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SpaceX's Shotwell Says US Regulators Must 'Go Faster'
SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell fired off fresh criticism at US regulators on Friday, saying rocket launch approvals need to catch up with the pace her company is innovating.
[....] Elon Musk's rocket and satellite company plans to launch the sixth major test of its new Starship vehicle on Tuesday, and sees as many as 400 launches of the moon and Mars craft over the next four years, Shotwell said. That compares with a record 148 missions that US regulators authorized for the entire commercial space industry in the government's most recent fiscal year.
[....] In September, Musk, SpaceX's founder and Chief Executive Officer, called on the head of the FAA to resign and claimed that government paperwork to license a launch takes longer than building the actual rocket.
On Thursday, the FAA said it plans to update its launch and reentry licensing rule, as the number of space operations could more than double by 2028, it said.
What did FAA do back when aircraft were new and novel, and could be dangerous?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Tork on Friday November 22, @02:15PM (28 children)
That might be true, but we're still not discussing how to actually fix a red tape bottleneck because we're frivolously measuring it against irrelevant metrics. "It should be faster because right now it takes longer than making a season of Venture Brothers." It doesn't matter how hungry SpaceX is to fly (that's the real reason for this round of bellyaching), if they cut the wrong corner the damage won't be exclusive to SpaceX-owned property.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday November 23, @02:13AM (27 children)
The longer that the FAA screws around, the less safe they make these vehicles.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Saturday November 23, @02:27AM (26 children)
Heh. Every single point you brought up is entirely within SpaceX's realm to deal with, not the FAA's. Actual "screwing around" by the FAA has yet to be called out by you or by SpaceX.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday November 23, @02:30AM (3 children)
The story indicates otherwise.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Saturday November 23, @02:39AM (2 children)
This is unproductive.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday November 23, @02:46AM (1 child)
It asserts more than that:
Direct quote.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Saturday November 23, @02:51AM
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday November 23, @12:36PM (21 children)
The obvious rebuttal is that SpaceX doesn't have even the slightest control over how long it takes FAA to process a correct, safe launch. SpaceX can mess up their license applications or generate safety issues that will delay or halt their launch license application. But they can't change the FAA's sloth in dealing with correct and safe applications. And even if we ignore the terrible workflow issues associated with these applications, there's stuff the FAA can do to speed things up.
First, put more people on it. This isn't a pregnancy. Review and processing of the application can happen faster. Second, of course, is the workflow. These launches are a long series of very similar vehicles and launch profiles. Despite the assertions of engineering changes, it's still something that can be expedited by following a similar approach to what is done with airplanes.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Saturday November 23, @05:30PM (20 children)
Ok. So what's your source for this information? There's a couple of reasons I ask: First is your examples are pretty generic, either this could have been fixed really easily ages ago so there is probably a good reason they haven't done that. Second it's weird that SpaceX didn't mention it. "All they have to do is hire more people!" ... is a much pointier jab at the gov't than behaving impatiently. Even if there's context I'm missing that makes it not-weird it's still weird that I had to fight that hard to not only pull that out of you but also the fine people who modded my post down who opted to stay silent rather than shut me up with facts.
I don't mind telling you you might be right, you might! But I am skeptical, so could I have a source, please?
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday November 24, @12:58AM (19 children)
Bureaucratic inertia and zero interest on the FAA side. I can point [soylentnews.org] to multiple agricultural programs that should never have existed in the first place, but took many years to go away (one example was reversed after being contested 19 years earlier, another overturned in an 11 year court case). Why are we to expect problems to be addressed when they routinely aren't addressed?
I worked for a non profit (JP Aerospace [jpaerospace.com]) that a few years earlier had tried for the Cheap Access To Space (CATS) Prize [archive.org] - $250k to the first fully privately funded team to put two pounds in Earth orbit. Their approach was via a rocket launched by balloon which failed in May 1999 with the prize expiring the next year (late 2000).
Over the years, they filled out a lot of paperwork for launch licenses from the FAA. It was informally described as a "pallet load" of paperwork that had to be started from scratch each time and took them an enormous amount of work to complete. The FAA typically took six months to decide (with rejection and resubmission common) And each time JP Aerospace submitted its license a real world aerospace company (I don't recall which were alleged to be doing that, but it wasn't just one company) would contest the license on a variety of grounds, always frivolous, but which took additional time and effort to rebut.
On that last point, I gather the aerospace business community is kind of like a dysfunctional frat house with all kinds of bizarre minor tricks done to obstruct and sabotage each other via regulation and bureaucracy - JP Aerospace wasn't unique. I heard from someone who alleged to have been there, that one of the Atlas III launches had to be scrubbed because a competitor had raised spurious safety concerns directly with the range manager who was overseeing the launch (from the government side) and the resulting hubbub delayed the launch long enough to miss the launch window.
SpaceX got kicked off a Vandenberg launch tower because a bigger player (at the time) wanted the spot. More recently, their attempts to increase launches at Vandenberg were temporarily blocked by a California environmental commission which spoke at length about Musk's personal political actions when voting to block SpaceX.
In other words, there was a lot of shenanigans that happened due to the heavy regulation of rocket launches including licensing per launch.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Monday November 25, @03:06PM (18 children)
Kay. The other side of this problem is that the regulations are there for a reason. You or SpaceX saying "they're bad!" is not enough for me and frankly, if you think about the purpose of all this, it shouldn't be. Cut the wrong corner and people die.
We were discussing this being a 'pregnancy problem' and throwing more people at it to speed it up. As a taxpayer I don't like that response, if they're playing solitaire instead of doing the work I don't want to throw more bodies at it. That's a new management hire. Anyway, even if I did want to throw people at it, I still haven't seen any evidence that's actually what's happening here. I actually did a little research when I started discussing this with you and I couldn't find a whole lot of detail about the process. What I did find seemed to suggest automation might help a fair chunk of the process, but then I discovered that SpaceX had nearly 150 of the 220 launches this year.
And this is where we circle back to my original point. Is there some actual fat to trim here or is SpaceX just being noisy because they're hungry for profit? It's lookin' a lot like the latter, and the issue with that is if it goes south it's the public who will pay for it both monetarily and possibly even in death. That ain't gonna fly.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 25, @10:01PM (17 children)
Fortunately, when I first argued my side, I did more than say "IZ BAD!"
I since have noted the safety problems that come from long licensing processes too. And I talked about why the workflow [soylentnews.org] was terrible: enormous paperwork load and competitors would routinely interfere with bogus complaints.
Sure, there is often a non-shitty reason for regulation, but it doesn't mean that the reason is furthered by the regulation. For glaring example, there have been complaints here about Boeing self-regulating themselves with respect to 737 MAX. What's missed is that the terrible process for regulating that airliner resulted in a variety of safety compromises, including said self-regulation.
So here, SpaceX has repeatedly shown that they can maintain a high launch tempo safely. It's time for regulation of their launches to similarly match that - especially given that we have a very similar sector of air flight already regulated in that way. It's a solved problem.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Monday November 25, @10:27PM (16 children)
You have blamed the licensing process but you haven't actually established that has anything to do with the FAA. Neither has SpaceX, same with bogus complaints from competitors. I've am well aware of your general distaste for anything involving the word regulation, but at the moment your hysteria about it is standing in the way of us having a productive conversation. It's up to SpaceX to make sure their shit doesn't rust and we don't want to remove the ability for competitors to raise complaints because despite the motivationss they'd have for mischief they are still in a much better place to catch corner-cutting than you or I.
I'm all for improving the efficiency of the process, I've never heard anyone say otherwise, but you're getting way ahead of yourself, here. This is not a 'trust SpaceX' thing and it never should be, Boeing being a very recent and glaring example of why.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 25, @10:48PM (15 children)
It's clearly a problem when a rocket transitions to an unsafe condition due to corrosion, tin whiskers, or the many other real world chemical and mechanical introductions of entropy that we already know about. And delay due to regulation is just as likely to contribute to that problem as delay from anything else. Similarly, there's an inherent dynamic to high levels of activity that make them safer: if you have an 1 in N failure mode, then activity that happens more than N times will likely find this failure mode. Again, slow regulation slows the frequency of launch and makes obscure failure modes harder to catch.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Monday November 25, @11:35PM (14 children)
I never said it wasn't. I said it isn't the FAA's problem. SpaceX's profit-margins aren't the FAA's problem either, clearly that's what this is about.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday November 26, @12:43AM (13 children)
Indeed. But they are the cause of SpaceX's problem with that regulation. Their point and mine is that the way that regulation is applied can be improved in a way that improves the safety of the launches and takes less time. Sure, it would also mean more profit for SpaceX with more timely licensing. But my take is we can have both - so why not?
(Score: 2) by Tork on Tuesday November 26, @01:52AM (12 children)
Nope. SpaceX is the cause of SpaceX's issues with entropy.
Uh huh. No-one said otherwise. Not. One. Person.
You think we can have both. But so far you've mainly suggested hiring more people so the rockets don't corrode before the next launch in a couple of days. There might be a good reason why there can't be more than 200 launches a year, we could have been talking about that like eight posts ago if we didn't take a scenic tour around why you are biased against regulation.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday November 26, @04:19AM (11 children)
I showed otherwise.
And yet there's our quotes in this discussion showing you're wrong. I don't see the point of denying reality here, but maybe it does something for you.
"Couple of days"? Licenses take months [faa.gov] to procure even for closely spaced launches of the same vehicle - even in the absence of rejection.
Sure, if my new business wants to launch a rocket that's never flown before, I can see these times being reasonable with rejection common. But a launch provider with hundreds of launches under their belt and many of these vehicles having flown before?
(Score: 2) by Tork on Tuesday November 26, @02:51PM (10 children)
You have not. All you've shown is they have a specification to meet if they want their shit to fly. It ain't the DMV's fault I was late to work because I had to renew my driver license. Does that mean the wait is unnecessary? Nope, it could be, but you haven't proven that and you won't ever do so with that line of thought.
Depends on the reason why. Since it's being applied to everyone across the board you've really got nothing to whine about.
I don't care how you spin it, enjoy being able to sleep at night. I was never against improving the process at all so you can knock off the grandiose sales pitch. This isn't about how nice it'd be if that wait time didn't exist. It's about what we, the people living underneath these rockets, give up to shorten it. Can you actually address that or are we going around the block again performing exactly the same fallacy I pointed out in my opening remark?
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday November 26, @11:43PM (9 children)
"Everyone" is solely SpaceX.
What did you give up for present streamlined FAA regulation of airflight? These are all silly arguments when we have a working example by the FAA of how to do it better.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Tuesday November 26, @11:47PM (8 children)
Is SpaceX getting delays others aren't?
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday November 27, @04:57AM (4 children)
Sure. Because they launch more, they get more of those delays.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Wednesday November 27, @05:06AM (3 children)
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday November 27, @05:33AM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by Tork on Wednesday November 27, @05:45AM (1 child)
We're having this conversation because SpaceX wants profit. 🖖
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday November 27, @07:01AM
And we already have an alternative that works much better - regular aviation safety. This is a problem solved a half century ago.
Should we do dumb things because someone might make a profit? What's missed here is that nobody was interested in fixing these problems because FAA regulation was part of a greater barrier to entry that preserved their profits (other examples: NASA-enforced orbital launch cartel and the thicket of regulation surrounding government contracts). The people with standing to contest the regulations were fine with the regulations. Now that this has become a significant obstruction to SpaceX launch frequency, SpaceX's rivals are even more fine with it now.
Incidentally, this is part of why so much bad regulation survives decade after decade. The people with standing to contest the regulation in court, profit from it instead. It's only when things transition from profitable to not, that they wake up and contest it.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday November 27, @05:08AM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by Tork on Wednesday November 27, @05:21AM (1 child)
I don't hate the idea but "SpaceX wants moar money!" is not an appropriate context for that decision. Remember: We're all underneath them.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday November 27, @05:33AM
I also pitched the "don't do licensing per launch". So don't act surprised that I brought this up.