Roadblocks in Space Development, and How to Fix Them
A Look into Two Issues Plaguing the Space Industry
I recently wrote about how the space industry has a speediness problem. Most space projects are years late (decades late, in many cases) and billions of dollars more expensive than intended. But not much has been said about why this is. This piece aims to explore two of the main reasons the space industry has stagnated, and how to fix them.
A Quick Interlude on Launch Cadence
Many space companies fail to scale. A successful space company is one that will launch many times, and preferably exponentially, year to year (2x, then 4x, then 8x, then 16x, etc.). There are a number of factors that get in the way of space companies trying to scale. Burdensome regulations are one. If a company is trying to rapidly iterate on its design and test its flaws, it needs to launch repeatedly to work out the kinks. This is counter to how safety regulations work.
Regulations
What is holding the space industry back from growth? The first place to start examining this is the environment of overregulation — and delays which stem from this.
Generally, when something goes wrong in the space industry, the federal government will step in and put all further flights for that company on hold until there is an investigation. SpaceX is currently trying to build and scale their Starship program, which will be the most important rocket to ever exist, due to its reusability and its mass to orbit potential. Success in rolling out this rocket will depend on the speediness with which SpaceX can fix all the kinks and the amount of iteration it can do on the designs. What this means is that SpaceX needs to be able to repeatedly launch their prototype, see it fail (or succeed), and then fix the issues that arise from launch, before anything of value can be placed in the vehicle. In other words, SpaceX needs to have the ability to blow up as many Starships as it needs to work out any issues.
However, most unplanned events that come out during iterative testing are considered “mishaps” by the FAA, which leads to a grounding of the program until their investigation is complete. For Starship, this meant three investigations in eleven months, where SpaceX had to wait for permission to relaunch and address the factors that led to failure. For a program that needs constant iteration and launch, constant mandated groundings of the vehicle slow progress tremendously. SpaceX made this point well in a blog post on September 10, 2024, when the FAA announced an additional 60 day grounding of Starship:
“The Starship and Super Heavy vehicles for Flight 5 have been ready to launch since the first week of August.
It's understandable that such a unique operation would require additional time to analyze from a licensing perspective. Unfortunately, instead of focusing resources on critical safety analysis and collaborating on rational safeguards to protect both the public and the environment, the licensing process has been repeatedly derailed by issues ranging from the frivolous to the patently absurd. At times, these roadblocks have been driven by false and misleading reporting, built on bad-faith hysterics from online detractors or special interest groups who have presented poorly constructed science as fact.
We recently received a launch license date estimate of late November from the FAA, the government agency responsible for licensing Starship flight tests. This is a more than two-month delay to the previously communicated date of mid-September. This delay was not based on a new safety concern, but instead driven by superfluous environmental analysis. The four open environmental issues are illustrative of the difficulties launch companies face in the current regulatory environment for launch and reentry licensing.”
Another example of burdensome regulations that slow progress is Varda Space Industries’ launch of its Winnebago-1 mission, which produced crystals of the HIV-drug ritonavir in orbit. Varda launched their first mission into orbit in June of 2023, with an expected mission duration of about a month, with the ability to extend this based on favorable re-entry conditions. However, the company soon encountered a hiccup in the re-entry process, with the FAA denying them a re-entry license, which left the mission in orbit for eight months as the company worked to coordinate with regulators to gain a re-entry permit.
A new set of FAA regulations, known as Part 450, was created to smooth the process for companies working on re-entry, but difficulties were reported by companies adjusting to the new process. Notably, Varda was the first company to receive the new Part 450 re-entry license from the FAA, even though it took eight months to get approval.
Luckily, the mission was a technical success; the ritonavir crystals and data on re-entry proved fruitful, an amazing accomplishment for a mission intended to only spend about a month in orbit.
It is important to note here that safety is essential to a thriving industry, and making sure that no one is hurt or killed is of the utmost importance. But too often, these regulations cripple companies in an industry that is already unforgiving and demanding of frequency or solvency. In the case of Varda, these capsules are uncrewed- there are no humans on board that can be injured.
A larger point stands here: if companies are forced to wait months for regulation permits from the government, they will not be able to succeed. Game-changing companies like Varda need to cascade to a point where they can launch or re-enter the atmosphere every day; if the government forces these companies to stay in orbit for months at a time per mission, the industry will fail, and nothing will be to blame except poor regulative choices.
Fixing the Regulatory Environment
Part of the slog of the FAA investigations of SpaceX are due to their own staffing issues. In October 2023, several senior SpaceX officials called for a doubling of FAA staff to help expedite reviews of critical spaceflight missions, especially if the government is serious about programs like Artemis. There is a lack of regulators at the FAA who are experts in their given field, and in this case, there are few who are experts in spaceflight. This is mainly due to this being a relatively new area of regulation.
The FAA has dealt with this type of problem in a different way, however. The FAA currently has a moratorium on human spaceflight, meaning that human spaceflight companies are immune for some amount of time from certain regulatory burdens, since it is an emerging industry. Similar practices could be adopted on various other aspects of the space industry, not just human spaceflight.
Safety is an essential piece of the puzzle on the path to making humanity an interplanetary species. Horrific accidents like the Challenger and Columbia shuttle missions set the industry back decades. In order to protect human lives, regulators must do everything they can to ensure mission safety, and they should hire more agents, and train them effectively, to accomplish this goal. It is also true that some regulations are overbearing on an emerging industry, especially when these missions are uncrewed and iterative tests. The route to fixing a convoluted regulatory environment is to place intense focus on protecting lives and preventing injury, while also removing the limitations that are slowing down and smothering any chance at scaling technologies in the space industry.
Manufacturing and Off-Shoring Capabilities
In a piece in Bloomberg in 2010, Andrew Grove, the legendary third CEO of Intel, wrote about the issues that had befallen the tech industry over the previous years, specifically in regard to job growth. As labor costs led to offshoring jobs to Asia, profits grew and growth continued to improve. But something negative was also occurring: knowledge, capability, and domestic jobs were all fading away. He stated in the piece,
“A new industry needs an effective ecosystem in which technology knowhow accumulates, experience builds on experience, and close relationships develop between supplier and customer. The U.S. lost its lead in batteries 30 years ago when it stopped making consumer electronics devices. Whoever made batteries then gained the exposure and relationships needed to learn to supply batteries for the more demanding laptop PC market, and after that, for the even more demanding automobile market. U.S. companies did not participate in the first phase and consequently were not in the running for all that followed. I doubt they will ever catch up.”
World War II was won due to a massive industrial effort unlike anything the world had ever seen. By the end of the war, the United States had produced close to 325,000 airplanes for the war effort. However, this effort did not happen overnight. It took several years of hard work and revamping to get the industrial base to a point where it could spit out airplanes faster than it could repair damaged ones. Today, the American industrial base is worse off, having moved most of these capabilities abroad. One need only look at the state of the United States shipbuilding industry to see something has gone horribly wrong. In 2022, China produced 1,794 ships. The United States produced 5.
The bigger issue cursing the space industry is actually a downstream effect of this huge national problem. With manufacturing moving offshore, production times and shipping times have risen, and as was noticeable during the lockdown era of the COVID-19 pandemic, supply chains fell behind. Aerospace parts manufacturers shipped their knowledge overseas, or are all retiring now, without any successors. This is partially due to a culture war. The prevailing narrative of the past twenty years has been that manufacturing is a dead-end job for young people, and everyone needs to go to college and get a four-year degree for better job prospects. As a result, the manufacturing industry is dying off, which in turn is slowing down the space industry.
On-Shoring Manufacturing
In the aforementioned article by Andrew Grove, he perfectly predicted the issue the tech industry is now facing. He wrote,
“Silicon Valley is a community with a strong tradition of engineering, and engineers are a peculiar breed. They are eager to solve whatever problems they encounter. If profit margins are the problem, we go to work on margins, with exquisite focus. Each company, ruggedly individualistic, does its best to expand efficiently and improve its own profitability. However, our pursuit of our individual businesses, which often involves transferring manufacturing and a great deal of engineering out of the country, has hindered our ability to bring innovations to scale at home. Without scaling, we don't just lose jobs—we lose our hold on new technologies. Losing the ability to scale will ultimately damage our capacity to innovate.”
The first step to overcoming the current stagnation in manufacturing grand space projects is to rebuild the industrial base. Luckily, there is a growing culture of builders trying to do just that.
Hadrian, a company founded to address this problem, is working on getting parts to aerospace companies for cheaper and faster than what is currently available. Chris Power, the CEO, sees the current state of manufacturing as a bottleneck to winning a second space race to the Moon and beyond. At the Reindustrialize 2024 Summit, Power gave a call-to-arms opening keynote, specifically lining out the need to reacquire the knowledge how to build things, or the West will lose any important conflict, whether that be military or even ideological. The road to a successful and fast space industry has to run through fixing the industrial base.
Special thanks to Shreeda Segan, Rob Tracinski, Andrew Miller, and Julius Simonelli for draft feedback.