Yahoo News by Loren Grush 10/17/2023
Space Exploration Technologies Corp. plans to advocate to the US Congress on Wednesday for a multiyear extension of a ban on imposing safety regulations on commercial human spaceflight.
An executive at Elon Musk’s rocket company who is scheduled to testify at a Senate subcommittee hearing plans to argue that the Federal Aviation Administration already is struggling to keep pace with a rapidly shifting rocket launch industry.
“We want to keep moving as fast paced as we can,” William Gerstenmaier, vice president of build and flight reliability at SpaceX, said Monday in an interview with Bloomberg News. “And we don’t want to be held up where we don’t need to be held up.”
Even under its traditional regulatory mandate, the FAA needs more staffing to carry out its oversight duties, Gerstenmaier said. SpaceX alone has launched 73 missions so far in 2023, with its 74th scheduled as early as Tuesday evening — the most it has launched in a single year.
“They’ve been supportive to us, but we think they’re just getting buried, and we just see them getting more and more busy in the future,” he said.
The FAA didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Since 2004, there’s been a moratorium on the FAA setting safety rules for spacecraft that take humans to and from space. People who fly to space on commercial vehicles do so under an “informed consent” framework, where they must acknowledge that the spacecraft they’ll be riding on has not been certified by the government.
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https://news.yahoo.com/spacex-fights-extend-ban-regulating-015853598.html
