The U.S. Space Force supports roughly fourteen installations, and almost all of them sit in Colorado, California, Florida, or a remote radar site far from any city. Five carry the Space Force Base name, one is a Space Base, seven are Space Force Stations, and one kept its old Air Force Base title. The table below lists every site, the state or country it is in, what is operated there, and the Space Base Delta or launch delta that runs it, as of 2026.
Every Space Force Installation and Where It Sits
Every Space Force installation is listed below with its location, its main job, and the unit responsible for running it. Support assignments shifted during 2025. Space Base Delta 41 stood up at Schriever and took over duties previously held by Space Base Delta 1, so the unit column reflects the arrangement published as of 2026. Several of the smaller stations have no website of their own, and the Space Force lists them on its official locations directory.
| Installation | Location | What Is Operated There | Supporting Unit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Peterson Space Force Base | Colorado Springs, Colorado | Headquarters of Space Force Combat Forces Command, plus North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command, and the headquarters of U.S. Space Command, which is in a phased move to Alabama | Space Base Delta 1 |
| Schriever Space Force Base | Colorado Springs, Colorado | Satellite control operations, including the crews that fly the GPS constellation | Space Base Delta 41 |
| Buckley Space Force Base | Aurora, Colorado | Missile-warning ground stations that process infrared launch detections | Space Base Delta 2 |
| Vandenberg Space Force Base | Lompoc, California | The Western Range and its launch pads, used for polar and sun-synchronous orbits | Space Launch Delta 30 |
| Patrick Space Force Base | Brevard County, Florida | Headquarters and housing for Eastern Range launch operations | Space Launch Delta 45 |
| Los Angeles Air Force Base | El Segundo, California | Space Systems Command, which buys the satellites and launches | Space Base Delta 3 |
| Pituffik Space Base | Greenland | Missile-warning radar and satellite tracking above the Arctic Circle | Space Base Delta 1 |
| Cape Canaveral Space Force Station | Brevard County, Florida | The Eastern Range launch pads used by military, NASA, and commercial rockets | Space Launch Delta 45 |
| Cheyenne Mountain Space Force Station | Colorado Springs, Colorado | The hardened alternate command center dug into the mountain | Space Base Delta 1 |
| Cape Cod Space Force Station | Sagamore, Massachusetts | Early-warning radar watching the Atlantic approaches | Space Base Delta 2 |
| Cavalier Space Force Station | Cavalier, North Dakota | The PARCS phased-array radar, which tracks missiles and catalogues objects in orbit | Space Base Delta 2 |
| Clear Space Force Station | Interior Alaska | Early-warning radar covering polar and Pacific approaches | Space Base Delta 2 |
| New Boston Space Force Station | Hillsborough County, New Hampshire | A Satellite Control Network tracking station | Space Base Delta 41 |
| Kaena Point Space Force Station | Oahu, Hawaii | A Satellite Control Network tracking station on the island’s western point | Space Base Delta 41 |
Where the Five Space Force Bases Are Located
Only five installations carry the formal Space Force Base designation, and three of them are in Colorado. Peterson and Schriever both sit in Colorado Springs, about twenty miles apart, and Buckley is an hour north in Aurora, outside Denver. That Front Range cluster is why a Guardian assigned to satellite operations, missile warning, or command staff work will very likely live in Colorado.
The other two are on the coasts, and both exist because of where rockets can safely fly. Vandenberg Space Force Base occupies a stretch of the California coast near Lompoc. Patrick Space Force Base sits on Florida’s Space Coast in Brevard County and provides the headquarters, housing, and support for launch operations at Cape Canaveral a few miles north.
Los Angeles Air Force Base is the sixth site people expect on this list and the one that breaks the pattern. It houses Space Systems Command, the organization that buys and builds the Space Force’s satellites. The installation itself was never renamed, and it carries the Air Force Base title as of 2026.
Space Force Base, Space Force Station, and Space Base Delta
Three different naming systems overlap on these sites, and the same location can legitimately appear under two names. Reading a Space Force address gets much easier once each term is separated from the others.
- Space Force Base. The designation for a larger installation with a resident population: housing, a commissary, a medical clinic, and families living on or near it. Peterson, Schriever, Buckley, Vandenberg, and Patrick hold this title.
- Space Force Station. A smaller site built around one mission, usually a radar, a tracking antenna, or a launch complex, with few or no permanent family quarters. Cavalier, Clear, and Cape Canaveral are stations for this reason, despite Cape Canaveral being one of the busiest launch sites on Earth.
- Space Base. A single case, Pituffik Space Base in Greenland, which sits on Danish territory rather than American soil and so takes a designation that does not import the domestic terminology.
- Space Base Delta. Not a place at all. A Space Base Delta is the unit that runs the installations: civil engineering, security forces, contracting, logistics. One delta can support several sites, which is why Space Base Delta 2 appears next to installations in Colorado, Massachusetts, North Dakota, and Alaska.
The two systems get mixed up constantly. A press release about Space Base Delta 1 describes an organization headquartered at Peterson, and there is no base called Delta 1. A Guardian who says they work at Space Launch Delta 45 is stationed at Patrick or Cape Canaveral. Numbered deltas name units, and Base, Station, or Space Base names the real estate.
Why Space Force Bases Look Nothing Like Airfields
The Space Force inherited its installations rather than building them, and it took the ones where space missions already happened. Every site on the list above was an Air Force base or station first, transferred between 2020 and 2023 as the new service stood up. No new installation has been built from bare ground.
That inheritance shaped what these places physically are. A Space Force site is usually an operations floor full of consoles, a radar or antenna field, or a launch complex. Very few have aircraft parked on them. Vandenberg and Patrick have runways because of their Air Force history, and Guardians do not fly combat aircraft from any of them.
The consequence for anyone weighing an assignment is straightforward. The Space Force has no equivalent of the dozens of Army posts and Navy stations spread across the country. A Space Force career means Colorado, coastal California, Florida’s Space Coast, or a small remote site. Career field and duty location are tied together far more tightly than in the larger services, and the Space Force jobs guide sets out which specialties sit where.
How Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg Split the Orbits
The two launch ranges are not interchangeable, because a rocket has to fly over water rather than towns. Cape Canaveral fires east over the Atlantic, and Vandenberg fires south over the open Pacific, and that single geographic difference decides which missions go from which coast.
| Criterion | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station | Vandenberg Space Force Base |
|---|---|---|
| Range managed | Eastern Range | Western Range |
| Safe launch direction | East, over the Atlantic | South, over the Pacific |
| Orbits it suits | Low-inclination and geostationary transfer orbits | Polar and sun-synchronous orbits |
| Boost from Earth’s rotation | Roughly 400 metres per second eastward at this latitude | Almost none on a southward polar track |
| Typical payloads | Communications satellites, crewed missions, most commercial flights | Imaging, weather, and reconnaissance satellites in polar orbits |
| Verdict | The default for anything heading east or to geostationary orbit | Required for anything that needs to cross both poles |
Cape Canaveral sits at about 28 degrees north. An eastbound rocket there picks up roughly 400 metres per second from the planet’s own spin, velocity it does not have to buy with fuel. Vandenberg gets no such help, because a polar launch flies across Earth’s rotation rather than with it. It has thousands of miles of empty ocean to the south instead. That clear corridor is the only way to reach a polar orbit from the continental United States without dropping spent stages on inhabited ground. The mechanics of reaching each orbit are covered in the explainer on how rocket launches work.
The Overseas and Remote Sites the Space Force Uses
Outside the continental United States, the Space Force operates from a small number of sites chosen for their latitude or their line of sight to satellites. Pituffik Space Base in Greenland is the northernmost, renamed from Thule Air Base in 2023. Its radar and tracking antennas see Arctic approaches that no site farther south can watch. Its history, its radar, and the political questions around Greenland are covered in depth on the Pituffik Space Base page.
Guardians also work as tenants on installations the Space Force does not own. Three Royal Air Force stations in the United Kingdom host American space units, including the early-warning radar at RAF Fylingdales in North Yorkshire. Kaena Point in Hawaii and New Boston in New Hampshire are small tracking stations. Each keeps antennas pointed at satellites as they pass overhead, so both sit where the sky is clear rather than near a city.
What Being Stationed at Space Force Bases Involves
Assignment to a Space Force installation usually means shift work at a console, on American soil, with a security clearance. Operations centers run around the clock, so crews rotate through nights and weekends in a way that office-hours jobs do not. The work is watching, flying, and defending systems already in orbit.
The larger bases behave like any other military installation of their size, with base housing, a commissary, schools nearby, and a spouse-employment market shaped by the surrounding city. The Colorado Front Range carries three of the five and has an unusually deep defense job market as a result. The remote stations are a different proposition. Cavalier, Clear, and Pituffik are small, cold, and far from services, and an assignment there comes without the amenities of a Front Range base.
Overseas assignments are rare compared with the Army or Air Force, and deployments in the usual sense are rarer still. Anyone weighing this against another branch should start from the location list above and pick the specialties stationed where they want to live. Then work through the entry requirements in the guide to joining the Space Force and ask a recruiter which Space Force bases that career field leads to.