“Pending regulatory approval”: launch companies struggle with licensingby Jeff Foust
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| “We work very well with SpaceX. We have a very strong dialogue with them,” said the FAA’s Murray. “They get the majority of our resources because they’re doing the majority of the operations.” |
While the hearing was in progress, the company published a statement on its website complaining about launch licensing delays. “The Starship and Super Heavy vehicles for Flight 5 have been ready to launch since the first week of August,” the company stated. “We recently received a launch license date estimate of late November from the FAA, the government agency responsible for licensing Starship flight tests. This is a more than two-month delay to the previously communicated date of mid-September.”
The company claimed the delay was due to “superfluous environmental analysis” regarding the water deluge system at the launch pad, the sonic boom of the returning Super Heavy booster, and the impact of the interstage section between the booster and ship in the Gulf of Mexico, whose location would shift from the previous flight in June to the upcoming Flight 5. Those issues, SpaceX claimed, “are illustrative of the difficulties launch companies face in the current regulatory environment for launch and reentry licensing.”
At the hearing, one committee member, Rep. Mike Garcia (R-CA), said he understood that FAA had previously planned to complete the licensing determination for Flight 5 by September 17, then recently changed it to November 22 and, later, November 26.
Kelvin Coleman, the FAA associate administrator for commercial space transportation, said the delays were linked to the work needed to modify the license, which has changed for each Starship flight. “SpaceX has four flights under its belt, three of which have been under modifications to the license that have been requested by the company,” he said. “It is the company that is pushing mission-by-mission approvals. That’s what the pace is about.”
SpaceX offers a unique challenge to AST because it accounts for the vast majority of commercial launches it regulates. While most are relatively routine Falcon 9 launches, the still-experimental Starship and its changing design exacerbates the burden on the office.
“We work very well with SpaceX. We have a very strong dialogue with them,” said Dan Murray, executive director of operational safety at AST, during a panel at the US Chamber of Commerce’s Global Aerospace Summit the day after the hearing. “They get the majority of our resources because they’re doing the majority of the operations.”
| SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, in posts on X, the social media network he owns, announced he would sue the FAA “for regulatory overreach,” claiming that the fines were “lawfare” by the FAA. |
Those resources, he said, include about 80% of the “hundreds” of hours of overtime recorded by the office each month. “We are doing everything we can to work with them as efficiently as we can.”
He defended the licensing delays for Starship’s Flight 5. “The driver on the current schedule is the environmental review, in this case. The safety review is not done yet, either, but it’s on a shorter schedule,” he said. The FAA itself, in a separate statement the same day, noted that SpaceX provided information only in mid-August about “how the environmental impact of Flight 5 will cover a larger area than previously reviewed,” requiring consultation with other agencies.
“Lawfare”
Last week, the dispute between the FAA and SpaceX intensified for reasons not directly linked to the Flight 5 licensing delays. On September 17, the FAA announced its intent to fine SpaceX about $663,000 for violations of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launch licenses on two missions in the middle of last year.
In one incident, the FAA said that SpaceX conducted a Falcon 9 launch in June 2023 without getting FAA approval for using a new launch control center at the company’s “Hangar X” facility at the Kennedy Space Center, and for not conducting a poll of controllers two hours before launch as specified in its communications plan. The following month, a Falcon Heavy launch from KSC’s Launch Complex 39A used a new RP-1 fuel tank farm without the approval of the FAA.
“Safety drives everything we do at the FAA, including a legal responsibility for the safety oversight of companies with commercial space transportation licenses,” Marc Nichols, chief counsel at the FAA, said in a statement. “Failure of a company to comply with the safety requirements will result in consequences.”
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, in posts on X, the social media network he owns, announced he would sue the FAA “for regulatory overreach,” claiming that the fines were “lawfare” by the FAA. “I am highly confident that discovery will show improper, politically-motivated behavior by the FAA,” he stated, although provided no evidence for such behavior.
SpaceX has yet to file that suit, but did release a letter two days it sent to leadership of the House Science Committee and Senate Commerce Committee, the two congressional committees with oversight of FAA/AST, offering its case against the fines.
“With respect to these matters, it is notable that in each instance, SpaceX provided AST with sufficient notice of these relatively minor license updates, which had no bearing on public safety,” SpaceX stated in the letter.
| “The fact that AST was unable to timely process these minor updates underscores systemic challenges at AST,” SpaceX noted in its letter. |
In the case of the Falcon 9 launch, SpaceX said it provided FAA notice more than a month of a half before the launch of the new location center, but that the agency did not provide any comment until shortly before the launch, when it told SpaceX there were “too many” changes in the plan for it to review and approve in time for the launch. The company added there is also no requirement for a T-2 hour poll and that it polls controllers closer to the launch.
For the Falcon Heavy launch, SpaceX said it the new propellant tank farm had already been approved by range safety officials at the site. During the countdown itself, FAA officials raised the issue of the unapproved tanks farm but that agency leadership ultimately “did not direct SpaceX to stand down or pull its license.”
The letter also reiterated Musk’s earlier allegations about political motivations for the fines. “It is notable that these violations and penalties were announced shortly after increased scrutiny on AST by Congress for its failure to reasonably and timely execute its regulatory obligations,” the letter stated, referring to the House hearing a week earlier. The letter also claimed that including the comment in the FAA release about the fines from the agency’s chief counsel—who, unlike the FAA administrator, is a political appointee—is “highly irregular, and perhaps unprecedented.”
Part 450 concerns
“The fact that AST was unable to timely process these minor updates underscores systemic challenges at AST,” SpaceX noted in its letter, voicing a theme throughout the industry about launch licensing.
At the earlier House hearing, both members and witnesses raised concerns about the FAA’s ability to keep up with a growing launch industry while also navigating a transition to a new set of launch licensing regulations called Part 450. Those regulations, enacted in early 2021, were intended to streamline the licensing process and provide launch companies with more flexibility.
Companies, though, say they are struggling to adapt to Part 450. “The way it is being implemented today has caused severe licensing delays, confusion and is jeopardizing our long-held leadership position,” said Dave Cavossa, one of the witnesses at the hearing. He is president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, an industry group whose members include several launch companies.
That implementation, he said, includes pre-application reviews that can get companies “stuck in an endless back-and-forth process” that can last for years, as well as missing advisory circulars from the FAA intended to help companies with aspects of the licensing process.
“We have a licensing regime with a lack of certainty, a lack of transparency, and significant delays,” said Pamela Meredith, chair of the space law practice group at KMA Zuckert LLC and another witness at the hearing.
| “We have a licensing regime with a lack of certainty, a lack of transparency, and significant delays,” said Meredith. |
Members of both parties at the hearing said they were worried about how implementation of Part 450 was going, including concerns it would affect NASA’s Artemis lunar exploration effort, which will use commercial vehicles like Starship that will require AST licensing. “I fear at this rate the [Chinese] Communist Party will launch taikonauts to the Moon while US industry remains tethered to Earth with red tape,” said the subcommittee’s chairman, Rep. Brian Babin (R-TX).
Coleman was effectively the only person at the hearing defending the current licensing process. The agency was working on new advisory circulars, he said, and budget increases had allowed his office to hire more people for licensing work. The FAA was also creating an industry panel known as an aerospace rulemaking committee that will offer recommendations on ways to improve the Part 450 licensing process.
However, he admitted the transition to Part 450 was going slowly. Only six of about 30 licenses had moved from existing regulations to Part 450, a move the others need to make by March 2026. “I will say that March 2026, at the moment, looks very challenging,” he acknowledged.
AST’s Murray said the next day that while Part 450 will need adjustments, it does not need “substantial” modifications. “It’s not a perfect rule. No rules are perfect. We’re very open to input that the industry has. That said, it’s not broken, either.”
Industry is not so sure about that conclusion. At the House hearing, Mike French, vice-chair of the Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee, said his committee had provided recommendations to the FAA on ways to improve Part 450. That included expanding the 180-day time period the FAA has to evaluate a completed license application to include some parts of the pre-application process as well as allowing companies to use existing legacy regulations for cases where there are no advisory circulars for the new regulations. However, it was not clear when, or if, those recommendations would be taken up by the FAA.
In the meantime, companies are muddling through the current launch licensing regulations that, for the time being, are keeping one Starship on its launch pad.
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