One of the most cautious, rules-bound arms of the federal government is on a collision course with possibly its most dangerous opponent yet: “first buddy” Elon Musk.
The Federal Aviation Administration has spent years tangling with Musk’s SpaceX for violations related to its operations, including multiple incidents when the company launched rockets without approval. During the past year, the agency proposed fining SpaceX $633,009 for twice using plans the agency had not green-lighted, and forced the company to idle its launch pads in Texas for months because of a pending Fish and Wildlife Service review.
And go-fast-break-things Musk has responded with scorched earth. He’s used his social media megaphone to threaten to sue the agency for “regulatory overreach,” accused it of “politically motivated behavior,” taunted the FAA with crude humor and poked at the agency’s rules, which he says move too slowly to meet his goal of getting human civilization to Mars. He has also called for the resignation of FAA leader Mike Whitaker — who has four years left on the job, assuming he serves out his term.
But now Musk is getting a chance to wield untold amounts of power over the aviation regulator’s future after President-elect Donald Trump put him and fellow MAGA cheerleader Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of an effort to transform and shrink the federal government.
While Trump has yet to spell out any details about the so-called Department of Government Efficiency — including whether it would even be part of the federal government — the 50,000-employee FAA offers Musk a fat potential target. And it could stand as a case study for how Musk wields his relationship with the incoming president to lash back at agencies that clashed with his business interests.
The FAA does have some structural advantages that other Musk antagonists lack: Nearly a century’s worth of laws have given the agency ultimate authority over who can use the nation’s skies, and it generally commands respect on Capitol Hill — despite all the complaints in recent years about lax oversight of Boeing. Few lawmakers have expressed interest in meddling with an aviation system that hasn’t seen a fatal crash by a U.S.-based airline since 2009, and which drives more than 5 percent of U.S. gross domestic product.
Then again, some lawmakers from both parties have been open to revisiting the part of the FAA’s jurisdiction that Musk has most complained about — its regulation of commercial space.
One of those lawmakers is Rep. Rick Crawford (R-Ark.), who is expected to be the next chair of the House Transportation Committee, which oversees the FAA. He has called overhauling the agency’s space regulations one of his top priorities.
If he wins the gavel, Crawford confirmed to POLITICO he would look to make over the FAA’s permitting processes, which Musk has long complained obstructs SpaceX from ramping up its rocket launches.
“There’s definitely some changes that need to be made,” Crawford told POLITICO on Thursday, adding that the FAA is too stringent and too slow to sign off on launches. Other GOP members have lamented that the U.S. cannot compete against China in its race to the moon if FAA’s lengthy regulatory process continues.
“For this country to outsource our space program and then try to impede the progress of the very company that we’re relying on seems to be a little bit counterintuitive, so we’re going to attempt to fix that,” Crawford said. He did not elaborate what that “fix” would look like, only saying some ideas are in the works.
It’s possible that lawmakers could simply decide to cut the FAA out of the business of regulating launches at all. Indeed, one bill in the House, supported by SpaceX, would allow the Commerce Department to certify “space objects,” defined as things in space that have been launched from Earth. The bill would not remove the FAA from its duties, however.
SpaceX did not return a request for comment.
The FAA said in a statement that its first priority is safety of the nation’s airspace, which includes ensuring that spacecraft are using it appropriately. The FAA stressed that while Congress has only given the FAA limited authority to regulate launches, space companies still have to comply with state and federal laws.
Still, the FAA said it continues to have “a productive working relationship with SpaceX.”
Most of the six current and former FAA officials and industry representatives interviewed for this article predicted that the FAA won’t simply bend to Musk’s will, no matter how much he berates its leaders.
“He has met an agency that doesn’t just bend, … that has a very clear mission,” said one former FAA official, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the agency’s relationship with Musk over the last several years. “He is going to need their permission to operate.”
Then again, the FAA has never gone up against an opponent like Musk — the world’s richest man, who just happens to have the ear of a president who’s assigned him to remake the entire federal bureaucracy.
A second former FAA official said that in the best-case scenario, Musk — “who’s obviously very smart” — could help push the space race forward in new ways that could “enable technology faster.”
“Having these novel perspectives … is never a bad thing,” the former official said, “while ensuring that safety will never be compromised.”
Because “what we wouldn’t want to do is wake up and say, ‘What the hell happened there?’” the official said.
A complicated history
The FAA, an agency that traces its history back to 1926, has a record of taking time to make up its mind about allowing new technologies in the air.
It spent years deliberating before letting airline passengers keep their iPads and Kindles on during takeoff. It still isn’t letting Amazon deliver packages by drone outside a handful of test communities, 11 years after then-CEO Jeff Bezos dazzled the media by announcing his flying-robot initiative on “60 Minutes.”
Unlike other federal agencies that Musk may be used to interacting with — such as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which historically has been a weak overseer of automobile manufacturers like Tesla — the FAA has rigid and extensive rules governing who can use America’s airspace. That includes ensuring that a rocket doesn’t come crashing down on a cul-de-sac or collide in mid-air with an airplane loaded with passengers.
“When the FAA makes determinations, they back them up with a lot of detailed analysis, said a former FAA administrator, who like the others quoted in this article was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the agency’s relationship with Musk. “And if they’re competent in their analysis, they’re not going to back down from that.”
That’s a recipe for friction.
The agency and Musk have had a frayed relationship since at least 2020, as a result of an incident where SpaceX launched a prototype rocket that exploded on landing — a situation the FAA said could have put residents around the Boca Chica, Texas, launch site at risk.
During that launch on Dec. 9, 2020, SpaceX proceeded despite not having FAA approval, which the agency had not granted due to concerns about weather. Reports at the time said the agency’s weather models had shown a clear risk to those around the launch site if the rocket were to explode. (Ultimately no one was injured.)
SpaceX staff had ignored the weather warnings because they assumed they were dated, according to documents obtained by The Verge.
After the explosion, the FAA paused SpaceX’s launch license while it investigated. But according to an FAA official familiar with the matter, SpaceX wasn’t humbled by its failure, which it trumpeted as a successful launch that succumbed to a “hard landing.” Instead, SpaceX continued to pressure the agency to move faster — not only on its investigation, but on other pending business.
Frustrated, then-FAA Administrator Steve Dickson, who had been nominated during Trump’s first term, called Musk in March 2021 to reprimand him during what the FAA official said was a tense call. (Dickson did not answer repeated requests for comment.)
“The pressure that SpaceX broadly was applying to the agency was out of line,” the official said, adding that Dickson was also dealing with the fallout from two Boeing 737 MAX crashes that killed 346 people in Ethiopia and Indonesia in 2018 and 2019.
“For Dickson, safety dictated timeline — that was on his mind,” said the official, who was granted anonymity to discuss the call candidly.
Following the call, the FAA issued a rare statement saying Dickson “made it clear that the FAA expects SpaceX to develop and foster a robust safety culture that stresses adherence to FAA Rules.”
Months later, SpaceX proceeded with building out its Texas location. The FAA warned that construction could “complicate the ongoing environmental review process” for Starship. According to the FAA at the time, SpaceX said its towers at the base shouldn’t be subjected to environmental oversight. The FAA shot back that the plan SpaceX submitted “indicates otherwise.”
“To me, it’s an issue of, Musk doesn’t like to ask permission — and he has to have the agency’s permission, not just on [environmental approvals] but also to operate in the airspace,” said the former FAA official.
While the agency didn’t fine SpaceX for the 2020 incident, it did fine the company $633,009 earlier this year for separate violations in which the company deviated from its launch plans. Musk has threatened to sue the agency.
Musk’s escalating pace of space launches doesn’t just occur within the massively congested airspace over Florida, but also in Texas, where the start of his Starship launches traverses some of the airspace down into Mexico.
When Musk moved ahead expanding in Boca Chica beyond his ongoing operations in Florida and California, he had assumed for a period that the agency was just going to “sign off on everything and without any conditions,” the former official said.
Besides the FAA’s space branch, the agency’s air traffic organization also has to sign off on the company’s use of U.S. airspace. But to Musk’s credit, the official said, SpaceX was one of the first companies to share real-time data that could be ported back into the FAA air traffic organization’s operations, which allows it to reopen the airspace much faster.
Whitaker, the current administrator, in September publicly defended the agency’s motivation behind SpaceX’s delays. The FAA said Whitaker and Musk have spoken “on more than one occasion,” but did not specify how recently that was.
“What we wouldn’t want to do is have an agency just designed around one entity’s idea of what makes for good … policy,” said the second former FAA official. “It could be that Elon’s ideas will be exactly the ideas that the FAA needs to move forward — but there are many users of the airspace.”
The FAA needs “to give it all the due diligence it deserves,” the second official said, “but recognize that we have a very, very complex aerospace system with a myriad of users, and all with a level of input that they want to see.”
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