6 ms·

FAA Considers Relaxing Licensing Requirements for Rockets

76 points by ga-vu 7y ago

SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
Is that really the thing keep people from making their own rockets? Red tape? > This action would also enable flexible timeframes, remove unnecessary ground safety regulations, redefine when launch begins to allow specified pre-flight operations prior to license approval, and allow applicants to seek a license to launch from multiple sites. I feel as though we do want careful and deliberate launches. After all, this IS rocket science. > remove unnecessary ground safety regulations Hmm.
- aidenn0 7y ago
  There is a cost-benefit trade-off for any regulation. If the non-regulatory costs of rocket launches are decreasing significantly, then it is worth revisiting the regulatory costs; what makes sense for 5-6 launches per year might not make sense for 50 launches per year.
  - bkor 7y ago
    Regulation and regulation costs are different things. Further, comparing costs incurred for business vs regulation costs seems odd. Regulation should be there for a reason. Just skimping on that because some other cost changed seems arbitrary. Further, I fail to see why you cannot optimize on the regulation cost; you can do this without changing the regulations. Another way of looking at costs: eased regulations vs long time investigations and associated costs when something goes wrong due to eased regulations.
    - aidenn0 7y ago
      I don't know what the FAA regulations are, but here's an example of how a regulation can incur unnecessary costs: If the regulation requires hand-inspecting part X and someone invents a machine to inspect part X, you are now incurring costs solely due to regulation. The above is somewhat orthogonal to my main point. If you inspect something 10 times, then it is marginally safer than if you inspect something 9 times, and so on and so forth. Everything can be made more expensive and safer or less expensive and less safe. If there are benefits of increased spaceflight that exceed the downsides of the reduced safety, and lowering the costs will encourage such increased spaceflight then it makes sense from a policy point of view to reduce the safety. This is in addition to the point that regulatory compliance tend to increase costs by more than the amount needed to increase the safety (my example of hand-inspecting a part that could be machine inspected is one example; paying someone to check up that the regulations are actually being followed is another).
  - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
    You'd think once you scaled up to 50 launches per year your process would as well.
    - Rebelgecko 7y ago
      When the critical path of your process is a government agency that is doing 10x more work than it used to (with only 50% more staff), there's only so many ways you can optimize your process without making compromises in other areas like schedule.
- imglorp 7y ago
  The FARs seem to follow a consistent philosophy. Prime directive is don't hurt innocent people uninvolved with your adventure. In the case of rockets this has to mean launch windows that don't intersect with air traffic and plans to avoid dropping burning boosters full of fuel into playgrounds. Second directive is try not to kill your friends and employees. After that, if it's just you, you can have a lot of leeway as long as the paperwork is in order.
  - londons_explore 7y ago
    I'd actually like to see it even slacker than this. Do what you want, but if you kill someone, you're gonna have to pay a big fine to the government, and you're going to have to have insurance to pay that fine if you go bankrupt. Then the only question is how big should the fine be - and the FAA should set that to trade off safety vs progress. Let's start at $250M per life lost. Insurance for that would probably work out to ~10 million per launch, given current accident rates.
    - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
      So now it becomes a cost / benefit analysis, and the loss of life is just the cost of doing business? Apparently a SpaceX launch is $57 million dollars. Given that you've massively reduced the regulations - if the red tape is in fact large enough to be a pain and the FAA is justified in reducing it to spur innovation, I bet you've saved that $10 million right there - totally worth it. Keep the deaths to a mostly low number, adjust insurance as needed, and you're golden! No more letting the price of a human life get in the way of private enterprise!
      - rwcarlsen 7y ago
        It is always possible anywhere in uncountable ways to spend money to save lives. Whether you like the idea or not, we all make trade-off decisions about money vs lives every day.
        SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
- Rebelgecko 7y ago
  There's a lot of busywork in the regulations. For example, the requirements for expendable and reusable rockets were written very independently, so if you want to re-license an existing expendable rocket to be reusable you basically have to start from scratch. The desire from a lot of the smaller launch providers is to have a set of generic "rocket" requirements, with specific addendums for where expendable and reusable vehicles differ. There's also a lot of redundancies when you want to launch a vehicle from multiple locations. If you want a second launch site, there's reasonable things you have to do like showing the FAA that your flight termination system won't rain flaming hydrazine into someone's backyard. However, you also have to expend effort re-explaining things that are totally location independent, like your software development methodologies.
VLM 7y ago
After reading the documents this seems to apply to industrial scale rockets, space-X scale launchers; not hobby rocketry or amateur rocketry. It would be interesting to see a rewrite of hobby/amateur rocketry laws but this isn't it.
dahart 7y ago
It took me a minute to find the actual full proposal text: https://www.regulations.gov/document?D=FAA-2019-0229-0001 https://www.regulations.gov/document?D=FAA-2019-0229-0001 The link here is to the comments, and definitely take a minute to read some submitted comments from the space industry, congress, airlines & observers. They are enlightening. Having read about a dozen extremely well thought out letters so far, I’ve seen nothing but very serious concerns with the proposal. Blue Origin, for example, created a diagram of the new licensing process, and detailed why it’s not likely to result in the monetary savings that the FAA is claiming. https://www.regulations.gov/contentStreamer?documentId=FAA-2019-0229-0096&attachmentNumber=1&contentType=pdf https://www.regulations.gov/contentStreamer?documentId=FAA-2... Many people commenting that the proposal isn’t adequately addressing the FAA’s mandate to public safety. To me it seems like a curious move to deregulate in the wake of the Boeing Max crashes that don’t look great for the FAA... but I don’t know how the FAA is structured, is it fair to draw any lines between rockets and airline regulation, or is rocket licensing a completely separate group of people?
- briandear 7y ago
  > that don’t look great for the FAA... I am not sure I understand. The crashes where in Indonesia and Ethiopia and those planes weren’t under the jurisdiction of the FAA: presumably they were inspected by the relevant aviation authorities in those countries. There weren’t any crashes in the US, so how does that make the FAA look bad? The US commercial aviation safety rate is unsurpassed and exceptionally good. I’d say the FAA has a pretty good track record. Just looking at the operational history of Indonesian airlines — it’s clear that their regulatory body has a serious problem. But the FAA? The American safety record is compelling.
  - swampthinker 7y ago
    The FAA waited for 2 catastrophic failures with the MAX before grounding all planes, risking the safety of thousands.
    - AndrewBissell 7y ago
gilrain 7y ago
If there's one thing I've been thinking about the FAA lately, it's that they're regulating TOO much. /s

76 points by ga-vu 7y ago

Is that really the thing keep people from making their own rockets? Red tape? > This action would also enable flexible timeframes, remove unnecessary ground safety regulations, redefine when launch begins to allow specified pre-flight operations prior to license approval, and allow applicants to seek a license to launch from multiple sites. I feel as though we do want careful and deliberate launches. After all, this IS rocket science. > remove unnecessary ground safety regulations Hmm.

aidenn0 7y ago
There is a cost-benefit trade-off for any regulation. If the non-regulatory costs of rocket launches are decreasing significantly, then it is worth revisiting the regulatory costs; what makes sense for 5-6 launches per year might not make sense for 50 launches per year.
- bkor 7y ago
  Regulation and regulation costs are different things. Further, comparing costs incurred for business vs regulation costs seems odd. Regulation should be there for a reason. Just skimping on that because some other cost changed seems arbitrary. Further, I fail to see why you cannot optimize on the regulation cost; you can do this without changing the regulations. Another way of looking at costs: eased regulations vs long time investigations and associated costs when something goes wrong due to eased regulations.
  - aidenn0 7y ago
    I don't know what the FAA regulations are, but here's an example of how a regulation can incur unnecessary costs: If the regulation requires hand-inspecting part X and someone invents a machine to inspect part X, you are now incurring costs solely due to regulation. The above is somewhat orthogonal to my main point. If you inspect something 10 times, then it is marginally safer than if you inspect something 9 times, and so on and so forth. Everything can be made more expensive and safer or less expensive and less safe. If there are benefits of increased spaceflight that exceed the downsides of the reduced safety, and lowering the costs will encourage such increased spaceflight then it makes sense from a policy point of view to reduce the safety. This is in addition to the point that regulatory compliance tend to increase costs by more than the amount needed to increase the safety (my example of hand-inspecting a part that could be machine inspected is one example; paying someone to check up that the regulations are actually being followed is another).
- SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
  You'd think once you scaled up to 50 launches per year your process would as well.
  - Rebelgecko 7y ago
    When the critical path of your process is a government agency that is doing 10x more work than it used to (with only 50% more staff), there's only so many ways you can optimize your process without making compromises in other areas like schedule.
imglorp 7y ago
The FARs seem to follow a consistent philosophy. Prime directive is don't hurt innocent people uninvolved with your adventure. In the case of rockets this has to mean launch windows that don't intersect with air traffic and plans to avoid dropping burning boosters full of fuel into playgrounds. Second directive is try not to kill your friends and employees. After that, if it's just you, you can have a lot of leeway as long as the paperwork is in order.
- londons_explore 7y ago
  I'd actually like to see it even slacker than this. Do what you want, but if you kill someone, you're gonna have to pay a big fine to the government, and you're going to have to have insurance to pay that fine if you go bankrupt. Then the only question is how big should the fine be - and the FAA should set that to trade off safety vs progress. Let's start at $250M per life lost. Insurance for that would probably work out to ~10 million per launch, given current accident rates.
  - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
    So now it becomes a cost / benefit analysis, and the loss of life is just the cost of doing business? Apparently a SpaceX launch is $57 million dollars. Given that you've massively reduced the regulations - if the red tape is in fact large enough to be a pain and the FAA is justified in reducing it to spur innovation, I bet you've saved that $10 million right there - totally worth it. Keep the deaths to a mostly low number, adjust insurance as needed, and you're golden! No more letting the price of a human life get in the way of private enterprise!
    - rwcarlsen 7y ago
      It is always possible anywhere in uncountable ways to spend money to save lives. Whether you like the idea or not, we all make trade-off decisions about money vs lives every day.
      - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
Rebelgecko 7y ago
There's a lot of busywork in the regulations. For example, the requirements for expendable and reusable rockets were written very independently, so if you want to re-license an existing expendable rocket to be reusable you basically have to start from scratch. The desire from a lot of the smaller launch providers is to have a set of generic "rocket" requirements, with specific addendums for where expendable and reusable vehicles differ. There's also a lot of redundancies when you want to launch a vehicle from multiple locations. If you want a second launch site, there's reasonable things you have to do like showing the FAA that your flight termination system won't rain flaming hydrazine into someone's backyard. However, you also have to expend effort re-explaining things that are totally location independent, like your software development methodologies.

VLM 7y ago

After reading the documents this seems to apply to industrial scale rockets, space-X scale launchers; not hobby rocketry or amateur rocketry. It would be interesting to see a rewrite of hobby/amateur rocketry laws but this isn't it.

dahart 7y ago

It took me a minute to find the actual full proposal text: https://www.regulations.gov/document?D=FAA-2019-0229-0001 https://www.regulations.gov/document?D=FAA-2019-0229-0001 The link here is to the comments, and definitely take a minute to read some submitted comments from the space industry, congress, airlines & observers. They are enlightening. Having read about a dozen extremely well thought out letters so far, I’ve seen nothing but very serious concerns with the proposal. Blue Origin, for example, created a diagram of the new licensing process, and detailed why it’s not likely to result in the monetary savings that the FAA is claiming. https://www.regulations.gov/contentStreamer?documentId=FAA-2019-0229-0096&attachmentNumber=1&contentType=pdf https://www.regulations.gov/contentStreamer?documentId=FAA-2... Many people commenting that the proposal isn’t adequately addressing the FAA’s mandate to public safety. To me it seems like a curious move to deregulate in the wake of the Boeing Max crashes that don’t look great for the FAA... but I don’t know how the FAA is structured, is it fair to draw any lines between rockets and airline regulation, or is rocket licensing a completely separate group of people?

briandear 7y ago
> that don’t look great for the FAA... I am not sure I understand. The crashes where in Indonesia and Ethiopia and those planes weren’t under the jurisdiction of the FAA: presumably they were inspected by the relevant aviation authorities in those countries. There weren’t any crashes in the US, so how does that make the FAA look bad? The US commercial aviation safety rate is unsurpassed and exceptionally good. I’d say the FAA has a pretty good track record. Just looking at the operational history of Indonesian airlines — it’s clear that their regulatory body has a serious problem. But the FAA? The American safety record is compelling.
- swampthinker 7y ago
  The FAA waited for 2 catastrophic failures with the MAX before grounding all planes, risking the safety of thousands.
  - AndrewBissell 7y ago

gilrain 7y ago

If there's one thing I've been thinking about the FAA lately, it's that they're regulating TOO much. /s