Alaska, home to the farthest-north spaceport in the United States, could soon add a second Federal Aviation Administration-licensed space launch facility.
On Tuesday, the University of Alaska’s Geophysical Institute in Fairbanks signed a five-year collaboration agreement with the state-owned Alaska Aerospace Corp.
Though the terms of that agreement are highly technical, Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s draft budget for the corporation indicates that the university plans to seek a FAA spaceport license for the university’s Poker Flat Research Range, which has been flying sounding rockets — smaller rockets used for research — into the upper atmosphere since March 1969, including some earlier this spring.
An FAA license could allow Poker Flat to launch larger rockets, and for commercial purposes, not just scientific ones. Making Poker Flat a “licensed vertical orbital spaceport” could take up to two years, the budget documents state.
It isn’t clear how much the licensing process will cost.
The new collaboration agreement doesn’t specifically list a spaceport license but says that “AAC and UAF will collaborate to develop and offer a combination of spaceport industry services that are more efficient and beneficial to the rocket and satellite industry than working independently.”
AAC and UAF will work to develop common standards and cross-train employees that could work at either the Poker Flat range north of Fairbanks, or the Narrow Cape spaceport in Kodiak.
Nine states have FAA-licensed spaceports, and there are 14 nationally. Only Texas, Florida, California and Virginia have two or more.
Poker Flat predates the Alaska Aerospace Corp., which launched in 1991 as the state-owned Alaska Aerospace Development Corp.
The new corporation initially considered Poker Flat for its headquarters and primary launch site, but in 1994, it picked Kodiak instead.
Poker Flat has stayed a research facility since then, with regular launches of sounding rockets intended to probe the aurora, without a spaceport license.
As far back as 2020, AAC was working with Poker Flat on a commercial spaceport license application for the Fairbanks-area site.
Alaska Aerospace has an annual budget of about $10.5 million, all of which is paid for by federal funds and money the corporation earns.
Thanks to the physics of a rotating Earth, locations close to the equator have an advantage when used as a launch point for rockets whose orbits are primarily east-west. Polar locations have an advantage for north-south, polar orbits.
The Kodiak Launch complex and California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base are valuable for rockets heading into polar orbits, because each has wide swaths of ocean to the south, and if a rocket launch fails, debris would fall into the ocean, not on inhabited land.
Vandenberg typically serves large, heavy-lift rockets built by major manufacturers like Boeing and SpaceX, while Kodiak has traditionally flown smaller rockets from commercial companies.
It isn’t yet clear what market Poker Flat might serve; launches there have typically been restricted by Fairbanks to the south, the Canadian border to the east, and the trans-Alaska pipeline to the west.
State budget documents suggest NASA contracts could be available for an upgraded Poker Flat, but since those documents were published, President Donald Trump has suggested significant cuts to NASA’s budget.