William Gerstenmaier, head of SpaceX and the company’s vice president for construction and reliability, told the Washington Post that he plans to press the point at a Senate hearing scheduled for Wednesday, during of which he intends to urge Congress to streamline regulations and increase the number of employees at the Federal Aviation Administration. dedicated to the issuance of space launch licenses.
“With flight fares increasing and other players coming in, we see that there is potentially a big problem for the industry, where the pace of government will not be able to keep up with the pace of development of the private sector.”Promoting Safety, Innovation, and Competitiveness in U.S. Commercial Manned Space Activities.”
In April, Starship’s maiden flight attempt ended a few a few minutes after launch when the most powerful rocket ever built began to tumble uncontrollably and be destroyed by its onboard flight termination system. The force of takeoff, powered by 33 engines, destroyed the launch pad, and it sent rocks and debris flying across the far corner of the South Texas launch site. No one was injured, but the FAA ordered an investigation, which concluded last month and required SpaceX to take 63 corrective actions. Musk said the company has completed all the required procedures to obtain a license.
The launch attempt also sparked legal action from environmental groups concerned about the impact Starship would have on the region.
Before SpaceX can fly Starship again, it must obtain a license from the FAA “that meets all safety, environmental and other regulatory requirements,” the FAA said in a statement last month. “The FAA is optimistic that the safety review of the license application can be completed by the end of October.”
But the FAA also said the company must adhere to an additional environmental review process it is undertaking with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The consultation with Fish and Wildlife will apparently extend through November, an FAA official recently told The Post.
SpaceX officials told the Post they worked for two years to get the first Spaceship Launch License and I’ve been waiting for the second one for months.
“We’ve been ready to fly for a few weeks now,” said Tim Hughes, SpaceX’s senior vice president, who oversees the company’s global and government affairs. “And we would love it if the government could act as quickly as we did.” If you can build a rocket faster than the government can regulate it, it’s upside down, and it needs to be fixed. We therefore believe that some regulatory reforms are necessary.
In 2021, NASA awarded SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to Spatialship to transport astronauts to and from the surface of the moon as part of the space agency’s Artemis program. Under these conditions, the FAA should work quickly, company officials said in interviews.
“There should be some sort of prioritization over programs of national importance,” Hughes said. “For example, launches that serve the Artemis program. You would think that these would be handled with the greatest efficiency, all within the context of protecting public safety.
SpaceX owner Elon Musk has long bristled at regulators and has done so before criticized the FAA like moving too slowly. In late 2020, the company launched a prototype of its Starship spacecraft in violation of its license. “Unlike its aeronautics division, which is fine, the FAA’s space division has a fundamentally broken regulatory structure,” Musk wrote at the time on Twitter, now renamed X. “Their rules are intended for a handful of unsustainable launches by year from a few government facilities. According to these rules, humanity will never reach Mars.
Recently, Musk met with senior FAA officials in Washington in what officials described as a cordial and productive meeting.
The FAA did not respond to a request for comment. But in a recent blog post, Kelvin Coleman, director of the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, said the agency has “the challenge of keeping pace with this industry — to keep pace intellectually, not just in licensing terms”. That’s what makes it fun. We like the challenge.
“As we see more and more businesses and the pace of operations increases, for us that means increased demand for our products and services. We still have some growth to do in terms of how we meet that demand,” he said.
A senior FAA official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said the agency’s space division has been “asking for more resources for several years , but with little chance.” This person said the agency had “had to shift all the resources we allocated to (SpaceX) programs to Starship to support the next launch; which means that work on Falcon (another SpaceX program) is suspended for the moment. So they start to really feel it.
The demands on the FAA will only increase. In 2015, the agency, whose primary mission is the protection of people and property on the ground, authorized only 15 launches. This number is expected to reach 288 by 2027.
SpaceX intends to launch up to 12 times per month next year and hopes to use Starship to begin putting its next-generation Starlink internet satellites into orbit. New rockets developed by United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, and Blue Origin, the space company founded by Jeff Bezos, are expected to begin flying in the coming months or years. (Bezos owns the Washington Post.)
“I think the general concern is that we are really slowing down what the government wants to do,” Gerstenmaier said. “The current approach jeopardizes American leadership. And I think it’s a very pivotal time, because I see this only intensifying as more providers come online and more business will move forward.
It also hurts SpaceX, he said.
“The innovation we need to maintain to be a leader in spaceflight is at risk because it is inconsistent with the regulatory approach,” he said. “I want to emphasize that we are not saying that we want to put public safety at risk in any way. We want to protect public safety. But we want to move as quickly as possible within this framework.
