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One small, errant drone can scrub a space launch at the cost of millions of dollars in delays, with further repercussions spanning across multiple commercial and government launch service providers. Just a single drone, with no malicious intent, could force range safety officers to abort the mission to protect the billions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure, spacecraft and cargo. This is the reality facing our nation’s launch ranges today, and the threat is getting more sophisticated by the month. To protect America’s launch infrastructure, we need better situational awareness, proper response plans and an updated legal framework to respond to drone interference with space launch.
In November 2024, a Chinese national flew a drone over the drone restricted airspace of Vandenberg Space Force Base for nearly an hour, photographing the installation. Investigators found he had specifically researched the base’s drone restrictions and discussed ways to bypass altitude limits. He was arrested while attempting to leave the country and later sentenced to four months in federal custody. Two months later, a Chinese-born Canadian citizen made multiple drone flights over Cape Canaveral on at least three separate days, capturing images of Space Launch Complexes, a payload processing facility, a submarine wharf and munitions bunkers. Federal prosecutors called those areas “vital defense installations.” Most drone operators who violate restricted airspace are never caught. The Vandenberg and Cape Canaveral cases represent rare exceptions where investigators identified the operators before they disappeared. In the Cape Canaveral case, the operator received 12 months of probation and was deported from the United States.
At most military installations and other critical infrastructure areas, detection, tracking and identification technologies remain reactive rather than proactive, designed to respond to known threats rather than anticipate unknown ones. Counter-drone systems, if they exist at all, are usually not deployed properly, are usually the wrong device for the operating environment, are not funded adequately and cannot mitigate in a legally restricted environment. The two cases mentioned above show how fragile our strategic and sensitive critical infrastructure is to a drone incursion. These incidents are not isolated and will likely expand as drone costs go down and ease of use increases.
The commander of NORAD and U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM) told Congress in February 2025 that 350 drone detections were reported over about 100 different U.S. military installations in one year. More recently, Barksdale Air Force Base, one of two bases for our nation’s B-52 bombers, detected multiple unauthorized drone incursions during the week of March 9, 2026, prompting a shelter-in-place order. This is a threat to our strategic bombers in the same way that drones over our space ranges threaten our strategic space forces.
Space launches are a celebrated symbol of American exploration. Each launch draws tourists to line the beaches and causeways surrounding the launch range just to see and hear the rumble of a rocket headed to space. Because of this visibility and the strategic missions our rockets fulfill, these complexes become attractive targets for our adversaries to exploit, using drones that provide easy accessibility and little threat of getting caught. We cannot afford the costs of a scrubbed mission, nor can we afford to deal with the public outcry a drone incident during a launch could produce.
Why this matters
Every satellite, every crewed mission and every scientific payload we send into space has strategic relevance to America. The Eastern (Cape Canaveral Space Force Station) and Western (Vandenberg Space Force Base) ranges supported a combined 186 launches in 2025. The Space Force has projected nearly 300 launches at the Eastern Range alone by 2030. More launches mean more exposure, which means more opportunities for disrupting a mission. The damage from even a single delay goes beyond the rocket sitting on the launchpad. Scrub one flight and the entire manifest shifts. Satellites that were supposed to be on orbit to provide intelligence, communications or missile warning sit while the calendar is rebuilt around the delay. An adversary willing to be patient does not need to blow anything up. They simply need to delay the launch on a pad long enough for the downstream delays to multiply.
The drone threat spans a wide range of threat vectors. At one end are careless operators chasing launch footage to post on their social media. At the other are deliberate threats attempting to collect intelligence on our defenses, mapping space launch complex layouts and testing how quickly security and police forces respond. The difference between reckless and deliberate matters less than the outcome to American launch operations. Whether the drone operator is curious or hostile, a drone near a launch pad during a countdown requires the same response by the range safety team: hold, scrub or go.
Beyond deliberate acts, there is also a safety concern as launch vehicles are vulnerable to object strikes. A collision during fueling or liftoff could range from mission loss to catastrophic damage of the rocket and launch pad infrastructure; damage that could take years and millions of dollars to repair. Furthermore, we have also seen what weaponized drones can do in Ukraine, Mexico and the Middle East. A drone carrying explosives, flown into a fueled rocket or nearby fuel storage, could cause damage way beyond the cost of the drone. Additionally, drones can also carry tools designed to collect signals intelligence or attempt cyber hacking against the networks on the launch ranges. No such attack has occurred on the Eastern or Western Ranges yet, but the capability exists and our detection, tracking and identification technology is not adequate for the threat.
Finally, there is the economic impact to the launch infrastructure at the ranges and the space companies’ bottom lines. A scrubbed launch is not just a minor problem to the calendar. It means labor costs, payload processing delays and schedule issues that have a ripple effect to other government and commercial customers waiting for their launch window. Fifteen years ago, NASA’s Space Shuttle program put the direct cost of a single scrub at approximately $1.2 million. In today’s commercial environment, SpaceX has argued in litigation that a scrubbed launch could cost roughly $4 million per day. A drone incursion that forces repeated holds is not a nuisance. It becomes a mission denial event with consequences deeper than the spacecraft on the launch pad and one that erodes confidence in U.S. launch range reliability in an increasingly competitive global market.
Things need to change
The U.S. launch enterprise needs to act on three simultaneous fronts.
Front 1: Build shared situational awareness. When a drone appears during countdown, no single sensor catches everything. Radar can miss small, low-flying targets. RF detection cannot detect drones flying preprogrammed GPS routes with no active radio link. However, an acoustic sensor, for example, can still detect the rotor noise coming from those drones. Each technology has limitations, which is precisely why the answer is a layered defense fused into a Common Operating Picture (COP), a single interface that merges all sensors into a single display for continued use by range safety, security forces, FAA controllers and law enforcement all at the same time.
Right now, most counter-drone systems come with their own proprietary display. That means defenders could be forced to monitor multiple screens, trying to reconcile conflicting data, under an event that is measured in seconds. An effective COP needs to be a decision support tool that connects a layered defense into a fused, responsive picture. The goal is a decision support chain that can detect, assess and act before a drone forces the scrub of a countdown. That means getting left of drone launch, not scrambling to respond after it has already forced a delay.
Getting there requires rehearsed emergency response planning, defined decision points and exercises that test responses under realistic conditions not just through tabletop discussions. Live red team exercises that validate how long leaders take to respond are necessary.
Front 2: Assess vulnerabilities and risk to determine the proper tools and response plans. Every launch range needs a Drone Vulnerability and Risk Assessment (DVRA) as a part of a larger integrated threat and vulnerability analysis. The DVRA becomes part of an evaluation of the assets that are most exposed, which drone corridors are most likely, and where current critical infrastructure defenses have gaps. At launch sites, this is more complicated than at a typical military installation. The space launch complexes at the Eastern and Western Ranges sit at the water’s edge, which means drone approaches from the sea are a vector that ground-based sensors alone may not be able to cover. A proper DVRA maps that exposure and designs a layered defense to address it. The DVRA helps build in overlapping sensor coverage that reduces coverage gaps and eliminates single points of failure.
The DVRA results will also help drive the production of Drone Emergency Response Plans, rehearsed playbooks and standard operating procedures that specify who makes decisions at each phase of a drone event, what actions are authorized before and during a countdown versus post-launch, how evidence is preserved for prosecution and how coordination flows between the range, law enforcement and range safety. When a drone appears over the pad at T-minus ten minutes, no one should be figuring any of that out on the fly.
Front 3: Understand the legal framework and push for all needed authorities. Detection without the authority to act is expensive surveillance and nothing more. Right now, only a handful of federal agencies that include the Defense Department, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, the Department of Energy, and the CIA have authority to take mitigation action against drones, and those authorities come with coordination requirements that do not fit the time crunch of launch operations. Countermeasures that work in other environments may not be usable at a launch site. During the rash of drone incursions at Langley Air Force Base in 2023, officials considered jamming and directed-energy options but ruled them out because jamming could have disrupted 911 calls and other aircraft. The same constraints apply at the ranges, where mitigation measures cannot interfere with telemetry, range safety systems or communications.
NASA conducts crewed launches at Kennedy Space Center, neighbors to Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and has no statutory authority to conduct counter-UAS mitigation. If a drone appears over a NASA pad during an Artemis countdown, NASA would need to rely on the Space Force next door to act on its behalf or develop an agreement to somehow have authorities passed down to them through the DOJ or DHS. Legislation has been introduced in the House to address this, but it has not passed. The FY2026 NDAA included meaningful progress expanding the Defense Department’s authorities and granting limited counter-UAS capability to state and local law enforcement through the SAFER SKIES Act. That is a great step in the right direction. But Congress needs to move faster, reduce the bureaucratic coordination requirements that slow real-time response and extend clearer authority to the full organizations that operate at the ranges, including NASA and the commercial launch providers at facilities like SpaceX Starbase on Brazos Island, Texas and the Pacific Spaceport Complex in Kodiak, Alaska.
The threat is not standing still
Drone technology is not evolving over years, it is evolving over months. Greater autonomy, lower radar cross-sections, longer range and coordinated swarm employment are no longer science fiction. A swarm of small drones operating together can overwhelm sensors, distract defenders, and disrupt a launch operation without a single kinetic impact. AI-enabled navigation reduces dependence on GPS and traditional radio links, making RF-based detection less likely. The low cost and modularity of drones means the same drone can shift between surveillance, jamming and delivery roles with minimal modification.
This is why a single sensor or a single acquisition program is not the answer. The solution must be an architecture that fuses awareness with a repeatable planning process through vulnerability assessments and response plans, proactive posture through getting left of the drone launch and legal clarity that enables decisive action when seconds matter.
The question is not whether drones will appear
The arrests at Vandenberg and Cape Canaveral are encouraging evidence that the system can identify and prosecute operators after the fact. But prosecution after the fact does not protect a space launch in countdown. Most violators are never identified; they are gone before anyone can track them down.
The question for policymakers and leaders is not whether unauthorized drones will continue to appear near launch sites; they will. The question is whether U.S. space launch ranges will be prepared to prevent the drone disruption when they do. Every space launch carries astronauts, satellites, defense capabilities, or scientific instruments that took years and billions of dollars to build. The infrastructure that gets America to space and maintains our global space dominance is too important to leave that question unanswered or, worse, have the answer be no.
Greg Hoyt is a retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel, a veteran of the Afghanistan and Iraq War, the former Director of the System Engineering and Integration Contract for the Launch and Test Ranges, and Senior Director of Asymmetric Threat Operations at ENSCO.
Chuck Webb is a retired U.S. Coast Guard Captain, a former Army and Coast Guard Aviator with over 30 years’ experience in air operations, a C-UAS instructor, and the Director of Operations for the C-UAS & Asymmetric Threat Operations at ENSCO.
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