Main Engine Cut Off - T+307: Executive Order on Regulatory Reform (with Tom Marotta)

Episode Date: August 15, 2025

Tom Marotta of The Spaceport Company joins me to talk about the executive order this week focused on commercial space regulatory reform, what problems it seeks to solve, his experience on both sides of those issues, and how we should understand the positioning of the order.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 34 executive producers—Frank, David, Jan, Josh from Impulse, Steve, Ryan, Joakim (Jo-Kim), Lee, Creative Taxi, Theo and Violet, Fred, Pat, Donald, Better Every Day Studios, Stealth Julian, Bob, The Astrogators at SEE, Russell, Joel, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Matt, Natasha Tsakos (pronounced Tszakos), Kris, Warren, Heiko, Will and Lars from Agile, Joonas, and four anonymous—and hundreds of supporters.TopicsTom Marotta (@thomasmarotta) / XTom Marotta | LinkedInThe Spaceport CompanyPrevious appearance: T+259: Tom Marotta, The Spaceport Company - Main Engine Cut OffEnabling Competition in the Commercial Space Industry – The White HouseTrump Issues Executive Order on Commercial Space – SpacePolicyOnline.comThe 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 NASAWork with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

Hello and welcome to main engine cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo, and I saw an executive order come across the news feeds this week regarding regulatory reform in the commercial space industry, and everybody was talking about it, and I was unclear if it was something to be talked about. So I reach out to an old friend of the show, Tom Marotta, who is at the spaceport company, formerly at FAA, spent some time at Astra, has a ton of experience on both sides of the FAA's Part 450 rules, as we'll talk about. It has a great perspective on some of the real minutia of this executive order and how we

should read between the lines in some cases or what we should make of these different things going on. So I feel a lot better after talking to him. I think you will too. So let's jump into it. Tom, thanks for hanging out with me and receiving my very last minute texts yesterday, two days ago, I guess, or email or whatever, to come on off nominal, but luckily, couldn't make off nominal, which means I get to steal you for my own show here. So thanks for joining me. My pleasure. Thanks for reaching out. Yeah, too bad Jake isn't here. We'll have to do an off nominal. It's fine. He's listening. He can catch up. He doesn't even live in this country anyway, and he's trying to leave the one that he did come from to join the other one. And so what does he care about our executive voters anyway? there's been I maybe want to take this to a meta direction of like is this news because there's been a lot of talk about this new executive order that's a pretty wide swath of regulatory reform that's everything from FAA rules to like office politics is how it reads so I just want your vibe on when you looked at this you went and you I guess other people may not have listened to the other Tom Rada show that we did where we talked about how you ended up at the spaceport company which was by way

of the FAA Office of Commercial Face for years. So you've got a really good insight on this. So what was your vibe on like news or not news? Yeah. So I think people might be wondering, like, why is Anthony asking this guy? So work for five years at the FAA, worked at Astra for about a year, got the first Part 450 license faster than anyone's done it yet. So pretty familiar.

Yeah, or ever. I think you could say ever now if we think Part 450 is going away. You may be the record holder. Well, part for 50 is not going away. We'll get to that. It's going to change substantially, though. It will. It will.

But yeah, so I know, I know regulation's pretty comfortable with all that. I'm pleased with the CEO. I think it's a step in the right direction. I think it's anybody who is excited about substantially increase. I think the phrase in the EO is substantially increasing commercial launch cadence and novel space activities. anybody who's in favor of that should be in favor of this EO. So that's good. It's a step in the right direction.

Now, are we going to blacken the skies with, you know, thousands of new SpaceX competitors and, you know, is this going to be the thing that unlocks cities on Mars and O'Neillian habitats, you know, before 2030? No. Okay. So let's just keep it. keep it in perspective.

It's a great move. There's a lot of good stuff in here, but there's still a lot of work to be done. Yeah. You make me think of the Gwen Shotwell tweet where she was like, this will unleash our industry. I'm like,

you don't appear to be leashed. You're firing off a rocket every other day here. Like thousands of satellites launch. You seem fairly unleashed at this point. But, you know, I don't know. If the industry is leashed, this will loosen the leash a little,

but, you know, there are other substantial capital, financial, and just technical things that have to get done before we all live that kind of, you know, moon-based life. We're all kind of hoping to get to. So I'm happy to go through it one by one, but yeah, I mean, that's kind of my hot take. I think it's a great move. A lot of really interesting things in there.

Yeah, but not a silver bullet. Yeah, let's talk about the 450 thing because that one in most of the articles about this references like this this one appears to be uncontroversial um yeah and and maybe we can do a little previously on part 450 last last time you were on the show we talked about it and tried to lay context for like how it was different from what came before where it was a at least yeah at some extent somewhat like self-defining right like you had to work with the f a to figure out what things you needed to supply to get licensed and and what was it about your particular infrastructure or architecture that mattered for licensing so that's right like

Why did it seem to, and this was only, how long is four, 50 in effect? Like seven years or something? No, no, no. Four years? Four, okay. Seven was like, I don't know, a little bit before the pandemic. But no, okay. So five years.

Yeah, I think it was 2021 because the legacy regulations were allowed to remain in place for five years. And that deadline's coming up in March of 2026. So what happened? Because last time we talked, I feel like people were hot about it. and it felt like the right way. And then that vibe has shifted over the last two years. Like what was the change? I was never too hot on it.

I was one very small part of the team that helped write part 450. So I guess I'm partially to blame. But I, you know, there was a lot of people who worked on it. Part 450 has underwhelmed the industry because it is very, very different. it is designed, and it still could do this, and it probably still will after FAA redos it again, it is designed to eventually allow far more flexible launch activities to launch faster with less paperwork. The previous regime, part 450, part 417, I mean, was a lot more prescriptive, and you basically had to get a license almost for every launch. Now, there was a way to get

what's called an operator's license, get multiple launches approved under one license, but it wasn't as potentially streamlined as 450 is. I think the challenge that industry is having with 450 is first, when it was first rolled out, frankly, FAA didn't really have that much experience with portions of Part 450, so there were some growing pains there. Those have been worked out. I can tell you that. They're much better enforcing their own rules now, which is great. But there's still a lot of chooseers. your own adventure aspect to Part 450. And there's a lot of work that a launch operator is required to do up front

in order to unlock a benefit that is supposedly coming later on. I don't think anybody in industry has yet unlocked those benefits that are supposed to come later on, right? The idea being, once you set the rules of your own game, once the FAA approves methodologies for performing certain analyses, getting approval for multiple launches will be a lot easier. We haven't yet seen that promise of 450 unlocked. And I think industry is moving so quickly and they're just like, look, we can't wait around for this anymore, right?

We need the benefit now. We need to be unleashed now, right? We need to go faster. And if you're a new rocket company, you're building a rocket, you're building a rocket, you're building a staff, you're building a factory, maybe you're building a satellite, you know, constellation in addition to a rocket, right? You're building components. You're selling gyroscopes or IMUs or solar panels or whatever. You're doing like 10 things. And you have to figure out part 450. You're just like, man, it's just a bridge too far. Why is this so hard? And of course,

it's mission critical, right? You have to get a license to fly. And so I think it's just, it's the straw that broke the camel's back. They're like, FAA, we just need this to be easier somehow. So what is that friction, though? Like, what is the thing? Is it the fact that because some of it is self-guided or choose your adventure, like you said, like that there's meta work to be done before you can even know what you need to tell the FAA? That's a big part of it.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. So the industry has... And you might not have those answers because you're still figuring out what your first stage looks like. Or if you're Stoke space, right? You're building a reusable upper stage and a brand-new first stage and you're still like... kind of flexible on some of this, some of the details? I don't want to speak for Stoke-Pace, but generally speaking.

It's just a good example. Yeah, that's right. You know, just a weird-looking launch vehicle, okay, Tom? It's your opinion, I'm on. It's cool, actually. It is cool. I'm not saying it's not cool. I'm just saying if you look around, all the other ones look like Falcon 9,

so they could probably cheat off the 450 application that Falcon 9 did, and Stokes is somewhat different. It's a great point. It's an exactly great point. Like, you first in a launch office, operator, first has to understand the regulation, to understand what adventures they can go on. All right. How do we want to put this together? Then they have to understand their vehicle, and then they have to negotiate the methodologies by which FAA will evaluate the launch license.

And then you evaluate the launch license. And then you finally get to the starting line. So there's lots of work that has to happen laying the groundwork to just get to the starting line. And that's part of, I think, the challenge with that industry has with 450 is like they've been doing all the preliminary work without yet realizing the benefit on the back end. Because once you've created all those methodologies, once you've had all those negotiations and difficult conversations with the FAA and they say, okay, for this trajectory, for this launch vehicle, for these payloads, you know, for this launch site, you're going to evaluate your flight safety. analysis this way. Your system safety is going to be done this way. All that's laid out, then you can, it's pretty, it should be pretty straight forward. You are, yeah, hopefully, theoretically will be unleashed. Right. Right. And so what is different about when people and, and I don't know, like, did you, did you feel this at Astra going through

the 450 process or because you also like kind of read all the words at some point, you were more familiar? You didn't have the way finding stuff. We did have the way-finding step. No, we absolutely had to go through all that preliminary stuff. The Astro vehicle at the time had launched. We were applying for a license to launch for the first time out of Cape Canaveral. It had already launched several times out of Alaska, and it already had an existing 417 license.

So there was a lot of familiarity in the FAA and in Astra on how to navigate portions. of the 450 process, but a lot of it, it was just the first time, and it was, it was extremely challenging for both sides. It was extremely challenging. I think a lot of that has been worked out now. That was, that was almost four years ago now, in that FAA is getting better at evaluating things. I'm involved with a couple of projects right now where we're going through the 450 process, and it's much smoother than it was for Astra. So I'm happy to say that. But it's still a giant lift. And there's just a lot of ambiguity and a lot of it is on the launch and reentry vehicle operator to define that. And so if you have an unusual vehicle like some sort of

rocket plane, or you get to pick it in the usual one, nice. Or, you know, not a vertically launched expendable vehicle. You know, if you're a kinetic launcher, right? Holy cow. Like that's, it's going to take a very long time to choose your adventure through 450. How do we do that? And the EO sort of speaks to that in sort of a vague, hard-to-understand way. There are references to regulations that are too attenuated to the actual operation of the launch vehicle. I don't really know what that means. I think what that means is, for example, if you have a launch vehicle that doesn't have any toxic materials on it, the way 450 is currently written, you have to prove to the FAA that nothing on that vehicle is toxic,

under any situation. So if like a bunch of plastic starts burning, right? You have plastic and you have to say, well, if that falls outside of your, you know, three sigma area, is it toxic or not? Like, well, that's, you know, come on, that's not really what that means. It's not hydrazine. It's just plastic. So, yeah.

And so I think that's kind of like where they're trying to give AST, where this EO is trying to give AST a little more flexibility, just have a little more. common sense. Okay. Trim out. Which they could have done years ago. I mean, this is well within the authority of the Secretary of Transportation to do anyway, but the fact that now it's coming from all the way from the top, from the Oval Office,

gives the Secretary of Transportation, the FAA administration, and the associate administrator of AST kind of top cover to be like, okay, let's use these. And the interim administrator of NASA. It's also giving in. by way of a weird certain way as much as that person might be involved. Yeah. They're usually not too involved with licensing activities outside of the payload of review. Well, let's say, let's say you were the Secretary of Transportation, and you are the one that shall reevaluate, amend, or rescind as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, the regulations at Part 450.

Do you have specific things in mind that you're like, that thing bugs me? I would take that out. Like, is the toxicity? Yeah, I'm on, I'm on record on the, on X. as, you know, I'm a big, I'm not a big fan of the way AST evaluates system safety. I think they've fixed a lot of that. Industry has told me they've fixed a lot of it. But I find it to be very subjective. You basically have to have done system safety at NASA for like 30 years and the Air Force at 30 years to kind of understand. And I haven't.

And so it was very challenging when I went through the process. And everybody at AST just kind of thirp their hands and they're like, you just need to hire somebody who has 30 years experience. And I was like, that's the wrong answer. This guy that I'm thinking of, yeah. No, and so that was, that was very challenging. A lot of that has been worked through there. It's Vizary Circulars now. There's a lot more guidance material, and I think that's been figured out.

But I would like to see more quantitative, objective, you know, metrics being used to evaluate a license rather than more subjective sort of qualitative metrics to evaluate the list. I understand why they did it. Launch vehicles are changing. it's hard to, you know, have a one-size-fits-all. That's what we had under 417. There were times it didn't really work. It got very complicated.

But the value to industry of having known quantitative, objective metrics, I think, is helpful to industry. And it's also helpful to AST and FAA. It protects them. Say, look, you either meet the number or you don't. We have that already in the flight safety analysis regulations, right? there are very clear math problems you do to find out if you meet one time 10 to the minus 6. Whereas in the system safety side, the metric the operator needs to meet is, is the risk to the public remote or extremely remote? And now if you look at the advisory circulars and there's a lot of industry knowledge, mill standard 882E and NASA has a whole guide, you can sort of back into a quantitative measure for extremely remote.

remote but at the end of the day if you're like no we don't think it's a little bit of a judgment yeah you know and and I don't that makes me uncomfortable I don't think I don't like that so I don't like it rescind it or or re-evaluate at least or resuscitate it's a lot of options there in the wording any of these other aspects of this like catcher I don't know if you have

much to say in the way of the environmental stuff maybe the maybe the the office debate could be something that we that we talk about so so on the on the environmental um here they've been talking about changing offices around two and i'm like never i never really actually care about this so you can one we should care um so let's hear it yeah yeah so um just quick on the environmental um when you build a spaceport the environmental is a big deal that can be that can be many years uh for, I think, pretty obvious reasons. Environmental reviews for launch operations at an existing approved spaceport,

especially a federal range, are a relatively small portion of the activity. So I know a lot of people in industry are now like, you know, throwing their drink at the screen and screaming and saying, oh, but I've been stuck in this environmental for a long time. We'll just strap in for the license because you're in for a lot more with the license, especially at an environmental. So eliminating the environmental approvals for launch and reentry operations, especially at a federal range, I don't think it will substantially increase, right? That's the measure that the EEO says. We're going to substantially increase launch cadence.

I don't think that's going to, that's not going to substantially increase things or unleash things, the environmental rules. Now, that said, they are, they are expensive, and they almost always result in a Fonzie, a finding of no significant. impact. So I think eliminating it will speed things up, but it's not going to substantially speed things up. Okay, on the moving the chairs around and moving the offices, right, big fan of this. Again, I'm on record as saying, I think AST should move up, should move back to the Department of Transportation. That's where it was when the office was formed in the 80s. And anybody who's worked inside of the federal government will understand why people outside would be like, What's the big deal?

The government, you know, we all live by oxygen. We have to breathe oxygen. The federal government lives on paperwork. And so when you have to get permission from the Secretary of Transportation to say, change your regulations or go do something or you need a legal opinion from an aviation lawyer or an aerospace lawyer. And maybe that lawyer works in the Secretary of Transportation's office, not at the FAA or they're in a different part of the FAA, the fewer steps there are between you

and the ultimate decision maker is really good because moving all that paper around takes a lot of time. Like a bureaucracy lives on paper. And it has to go through the layers and everybody has to sign off on it. And it just takes forever. And so the commercial space industry is a national security asset. It is a special thing. It is different from other modes of transportation. It is in fact not legally a mode of transportation yet. Actually, that's not true. It is now a mode of transportation, but it's different from highways and rails and everything like that. These are ICBMs, essentially, that we're using to unlock the high frontier, right? And so it should be as close to the highest level of decision-making authority as it can

possibly get. And I haven't really heard a good argument as to why AST needs to remain in FAA. I'm open to it. People say, oh, we need it there because of the air traffic control and clearing out the airspace for launches. I get that, but that can be done almost independent of licensing, post-licensing. They close. There's plenty of times or things that are not in the FAA per view. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly, exactly. And so I think the licensing activity, yeah, should go back up to, should go up to DOT. And maybe they will. Maybe that's, maybe there's another EO coming. I don't know. I was very interested, by the way, that the EO says, the secretary of transportation

or says something like, will appoint a non-career civil service employee or something like that. It was like non-career employee to run AST. That kind of raised my eyebrows. And I was wondering of what you thought about that. Typically, I think always, all of the associated administrators of commercial space transportation have been long-time career safety professionals who have spent years, if not decades in and around the aerospace industry and actually in in FAA. And I'm thinking, you know, Mary Grace Smith, George Neald, Kelvin Coleman, they brought in Wayne Malthyth, but he, He was an Air Force general, clearly very, very, you know, knowledgeable about those kind of things. So bringing in a non-career person is kind of an interesting.

Is there a legal definition of that? Like, do you have to have to spend no time in this chain of command to qualify as a non-career employee? Typically a career employee is like a civil, long-time civil servant, right? So non-career indicates to me that they're bringing in somebody from the outside. I mean, number one, if you're asking, I'll do it. 100% we'll take that position you don't want that job

maybe the NASA administrative I thought you were going to be Matt NASA administrator I'm running for it still listen it seems like Sean W might have mine over already so we'll find out yeah I could do both

it doesn't seem to be a limitation on the on the job anymore I don't know this this fits with what you said earlier that like some of this stuff was already possible and it's just being explicitly stated here

is more of a of a reason to make a statement because, like, they could have always... Which is great. There's nothing that would prevent this from happening previously. If Jared Isaacman was going to be this role, like he could have always been nominated for that role or appointed that person. But simply excluding anyone else in the org chart.

I mean, it definitely fits with all the other appointments that we've seen in the administration, which was like, you know... Exactly. Either elevate someone up or, like, you know, oust Jim Free instead of just what NASA assumed would be his ascension into this acting role. So, yeah, I mean, we're out on a limb here. We're speculating, but it might be giving Secretary of Transportation and the FAA administrator top cover to put somebody in there who's kind of some new blood, you know,

a business person, you know, maybe a Jared Eisenman type person. Jared Isamint would be, I don't think he's going to get the tap, but, you know, I don't know. I think he'd be great. He pretty would, but I think he's out. Yeah, yeah, I think he's not too. Rubicide. I'm coming. Too bad.

Yeah, you're right. Like, it's especially, if they have someone in mind for this already, I think it makes sense because you're right now, now everyone can be mad at this executive order and not, you know, whoever made that call otherwise. And that person won't get the flack. This will. Right. Right. So you might be right. This is like more positioning for a thing that they know is coming. It's pretty far down. Right. This is like section six of eight on the executive order. So yeah. So it was not the first thing they were listing. They're trying to slip this in, you know, the back half of the, but. All right. I feel better about all this. I'm, I'm still, I get the point of the office elevation. You're saying that would elevate it to be a peer of the office that currently sits under. Is that the way that the org chart would flow? I don't think I understand, like, I, I am just advocating that AST go back up to the DOT office and that whoever is running AST report directly to the secretary rather than through the FAA administrator. Okay.

That's, that would be ideal. The other thing I want to point out from the CEO. This is the same argument that I buy for the Space Force of being elevated out of the Air Force so that they get appear. That's right. Yeah. Somebody needs to be up all night thinking about AST and that person needs to have the ear of the Secretary of Transportation and not, you know, nothing against the FAA administrator, but the FAA administrator has a lot on that. No, right. It's easy to get lost on your plate.

Your priority gets lost amongst all that. Right, right, right. So let's bring it right up to Secretary Duffy. The other thing I want to point out in the last few minutes we have here is the mission authorizations for Secretary of Commerce for unconventional space activities. This is huge. Big thumbs up for this. This is something that has been talked about for a long time.

I'm not sure if there's been some prior. executive orders on it, but whether it's been done before or not, like, reiterating that the U.S. government is going to issue authorizations for unconventional space activities like lunar landers or commercial space stations, and that's going to come through the Secretary of Commerce is really great. That's really good. I don't care where it comes from, whether it's DOT or commerce or whatever, it's coming through commerce fine. There's going to be some coordination issues with DOT and launch licenses, whatever, they'll figure it out. It's not a big deal. But the fact that the U.S. government writ large is saying, yeah, we're going to authorize

Newerlanders and Mars missions and kind of like weird stuff that is sort of vague under the outer space, the outer space treaty. Yeah, it's great. It's like, it reminds me a couple of years ago when you were like asteroid mining you know remember they authorized asteroid mining yeah and i'm like i was all about that too so this is great yeah and i think the previous time that this had been talked about there was a lot of people saying we were currently unsure of who we actually need to ask and who can say yes to this activity and we know we need to ask different people but like we didn't know we needed to ask those people and we didn't right no one gave us the sign off and if nobody's nobody knows they're the person to give the sign off then nobody's going to give the sign off and

then you just in a weird email. That's right. That's right. That's right. Whatever. I don't care. And again, like the one quibble I would have is, okay, now this is like yet another organization, a startup has to go to get like a letter to say you're good to go. It would have been nice if, you know, remember one stop shop?

That was, that was cool. Like, can we try that again? But, okay, whatever. I'm just happy that somebody, there's somebody to go to. There's a point of contact to get authorization for, um, um, you know, um, you know, you're lunar lander, right? And that's consistent with the pushback to the moon, nuclear reactors on the moon, right? If we're going to have a commercial lunar reactor on the moon, they know now they have

to go to the Secretary of Commerce to get mission authorization under the outer space treaty. Great. Somebody was thinking about that, which is good. I am already one minute over the calendar invite I've sent you. So I don't want to keep it too long, but I do want to hear what the spaceport company's up to. I don't want to leave before you can give us an update on what you're working. Oh, I appreciate that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're heads down. We had a good 2024. We're about to go out to see today is August 15th. So we have an operation that we're getting underway. So we'll stay tuned. We'll have some news on that, hopefully, here in a couple weeks. And we're gearing up for some more launches in 2026. So I'll just leave it at that. Company is good. We like to keep things quiet. Team is working hard. I want to give heads up and thanks to the team. And stay tuned for more news. All right. Oh, a mysterious spaceport company update. I like that one. We're not in stealth mode. We are out there.

But, yeah, we're just heads down working on our, on our, making our customers happy. I like it. That's what I like to hear. Tom, you're the best. I appreciate you jumping on this kind of conversation. And, yeah, we can come back and talk about more fun, non-executive order things next time. So that'll be great. I love it.

Thanks, Anthony. Thanks again to Tom for coming on the show. As I told you up front, I always feel better about this stuff after talking to him. I think he's got a great take on how this all shakes out. Great insight on what matters and what doesn't. So hope you did too. I hope you enjoyed it. Let me know what you think.

Hit me up on email, Anthony at Managing Caughtoff.com. And if you like the show and you want to support it, head over to Manchincautoff. com slash support. There are almost 900 of you supporting every single month. I'm so thankful. This is a 100% listener-supported show. If you go elsewhere, you got weird ads or you got ads from weird space companies that always feels a little bit odd to me. Right here, it's just you who likes the show, who makes it

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And I can't wait for you to hear. So thanks again. I'll talk to you soon. I don't know.