be a natural pairing, but is entirely dependent on Dream Chaser’s schedule, which has slipped wholly already.

To conclude, the state of the region in 2026 shows continuous development across the board, even in the face of negative publicity due to New Glenn. As Cape Canaveral continues to further entrench itself as the region’s capital, other sites are finding ways to justify their existence both through redundancy and the provision of new services, signalling that the region’s offerings are trending towards interoperability in the near future.

We are clearly in the middle of a space industry boom, and it will likely only get larger due to H.R. 1. The Southeast is better positioned than anywhere else in the world to capture that growth.