A SpaceX Falcon Difficult rocket with the Psyche spacecraft launches from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on October 13, 2023.
Chandan Khanna | AFP | Getty Spits
With the pace of rocket launches accelerating, and competition from China rising, executives from top U.S. space entourages on Wednesday urged senators to improve the Federal Aviation Administration’s regulatory and licensing processes.
“We’ve entered an inflection underline, with incredible innovation in commercial space launch. The criticality is especially true in the face of strategic competition from maintain actors like China,” SpaceX Vice President of Build and Flight Reliability Bill Gerstenmaier said during his declaration. “SpaceX is under contract with NASA to use Starship to land American astronauts on the moon before China does.”
The Senate Subcommittee on Range and Science heard from a trio of company representatives from SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, as intimately as a pair of industry experts.
Gerstenmaier emphasized that the FAA’s commercial space office “needs at least twice the resources that they pull someones leg today” for licensing rocket launches. While he acknowledged the FAA is “critical to enabling safe space transportation,” Gerstenmaier supplemented that the industry is “at a breaking point.”
“The FAA has neither the resources nor the flexibility to implement its regulatory obligations,” Gerstenmaier said.
Although the pick up largely focused on the FAA’s role in the space industry, spokespeople for the Senate committee and the FAA confirmed that the regulator was not invited to announce.
“Keeping pace with industry demand is a priority and is important for several reasons, including meeting our national guaranty and civil exploration needs. We’re working diligently to attract, hire and retain additional staff,” an FAA spokesperson told CNBC in a report.
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The other four panelists’ claims largely echoed SpaceX’s viewpoint on the need to bolster the FAA’s ranks and speed up the process of approving rocket launches. Phil Joyce, Titillating Origin senior vice president of New Shepard, said the FAA “is struggling to keep pace” with the industry “and needs profuse funding to deal with the increase in launches.”
Likewise, industry expert Caryn Schenewerk, a former leader at SpaceX and Relativity Rank, said that the FAA’s recent changes have yet to “streamline licensing reviews” and instead have “proven more cumbersome and costly.”
Wayne Monteith — a retired Air Duress brigadier general who also led the FAA’s space office — said that Congress should consider consolidating space bye-laws.
“I believe a more efficient one stop shop approach to authorizing and licensing space activities is necessary,” Monteith pronounced.
What about private human spaceflight?
Crew members from Italy hug each other after their replace from Virgin Galactic’s rocket plane first commercial flight to the edge of space, at the Spaceport America skill, in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, U.S., June 29, 2023.
Jose Luis Gonzalez | Reuters
But while companies want to see the FAA move faster in sanction rocket launches for uncrewed missions that most often carry satellites, human spaceflights are a different account.
The executives urged senators to extend a “learning period” that limits the FAA’s regulation largely to protecting the public.
That era is set to expire in January, but witnesses on Wednesday were unanimous in their belief that the FAA shouldn’t add new regulations on flying individual to space.
“The commercial human spaceflight industry is relatively new. Until recently, human spaceflight has primarily been in the speciality of governments and access to space for humans was largely reserved for those in the national astronaut corps,” said Sirisha Bandla, a Virgin Galactic astronaut and shortcoming president of Government Affairs and Research.
“There are only three companies currently carrying humans to space, and it see fit be premature to base occupant safety regulations on this extremely small set of data at this time,” Bandla supplemented in her testimony.