SpaceX and its competitors are urging regulators to stop throttling innovation with burdensome and outdated regulations.
When Dale Skran drives by the airport near his New Jersey home, he can’t help but notice the “conga line of planes” taking off and landing: “It’s just zoom, zoom, zoom,” he said. “Every few minutes a big jet lands and there’s multiple runways.”
A leader at the National Space Society, Skran sees a similar future for space travel.
There were 148 licensed commercial space operations in fiscal 2024; that’s about one launch every two-and-a-half days, a more than 900 percent increase over a decade, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.
But to continue leading in space, the United States needs to move faster. Americans, Skran said, need to “get their minds around a launch an hour.” Eventually more.
“People need to stop clutching their pearls about these rockets,” he said.
Advocates for space exploration like Skran have great expectations for the emerging commercial space industry: space hotels to accommodate the growing space tourism industry are already in the works; medical firms are seeing promise in growing human organs and developing artificial retinas in a microgravity environment.
In the coming years, rockets could deliver important packages around the globe at supersonic speeds. Further down the road, space advocates are eyeing outposts on the moon and Mars, space mining, space-based solar panels harvesting clean energy and transmitting it back to Earth, solar shades cooling the planet, and much more.
“There’s a lot of room to grow,” said Skran, a senior vice president of the Space Society, a nonprofit educational group that advocates for the exploration, development, and settlement of space. “Our position is: space is to live, work, and play. It’s for everybody.”
Before people can start shopping for real estate on Mars, though, the industry and the technology behind it need to catch up to their dreams.
But industry leaders and space advocates who spoke to National Review said the development of the American commercial space industry and the ability to continue leading the race into space is being hampered by an unnecessarily cumbersome regulatory regime that’s too rigid, too confusing, discouraging of innovation, plagued by inter-agency turf battles, and too often politically driven.
SpaceX chief Elon Musk, who is slated to co-lead President-elect Donald Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency, recently vowed to sue the FAA for “regulatory overreach,” and alleged that the industry’s regulation amounts to “one crazy thing after another.” He’s complained that SpaceX was even required to run analyses to determine if one of their rockets might hit a shark or a whale when landing in the ocean.
“I’m like, it’s a big ocean, you know,” he said during a recent presentation. “There’s a lot of sharks. It’s not impossible, but it’s very unlikely.”
Concerns about overregulation in the U.S. come as China is greatly accelerating its capabilities in space, including developing anti-satellite weapons and utilizing tactics to jam GPS signals and engage in cyberattacks.
It was less than a decade ago, in 2015, that China officially designated space as a new domain of warfare. U.S. Space Force chief General B. Chance Saltzman recently told Politico that China’s space capabilities are advancing at a “mind-boggling” pace.
“Getting to the moon, getting to Mars, understanding our universe, and winning the competition in space is really important for us as a country,” said Senator Eric Schmitt (R., Mo.), ranking member of the Space and Science Subcommittee. “I think the 21st Century will be judged by that, who wins this great competition with China.”
Dave Cavossa, president of the Commercial Space Federation, which represents about 75 space-industry firms, said that with the U.S. in the lead, space has remained peaceful.
“Any country can go up there today and launch a commercial satellite and use frequencies and provide a service to their people and explore the moon if they have the money and the capability,” he told National Review.
Cavossa said the threat that an unfriendly government — potentially Russia, but more likely China — could overtake the U.S. in space is “number one on my list of concerns.”
“If we lose the high ground in space,” he said, “there is a threat that in the future we won’t be able to do whatever we need to do, that space will not be the place for free access.”
While people around the world have grown increasingly dependent on technologies derived from space — cell phones, GPS, the internet, weather forecasting tools, and more — Cavossa contends that most Americans don’t really understand how much space is intertwined with their daily lives.
“A day without space,” he said, “is a really bad day for the United States as a whole.”
Starships Are Meant to Fly
In mid-October, on the fifth test flight of its powerful Starship, SpaceX accomplished an engineering feat: launching from the company’s facility in Boca Chica, Texas, the rocket’s first-stage booster sent Starship into space, and then returned from an altitude of about 40 miles back to the launch pad, where it was caught with a pair of mechanical arms in a so-called “chopstick” maneuver.
SpaceX engineers on the ground burst out in applause at what they accomplished.
But that accomplishment and the celebration were preceded by months of regulatory delays that infuriated Musk.
His frustrations grew in September when the FAA slapped SpaceX with $633,009 in civil penalties related to two previous launches of the company’s Falcon 9 rockets, penalties the company alleged were due to disagreements over paperwork.
Musk accused the FAA of “lawfare” and engaging in “improper, politically motivated behavior.”
“SpaceX will be filing suit against the FAA for regulatory overreach,” he wrote on X.
In a September post on its website — Starships are meant to fly — SpaceX leaders took aim at the regulatory regime they claimed too often keeps their rockets grounded.
“Starships need to fly. The more we fly safely, the faster we learn; the faster we learn, the sooner we realize full and rapid rocket reuse,” the post read. “Unfortunately, we continue to be stuck in a reality where it takes longer to do the government paperwork to license a rocket launch than it does to design and build the actual hardware.”
SpaceX leaders said it is “understandable” that a unique operation like theirs would require additional licensing time. But “instead of focusing resources on critical safety analysis and collaborating on rational safeguards to protect both the public and the environment,” they wrote, “the licensing process has been repeatedly derailed by issues ranging from the frivolous to the patently absurd.”
When Musk complained that he could produce new hardware faster than the government could approve it, “he’s not wrong,” said Skran with the National Space Society.
“One problem,” he said, “seems to be a kind of serialized bureaucracy where the FAA looks at something and then after a couple of months they call the Fish and Wildlife Service, and they look at it for a couple of months. Well, now you’re starting to talk about three, four, five, six months. That really is the development cycle for a lot of engineering things.”
That kind of foot-dragging, whether intentional or not, is harmful to innovation, he said.
“You can sit down in a room in D.C. and destroy a company by strictly enforcing regulations; just sort of a Kafkaesque, your answer’s never right, more information is always needed,” Skran said. “Companies can’t withstand that.”
“There is a real issue here where the FAA is not set up for the pace at which things are starting to move,” he said.
Part 450 Regs: ‘A Huge Drag on the Industry’
The primary regulator of the commercial space industry is the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation (it’s often referred to as AST, after the office’s head, the Associate Administrator for Commercial Space Transportation).
The FAA is responsible for issuing commercial space licenses, including the authority to launch and return to Earth. Licensure requires a bevy of analyses and assessments, according to the FAA website, including flight and ground hazard analyses, a trajectory analysis, a population exposure analysis, computer system assessments, work shift and rest requirements, and space debris mitigation.
There are also environmental reviews, financial reviews, and safety reviews in consultation with the Department of Defense, the Department of State, and NASA.
The biggest concern that many space advocates and industry insiders have with the current licensing regime involve what are known as the FAA’s Part 450 regulations, which were created in 2020 to streamline the commercial licensing process.
“The regulation was well-intentioned,” Cavossa said. “But the implementation of it has become a huge drag on the industry.”
Testifying before Congress in September, Cavossa said defects of the Part 450 regulations were “evident from Day One.” The new regulations, he said, are unclear, lack clarity of intent, are subject to often conflicting interpretations, and constrain innovation.
As a result, many companies are choosing to be licensed through the previous regulatory regime, which is congressionally mandated to go away by 2026.
While commercial space companies are now launching every two or three days, on average, “a vast majority of those are licensed through the old mechanism, not through 450,” Cavossa told National Review. “If they were launched through 450, we would not be launching every two days.”
Jane Kinney, president of the Association of Commercial Space Professionals, said that under the current regulations, “any small change about a mission or a launch, the minutest detail, kicks it really back to the beginning of the application process.” That’s particularly problematic during a project’s experimental phase, when changes are often necessary.
Kinney said the FAA needs to move faster on issuing industry advisories.
To do that, the FAA and the Office of Commercial Space Transportation need to staff up, Cavossa said, but the FAA’s bureaucratic hiring process can often take months, leading qualified applicants to look elsewhere.
Kinney suggested policy changes to make it easier for international students studying space to stay and work in the U.S. after graduation could help the FAA fill its ranks.
“We’re losing some of the best and brightest talent that we’re educating and then sending back home to develop their programs,” she said.
Some space advocates also recommend moving the Office of Commercial Space Transportation out from under the FAA to report directly to the transportation secretary.
“You want somebody in charge who can vigorously advocate for space ports and space regulations and the rights of rocket people to launch, and all of that, without being subordinate to aircraft people,” Skran said.
Some space advocates also question whether the FAA and the Office of Commercial Transportation should even be the primary regulator of the industry — some would like the Office of Space Commerce in the Department of Commerce to be the go-to agency.
Regardless of which agency is ultimately the commercial space industry’s primary regulatory body, the argument over where the line is between necessary and overly burdensome regulations “has been happening forever,” said Stephen Dedmon, who teachers space law at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida said
“That line is going to be subjective,” he said.
Bureaucratic Turf Battles
While the FAA’s space office is the commercial space industry’s primary licensing body, several other federal agencies, including the Federal Communications Commission, also have their hands in the space pie. Skran said that those agencies are increasingly flexing their muscles and claiming turf.
“The bureaucracies are competing to control space. That’s literally what’s going on,” he said. “Who’s going to make regulations? Will it be the FAA, the FCC, some other group?”
The FCC licenses the broadcast spectrum for companies launching into space. But it’s also now involved in regulating space debris.
“What does that have to do with the mandate of the FCC? Well, nothing really,” Skran said.
In some cases, Cavossa said, there are duplicative regulations with two agencies “trying to give you a license or thumbs up on the exact same thing, like orbit debris mitigation.”
Cavossa would like one agency regulating commercial space, but noted that breaking up established agency and congressional jurisdictions is easier said than done.
Kinney warned that consolidating regulatory functions into one body could possibly lead to more delays. “It’s good if people have a small piece of the pie, because then they can really focus on that one piece and that’s what they’re responsible for,” she said.
It’s critical, though, for the federal agencies regulating space to “understand the moment that we’re in,” said Schmitt, the Missouri senator. Too often, he said, regulations are made and enforced in “a clumsy way that really does stifle innovation.”
“Really what you see … are agencies that were created decades ago for something else trying to assert their will on a new industry like this, and it’s not helpful,” he said.
In addition to federal regulators, space-launch companies also must work with state and sometimes local agencies, particularly around environmental regulations. Those agencies often have limited or no familiarity with the space industry.
Musk and SpaceX say that in Texas they have a list 200 items long, “including constant monitoring and sampling of the short- and long-term health of local flora and fauna.”
SpaceX has complained that “superfluous” environmental analyses, more so than safety concerns, are driving long launch delays.
“That’s sort of the canary in the coal mine for us, for all the other eight launch companies I represent that are trying to get on that same cadence and get their rockets approved,” Cavossa said. “They’re looking at it and going, ‘Oh man, if SpaceX is dealing with this, we’re all going to have to deal with this, too. We need to fix this now.’”
In an effort to accelerate the buildout of space infrastructure, Cavossa’s federation recommends the incoming Trump administration speed up environmental reviews and categorically exempt some commercial space launch projects from National Environmental Policy Act reviews, as some vital airport projects already are.
The nation’s leaders, he said, have an important high-level decision to make: “Is U.S. leadership in commercial launch important enough that we just have to sort of push forward on this for a number of years and reduce regulations, sort of unleash the industry? Otherwise, it’s going to lose its leadership role to the Chinese or Russians.”
Unleashing American Ingenuity
Cavossa said his federation’s leaders are “very optimistic” about Trump’s new administration. Trump’s first administration, he noted, reinstated the National Space Council after more than two decades of inactivity to align agency interests.
Trump’s first administration, he said, was “great for the commercial space industry and great for America.” Cavossa also said Trump’s nomination of Jared Isaacman to head NASA is a “great sign.” Isaacman, an entrepreneur and pilot who’s traveled to space, is a commercial space businessman and billionaire who “gets it,” Cavossa said.
Dedmon, the Embry-Riddle professor, said that “Trump is all about being the biggest and the best, in every context.” He assumes that will continue to apply to commercial space.
Trump “running on this campaign of sort of being a disrupter against permanent Washington, I think this sort of feeds right into that,” Schmitt said.
Kinney said she is also optimistic about a new Trump administration regarding space exploration and development. “I was very pleased with the first administration and their focus on space,” she said. “You can’t say they didn’t prioritize space.”
While Mike Pence won’t be heading up the space council this go-round, Kinney said she’s hopeful “the same enthusiasm is going to carry into this administration even without the former vice president.”
Most important for the continued development of the commercial space industry is “allowing our American ingenuity to do its thing,” Kinney said.
“We have so many brilliant and smart people here,” she said, “we just want to let that shine and it’s going to bring an amazing space economy and an amazing future.”