from
"SpaceX potentially launching Intelsat 35e this Sunday, July 2, which would be third F9 mission in just over nine days." • r/spacex
Since no one's answered your question (the other replies talking about the pad, which doesn't answer your question), "the range", meaning the
Eastern Test Range operated by the Air Force, is the tracking and communications infrastructure required for all launches from Florida, and which can also be used to supplement other ranges, such as Wallops in Virginia or even launches from the ESA range in French Guiana. So when any rocket launches from Florida, it is radar tracked, various sorts of commlinks-tracked, flight termination system comms, basically everything that is transmitted by EM radiation to the ground, is handled by Eastern Range equipment belonging to and operated by the Air Force. This applies to every launch ever done from Florida. Mercury, military test missiles, Gemini, Apollo, Shuttle, various other military hardware, Boeing, Lockheed, ULA, SpaceX, you name it -- it's all been tracked and controlled by the Eastern Range. To quote from the link above:
The range consists of a chain of shore and sea based tracking sites. "By January 1960, the Eastern Range included 13 major stations, approximately 91 outlying sites, a fleet of ships and three marine support stations. By September 1963, the Eastern Range extended around the tip of South Africa to the island of Mahé in the Indian Ocean.[16]" Much the sea based tracking and many of the land based stations have been replaced by space based tracking, including the present TDRSS.
Locations include (besides the obvious CCAFS and KSC hardware) Jonathon Dickinson State Park near Miami, Antigua, Ascension Island in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, and Newfoundland on an as-needed basis.
Needless to say, there's a
lot of infrastructure that needs to be kept track of, maintained, and upgraded on a rolling basis. A month long closure of the range is basically par for the course, at least for American/Western launches (I know nothing about Russian/Chinese practices).
Frankly, the Range is the single biggest bottleneck in SpaceX's future -- as of even last year, it took several days for the entire Range to be reconfigured from one rocket type (e.g. Atlas V) to another (e.g. Falcon 9), imposing a bare minimum time between launches that the providers can do nothing about, not directly. That's why the Automatic Flight Termination System was such a big hoopla -- much of that multi-day turnaround was because of the extensive 50s and 60s-vintage hardware for people to be in the loop. So not only are humans no longer in the loop (way less computer-machine interaction), but all that old equipment was also upgraded in the process.
Of course the Air Force certainly has a strong incentive to allow as many launches as its providers can supply, so it is certainly planning for and building and maintaining for the future -- which occasionally requires month-long downtimes to perhaps allow major upgrades (or maybe just expensive and time consuming maintenance on 50 year old equipment). This is another reason why Boca Chica will be so important for SpaceX, because it would be the first time -- or maybe second? -- that a rocket is launched without any direct infrastructure used that was provided by the government. (The Rocket Lab Electron site in NZ might qualify under some interpretation of the previous criterion, though I couldn't say for sure, and there might be other examples I'm precluding. Very open to corrections and clarifications on this distinction.) And if SpaceX controls the range, they control the launch schedule and rate (subject to the contracts they signed to secure the site, which I expect to be negotiable in the future, even if they currently stipulate a maximum of 12 launches per year), and would presumably not have such extended down times. This is also why it takes years to build the site -- constructing a pad is relatively easy, but getting all the comms hardware and software in place is far more complicated and time consuming, as much so as the ancillary GSE stuff required to support the pad.
Anyway this turned out way more long winded than I meant it to be, but hey there it is. If the Air Force says the range is down, the range is down, and no amount of begging or even paying by either SpaceX or ULA will change that. Here's hoping the Air Force is putting the down time to good use by modernizing and upgrading its equipment, rather than just maintaining decades-obsolete stuff.
