How Alaska’s little-known spaceport revolutionized military conflict
Posted: 11th November 2024
https://www.cryopolitics.com/2024/04/29/kodiak-pacific-spaceport-complex-israel/
At the Pacific Spaceport Complex in Kodiak, Alaska, in 2019, the Israelis successfully tested an anti-ballistic missile system that intercepts weapons in space. Now, in the Israel-Hamas War, it’s finally being used in battle, pushing military conflict above the atmosphere.
KKodiak Island is better known for its salmon-guzzling grizzly-bears than its rockets. But the forested Alaskan isle, separated from the mainland by the Shelikof Strait, has had a small commercial spaceport since 1998. Kodiak’s Pacific Spaceport Complex is intended for launching small satellites into polar orbit and got its start as the country’s first commercial spaceport. More famous facilities, like Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and Vandenberg Space Force Base, are government-operated spaceports. Yet the majority of the 31 launches that have taken place at Pacific Spaceport Complex since its opening have, in fact, been for the military or government, including one foreign one: Israel. The shift towards supporting launches by the men in black has frustrated many of Kodiak’s residents, as I discovered when I visited the island last month.
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Bruce K. Gagnon
Coordinator
Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
PO Box 652
Brunswick, ME 04011
(207) 844-8187
<a href="http://www.space4peace.org/">http://www.space4peace.org</a>
<a href="http://space4peace.blogspot.com/">http://space4peace.blogspot.com</a> (blog)
Twitter: @BruceKGagnon
'Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.'
~ Henry David Thoreau