WASHINGTON — The Space Force is upgrading defenses for Cape Canaveral to counter unmanned aerial systems (UAS) without endangering air traffic, the commander of Space Launch Delta 45 said.
Driven in large part by drone-threat lessons from Ukraine, Col. Brian Chatman told last week’s SCSP AI + Space conference that the Eastern Range is “installing a multi-million dollar counter-UAS system that helps detect UAS flying into the airspace beyond capabilities that we have today — which are pretty good [already]. This is going to take it to the next level and allows them to engage those capabilities.”
“It’s giving me a holistic coverage over the Cape, as opposed to pockets of coverage that I have today,” the colonel told Breaking Defense in an interview after his remarks. “We have capability today to render UAS systems incapable if they are flying into our area,” but the upgrade will “expand that out” and bring in new technologies from the Air Force Research Laboratory and the National Reconnaissance Office. It will also give AFRL and NRO an opportunity to test new tech in a uniquely busy and complex environment under strict safety conditions, he said.
Both the Eastern Range serving Cape Canaveral and the less-active Western Range out of Vandenberg Space Force Base in California have radically ramped up their rate of launches in recent years, largely thanks to Elon Musk’s SpaceX. In 2023, the two ranges broke the Soviet Union’s 1982 record for 108 launches in a single year, then hit a combined total of 144 in 2024 (93 East, 51 West). The Eastern Range had its 100th launch for 2025 in November, Chatman told the conference, and in the near future he’s “estimating upwards of 300 launches a year off the Eastern Range alone.”
Those space launches come on top of military missile tests and a tremendous amount of civilian air traffic, so both counter-drone tests and operational defenses must be carefully calibrated to jam only unauthorized drones, while not interfering with legitimate communication and navigation systems.
“It’s a holistic look at everything that’s happened in the RF [radio frequency] environment to make sure that we protect and defend the Eastern Range, while not having second order effects that will impact other operations, [using] RF effectors that are deconflicted in the spectrum,” Chatman said.
RF effectors in this context refers to electronic warfare — jamming — rather than “kinetic” defenses like anti-aircraft guns or missiles: While the Department of Homeland Security is testing kinetic defenses for domestic airspace, there’s historically a strong reluctance to deploy them domestically for obvious safety reasons.
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“As the research labs develop new capabilities, we’re open to bringing them out, taking a look at what that would look like out on the Eastern Range, and then if we get to spectrum deconfliction, affording them the opportunity to come out and test those capabilities,” Chatman said. “It’s an ongoing effort that we have in partnership, that we’ve started up now, to bring on and then employ over the course of the next couple years.”
Meanwhile, Chatman’s counterpart commanding Space Launch Delta 30 and the Western Range, Col. James Horne, said the California arm was still figuring out its way ahead on security, especially for countering small unmanned aerial systems like camera-equipped hobby drones.
“Counter-sUAS is a key capability that we really are behind on,” Horne told the SCSP conference. ”We have hundreds of incursions from foreign adversaries at our gate, we have 22-mile coastline, over 18,000 acres — most of it unfenced — and we’re mostly behind when it comes to things like counter-UAS capability. So those are things that we’re focused on building.”
Theresa Hitchens contributed to this article.