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Industry warns of dangers of cutting FAA commercial space budget

Earlier this week the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee marked up its fiscal year 2015 spending bill. The bill includes funding for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), including $16 million for the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST). That’s less than the $16.6 million requested for FY2015 by the administration and the $16.3 million it received for FY2014.

At first glance, that cut appears minor. However, at this week’s meeting of the Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC), an industry group that advises FAA/AST, both FAA and industry officials warned that the proposed cut, or even flat funding levels, could have significant negative impacts on the commercial space industry given current and projected growth in launch activities.

“The number for the FAA is pretty disturbing from the House,” said Mike Gold of Bigelow Aerospace, chairman of COMSTAC, at a public meeting of COMSTAC working groups on Wednesday in Washington. “It doesn’t sound like a lot of money, but with increasing costs and increased activity, a lower figure for the FAA could be quite devastating.”

Gold went on to argue that the potential impact of the cuts isn’t recognized even by people within the industry. “I believe we could face a triage situation,” he suggested, where licenses for commercial cargo missions to the ISS are prioritized over those for suborbital commercial vehicles or proposed new spaceports. “We could end up waiting in line as a commercial industry.”

George Nield, FAA associate administrator for commercial space transportation, did not directly address the proposed House cut for his office during a speech at the full COMSTAC meeting on Thursday, but did warn flat budgets would make it difficult for his office to keep up with the growth in commercial launch activity. He noted that while there were only three launches in fiscal year 2012 that took place under commercial launch licenses or experimental permits, there were 18 such launches in fiscal year 2013, and likely even more in 2014 and beyond.

“If we assume that our budget will continue to remain flat, as it has for the last few years, keeping up with the needs of industry is going to be challenging, to say the least,” Nield said. So far, he said that AST has kept up with the growing workload, and has made efforts to streamline its work. “But frankly, I don’t consider the current situation to be sustainable.”

As Gold suggested Wednesday, Nield said that “some kind of prioritization” may be needed to determine which licensing and other activities get first access to the office’s resources. “It’s not a good situation for any of us, obviously,” Nield said.

Michael Romanowski, director of the Space Integration Office at FAA/AST, said later at the COMSTAC meeting that the office was looking at ways to improve the licensing process in order to reduce the workload, given the office’s flat budget and workforce. “With the workload we’re facing, licensing is going to become a significant barrier,” he said. AST is required by law to make a determination on a launch license within 180 days of that license being considered substantially complete, but he cautioned that may soon not be possible under the current system.

(Disclosure: the author has previously worked with FAA/AST, but is not currently.)

7 comments to Industry warns of dangers of cutting FAA commercial space budget

  • Last year most democrats, and even establishment Republican John Boehner misled the American people claiming that millions of jobs would be lost if sequestration were enacted. The results are in. Yesterday, a GAO report claimed that in reality a single federal job was lost. One. The federal bureaucracy has proved very adept at preserving itself. Slash the FAA commercial space budget and know that the situation will be managed.

    • Coastal Ron

      amightywind said:

      Yesterday, a GAO report claimed that in reality a single federal job was lost.

      Well duh. But you are looking at the wrong metric, and really the only metric that matters – if the government can’t function to service business and citizens, then it is failing, regardless what political machinations are causing the failings.

      In this case if FAA/AST is not properly funded then U.S. businesses are affected. Apparently from a political standpoint you think that’s good, but then again you’ve never seemed to be very pro-businesss anyways.

      I’d say as more and more activity is being done in space, that the agencies budget should indexed to that activity in some way.

      • The US government, all of government needs fiscal reform. That means a reduction in jobs. The great recession never visited the federal government.

        • Coastal Ron

          amightywind said:

          The US government, all of government needs fiscal reform. That means a reduction in jobs.

          I’m all for increasing government efficiency, but hacking jobs for the sake of hacking jobs, and not changing the work load, fails. It’s the most ignorant thing to do. If you want to change the number of people needed for a job, then address the requirements and efficiency of the task.

          And since the job of the government is to serve it’s citizens, blindly removing the ability to serve the needs of it’s only customer is not the best way to do that.

          Put in context with this blog topic, not serving the needs of the commercial sector is going to make America weaker and less competitive around the world. Is that what you advocate for?

          If Congress doesn’t want to pay to regulate the commercial space industry, then they should remove all need to regulate it. Allow the industry to self-regulate themselves. There’s good and bad in that of course, and Congress is unlikely to do that, but they can’t have it both ways.

    • Hiram

      “Last year most democrats, and even establishment Republican John Boehner misled the American people claiming that millions of jobs would be lost if sequestration were enacted.”

      That was an easy call. The $85B sequester was about money that would be expended on jobs. $85B (sequester)/$60,000 (mean salary) ~ 1.5 million. BTW, it was the non-partisan CBO that came to that conclusion. “Most Democrats” and Boehner just repeated that conclusion. That probably happened. As you say, the federal bureaucracy preserved itself. But no one was misled. Do you even read what you write?

      As in “jobs lost” does not equal “federal jobs lost”, and no one ever said it did. But the dream of much of the GOP, that the sequester would result in the loss of 1.5 million FEDERAL jobs, was quashed. They lost. Get over it.

    • Vladislaw

      Wasn’t that Bill over in plant maintence?

  • vulture4

    In my experience the FAA office of spaceflight has been remarkably effective both in comparison to NASA and in comparison to much of the FAA itself. If commercial spaceflight is going to succeed in the US it will be under FAA authority, not the DOD.

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