SpaceX: Regulation Surpassing Launch Cost as Largest Hurdle to Space
With the cost of space travel decreasing, regulatory hang-ups are starting to eclipse launch costs as the biggest barrier to commercial space, SpaceX Vice President of Satellite Policy David Goldman said Wednesday. Regulatory challenges are "where the bottleneck is," he said at a space and spectrum conference at the University of Colorado Law School in Boulder.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Communications Daily is required reading for senior executives at top telecom corporations, law firms, lobbying organizations, associations and government agencies (including the FCC). Join them today!
For example, licensing fees for a set of CubeSats that the University of Colorado might want to use would -- over their lifespan -- exceed the cost of launching them, Goldman said. The FCC Space Bureau is trying to streamline its work, but it's "pushing against a lot of legacy regulations and norms." He noted that a satellite application filed with the agency today might not receive a license for 27 months.
Meanwhile, SpaceX's next rideshare mission, which isn't fully booked, is scheduled for 20 months from now, he said. A startup that misses that 2027 launch date because it hasn't received a license isn't merely delayed, Goldman said -- it probably runs out of funding and closes.
Many of SpaceX's customers end up getting their license close to the launch date, which he said can be problematic if the approval comes with numerous conditions. Those conditions and the timing are "a big scramble" for startups, especially because conditions are often highly unpredictable and not boilerplate. The difficulty that operators face as they try to predict conditions "is not trivial," he said, adding that more standardization and predictability are needed.
Goldman laid out an array of regulatory reform suggestions, including a "light" licensing model for ground stations, so an application is approved as long as it isn't practically on top of an existing ground station. Gateway applications can take a year to process, and the light approach would accelerate approvals dramatically, he said.
Goldman also touted sunsetting protections that incumbent satellite operators receive from new entrant satellite operators as a way of incentivizing both to settle issues. In addition, the FCC should make sharing ground networks easier, he said. A company wanting to provide gateways as a service might need to file hundreds of applications with the FCC -- one for each gateway and satellite it wants to talk to. It's also too cumbersome to gain approval for a hosted payload on someone else's satellite, he noted.