Permission to launch
By Jonathan O'Callaghan|January 2025
The U.S. space industry wants regulatory changes that would speed up the licensing of launch and reentry, as FAA delays mount. With Elon Musk’s new government advisory role possibly spelling a monumental shakeup, Jonathan O’Callaghan investigates why licensing takes so long and the possible solutions.
For almost six months, a spacecraft operated by Varda Space Industries of California was stuck in orbit. Their washing-machine-sized uncrewed capsule, Winnebago-1, was launched in June 2023 on a mission to make a form of the drug ritonavir, used to treat HIV/AIDS. The crystalline drug and control samples would be returned in the capsule under a parachute, hopefully demonstrating that a drug created in space could be returned to Earth without its chemical structure being ruined.
Varda needed permission from FAA to attempt the reentry. Months into the mission, it had still not received its license.
“There was no law or regulation that said you can’t launch without your reentry license,” says William Bruey, Varda’s CEO, so the company had launched the spacecraft in the hope the license would arrive in good time. Initially targeting a reentry in September 2023, however, Winnebago-1 remained stranded until Feb. 14, 2024, when the license arrived. One week later, it touched down in the Utah desert. Analysis showed that the drug’s structure indeed remained stable.
Prompted in part by this saga, FAA two months later posted a notice in the U.S. Federal Register that, going forward, reentry vehicles must have a reentry license before they are launched.
The situation highlights current complaints with FAA’s lengthy launch and reentry licensing process. “The regulations are 100% throttling humanity’s expansion into the cosmos,” says Bruey. “It took us two and a half years to build a spacecraft that got into space, and almost as long to get the license.”
Some in the industry view the oversight as heavy handed, and they fear it could quell innovation. Of particular concern is China.
“The only things holding the Chinese back are math and physics,” says Dave Cavossa, president of the Commercial Space Federation in Washington, D.C. “Our leadership in space is at risk. The Chinese government doesn’t take this long to license launches.”
At least one congressional ally has taken note. “Inefficiencies in our launch licensing process cause me great concern,” U.S. Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas) said at a subcommittee hearing of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology in September, which I watched online. He added that applications were “taking years to complete” and that many licenses were “still under review, impacting launch schedules and NASA missions.”
SpaceX and its CEO, Elon Musk, have been particularly vocal about the effect that regulatory delays are having on the rapid development of its Starship- Super Heavy combination. In a statement posted on its website in September, SpaceX called some of the issues raised in FAA’s licensing process “patently absurd.” The same day, Musk made this post on the social media site X: “We will never get humanity to Mars if this continues.”
Others point to a need for the government to be vigilant about safety and mindful of impacts on the environment as Musk and others expand our economy and perhaps society into space.
“It’s a delicate balance,” says Michelle Hanlon, executive director of the Center for Air and Space Law at the University of Mississippi’s School of Law. She sees complex factors at play, particularly for Starship, the effects of which on the local environment are still being studied. With SpaceX and others pushing for faster regulation, and environmental groups raising the alarm, the situation could be at a tipping point — one that might be influenced by Musk’s advisory role to the incoming Trump administration to help improve government inefficiency.
The biggest challenge facing FAA right now is the rapid increase in space activities, says Wayne Monteith, who led the Office of Commercial Space Transportation from 2019 to 2022.
“The launch cadence has got significantly greater, and there’s a diversity of launch vehicles that all have to be licensed,” he says. “And now there’s an increase in requests for reentry licenses too. FAA has not been able to keep pace with the increased demand.”
How FAA came to be responsible for regulating launch and reentry dates back decades. In 1982, Deke Slayton, one of NASA’s Mercury Seven astronauts, started the company Space Services Ltd. to launch rockets.
“They started checking who they needed to talk to to get permission,” says George Nield, who was head of the Office of Commercial Space Transportation from 2008 to 2018, “and it turned out there were like 16 different agencies that each wanted to weigh in.”
To take over those functions, in 1984, President Ronald Reagan and Congress established the Office of Commercial Space Transportation, known as AST for its designation within the Department of Transportation office code. In 1995, the office was moved into FAA.
“It’s been that way ever since,” says Nield.
For years, that process was adequate because rocket launches were few and far between. In 1995, for example, there were a little over 20 successful orbital launches in the U.S. That has all changed in 15 years, and for one main reason.
“Let’s just say it out loud: SpaceX,” says Hanlon. The company has transformed U.S. launch with its partially reusable Falcon rockets and, soon, Starships. When I completed this article in mid-December, 127 Falcon 9 launches had been conducted in 2024, an average of two a week, and other companies are hoping to follow suit.
“It’s not just SpaceX,” says Hanlon. “Blue Origin, Rocket Lab — this reliance on space assets is just going to grow. Our civilization is just going to need it more and more.”
Many of these companies have lofty ambitions. Blue Origin is aiming for a launch every two weeks by 2026, Rocket Lab a launch a week and SpaceX eventually three Starship launches per day, Musk said in 2022 at the company’s Starbase launch site in Boca Chica, Texas.
FAA’s regulatory framework, once tasked with overseeing just a couple dozen launches a year, now faces a revitalized industry. In an attempt to deal with this new reality, FAA introduced a new regulatory framework in 2021, Part 450, that was to meant to streamline the licensing process. [See below: “What is Part 450?”] But the implementation has gone “not well,” says Monteith, with some applications taking years to complete.
“There’s still ambiguity in what it takes to meet the requirements,” he says. FAA declined to make someone available for an interview but responded to questions via email, saying it “strives to make license determinations in a shorter amount of time.”
The agency was given little time to implement this sweeping licensing change after being directed to do so by the first Trump administration’s Space Policy Directive-2 in 2018, says Monteith, who led the Office of Commercial Space Transportation during the transition to Part 450.
“The review process was truncated significantly,” he says. “We were not able to collaborate with industry as much as would have been beneficial.”
The end result? Regulations that solve some issues but hamper others. FAA can now license launches in batches, meaning that multiple Starship flights, for example, can be approved without having to individually license each one.
“The idea is you’re creating a class of rockets,” says Paul Stimers, an attorney and lead of the space policy team at the Holland & Knight law firm in Washington, D.C. That begins to align space launch more closely with aviation, in which the design of a passenger jet is approved for flight but each aircraft doesn’t need a license for takeoff.
“There’s no other vehicle that we regulate by the ride,” says Stimers. “It really doesn’t make sense for us to continue to do it with rockets.”
The licensing process can still be painstakingly slow. FAA has 180 days to respond to an application, but the initial discourse that takes place between the agency and a company via email, phone and in person before the application is submitted must also be considered.
“That is what is starting to take most of the time,” says Stimers.
That being said, not everyone thinks the licensing rules need a grand overhaul. Justin Fiaschetti, CEO of the California reentry company Inversion, which received a reentry license to return a capsule under Part 450 in October, says he found the whole process straightforward. “We started the process about 18 months prior,” he says, with plenty of time for the development of their spacecraft. “It was a pretty smooth process. We didn’t run into any substantial hurdles.”
Inversion ultimately wants to have vehicles reentering the atmosphere multiple times per day. “There’s nothing stopping that right now,”Flaschetti says. “From our perspective, as long as you have the experience and foresight to know you’re going to need regulatory approval, it’s pretty straightforward.”
While bemoaned by some, FAA’s regulations exist for a reason, says Billy Nolen, who was FAA’s acting administrator from 2022 to 2023. “It is first and foremost about safety,” he says, including “the safety of people on the ground, environmental protections and debris fields.”
Nolen didn’t reference any specific companies, but for others, Starship leaps to mind. We “don’t know what the impact is” of Starship on the surrounding environment yet, says Eric Roesch, a U.S.-based environmental compliance and policy expert.
Each rocket consists of a Super Heavy booster with a Starship spacecraft atop it. The design is the largest ever launched, with double the thrust of NASA’s own behemothic rocket, the Space Launch System. To achieve this thrust, the stages are filled with a combined 4,600 tons of liquid methane and liquid oxygen kept at cryogenic temperatures.
The concern is that one could explode on the pad or just above it. A study, “Investigating the Explosive Hazard of Liquid Oxygen-Liquefied Natural Gas Rocket Propellant,” published by the NASA Engineering and Safety Center in 2023, described the explosive potential of its mixture, which is different from the kerosene-oxygen combination of most previous rockets. It found that even small amounts of methane-oxygen “have shown a broad detonable range with yields greater than that of TNT” but noted that “very little explosive data is currently available.” Testing is underway to investigate the issue.
Starships are currently launched from Starbase, which is just a few kilometers from nearby residences that are evacuated on launch days. Plans call for eventually launching Starships from Cape Canaveral in Florida and recovering them there as part of NASA’s Artemis program to return to the moon.
Wayne Eleazer, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel, says the possible explosive potential yield of the rocket if something were to go wrong is “beyond anything else that anybody is operating,” with possible risks for local infrastructure and even life.
“When the rocket is on the pad, it’s a giant bomb,” says Abhi Tripathi, an aerospace engineer at the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley and a former mission director at SpaceX.
One aspect of Starship that has been studied is the noise the vehicle produces when it is launched and by the large Super Heavy booster on its return — something SpaceX demonstrated for the first time in October on the fifth test flight by catching Super Heavy in the “chopstick” arms of the launch tower.
Kent Gee, a professor of physics from Brigham Young University in Utah, has been studying Starship’s noise. For the fifth Starship flight, he monitored the noise at various distances by placing laboratory-quality microphones inside foam windscreens positioned 10 to 35 kilometers from the pad.
“It was the equivalent of four to six SLS launches, or at least 10 Falcon 9 launches,” he says. “It produces more acoustical energy than any other rocket that’s ever flown.”
The impact of that sound blast on the local environment is still an open question. “You’re starting to approach levels that are associated with an elevated risk of structural damage,” Gee says. “If you were close enough, there’s a potential for hearing loss.”
The returning booster also produces a sonic boom over land as it decelerates through the sound barrier, something that the Concorde airliners were famously not allowed to do.
While Starship launches are few and far between for now, the plan for multiple launches per day has not gone over well in some quarters. “People don’t want to have an Earth-shattering sonic boom every week for the rest of their life,” says Roesch. “They will lose their minds.”
Other environmental issues abound, including about the effects of the water deluge system used by SpaceX to dampen the heat of the Super Heavy engines. During liftoff, 1.6 million liters of water are shot under the base of the booster. SpaceX said in a post on X in August that this deluge system uses “potable (drinking) water” and therefore doesn’t impact the local environment, but the Environmental Protection Agency disagrees and fined the company $148,378 in September for discharging wastewater without a permit.
Roesch strongly disagrees with SpaceX. He says even drinking water can contain contaminants such as chlorine that are harmful to natural waters like the wetlands at Boca Chica.
“If you buy a fish and put it into an aquarium with tap water, it’ll die,” he cautions.
SpaceX is also facing ongoing legal action from a consortium of environmental groups over the impact of Starship on the local environment, including the American Bird Conservancy, based in Virginia, which told me in an emailed response to questions about Starbase that it was “deeply concerned about the facility’s impacts on wildlife.” Jared Margolis, senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity in Arizona and another plaintiff on the legal claim, adds that there are other effects on the local population, including the inability of the local Carrizo/Comecrudo tribe to access sacred lands during Starship launch activities when closures are in place.
SpaceX did not respond to multiple requests for comment via email and phone.
These issues with Starship alone illustrate the challenges facing FAA, which must consider complex environmental impacts like these, as well as impacts on human life, in any launch or reentry license it grants. Hanlon cites an infamous launch in China in 1996, in which a rocket veered off course and crashed into a nearby village, reportedly killing hundreds of people.
“We do not want to turn into that,” she says.
Without disregarding safety and the environment, there are potential solutions to the lengthy licensing process. “I believe FAA needs more staff,” says Monteith, something that SpaceX seemingly agrees with, based on a letter the company sent to the chairs and ranking members of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology and Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.
“It has been clear for some time that AST [FAA’s Commercial Space Transportation Office] lacks the resources to timely review licensing materials,” SpaceX wrote in the letter, which it also posted on X.
Currently, FAA has some 40,000 people, but only “a little over 100 work on space,” says Nield, the former head of the Commercial Space Transportation Office. Increasing that number could help address regulatory queries and issues more adeptly and issue licenses more quickly.
Funding increases would help too. Of FAA’s $12.7 billion operating budget in fiscal 2024, $42 million went toward space, or about 0.3% of the total budget. “You could double those numbers and it wouldn’t show up as more than a rounding error,” says Nield. “But that could make a huge difference in terms of responsiveness and having enough people to cover all the launches and companies.”
Another option would be to tweak FAA’s role in licensing launch and reentry. “More resources can help, but there’s other things like just the placement of the Office of Commercial Space Transportation in the organizational structure that could make a huge difference,” says Nield. “I’d love to see that kind of option considered.”
Perhaps its role could even be removed entirely. “A lot of policymakers say everything should go to the Department of Commerce,” notes Hanlon.
And then there’s the Musk role in the new presidential administration. He and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy have agreed to head a planned Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, a nod to a cryptocurrency of the same name. As the idea stands, DOGE would be an advisory entity, not a new department in the federal government. Its aim will be to curb government spending, and while Musk’s exact intent is unknown, FAA could be an entity firmly in his sights — despite SpaceX suggesting the agency needed more funding, not less.
Depending on how far Musk is allowed to go, there could be wholesale changes. “I think it’s going to be open season on all regulations,” says Tripathi. “You’re going to see others take advantage of this under the new administration.”
All eyes will be on whether Musk agrees.
What is part 450?
Part 450 is FAA’s attempt to streamline how it regulates launch and reentry vehicles. Prior to its introduction in 2021, the licensing process was addressed under several different policies within FAA. “It changed everything,” says Brian Weeden of the Virginia-based Aerospace Corporation, the federally funded research and development center where he is a systems director in the Center for Space Policy and Strategy.
Weeden gives an example of getting a license to launch from multiple locations. “Before this reform, you would need two different licenses,” he says. “Now, you don’t need to do that.”
The reform also switched FAA from licensing launches on a prescriptive basis — that is, telling companies how they should achieve launch and reentry — and moving to a performance-based approach. “The regulations describe what the goal is, and how to meet that goal is left up to the licensee,” says Weeden. “That was something requested by industry.”
However, Part 450 is a long policy — 700 pages as a PDF — with many topics to be addressed by companies applying for a license. That can take time, years for some applicants, while modifications to existing licenses can also take months or more.
At the end of the process, including back and forth with FAA to address any queries (sometimes merely by email or phone), a company will get its license if it has satisfied all the requests. That final license can be short, but still grueling to obtain.
“Ours was seven pages,” says William Bruey, CEO of Varda Space Industries. “It’s up on the refrigerator.” — Jonathan O’Callaghan
