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posted by janrinok on Friday November 22, @12:01AM   Printer-friendly
from the all-boxes-on-all-forms-must-be-checked dept.

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?


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by pTamok on Friday November 22, @03:00PM (1 child)

    by pTamok (3042) on Friday November 22, @03:00PM (#1382864)

    And the FAA take their own sweet time to license the changes, which is precisely what they are doing when the Starship changes.

    It's fine to criticise the speed of such work, but it is not just SpaceX that has this challenge. There used to be a saying about the aero-development business: when the documentation exceeds the weight of the plane, the plane will fly. That no longer applies with electronic documentation, but the bureaucracy is extensive. And when it fails, like when Boeing ended up 'marking their own homework', people die.

    This could all change when Musk heads up the Department of Government Efficiency, but I'm not sure if safety standards will remain the same or improve.

    It is a genuine problem, and I do not see a way in which safe regulation can be applied at the pace SpaceX says it needs, but I am definitely not an expert in these matters. Perhaps some high-IQ people working 80-hours a week for free can work it out.

    There will be a debate over what is necessary regulation, because, obviously, any regulation that can be dispensed with will take up no time. If any is left, how to speed it up will be the next task, and that is not easy.

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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday November 23, @02:06AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday November 23, @02:06AM (#1382928) Journal

    It's fine to criticise the speed of such work, but it is not just SpaceX that has this challenge. There used to be a saying about the aero-development business: when the documentation exceeds the weight of the plane, the plane will fly. That no longer applies with electronic documentation, but the bureaucracy is extensive. And when it fails, like when Boeing ended up 'marking their own homework', people die.

    It's just really glaring when it happens to each launch. Keep in mind that "marking their own homework" was part of that extensive bureaucracy.

    It is a genuine problem, and I do not see a way in which safe regulation can be applied at the pace SpaceX says it needs, but I am definitely not an expert in these matters. Perhaps some high-IQ people working 80-hours a week for free can work it out.

    The license fee already pays for the work, doing it slow isn't doing it safer, and as I already noted it's a long line of the same line of rockets with the cores often having flown many times before.

    There are some things like pregnancies that can't be sped up by putting more people and a higher priority on the activity. But rocket safety isn't one of those things.