The Eastern Test Range: the cape's stations downrange

A launch from Cape Canaveral is only the start of a range that runs a long way out to sea. The Space Force describes today’s Eastern Range as a 15-million-square-mile area running from the cape to its station on Ascension Island in the South Atlantic and beyond. For most of its history the range was a chain of island tracking stations, and it carried a string of names: the Long Range Proving Ground from 1949, the Atlantic Missile Range from 1958 and the Eastern Test Range from 1964, according to the 1984 National Historic Landmark nomination for the station.

Building the chain

Islands were the reason the range is in Florida at all; Britain’s willingness to let the Americans build tracking stations in the Bahamas decided the site, as our proving-ground page explains. By the end of 1954, the Space Force’s heritage history says, the cape was the hub of a network reaching southeast to an instrumentation site on Grand Bahama Island. That was only the first 500 miles. Stations on Eleuthera, San Salvador, Mayaguana and Grand Turk went into service in July and August 1955, and stations in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico on December 5, 1956, completing the first 1,000 miles of what was to be a 5,000-mile range.

After negotiations with Britain, Brazil and St. Lucia, more stations went up on St. Lucia, Antigua, Fernando de Noronha and Ascension. The range supported its first 5,000-mile flight, a Snark cruise missile, on October 31, 1957. By January 1960 it had 13 major stations, about 91 outlying sites, a small fleet of telemetry ships and three marine support stations, and by September 1963 it reached around the tip of South Africa to the island of Mahe in the Indian Ocean.

Ships and contractors

The range filled the gaps between islands with ships. Two Advanced Range Instrumentation Ships, the USNS General H. H. Arnold and the USNS General Hoyt S. Vandenberg, went into service in 1964, and the USNS Redstone joined at the end of 1969. From the start, much of the work was done by contractors: the Air Force signed the first range contract with Pan American World Services on December 31, 1953, and contractors have operated the range under Air Force oversight ever since.

Closing the stations

The Snark and Navaho cruise missiles were what first pushed the range down to Ascension, the heritage history says, but by the early 1960s ballistic missiles and space launch vehicles were its main users. After the last Snark launch in December 1960 and the last Mercury flight in May 1963, about half a dozen stations were retired:

Station	Closed
Mayaguez, Puerto Rico	Deactivated August 1961
Dominican Republic annexes	Returned November 6, 1962
St. Lucia	Property eliminated or transferred December 1967
Fernando de Noronha, Brazil	Returned January 14, 1969
San Salvador	Caretaker status March 1965, closed January 31, 1970
Mayaguana	Abandoned June 16, 1970, apart from its airfield
Grand Turk	Deactivated in the 1980s
Grand Bahama	Handed to the Government of the Bahamas January 30, 1988
Antigua	Returned to the Government of Antigua July 22, 2015

A new site at Argentia, Newfoundland, was completed in June 1993 to cover launches flying north. The stations on Antigua and Ascension were kept and modernized, covering launches from the cape and Trident II missile tests in the Atlantic, until the Air Force decided in 2015 that Antigua’s tracking work could be done with data from other assets, saving about $10 million a year. Its release ended a 50-year presence on the island. Ascension was still a range station in 2022.

The organization

The command behind the range changed names too. The Air Force Missile Test Center, set up in 1951, became the Air Force Eastern Test Range on May 15, 1964, and served until February 1, 1977. Its successors were the Eastern Space and Missile Center from 1979, the 45th Space Wing from November 12, 1991, and, since May 11, 2021, Space Launch Delta 45 of the U.S. Space Force.

Further Reading

• Live from Cape Canaveral by Jay Barbree