Clean Technica by Jennifer Sensiba January 30th, 2021
According to The Verge, the current dispute between Musk and the FAA came about when FAA officials said SpaceX violated its launch license, and they’re also investigating the last test as a “mishap.†If you didn’t watch it or don’t remember, the Starship SN8 test ended in an explosion when the rocket failed to land properly.
Being a test, it was expected that things would go wrong, but the FAA doesn’t see it that way. That may be why Musk says the current rules were meant for “a handful of expendable launches,†as an expendable rocket wouldn’t ever have a landing problem in testing (because they don’t land at all). Instead of being able to accept that the fireball was a successful test that gave SpaceX data to improve the design and operating procedures, current rules require them to treat it like an accident that must be investigated.
While you’ll find great coverage all over the internet of the ins and outs of FAA’s issues with SpaceX, I want to make a wider point about the FAA that affects not only space programs, but also the most popular form of electric aviation: small unmanned aerial systems, sUAS, or “drones.â€
The TL;DR here is that the FAA is great at managing long-standing things like commercial airliners and general aviation, where rapid change isn’t happening . When it comes to a new aircraft or space technology, the agency struggles to do anything at all at first, and then is very slow at responding to the changes. This not only hampers the good that new technologies can do, but leads people to believe that the agency isn’t acting in the nation’s best interest.
Elon Musk feels that way right now, and I’ve had my own struggles with it in the past that made me feel the same way.
I’m going to talk about my experiences with the agency as a drone operator and then get back to SpaceX.
The FAA’s Slow Handling of DronesDrones are definitely a technology that caught the federal agency flat-footed. Remote-controlled aircraft are nothing new at all, and people operated them for decades with the understanding that they weren’t subject to the same rules as aircraft.
What changed was what they were capable of doing. Older model aircraft weren’t very useful for anything but play in most cases. The technology to do anything useful like a military drone would do was too bulky and expensive for hobbyists and small business owners to get into. The computer and smartphone revolutions upended this quickly, though. Everything got cheaper. GPS got smaller and more accurate. Orientation sensors got cheaper and smaller. Electronic gimbals to stabilize cameras got much better and far cheaper. The computing power to manage all of this and make a quadcopter fly got smaller and cheaper. Finally, radio control got so good that it could handle all this and give the operator a first-person view.
The age of being able to use radio-controlled aircraft to make serious money came, and fast.
When this happened, the FAA decided that it wanted to clamp down, but didn’t go through the proper rulemaking process that applies to federal agencies. To create a new regulation, a regulator can’t simply say “these are the new rules†in a dictatorial fashion. They’re supposed to create draft regulations, put them out for public comment for a set period, and then, after considering the feedback, make any needed changes and make the rules final.
More:
https://cleantechnica.com/2021/01/30/i-agree-with-elon-the-faa-doesnt-do-new-things-very-well/
