More money would make the situation worse. They need competent leadership. Everyone like to just say “add more money” because it means no actual operational change to the status quo.

You are right they are already trying to slow SpaceX as much as possible. More people in their hands more people finding ways to decelerate SpaceX

Hardly, the FAA is handing permits out the instant the mandated waiting time is up. They couldn't go faster without a literal act of congress.

It's not a mandated "Waiting time". It's the max amount of time that they have to respond. And they wait until the very last day.

The FAA already has competent leadership and staff. They don't have the budget to handle the increasing number of tasks they have been given to manage.

The FAA manages more flights and space launch operations than it did in the 1980s, when it had a budget more than quadruple the size.

To put it bluntly: you get what you pay for.

You get what you incentivise, not what you pay for.

Yeah in my area govt. officials can be incentivized to say no to prove they are doing the job. Adds massive amounts of delay.

We're going to need a dedicated FSA (federal space agency) at this rate, which should do most of the heavy lifting (ha) for the FAA and just use them for NOTAMs and TFRs.

Need to remove regulations instead and fast track SpaceX.

Every fucking time we don't need to increase the size of the Government. It only gets bigger. Never smaller.

No, launching big heavy explosive things into space shouldn’t have fewer regulations. That’s insane to think they should be able to just do it without much oversight.

Sure the safety part of it is something that should be verified before launch. But when they are launching multiple of these things and the variables are all mostly the same you don't need to do the same analysis over and over again.

A prime example is the environmental impact stuff. They have already done that multiple times. Nothing really changed. If it succeed and doesn't blow up the impact is X, if it blows up the impact is Y. Yet these approvals take weeks and months.

There are also multiple agencies that put their foot down. Famously fish and wildlife was worried starship would crash in the water and hit a shark/whale. No seriously. https://youtu.be/kS8G5D9fg3g?t=21

Then there is the story that at Vandenburg air base, they had to strap a seal to a board and play rocket noises through headphones to see if it was distressed. Keep in mind Vandenburg has been a military rocket launch site for decades. But only now when its SpaceX do these agencies put up road blocks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SvJP5wfN4k

Isn’t this exactly what happened with Boeing, where the FAA delegated its authority, on the assumption that Boeing knew what it was doing?

Regulations probably are not going to fix the rot that's inside Boeing. It's like putting water in groundhog tunnels, clamp down on one area and it will pop up somewhere else.

They need to die off and get replaced by better competition when they mess up. And their market centralization ground to a halt instead of encouraged by the gov because of jobs and total risk aversion.

Boeing is publicly funded though, which means crazy incentives take over that are out of whack.

If by the size of government you mean the budget, there have been multiple instances of the government shrinking. As a percent of GDP the 90s saw cuts to federal spending, the 2011 sequestration saw a drop in spending even in nominal terms, and obviously the end of WW2 saw a massive collapse in government spending and the end of multiple different programs

It seemed to not be FAA here, but the several other agencies that all had 60 days to respond. FAA fast-tracked it but couldn't fast track it past the other guys' 60 day allowed time.

What makes you think the issue is funding?

Oh idk maybe picking up just about any recent history book? ie, the goals and effects of austerity politics?

perhaps we need less thorough reviews

Not sure why this is downvoted.

Our risk-to-regulatory oversight cost benefit analysis seems extremely off - we overregulate small things that do not have large-scale meaningful impact while basically grandfather in stuff like depleting the Great Salt Lake, coal emissions, etc. which have vastly less regulatory $ spend per environmental impact.

Ideally, if we could quantify all environmental impacts into a single number (ie. CO2 emissions but also wildlife impact, etc.), the $/impact spent across different fields would be equal.

Currently, however, we are likely spending 100x+ on a per-impact basis on SpaceX regulation.

>while basically grandfather in stuff like depleting the Great Salt Lake, coal emissions, etc.

Gee, almost as if decades of austerity politics, lobbying by financial interests, and regulatory capture has malformed a well intentioned regulatory apparatus? Seems like we need more regulation that's less interested in what "united citizens" have to say. (read lobbyists)

How are you arriving at that assessment of regulation of spaceX? i'd be interested in reading more.

Austerity politics? I don’t agree, we have record spending as a percentage of gdp and are rapidly approaching sovereign debt crisis levels of mismanagement. We aren’t Europe, we never really had an austerity moment.

> How are you arriving at that assessment of regulation of spaceX?

I mean, SpaceX launches simply do not have a large impact on the environment compared to say, all cumulative coal emissions in the US. The FAA AST budget (which is for SpaceX launches) is about 60 million. Total EPA budget is about 9 billion. That’s about 160x the size of the FAA launch regulatory budget, but the environmental impact of things the EPA covers (and mostly fails to cover) is much much much more than 160x the impact of spacex launches.

Or dismantled, lol