Roketsan, Turkey’s state-backed missile developer, will use the new spaceport being constructed on Somalia’s Indian Ocean coast to test long-range ballistic missiles. The facility is designed to accommodate systems with ranges of up to 1,250 miles. Draw that radius from Kismayo and it covers the Arabian Peninsula, the Strait of Hormuz, the Gulf of Aden, the Red Sea shipping lanes, the Indian Ocean littoral, and India’s western coastline. That suggests less a commercial space program than a power-projection asset dressed in the language of satellite technology.
When Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced the project in Istanbul on December 30, 2025, alongside Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, he called it a technological partnership between friendly nations. Selçuk Bayraktar, chief technology officer of Baykar—Turkey’s dominant drone manufacturer—framed the issue in strategic positioning: “Because Somalia is part of our heartland geography, there will be a space station there.”
The spaceport is the latest and most consequential layer in a decade-long Turkish project to convert a failing state into a forward operating base.
The facility is being built on a 350-square-mile site in the Jamaame dunes region near Kismayo, along Somalia’s Indian Ocean coast.
Turkey opened its TURKSOM Military Training Base in Mogadishu in 2017, its largest overseas base, providing training, equipment, and logistical support to Somalia’s military. In February 2025, the two countries signed a framework agreement granting Turkish naval forces a decade-long mandate to patrol Somali waters and safeguard offshore resources. Ankara then dispatched its first drilling ship to Somali waters, following seismic research conducted between 2024 and 2025, with Turkish energy officials expressing optimism about three offshore blocks spanning roughly 1,930 square miles each.
Add the spaceport and what emerges is not a partnership—it is a portfolio. The facility is being built on a 350-square-mile site in the Jamaame dunes region near Kismayo, along Somalia’s Indian Ocean coast. Turkish officials say Somalia’s proximity to the equator gives rockets an additional rotational boost from Earth, reducing fuel costs and increasing payload capacity—the same logic that leads the European Space Agency to launch from French Guiana. The technical argument is sound, but geography alone does not explain why Baykar’s chairman and Roketsan are the primary users, why the facility will be protected by Turkey’s military, or why American, French, and Chinese reconnaissance satellites repeatedly image the planned launch zone as they assess dual-use implications.
Somalis should scrutinize Turkey’s actions. Somalia is not simply a weak state that an outside power exploits. Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s government has made deliberate choices: trading sovereign assets for regime security, patron protection against al-Shabaab, and leverage against Ethiopia and Somaliland. Mogadishu signed off on the spaceport agreement, like the naval deal and the oil concessions before it, voluntarily and not under duress. What separates a strategic partnership from a dependency trap is whether the weaker party retains meaningful exit options. Somalia, whose military Turkey largely trained and whose waters Turkish ships patrol, does not retain independence of action.
In February 2026, Turkey passed another threshold after it deployed F-16s to Somalia and Turkish soldiers participated in ground combat against al-Shabaab, ending Ankara’s previous posture of training and indirect support. Once Turkish forces fight on Somali soil, the protection of Turkish infrastructure—including a spaceport whose first operational phase is expected to conclude within 12 months—becomes self-reinforcing. Presence becomes permanent.
U.S. Africa Command’s counter-terrorism priorities crowd out the harder question of who is building what, for whom, along the coastline its own drones patrol.
Washington has begun belatedly to register the implications. U.S. officials expressed displeasure about Turkey’s spaceport plans and its resource extraction in Somali waters and made clear to Mogadishu that if it did not remove its defense minister, Washington would reconsider security cooperation against al-Shabaab. Hassan Sheikh Mohamud sacked the minister. That a foreign government’s cabinet appointment was resolved by a bidding war between Ankara and Washington illustrates how thoroughly Somalia’s sovereignty has been subdivided among its patrons.
Burhanettin Duran, head of the Turkish Presidency’s Communications Directorate, described the spaceport as one of Ankara’s most significant partnerships with Mogadishu and said it would open new opportunities in security, the defense industry, and technology sharing. A presidential communications official volunteering that a civilian space facility will advance the defense industry is an accurate description of the project’s purpose—offered without apology because Turkey calculates that no one with the ability to contest it will do so.
That calculation may prove correct. The United States has no comparable footprint in Somalia and no bilateral security architecture deep enough to match Turkey’s entrenchment. The Gulf Arab states—the United Arab Emirates chief among them—have concentrated their Horn of Africa investments on Somaliland and Puntland rather than in Mogadishu, leaving the federal government almost entirely in Ankara’s orbit. U.S. Africa Command’s counter-terrorism priorities crowd out the harder question of who is building what, for whom, along the coastline its own drones patrol.
A missile test facility that puts most of Africa and the Middle East within its range, secured by a standing military base, protected by a decade-long naval mandate, and funded partly by resource extraction from the host state’s seabed, is being constructed on the Indian Ocean coast. The primary Western response so far has been reconnaissance photography. That is not a strategy.
