The United States is updating its approach to managing spaceflights that lift off and land within its borders, and aims to expand the nation's capabilities to support more than 1,000 rocket launches per year by 2030.
President Donald Trump just signed a new National Space Transportation Policy that lays out priorities for commercial, civil and national security missions to orbit. The memorandum, published Thursday (Aug. 20), introduces the first update to the policy since 2013, and comes as commercial operators such as SpaceX have driven U.S. launch cadences up more than 800% since 2015.
The policy centers on expanding the infrastructure and procedures needed to support a much busier space industry. It directs federal agencies to identify and broaden commercial access to additional launch and reentry sites, and to incorporate spaceflight operati...
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