WASHINGTON — A top Department of Transportation official suggested the launch industry should help pay for extra resources for the Federal Aviation Administration’s industrial space office.
Speaking at a virtual meeting of the FAA’s Industrial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC) Nov. 8, Polly Trottenberg, deputy secretary of transportation, all but rejected calls from industry to sharply increase the budget of the FAA’s Office of Industrial Space Transportation, or AST, to take care of growing levels of launch activity.
At an Oct. 18 hearing by the Senate Commerce Committee’s space subcommittee, industry witnesses advisable a big increase within the budget for that office, which received nearly $37.6 million in fiscal 12 months 2023, to rent more personnel to handle launch and reentry licensing. One witness, Bill Gerstenmaier of SpaceX, specifically advisable doubling the office’s budget.
Asked about increasing AST’s budget, Trottenberg said there have been competing priorities elsewhere within the FAA, noting that the aviation didn’t receive as much support in last 12 months’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law as other modes of transportation. “I don’t think we made the commensurate investments on the aviation side,” she said, including in “the bread-and-butter systems of the FAA.”
She proposed that it might be time for industry to contribute some portion of additional revenues needed for enhancing AST. “We’re an agency that has the flexibility to generate revenue and I believe that’s going to be a matter for this industry,” she said, adding that she was offering her own opinion and never that of the department itself.
While the FAA does generate revenue from user fees for aviation, it has not generally collected any such fees for launch licensing. She returned to it later within the meeting when one other COMSTAC member noted the relatively small size of the AST budget relative to the general FAA budget. The FAA requested $19.8 billion for fiscal 12 months 2024, of which $42 million would go to AST.
“Everyone seems to be ducking just a little bit my query, which is, does the industry need to begin, frankly, contributing some revenues to resolve the funding challenges that AST has?” Trottenberg said.
She described the tensions between the launch industry and the industrial aviation industry on access to airspace, and criticism from the launch industry that proposed FAA guidelines for deconflicting airspace uses appeared to favor aviation. “I desired to chuckle just a little bit because, admittedly, industrial aviation funds a lot of the agency.”
She argued that while AST’s budget and the requested increase is a small fraction of the general FAA budget, “every penny gets fought over.” She mentioned competing priorities, comparable to investing in technologies to handle a recent series of near-misses in aviation. “You’ll be able to say each little piece doesn’t cost that much, but while you add all of it together the agency has big needs writ large.”
Her views were seasoned by a four-and-a-half-month stint earlier this 12 months as acting FAA administrator. That included, she said, “plenty of the interagency parts of economic space” working with the White House and other agencies. “Quite a lot of collaboration, sometimes some spirited engagement.”
One factor driving industry’s desire to extend FAA’s budget is the demands of a brand new licensing regime for industrial launches, called Part 450. While designed to be streamlined, a number of the first firms to make use of that latest licensing process have complained of delays. Gerstenmaier, on the October hearing, warned “your entire regulatory system is liable to collapse” because the FAA moves vehicles operating under older licenses to the brand new system.
“There’s been plenty of talk recently in regards to the Part 450 regulations and the time and complexity of completing an application,” said Michael O’Donnell, deputy associate administrator of economic space transportation on the FAA, on the COMSTAC meeting.
He argued that the 4 licenses issued so far under Part 450 were all for brand spanking new vehicles, which required “substantial iterations” in the course of the license review process. “The FAA believes that future Part 450 evaluations can be accomplished in a timely way.”
COMSTAC members weren’t necessarily convinced. Caryn Schenewerk, a consultant who previously worked for Relativity Space and SpaceX, argued latest firms using the Part 450 process are at a possible drawback to existing firms with older licenses. “I’m quite concerned with what I see as looking like a hindrance to newer entrants and that it’s affecting potential competition amongst providers,” she said.