Stopgap budget bill includes three-month extension of regulatory “learning-period”
The stopgap 45-day continuing resolution passed by Congress on September 30, 2023 also included a three-month extension of regulatory “learning-period” first established in 2004 and extended several times since then.
Among the provisions in that FAA reauthorization was a three-month extension of the existing restrictions on the FAA’s ability to regulate safety for commercial spaceflight participants. That restriction, often called a “learning period” by the industry, was set to expire Oct. 1 but now runs until Jan. 1.
It must be noted that this so-called limitation on FAA regulation of commercial spaceflight really does not exist any longer, no matter what law Congress passes. The administrative state really runs the show now, and both the FAA and Fish & Wildlife have decided heavy regulations are required, and are imposing such controls over SpaceX’s Superheavy/Starshp test program, while the FAA by itself is imposing strict regulation on Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spacecraft. The result is a slowdown in launches for both, extending months to a year.
It also appears that this heavy regulation is squelching launches of new rockets. Last year four new rocket startups attempted new launches (Astra, ABL, Firefly, Relativity), some making multiple attempts. This year, such test flights have essentially ceased, with only Firefly completing one launch for the military. Worse, two of those companies (Astra and Relativity) have abandoned their rockets entirely, claiming they are building new bigger versions, but one must now wonder.
The long term historical significance of these facts extends far beyond the space industry. Increasingly the unelected bureaucracy in Washington is taking on powers it is not supposed to have, while Congress (which is delegated those powers) increasingly is irrelevant. The shift in power signals a major reshaping of American governance, in a direction that is not good for freedom or the fundamental concepts that established the country and made it a success.
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 stopgap 45-day continuing resolution passed by Congress on September 30, 2023 also included a three-month extension of regulatory “learning-period” first established in 2004 and extended several times since then.
Among the provisions in that FAA reauthorization was a three-month extension of the existing restrictions on the FAA’s ability to regulate safety for commercial spaceflight participants. That restriction, often called a “learning period” by the industry, was set to expire Oct. 1 but now runs until Jan. 1.
It must be noted that this so-called limitation on FAA regulation of commercial spaceflight really does not exist any longer, no matter what law Congress passes. The administrative state really runs the show now, and both the FAA and Fish & Wildlife have decided heavy regulations are required, and are imposing such controls over SpaceX’s Superheavy/Starshp test program, while the FAA by itself is imposing strict regulation on Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spacecraft. The result is a slowdown in launches for both, extending months to a year.
It also appears that this heavy regulation is squelching launches of new rockets. Last year four new rocket startups attempted new launches (Astra, ABL, Firefly, Relativity), some making multiple attempts. This year, such test flights have essentially ceased, with only Firefly completing one launch for the military. Worse, two of those companies (Astra and Relativity) have abandoned their rockets entirely, claiming they are building new bigger versions, but one must now wonder.
The long term historical significance of these facts extends far beyond the space industry. Increasingly the unelected bureaucracy in Washington is taking on powers it is not supposed to have, while Congress (which is delegated those powers) increasingly is irrelevant. The shift in power signals a major reshaping of American governance, in a direction that is not good for freedom or the fundamental concepts that established the country and made it a success.
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
Bob:
I concur with you in general but believe the extra scrutiny being afforded the Blue Origin New Glenn is in fact justified. My reasoning is two fold:
A. Blue Origin considers this a mature system, NOT an experimental vehicle anymore.
B. New Glenn is a MAN RATED vehicle intending to launch with passengers on most every flight. It is in fact nothing more than a most fortunate coincidence that their first stage failure happened to occur on a launch with no passengers aboard.
These circumstances are entirely different at this time for Starship/Super Heavy and other rocketry startups which are openly classified as experimental test flights at this point.
Clearly the regulatory burden should be starkly reduced between these but as it stands under the Biden administration there isn’t.
It makes me wonder if NASA requires a launch license from the FAA for SLS which is insanely planning to man just the second Artemis launch for a trip all the way to the moon using a ship for which the life support system will be flying for the very first time. I’m guessing not, but shame on the FAA if they do and sanction this level of stupidity with a license.
MDN: I am certain that NASA needs an FAA launch license for SLS, but getting one is automatic, and instantanous, as this is a government rocket and it of course must be approved.
Remember, the bottom line in all of this is obtaining and keeping of power. SLS is part of the government power apparatus, so no effort will be made to hinder it. Private rockets however are direct competitors whose success threaten that power, so of course they must be stymied.
The FAA might claim legitimate reasonas for the strict regulations, but what we are seeing not only is unprecedented, it actually violates the language and spirit of that “learning period” exemption, which is supposed to allow new commercial spacecraft/rockets to have great freedom to test and experiment.
MDN: By the way, I think in paragraph B you meant to say “New Shepard,” not “New Glenn.” I mention this just for clarity.
Bob:
I suspect that Congress is irrelevant because they want to be. They’d rather run for orifice than actually do anything.
ps.
my browser keeps trying to misspell words, so I changed it to orifice
Greg M: I agree that this is what Congress wants. This doesn’t change the fact that it signals a fundamental and very bad shift in power, one that is going to do great harm to our nation for decades if not centuries to come.
Bob,
I think I’ll just refer to the GOP. It seems that the Democrats are fine and dandy with asserting their powers.
About all you can do is self-defeating things in response to their refusal to act. For instance, you could stay home and not vote, but only guarantees that the Democrat will win. If you do vote, you get the same thing anyway, but it might be a little slower in coming. ( if we’re lucky)
Greg M: Your comment actually points directly to the real source of the problem: the voters, most especially the Demcratic Party voters who support this corrupt party year after year, even as the evidence piles up showing it has become a power-hungry communist operation with an additional racist agenda.
That party stands in the way of any reform, and instead supports the growth of governmental power at all levels, independent and free from any legal or voter supervision. And because its opposition is weak and divided, the power of the Democrats and the administrative state is free to grow step by step.
All because it has a solid base of about 40% of the voters, who continuously vote blindly and ignorantly and possibly enthusiastically for its agenda.
Bob,
I don’t know what to do about Democrat voters with their anal rectal inversion, but I can go after GOP types who won’t do anything. It may prove to be self-defeating, but maybe it might actually get them to move.
Gaetz is said to be going after McCarthy. I think that is the way to go. Democrats are said to be laughing at McCarthy for a “total surrender” on the CR thing. The GOP gets its back up about Gaetz, but why can’t they get mad at Democrats for once?
Bob:
Good catch. Yes, I meant New Shepherd, not New Glenn. Thanks for sweating the details.
I agree it is a power game and being abused. My point is merely that in the Blue Origin case much closer scrutiny is warranted. Especially given their relatively minimal record of merit to date.and multiple recent and prominent equipment failures which reflect poorly on the company at large, not just one program.
MDN: In the old days, when America was free, Blue Origin would rise and fall without government oversight. No one expected or wanted such a thing. Instead, buyer beware and personal responsibility were the watchwords. All this regulation does is prop up bad companies.
Let once again add that there is no one at the FAA qualified to investigate New Shepard properly. Only Blue Origin’s people can do that. All the FAA paper-pushers are doing is sticking their nose in for a bit of empire building.
Worse, two of those companies (Astra and Relativity) have abandoned their rockets entirely, claiming they are building new bigger versions, but one must now wonder.
Well…not to knock too much of a hole in your theory of administrative state overreach (which is real), but Astra had loads of problems with its entire program. When you lose 5 out of 7 launches, that’s really on you, and you can’t expect to sustain that.
Relativity’s problem seems to have been a major shift in strategy, abandoning what no longer looked like a viable small-launch market to just go all in on their medium-heavy class lifter. But that will take more time before it’s ready to try out a launch pad.
Richard M: Everything you say is true, but I can’t help wondering if this new regulatory leviathan entered into the calculations of both companies, and in fact was a major unstated factor.
Richard M wrote: “Relativity’s problem seems to have been a major shift in strategy, abandoning what no longer looked like a viable small-launch market to just go all in on their medium-heavy class lifter.”
This no longer viable small launch industry launches hundreds of small satellites each year. Rocket Lab is still working on increasing its launch cadence, and SpaceX is still launching Transporter missions multiple times per year, each with dozens of (non-Starlink) small satellite payloads. (“Small” satellites are generally defined as 600 to 1200 Kg. Below that, they are “mini,” “micro,” or other small-sounding words.)
The small satellite market is not waning but is providing businesses with opportunities to operate in space for low cost.
This no longer viable small launch industry launches hundreds of small satellites each year.
Yes, and at least in the US, most of those are going up on SpaceX rideshares!
The small-lift market is not dead, but it just is not what people were expecting a few years ago; and partly that is because SpaceX has sponged up a lot of it (they have launched 682 satellites via rideshare to date), and they will sponge up more with their new Bandwagon rideshare program. The big LEO constellations is the lucrative market almost everyone (including Rocket Lab) seems to be aiming for now. As Peter Beck it put it not long ago, “On small launch, my personal view is that it’s pretty tough to enter that market at this point. We’ve seen a failure of a lot of small launch vehicles or a failure to deliver over the years and even more recently in more dramatic ways.”
There’s room for *someone* in this niche, just not as many someones as everyone thought five years ago.
Richard M,
“The small-lift market is not dead, but it just is not what people were expecting a few years ago; and partly that is because SpaceX has sponged up a lot of it (they have launched 682 satellites via rideshare to date), and they will sponge up more with their new Bandwagon rideshare program.”
The problem with the small launchers is that they are failing to become operational. SpaceX’s Transporter service is virtually the only option available. Rocket Lab is not suffering for customers, but it has not ramped up, yet. That is what Beck’s reusable boosters are for, to have enough boosters available to launch frequently, similar to SpaceX’s ability. There are literally hundreds of satellites to launch, and every Transporter launch is one less Starlink launch that SpaceX can do. Right now, SpaceX’s focus for Falcon is on Starlink, because they don’t yet have Starship available, and they have a huge number of Starlink satellites to launch in a short time, otherwise they could lose their FCC license for their frequencies.
The price of a Transporter ride is very high, $1/4 million for a 1 kilogram satellite. The small launchers are much more economical. SpaceX had not set itself up for the smallsat business, but the failure of the launch industry to meet the need has resulted in SpaceX taking up the overflow. You think that SpaceX is the problem, but it is the interim solution.
The problem is not SpaceX, the problem is all the other small launchers that are not becoming operational. If government is causing this failure, then government is the root cause of the failure. We already saw the British government kill Virgin Orbit, which was another promising company. Meanwhile, Rocket Lab and SpaceX are the solutions, so far. Virgin Orbit, would have been, too, but it was murdered by bureaucratic indifference and incompetence.
Richard M wrote: “As Peter Beck it put it not long ago, ‘On small launch, my personal view is that it’s pretty tough to enter that market at this point. We’ve seen a failure of a lot of small launch vehicles or a failure to deliver over the years and even more recently in more dramatic ways.’”
Beck was not saying that SpaceX had sponged up a lot of the small-lift market. He was saying that making a new rocket is difficult. It always has been. Beck specified that the difficulty is seen by observing the failure of a lot of small launch vehicles.
The more dramatic ways of failing to deliver includes Virgin Orbit’s demise due to the British government causing the company to spend five month’s of precious capital reserves while awaiting a launch license. The company was already implementing its plans to expand, but that plan had expected a launch in Britain in September of last year, not February of this year. The delay left them with insufficient funds to recover from the unexpected failure, a failure after a few successful launches.
“There’s room for *someone* in this niche, just not as many someones as everyone thought five years ago.”
Five years ago we were unsure how many launch companies would be needed for the increasing demand for smallsat launch services. There were more than one hundred companies that had announced intentions to develop launch vehicles, and around twenty companies that were visibly developing them. So far, somewhat over half a dozen have attempted a first orbital launch. Of those, two have chosen to skip the small launch vehicles and try for the medium or large market, and one was driven out of business by the British government, which said that it intends to encourage a launch industry in Britain, but its licensing agency acts with a different intent.
We still do not know how many companies will be needed to fill this niche, because we don’t know how much more the smallsat market will grow and we don’t know the eventual launch cadence of the up and coming small launch companies. The lack of smallsat launchers limits the current satellite launches to the batches to limited orbits on Falcon 9s and the limited number of launches that Rocket Lab offers. The success of Firefly gives us hope for another operational smallsat launcher, helping to provide additional options for smallsat orbits and a larger variety of operations. As long as the supply of launches remains low, the growth of the niche remains slow.
SpaceX provides some amount of relief for companies that want to go to popular orbits or that don’t care what orbit they end up in. Taking large numbers of smallsats to the same orbit is not always the best solution for those satellites, but it may be the best compromise for the organizations that operate them. A better solution is for small launchers that can inexpensively take smallsats into optimal orbits. Three decades ago Pegasus could take smallsats to optimal orbits, but the price tag was similar to a Falcon 9 launch, which was too expensive to make smallsats popular. Cheap piggyback rides were available, but the orbit was limited to the main payload’s, which could be suboptimal for the smallsat.
Smallsats allow companies to break into the space business for much less cost and much less startup funding than it costs for large satellites. They also allow for profitability from space products that would be marginal or unprofitable using large satellites. Smallsats are an inexpensive way to rapidly test and develop concepts through actual orbital experience. We still do not know how large the smallsat business will be in five years, much less ten. We also do not know how many satellite launchers and satellite operators will be able to survive the rapidly increasing governmental interference through overregulation, bureaucracy, and corruption.
Five years ago, we had expected a rapid expansion of commercial space utilization. The reality is that governments are tripping all over themselves to regulate this market and to extort their own “cut” of the business. During a two-year wait between the last Starship test flight to the first integrated test flight, government regulators delayed licensing for a year and a half, giving requirements for SpaceX to meet, including unnecessary payments to unrelated organizations. We don’t know how fast the smallsat market can grow in such an infertile, rocky field, so we don’t know the future demand for launches. However, with government interference as it is today, we can be sure that the growth will be less than we had hoped, five years ago.