The Pacific Spaceport Complex, a launch site for suborbital and orbital rockets, sits on Narrow Cape on the east coast of Kodiak Island, about 25 miles (41 km) south of the city of Kodiak and 180 miles (290 km) south-east of King Salmon, Alaska. It is owned and operated by the Alaska Aerospace Corporation, a public corporation of the state of Alaska. Kodiak Island lies on the western side of the Gulf of Alaska, where it exposes rocks of the Chugach–Prince William composite terrane. South of Chiniak Bay the coast is dominated by the Ghost Rocks Formation, a poorly dated mass perhaps 16,400 feet (5,000 m) thick consisting of sandstone, pillow basalt, claystone and tuff that developed during the Late Cretaceous and Paleocene (about 100 million to 60 million years ago), and now severely faulted, folded and sheared. Narrow Cape juts into the gulf between Chiniak Bay to the north and Ugak Bay to the south. It is formed by the Narrow Cape Formation, a shallow-water deposit about 2,300 feet (700 m) thick consisting of sandstone and some conglomerate in the lower two-thirds, and siltstone above, that developed during the middle Miocene (15 to 12 million years ago). Ice-age glaciers carved the island’s fjords into their present-day configuration.

Alutiiq people have lived on Kodiak’s coasts for millennia. At Rice Ridge, near Cape Chiniak, residents hunted sea otters and fished for cod between about 7,100 and 4,000 years ago. In 1846 Russian colonial administrators let an Alutiiq-Russian family settle at Chiniak. The military era began in September 1939, when a civilian contractor arrived to build a naval base. The first coast-artillery units came in 1941, as Fort Greely rose, and Narrow Cape became one of three outlying harbor-defense observation posts. Remains of a road, bunkers, and wooden buildings were still visible in 2000. In 1976 the Coast Guard opened a Loran-C station there, with a 625-foot (191-m) guyed tower. Loran, a radio-navigation system, grew out of a proposal in October 1940 by the physicist Alfred Loomis to the army’s Signal Corps and was developed at MIT’s Radiation Laboratory. The station stopped transmitting on February 8th 2010 and the tower was removed in 2012.

Alaska’s legislature created the Alaska Aerospace Development Corporation in 1991. Construction of the Kodiak Launch Complex began in January 1998, and the first launch, of a suborbital rocket, came that November. On August 25th 2014 a failed launch damaged the launch tower and two processing facilities. During repairs the site was renamed the Pacific Spaceport Complex, and it was rededicated on August 13th 2016. It covers about 3,700 acres (1,500 ha) of state-owned land and has a mission-control center, a clean room for satellites, a fully enclosed 17-story rocket-assembly building and two independent range and telemetry systems. Launchpad 1 is for orbital flights, launchpad 2 for suborbital ones. Activity is set to rise. In February the corporation bought another 140 acres (57 ha), and on July 21st the Defense Department announced a $266m Air Force contract for Rocket Lab to make at least 12 suborbital launches from Narrow Cape, with options for six more through 2028. A dedicated Rocket Lab pad is under construction. Read more here and here. Explore more of Pacific Spaceport Complex and Kodiak Island here: