Space News by Debra Werner 11/23/2018
A report delivered in October to the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation recommends a streamlined approach to launch licensing aimed at significantly speeding up the process and reducing its complexity.
Instead of the current approach, where companies follow 350 pages of federal safety regulations and meet 2,845 specific requirements, the report, prepared under contract to the FAA by Safety Engineering and Analysis Center (SEAC), a division of APT Research Inc. of Huntsville, Alabama, suggests the government could attain the same level of public safety by auditing a company’s own safety program.
This approach, called Safety Case, puts the onus on the applicant to prove their planned operations offer the same level of public safety as the prescriptive approach, according to “A New Path to Launch Licenses,†the Oct. 22 report written by SEAC founder Tom Pfitzer and Katie Byers, an APT writer and regulatory specialist.
The Trump Administration has focused heavily on streamlining regulations. Space Policy Directive 2, published in May calls for the FAA to propose streamlined rules for commercial space launch licensing no later than Feb. 1, 2019. The streamlined rules are expected to follow a more traditional path to licensing, which the SEAC report calls Path A.
More:
https://spacenews.com/launch-certification-seac-report/
