John Oberst, the head of the Alaska Aerospace Corporation, told the U.S. Arctic Research Commission on Wednesday, Nov. 5, that the corporation has been growing in the last year and is up to 50 employees.
"We had 20% growth last year in jobs and we expect the same for next state fiscal year, July to July," he said.
Oberst did not say why he expects more job growth, but the corporation is currently hiring for two open positions according to its website.
The corporation oversees two launch facilities, the Pacific Spaceport Complex-Alaska, which is located on Kodiak Island near Narrow Cape, and the Poker Flat Research Range north of Fairbanks.
The Kodiak Island spaceport is able to launch rockets, satellites and other spacecraft into orbit. But the Poker Flat site is only able to launch sub-orbital rockets. Suborbital launches go up into space, typically for only a few minutes for research, and come right back down.
Oberst said they have begun the licensing process with the Federal Aviation Administration for the Fairbanks range to be approved as an orbital spaceport. Then, more powerful and varied commercial rockets could launch from Poker Flat.
“We started that process with the FAA and it’s a long one. We’ll get there and we’ll start launching over land," he explained. "And we’ll probably be the first ones in the United States to do so for orbital launch.”
That’s one benefit of the agreement signed between the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Geophysical Institute and Alaska Aerospace Corporation earlier this year.
The Poker Flat rocket range is owned and operated by UAF’s Geophysical Institute under a contract with NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility which is part of the Goddard Space Flight Center. Bob McCoy, the director of the institute, said the range hopes to increase its launch opportunities to accommodate more research and even hypersonic testing.
“And so what we’re doing, working with John, is bringing several of these things together to support… John’s talking about, an Arctic hypersonic test range. This is very timely for what’s happening in the administration with Golden Dome and hypersonic launch," McCoy said.
That also means the Department of Defense, recently rebranded by President Donald Trump as the Department of War, is working with the state’s two launch facilities, McCoy said, because the department wants to launch more small rockets in the near future. But as of Nov. 5 Oberst said there is no contract in place between Alaska Aerospace Corporation and the Department of Defense.
In August,the federal government launched a rocket from the Kodiak Island spaceport. Although Oberst declined to say what the purpose of the launch was, anonline satellite tracking website said it was likely a hypersonic missile test.
Oberst has said that the federal government’s multi-billion-dollar Golden Dome missile defense system to shield North America will bring significant investment into Alaska’s launch facilities, and that requires lots of hypersonic missile tests.
Oberst said the corporation has also been talking to companies like Rocket Lab or NASA to explore potential partnerships and launches in the future from either the Kodiak Island spaceport or Poker Flat.
John Farrell, the executive director of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission, said it’s imperative that the commission hear from local scientists and researchers about what their priorities are.
“And then we take that information back to Washington D.C., we try to make sure that researchers in all other parts of the federal government including the National Institutes of Health, or NASA, or NOAA, or National Science Foundation, have the benefit of what we’ve learned," Farrell said.
The commission is tasked with recommending federal research priorities for federal agencies. In Kodiak the group also heard about local bear research, harmful algal bloom research and other local research programs that all involve collaboration between a combination of state, tribal and federal entities. But because of the government shutdown, some federal employees on the island, like Mike Litzow with NOAA Fisheries, were unable to present as planned to the commission.
Once the federal government shutdown ends, then a separate committee, the Interagency Arctic Research Policy Committee or IARPC, can write an implementation plan for the next five years of Arctic research [2027 to 2031].
The federal government is accepting public comment on the development of its new Arctic Research Plan until Nov. 15.
