FAA to now require that reentry spacecraft get landing license before launch
We’re here to help you! The FAA is now going to require that any company planning to launch a payload or spacecraft into orbit to get both its launch and landing licenses before launch, in order to avoid the situation that occurred last year when Varda launched its capsule and then had difficulties getting its landing license approved due to red-tape confusion between government agencies.
In a notice published in the Federal Register April 17, the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation announced it will no longer approve the launch of spacecraft designed to reenter unless they already have a reentry license. The office said that it will, going forward, check that a spacecraft designed to return to Earth has a reentry license as part of the standard payload review process.
In the notice, the FAA said that decision was linked to safety concerns of allowing spacecraft to launch without approvals to return. “Unlike typical payloads designed to operate in outer space, a reentry vehicle has primary components that are designed to withstand reentry substantially intact and therefore have a near-guaranteed ground impact as a result of either a controlled reentry or a random reentry,” it states.
While this seems to fall directly under the FAA’s basic authority, to make sure launches and landings pose no risk to the general public, I guarantee it is also going to slow the growth of the new space manufacture industry. I fear that with time approvals will be delayed, some so much that companies will go bankrupt waiting for approval. The FAA will never be able to guarantee perfection in this matter, and as bureaucrats tend to be cautious, expect it to increasingly oppose re-entries by new companies.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
We’re here to help you! The FAA is now going to require that any company planning to launch a payload or spacecraft into orbit to get both its launch and landing licenses before launch, in order to avoid the situation that occurred last year when Varda launched its capsule and then had difficulties getting its landing license approved due to red-tape confusion between government agencies.
In a notice published in the Federal Register April 17, the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation announced it will no longer approve the launch of spacecraft designed to reenter unless they already have a reentry license. The office said that it will, going forward, check that a spacecraft designed to return to Earth has a reentry license as part of the standard payload review process.
In the notice, the FAA said that decision was linked to safety concerns of allowing spacecraft to launch without approvals to return. “Unlike typical payloads designed to operate in outer space, a reentry vehicle has primary components that are designed to withstand reentry substantially intact and therefore have a near-guaranteed ground impact as a result of either a controlled reentry or a random reentry,” it states.
While this seems to fall directly under the FAA’s basic authority, to make sure launches and landings pose no risk to the general public, I guarantee it is also going to slow the growth of the new space manufacture industry. I fear that with time approvals will be delayed, some so much that companies will go bankrupt waiting for approval. The FAA will never be able to guarantee perfection in this matter, and as bureaucrats tend to be cautious, expect it to increasingly oppose re-entries by new companies.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
The FAA’s motto: “we’re not happy until you’re not happy”
Well at least they finally acknowledge that a landing license should be part of any launch license.
Even if a launch does not have a re-entry capsule of some kind they do have stages that will come back down.
It would be nice to know those are planned for.
They need to focus on the aviation products of Boeing-Yutani
Having extensively hindered the aviation industry, the world’s civil aviation regulators are turning to new fields to hinder – space and even R/C model aircraft.
Robert wrote: “The FAA is now going to require that any company planning to launch a payload or spacecraft into orbit to get both its launch and landing licenses before launch, in order to avoid the situation that occurred last year when Varda launched its capsule and then had difficulties getting its landing license approved due to red-tape confusion between government agencies.”
Well, that should solve the red-tape issue. Once again, the FAA sees an issue and creates a fix for it with a bureaucratic equivalent of a bandaid.
The problem is not getting the payload out of orbit safely. If a license cannot be obtained for a land landing, the payload can always be safely reentered in the Pacific, just as is done with spent boosters and spent satellites. Safe disposal is not the issue.
The problem is that the regulators just cannot handle their jobs. We have/had a government of the people, by the people, for the people, but the bureaucrats have forgotten that basic American tenet. They behave as though their services are for their own benefit, not for the benefit of We the People.
NASA was turned into a bureaucracy rather than an innovative research and development agency, which is the reason why SpaceX has a relatively inexpensive plan for going to Mars and creating a colony and NASA had an unaffordable plan just to put boots on Mars’s soil. NASA became a toy for presidents and Congresses to play with in their spare time. It became a political tool rather than a tool for American innovation. This is the reason why space manufacturing is only now becoming an industry instead of being developed half a century ago.
Commercial space is booming in ways similar to new industries on the ground, but this boom takes the glory off of government’s toy, NASA, and puts it onto We the People — where is should be. In a free market country, like the USA, this is where space commerce should have been from the beginning, but for some reason, government in the 1960s took complete control of space activities and only allowed the telecommunication industry to operate in space. Maybe the bureaucrats thought that was a mistake and shut out all the other industries, but whatever the reason, commercial space was delayed at least four decades, and probably five.
It seems that the FAA and other government agencies are still trying to control commerce in space, not regulate it. They just don’t want to admit that they work for us, not the other way around.
Great way to hinder SpaceX. Now every booster and fairing will require a landing permit. For every launch. No matter where it comes down to on this planet. But Bob Zee and I are just full of conspiracy theories, right? That will never happen, right? So much for the idea that launches will become like airliners taking of from the local airport……
Most of you are old enough to think of the tune this would go well with…
(Spoken)
These are the times that thy men’s souls
In the course of our nations history the people have rallied bravely whenever the rights of men have been threatened.
Today a new crisis has arisen
The Federal Aeronautics Administration, better known as the FAA is attempting to levy a burdensome reg on the population in the form of a landing license from orbit
… this could happen to you!
(Sung)
So let me tell you the story of a man named Robert on a tragic and fateful day.
He put his (launch) license in his pocket, kissed his wife and family and
went to fly away.
Well did he ever return?
No he never returned! and his fate is still unlearned!
He may fly forever in the skies above
He’s the man who never returned.
Robert handed his pass to a man named Elon
and boarded a re-useable tube.
When he tried to de-orbit the FAA told him
“One more nickel”
Robert couldn’t come to Earth again
Well did he ever return?
No he never returned! and his fate is still unlearned!
(poor old Robert)
He may fly forever in the skies above
He’s the man who never returned.
Now all day long Robert rides in orbit
thinking what will become of me?
How can I go caving or see my wife and family
when I’m stuck in a can you see?
Well did he ever return?
No he never returned! and his fate is still unlearned!
He may fly forever in the skies above
He’s the man who never returned.
Robert’s wife goes down to the Chica station
every day at quarter past two
and to the daily freight flight she hands up sandwich as a
Falcon rumbles up too!
Well did he ever return?
No he never returned! and his fate is still unlearned!
He may fly above us in an orbit forever
He’s the man who never returned.
Now you citizens of America don’t you think its a scandal
how the people have to pay and pay!
Fight the Reg increase!
Vote for Donald John Trump!
Let Robert return to Earth again!
Or else our rights won’t return!
No our rights won’t return!
and we’ll have to pay and pay.
Robert may fly forever o’re skies above
Let Robert return to earth again!
Well done Chris. I’m old enough to remember the Kingston Trio singing that.
It’ was written for the 1949 Boston Mayoral election. The Good Government candidate (Boston was more corrupt than Hudson County, NJ, which calls Chicago, “a bunch of amateurs”). hired some songs writer, then a band to play the song over a loud speaker on a truck cruising the streets. Boston MBTA’s automated fare card is called a “Charlie Card”
“The song, based on a much older version called “The Ship That Never Returned” (or its railroad successor, “Wreck of the Old 97”), was composed in 1949 as part of the election campaign of Walter A. O’Brien, a Progressive Party candidate for Boston mayor. O’Brien was unable to afford radio advertisements, so he enlisted local folk singers to write and sing songs from a touring truck with a loudspeaker (he was later fined $10 for “disturbing the peace”).
One of O’Brien’s major campaign planks was to lower the price of riding the subway by removing the complicated fare structure involving exit fares—so complicated that at one point it required a nine-page explanatory booklet. The Progressive Party had opposed the public buyout of Boston’s streetcar system, which it argued enriched the previous private ownership and was followed by higher fares to city residents. In the Kingston Trio recording, the name “Walter A. O’Brien” was changed to “George O’Brien”, apparently to avoid risking protests that had hit an earlier recording, when the song was seen as celebrating a socialist politician”