The MBTA is the ultimate expression.

Flights will have to get to at least once a day from a single facility for a profit to be seen in the private sector. Until then the government will have to do the heavy lifting.

But warning signs are emerging. One is that the Cape is effectively full. “Today, every single pad we have on the Cape is occupied by somebody or multiple somebodies,” [deputy director of launch and range operations for the Space Force’s Space Systems Command, Col. James] Horne said during a panel at the SpaceCom conference Feb. 22. “There’s massive congestion, tons of construction going on.”

The additional payments may be able to help increase the number of companies launching rockets and the increased cadence of these launches. Current law limits what the leasing companies can contribute to the government landlord to help with infrastructure or other services.

[Thomas Engler, who leads the center planning and development directorate at KSC] noted on a SpaceCom panel that the center was already trying to juggle growing power demands at the center. That included “carving out” part of the grid that serves Exploration Park, the commercial development just outside the center’s gates, so that a local utility could set up a substation to meet the needs of Blue Origin’s New Glenn manufacturing facility there.

SpaceX’s Falcon launches and the coming Starship are also hungry for electrical power. However, laws limit what the government landlord can do:

Even something as seemingly simple as maintaining a road is difficult. “Our roads are not adequate to support how we transport things back and forth across KSC and the Cape,” Horne said. Some bridges can’t be used, he added, because they can’t support the loads of vehicles transporting rockets or spacecraft.

“We frankly don’t have a lot of mechanisms to move fast on any of that,” he said. He described one bit of bureaucratic sleight-of-hand where the Space Force worked with Space Florida, the state space development agency, to lease a road to Space Florida and had it handle a widening project for it, then returned it to service. “If I had to do that the old-fashioned way, it would have taken me 20 years.”

That, he said, was because of the slow pace of military construction projects in general. He noted work had only recently started at nearby Patrick Space Force Base for a new entrance gate, even though it had been on the books to be built for more than 15 years. “We can’t operate like that anymore.”

An excellent example of why government launch sites may not be the best sites for commercial launch companies. The government landlord just isn’t able to quickly adapt to the growing needs of the launch community that it is being paid to serve.

It seems that Capitalism in Space is so successful that it is beginning to overwhelm the launch sites, which had been designed for a mediocre space program, not a booming one.

Will the extra fees really help? Maybe, but either way, I think that it is time for commercial companies to find ways of building privately owned and operated launch sites. The government may be here to help, but it can only do a limited amount. We may have reached that limit with the rousing success of the Falcons.

A lot of companies are refurbishing these launch sites, but I bet there will be a contractual clause about turning it over clean at the end of lease or decommissiong the site if needed. In other words a damage deposit.