Spaceport Location Planning in the Continental United States

The burgeoning commercial space transportation industry necessitates an expansion of launch infrastructure to meet rising demands. To rigorously reason about where such future spaceports might be located and what their impacts might be, we introduce a facility location planning model for future US spaceports (SPFLP). The SPFLP outputs a cost-optimal set of candidate locations for future spaceports while satisfying a range of operational constraints. By conducting sensitivity analyses on the SPFLP, we can examine differences in flight rerouting costs and optimal launch mission allocations. Our model and numerical experiments offer valuable insights for future spaceport site selection, contributing to the strategic development of commercial space transportation while keeping in mind the need to integrate these operations within the US National Airspace System. I will conclude by briefly expanding on other applications of operations research in aerospace engineering, including in sustainable aviation and air traffic management. Joint work with Teja Koduru, Angel Lin, Jackson Miller, Aria Olson, Kevin Sun, Nattanan Wongprapinkul, Haochen Wu, Gökçin Çınar, Oliver Jia-Richards, and Aaron Johnson.