Main Engine Cut Off - T+285: The Public Dispute Between SpaceX and the FAA

Episode Date: September 30, 2024

SpaceX and the FAA have been going a few rounds back and forth in public over fines and delays. It’s weird and inscrutable but maybe helpful in the long run in a few ways.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 31 executive producers—Donald, Pat from KC, Joel, Jan, Lee, Better Every Day Studios, Fred, Theo and Violet, Russell, Pat, Warren, Joonas, David, Stealth Julian, Bob, Harrison, Frank, Josh from Impulse, The Astrogators at SEE, Kris, Ryan, Will and Lars from Agile, Steve, Matt, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), and four anonymous—and 821 other supporters.TopicsThe war of words between SpaceX and the FAA keeps escalating | Ars TechnicaFAA administrator defends SpaceX licensing actions on safety grounds - SpaceNewsSpaceX letter criticizes FAA for “systemic challenges” in launch licensing - SpaceNewsSpaceX on X: “FAA Administrator Whitaker made several incorrect statements today regarding SpaceX. In fact, every statement he made was incorrect. It is deeply concerning that the Administrator does not appear to have accurate information immediately available to him with respect to SpaceX”Elon Musk on X: “Amazingly, no Starliner fines for Boeing! The FAA space division is harassing SpaceX about nonsense that doesn’t affect safety while giving a free pass to Boeing even after NASA concluded that their spacecraft was not safe enough to bring back the astronauts. There need to be resignations from the FAA leadership.”Elon Musk on X: “Shouldn’t the head of an organization responsible for regulating the safety of airplanes & rockets know something about how they work?”Reentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second Space Age | West Houston's Neighborhood BookshopReentry by Eric Berger - Audiobook - Audible.comReentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second Space Age Kindle EditionThe ShowLike the show? Support the show on Patreon or Substack!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOFollow @[e-mail] on MastodonListen to MECO HeadlinesListen to Off-NominalJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterArtwork photo by ESAWork with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

hello and welcome to main engine cutoff i'm anthony colangelo back after a little bit of a hiatus on the main feed here uh did have my second child a couple weeks in at this point so uh getting back to regularly scheduled programming but i've also been trying to uh put out a show about this whole spacex faa public spat that they're having um but it's kind of been going on for way longer than i thought it would to be honest i usually with these kind of stories let uh let it progress a bit because you know when uh there's two parties subtweeting each other or sending letters to Congress that it goes on for a bit, but it eventually settles out and you kind of take

full stock of what everybody is saying. This one has went on several rounds longer than as usual, so I'm trying to make sense of this, and I'm not sure, honestly, that from the outside we'll be able to make complete sense of the situation. But at least I think there are at least a couple parts worth commenting on. So as a rundown, the FAA has published some fines for SpaceX's for launch license violations. This is going back to June of 2023. So this is, you know, more than a year in the past, two instances very close together in time first one was during a falcon 9 launch uh the second one was during a falcon heavy launch last july so just a couple weeks later in the case of the falcon 9 one uh spacex was updating their plan to launch by using a new launch control center located a different hangar than they

had used previously and updated their flight rules regarding that. Per SpaceX's timeline, they modified the communications plan to account for this new control center. They sent in the paperwork on May 2nd. On June 13th, just a couple of days before the launch was scheduled to go off, the FAA let them know that there were too many changes for a timely review of the license. SpaceX sent a revised plan two days later changes for a timely review of the of the license spacex sent a revised plan two days later changing only the location of the command of the control center but nothing else about the flight profile and then they launched on june 18th on august 20th the fa completed their approval for all of their spacex launch licenses regarding that change

but they flew before that so they're being fined, let's see, it was $350,000 for that launch because there were two parts. There was using the new control center, but there was also skipping a T-minus-two-hour poll that was written into their old flight rules that is required by an early version of the communications plan. So a lot of minutiae stuff there. On the Falcon Heavy side of things, nine days before the launch, SpaceX requested to modify the launch license to use a new tank farm at Launch Complex 39A. They got notification from FAA two days before the launch that they could not make that modification in time, but SpaceX went ahead and used that new tank farm anyway now this this part takes a weird little side jag where uh the faa uh in was it in the the hearing the other day um faa administrator

whittaker was in congress stated that they use a new tank farm closer to uh to public whereas spacex saying no no we actually used a tank farm farther away from public so this clearly did not uh harm public safety by any means it was approved by the range as well which is a note that i would like to come back to in a little while um but anyway all in all they did not get their launch license approved in time so they use that new tank farm they're being fined an additional 283 000 and nine 283 000 nine dollars that, which is a funny amount. But all in all, they're being fined about $633,000 for these issues from June and July last year. SpaceX has posted a couple letters publicly saying, you know, that all this information is incorrect. But also, this is proof that the FAA is not able to respond timely, in a timely manner to changes that are so small that we're not even

sure we should be sending to the FAA in this case, like meaning, you know, should these things actually be holding up a launch license for Falcon 9 launches. And in both cases, the FAA did eventually approve these plans anyway, you know, a couple weeks, months later, all this was fine. Now, separate from SpaceX posting letters um even in some spacex documentation but mostly elon musk tweeting himself uh they're talking about how this is a politically motivated um push from you know some within the government to go after spacex because of uh elon musk's politicking of late right he's been uh up until you know what a year or two ago he was mostly this kind of like outside voice was not you know particularly able to be pinned

down on on which party he's supporting polit politically and which politicians he was getting close to um but obviously that is not the case anymore and he's saying look they're coming after my companies because of this politically motivated kind of stuff. SpaceX has even kind of, you know, broached that subject with some of these letters as well. And I don't think it's entirely outside of what's going on here. Eric Berger's new book, Reentry, is out. We talked to him over on Off Nominal. You should check that show out if you have not heard it. But you should definitely check the book out. In his prologue and epilogue he talks a lot about the fact that um elon musk's approach to politics right now is a huge risk for the company

because it does expose them and him to a different level of scrutiny and uh it does expose some different vulnerabilities that they would have you know previously to this and we've seen that around the world we've seen that around the world. We've seen this weird situation in Brazil, was it, where they were freezing SpaceX's assets because of stuff that X or Twitter was doing. Certainly, you know, there's contention between Elon and Joe Biden over, like, Joe Biden never really talking about Tesla much, and Elon feeling spurned by that. There are these kind of minor things that crop up from time to time, but that definitely is more of the case now,

the more overtly politically he gets. And Eric's point in the book is that that's a huge risk for SpaceX to enter into that world, especially with a company that works so closely with so many different parts of the federal government, not only, not only from their customers from NASA and NOAA and NRO and the US Space Force, all these different government agencies that they launch stuff for, but they're also operating within, you know, federal ranges, they're operating within this regulatory environment. So there's all these different ways that they interact with the federal government at a time when their founder and CEO is out there being very political. and in some cases on Twitter, you know, attacking people within the FAA now. That is a really weird way to go about

some of this stuff. And I think it's, you know, if you've been following Elon's, you know, descent into whatever he's got going on these days, it's not shocking that he's gotten there. But it's different than SpaceX has went about this stuff in the past. You know, they've definitely commented on this kind of thing in the past when it was original Starship missions or making statements that like, well, the Starship hardware is ready for Starhopper or whatever. I don't know which particular one it was. But in the old days of Starship and Boca Chica, that was definitely the case when we were

all waiting to see if they would get approval for this launch setup at Boca Chica. They would talk about it before. But this is much more explicit and a much more kind of polarizing way of going about it. And I find that interesting for a company that is so quiet. They have posted a lot of open letters. They've done a lot of tweeting about the situation. They have, Gwen Shotwell was talking within Texas about this. They have done a lot of public outreach, if you can call it that, about the situation in a way that I find unique and kind of weird. So I've been trying to understand what the situation is here. I think regarding SpaceX's public approach, I think this might be an interesting moment in time.

Because these two fines, $633,000 total, with what we assume and have calculated based on SpaceX's margin for a Falcon 9 launch. Probably not breaking the bank compared to what they're doing overall. It is so far out of when they had this issue that it is strange that the FAA is on that much of a lag in terms of their fines. Now, I tried to look up their other enforcement actions for, you know, airlines and aviation environments and all that kind of stuff. And it does actually kind of seem like, at least from their public documentation, where they list these fines, it does seem like it's a year, year and a half lag for when they actually post these fines publicly. So I'm actually curious to find out when SpaceX first heard about them, about these fines in particular. Because per SpaceX's

timeline, the FAA and SpaceX were going back and forth on this. So it's not like the FAA was unaware until recently that this stuff happened. They knew, you know, the moment that they launched that this stuff was not closed out yet. Now, does it take that long for enforcement action to go through? Or to SpaceX's point, is this politically motivated and that these things were kind of sitting there? And, you know, if you look hard enough, you're able to find an area where somebody didn't adhere to their launch license and you can issue a fine for that. You know, can you go back in time and find something that SpaceX did on a random ass Starlink launch? And oh, there was a launch

license violation. We'll send a $283,000 fine for that thing. Is that possible? Or is this lag time really legit? Or was it filed, you know, right after the launch, and SpaceX knew about it in June 2023. And now it's only being public. You know, in any of those cases, it's also interesting to think about the fact that this is 15 months ago, are there a whole host of other fines that are about to come out from the launches that have occurred between June 2023. And now because there's been about 100 launches or whatever the number is. It's, you know, triple digits of launches between then and now. So is there going to be a huge wall of fines? Is that what if SpaceX is telling the truth about this whole politically motivated thing or whatever telling the truth would mean in that instance, if they are assessing it accurately, that this is a politically motivated kind of approach, you know, is there a huge wall of fines that are about to hit? Or does the FAA just, whoever this politically motivated tangent

is within the FAA, do they just want it to seem like this is going to hang over SpaceX's head, that there's a huge wall of these things that are coming out? Because $300,000 a launch is definitely going to add up. If it's one or two, because they have found these issues and they want to effect some enforcement on SpaceX, not a big deal. But if it's every single launch, you know, that's something that they have to start doing math around. Now, the other aspect here for SpaceX that I want to talk about is the whole public approach to this, because that's something I find interesting, given how much this whole topic of FAA launch licenses and rethinking how this stuff works has been a topic of conversation for years now. It has been something that has come up frequently. I do think there might be something here about the approach that

is interesting to consider. But before I talk about that part, I want to say thank you to everyone who supports Main Engine Cutoff over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. You can support us either on Patreon or Substack. And there are 850 some of you. I haven't gotten the final number because of me not running the books because I'm sleep deprived, but it's something north of 850. And I am so thankful for all of your support. I do know there are 31 executive producers of this podcast and they made this episode possible. So let's shout them out. Thanks to Donald, Pat from KC, Joel, Jan, Lee, Better Everyday Studios, Fred, Theo and Violet, Russell, Pat, Warren, Eunice, David, Stealth, Julian, Bob, Harrison,

Frank, Josh from Impulse, The Astrogators, SCE, Chris, Ryan, Will and Lars from Agile Space, Steve, Matt, Tim Dodd, David Ashtonot, and four anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for making this episode possible. If you want to join that crew, mainenginecutoff.com slash support. Thank you all so much for the support. Alright, SpaceX's

public approach. You know, if these cases here, these Falcon 9, this Falcon Heavy case, it could be that these are things that SpaceX knew were coming down, and they see them as good examples of the kinds of stuff that they take issue with, with the FAA licensing process. The fact that they, to change and use a new control center, that they have to get their launch license re-approved, and the fact that they to change and use a new control center, that they have to get their launch license re-approved. And the fact that to use a new tank farm, they have to get their launch license re-approved. Maybe these are things that they find really good examples of what they see

as the problem with the FAA licensing process. And they're willing to go and say, you know what, these are the things that we're going to make an example of. We're going to be super public about the communications about these issues. We're going to put them all out on Front Street so that we can actually have things to point to. Because up until now, everybody just talks about FAA licensing, you know, rethinking or reworking in very general terms. We don't ever really have great examples of what specifically SpaceX would want done differently or what specifically new upstarts would want done differently in terms of regulation. A lot of times people just don't feel like getting into the details because it is so dense for people that aren't into regulations. But I mentioned

this on Off Nominal the other day. I do kind of feel like it's the space version of US politicians saying comprehensive immigration reform. A lot of politicians just say that and they never specify what they think the reforms need to be, what the problems are with the system that they address it. But like both sides can get applauded for just saying, we need comprehensive immigration reform. And the FAA side feels like the space version of that, where the FAA is saying it. You know, we've talked to a lot of people at the FAA over the years. We've had some people on the show that have worked in the FAA in the past. And people within the Office of Space at the FAA, you know, number one, they're space nerds. They are probably listening to the show right now. They probably think a lot

of the same things you do about space. They probably watch all the same webcasts that you do. They're as excited about the same missions that you are. They want this stuff to work really well. And they're not happy with the current state of things there. They don't want to be handling this in the same way that it is. They want to update these rules as well to make their job easier, to make it more efficient, and to actually be effective on the things that they care about. That is 100% true. And at the same time, SpaceX and the operators want that as well. But to be able to have all this stuff out in public, I think actually is going to be a good thing long term. How SpaceX is going about it, using the whole politically motivated line, I'm not 100% sure on

if they maybe should just stick to, you know, this seems really dumb that we have to, you know, when we change what office we're going to use to operate a vehicle that we have to go through this whole process that takes months to do. That just seems like a really good win to put that out there and say, this is the issue that we're assessing. Because you can actually point to that, and you don't have to get into this like politically motivated rhetoric that fires up a bunch of red versus blue stuff. You can actually just say, no, it is kind of dumb that I had to tell them I'm changing the seat that I'm sitting in, and it took two months for them to say okay. And also, in the case of these fines, we flew a

hundred times before this stuff was either told to us or made public. I'm very murky on what that actually means when they post these fines. That seems like an issue. If something was really wrong, would they let 100 Falcon 9s fly off the pad before they either stopped launches or let them know or tried to get it addressed? So I think there is actually something going on here that is beneficial to have out in the public I think there are certain aspects of the Elon Musk public persona right now that are very harmful to that effort but I do think using these examples as things that SpaceX wants to see fixed is a really good idea and there are some cool ideas out there I've talked to a handful of people over the

last like two weeks to try to understand what might be going on internally during this, you know, in this kind of public spat, talk to people on the regulatory side and the operator side to just understand how they see the approach here or the issues at bay. I've heard some really cool ideas on how they could actually go about and improve the workload here. The coolest one I heard earlier today was if any launch operator is operating out of a federal range and the federal range approves whatever that launch operator is doing, the FAA doesn't need to comment on it. It just gets approved because they are leveraging the resources

of these other federal agencies. I thought that was a really cool idea because federal ranges in particular, you know, we're talking about Cape Canaveral or Wallops, there is a huge amount of work that they do, you know, in ensuring the launch facilities there and ensuring safety from the range, both locally at the range, but also with whatever operations are happening out of it. If they are approving this situation, in a lot of cases, in the SpaceX issues here, they said, you know, the range approved our new tank farm or whatever it was, or the use of the new, you know, facility to communicate with our vehicles. That, you know, this idea was that that just kind of clears it through and the FAA doesn't

need to comment on that. And that saves the FAA's time for the things that are not in federal ranges, smaller upstarts, Boca Chica, things that actually are unique and that no one else would be covering if the FAA was not. I thought that idea was really cool. And I think these kinds of instances, we can actually have some hard data and say, oh yeah, these are the things that we need to fix about the process. Not just like, you know, what forms you need to fill out because you and I, you know, maybe you do

because you work in the environment, but like, I'm never really gonna understand the difficulty of one form versus another. But these actual anecdotes are helpful to understand the kinds of things and the process flow. And, you know, when SpaceX submitted this info, it had to get forwarded to these other three people. And you're dealing with like, you know, it was the summer. So like, was there vacation time and people were off? And then there was stuff going on that kept them from that. And then at the same time, the FAA is also dealing

with, you know, the whole Boeing fiasco over the last couple of years. And was that tying up the legal team and all this coordination aspect? It's not surprising to me that some of these things take three weeks, four weeks, a month to actually get through. But having an understanding of what it is that's, what are the updates that are being requested that are taking this long? And how does that actually impact operations, I think is a really helpful thing in the long run. So a couple of thoughts that I thought were worth sharing. I don't feel like the storyline's over yet. SpaceX and the FAA are still going back and forth. They're still getting called in front of Congress and talking some smack about each other

in a way that is a very Michael Jackson popcorn gif. So we'll see if that continues. But yeah, I feel like that's all I got on it at the moment, but I thought it was worth putting that out there. And I haven't talked to you in a bit, so good to hit your ears again. But thanks all so much for dealing with my little off time while I've got adjusted to my new sleep schedule and my new old sleep schedule, I guess. And you'll be hearing from me more frequently. So thank you all so much for listening. Thanks for your support, as always, at managingcutoff.com. If you've got any questions or thoughts, hit me up, Anthony, at managingcutoff.com or on Twitter at wehavemiko,

on Mastodon at miko at spacey.space or wherever else you can find me on the internet. Until next time, thanks so much. I'll talk to you soon.