Government Launch Sites

The cosmodrome where space flight began: Sputnik in 1957 and Gagarin in 1961. Sprawling over the Kazakh steppe, Baikonur is leased...

The Cape opened with a captured V-2 called Bumper 8 in 1950 and flew the Mercury missions. Today dozens of pads host Falcon 9, Atl...

The home of Apollo. Saturn V moonshots left Pad 39A from 1967, the shuttle fleet flew 30 years, and SpaceX now leases 39A for Falc...

The West Coast polar launch base, first to orbit a satellite over the poles with Discoverer 1 in 1959. Rockets fly south over the ...

One of the oldest rocket ranges on Earth, established for aeronautical research in 1945. Antares cargo rockets flew to the space s...

The cradle of American rocketry. Captured V-2 missiles flew from 1946, and in 1949 a Bumper V-2 stack reached almost 400 kilometer...

The European gateway to space at 5 degrees north, ideal for eastward launches to geostationary orbit. Ariane rockets flew from 197...

One of the largest overland test ranges on Earth, a vast prohibited area in the South Australian outback. British Skylark and Blac...

The Kagoshima Space Center on Kyushu, the cradle of Japanese space science. The Lambda-4S rocket orbited Ohsumi in February 1970, ...

The largest Japanese launch center, occupying a granite headland south of Kyushu. H-IIA became one of the most reliable rockets fl...

The national spaceport on the Goheung peninsula. The joint KSLV-1 with Russia reached orbit on its second try in January 2013. The...

The Tongchang-ri launching station near the Chinese border, with a tall umbilical tower visible on satellite imagery. First used i...

The island spaceport of India on the Andhra coast. The SLV-3 rocket orbited Rohini in 1980, and two modern pads launch PSLV, GSLV,...

The Iranian launch complex launched the Omid satellite in February 2009, making Iran the ninth country to orbit its own satellite....

The Israeli coastal base where Shavit rockets launch Ofeq reconnaissance satellites westward over the Mediterranean, a rare retrog...

The closest mainland launch site to the equator at 2 degrees south. A 2003 pad explosion killed 21 engineers days before the first...

The first Brazilian rocket base, near Natal, launching Sonda sounding rockets from 1965 and tracking space missions for decades. I...

The geostationary launch base of China in the mountains of Sichuan. Long March 3 rockets fly navigation and communications satelli...

The northern Chinese launch center for polar and sun synchronous missions. Fengyun weather satellites, Earth observation spacecraf...

The oldest and busiest Chinese launch center, deep in the Gobi desert. The first Chinese satellite lifted off here in 1970, and Ya...

The coastal Hainan spaceport, opened in 2016 for the huge Long March 5. Space station modules, Moon and Mars probes, and the heavi...

A secret ICBM base turned busiest launch complex in history. Since its first space shot in 1966, Plesetsk has flown more orbital l...

The new far eastern cosmodrome, built to reduce dependence on Baikonur. First launch came in 2016, clouded by construction corrupt...

The European sounding rocket hub above the Arctic Circle at Kiruna. Since 1966, meteorology, ozone, and aurora research rockets ha...

The Norwegian rocket range on an island above the Arctic Circle, firing research rockets since 1962 for aurora and atmosphere stud...

At 79 degrees north on the Svalbard archipelago, the northernmost launch site in the world. Sounding rockets study the polar atmos...

Built for the Saturn V, Pad 39A launched Apollo 11 and most of the Apollo Moon missions, then the first Space Shuttle flight in 19...

The sister pad to 39A first launched Apollo 10 in 1969, then the three Skylab crews and the Apollo Soyuz flight on Saturn IB rocke...

Built for Trident II submarine missile tests, LC-46 was converted into a launch site operated by Space Florida. An Athena II rocke...

Nicknamed Slick Six, the pad was built for the Manned Orbiting Laboratory, canceled in 1969, then rebuilt to send the Space Shuttl...

The second R-7 launch pad at Baikonur, used for Soyuz rockets since the early 1960s. Long a partner to Gagarin Start, it became th...

The launch complex built for the Ariane 6, with a mobile gantry that rolls back before liftoff instead of moving the rocket to the...

First built for the Europa II rocket, whose single launch from Kourou failed in 1971, ELA-1 was rebuilt to launch the early Ariane...

An intercontinental missile base near the town of Yasny in Orenburg region that hosted commercial space launches using Dnepr rocke...

The cradle of the Indian space program, near Thiruvananthapuram, chosen for its position close to the magnetic equator. Its first ...

Formerly Wheeler Island, this small island off the Odisha coast is the main Indian test site for long range missiles, including th...

An interforce test range on the east coast of Sardinia near Perdasdefogu, the main Italian site for rocket and missile trials. Sou...

A rocket range of the Spanish National Institute for Aerospace Technology on the Atlantic coast of Huelva province, used for sound...

A Ministry of Defence missile range on South Uist and Benbecula in the Outer Hebrides, firing west over the Atlantic. Established ...

The launch site on the Arabian Sea coast west of Karachi where Pakistan fired Rehbar-I, its first sounding rocket, in June 1962 wi...

A launch site of the Revolutionary Guards near Shahroud in Semnan province, separate from the civilian program. In April 2020 a Qa...

A missile and rocket test range on the Southern Cape coast near Arniston, built in the 1980s partly for a secret South African sat...

The US Army range spread across Kwajalein Atoll, long the target area for intercontinental missile tests fired from California. It...

A rocket range north of Fairbanks, Alaska, owned by the University of Alaska and used since 1969 to launch sounding rockets into t...

The California desert flight test center where the X-15 rocket plane landed after flights to the edge of space in the 1960s and wh...

The 4.6 kilometer runway at Kennedy Space Center built for returning Space Shuttles, which first landed there in 1984 and made the...

The second orbital pad at Sriharikota, commissioned in 2005 and built to handle the heavier GSLV and LVM3 rockets. It launched Cha...

The main orbital launch complex at Tanegashima, first used for the H-II rocket in 1994. It has launched the H-IIA, H-IIB, and H3 r...

A missile test center on the Landes coast of southwest France, founded in the 1960s as the Centre d Essais des Landes. French stra...