31 thoughts on “The FAA Overreach”

  1. Sonic booms?! I know I have trauma from sonic booms from
    Richards-Gebaur AFB while riding my bike in Kansas City in the 60’s.

  2. “I think they need to operate at the highest level of safety, and that includes adopting an SMS [safety management system] program and that includes having a whistleblower program.”

    What an odd thing to say.

    Looks like Musk has some Democrat saboteurs working for his company. Have to give Democrats credit for being such great schemers.

  3. When bureaucrats are concerned so much about “safety”, it’s usually their careers they’re talking about. Giving permission is risky because things could go wrong. It’s always safer from a career perspective to deny permission. This applies to just about all bureaucracies and bureaucrats, not just the FAA.

  4. I still say that Elon Musk’s best hope is the designs that the pentagon probably have on space x’s super heavy /starship to be used to launch its satellites (spy/SDI/etc.) in Earth orbit. DOD/CIA/DIA/etc have vastly more clout than NASA or space X they won’t let bureaucrats stand in the way of their likely ambitions for long. Once it is proven to work of course that important caveat.

    1. The point about spy sats is a good one. For photo-recon especially, it’s often very, very useful to adjust orbital parameters via a burn (to allow unexpected overhead passes, on demand passes, etc). This isn’t done often, due to propellant constraints, imposed by launch mass and bulk constraints. It would thus be very useful to increase the prop load by a lot, simply by adding extra prop tankage.

      Starship fits the bill for doing that. Nothing else does.

      1. “Starship fits the bill for doing that. Nothing else does”

        Yes. And eventually large massive SDI satellites (once you get to a laser/particle being weapon of useful power–say megawatt class to have a chance at stopping ICBM/hypersonic missiles) you’re probably well into the hundreds of tons of satellite. And you would likely need dozens or even hundreds of them to protect the US/NATO. The starship wedded to the super heavy would finally make that practical. 330K pounds per flight and reusable you could put up large satellites of several 100 tons each with just a few flights. Doubt if FAA bureaucrats would have the balls to get in the pentagon’s way and once you have dozens or hundreds of flights a year by DOD it would be kind of hard for them to pick on Elon Musk’s relatively modest flight rate to Mars.

      2. And of course the decline in launch costs caused by the economies of scale that would inevitable build up to satisfy DOD’s need for 100’s of flights a year (to launch, assemble, and service a large stable of SDI sats) would be available to enable Elon Musk’s comparatively modest onward to Mars demands.

      3. I take the opposite tack. If you put cameras on Starlink sats and you put several thousands in orbit almost the entire surface of the planet is nearly observable 24/7 no delta-v required.

      4. Sensitive military locations are told when other countries’ spy satellites are going to fly over. They can take measures to try to hide what they’re doing during those times. That was fine when there were only a small number of imaging satellites in space. Today, there are hundreds of them ranging from Planet Lab’s Super Doves to the latest ones belonging to the NRO. With so many imaging satellites, you’d be constantly hiding instead of getting anything accomplished.

        SuperDoves have a resolution of about 3-5 meters, which is about the same as the CORONA satellites of the 1960s. They still return useful information and in a much timelier manner than those early film-return systems. There are several families of imaging satellites with sub meter resolution, which is better than the KH-8 and KH-9 systems that were in used until the mid 1980s. Resolution is important for some things, such as precision measurements of new systems. However, short revisit intervals are at least as important as resolution. Think back to the 1991 Gulf War when the coalition forces did an end-run (“Hail Mary”) to catch the Iraqi forces off guard. Imaging how difficult it would be to hid the buildup of forces necessary for that invasion when military and civilian satellites are flying over multiple times per hour.

      5. Having on-orbit unmanned refueling would also be good. But we cannot even decide on a standardized fuel maniforld.

      1. Better yet, say the ride up in a Dragon is free. 100% of the per-seat charges is to bring astronauts back 🙂

  6. From the SpaceNews article linked in the X post:

    “SpaceX has been a very innovative company,” Whitaker responded,

    I find that quote with the use of “has been“ instead of “is” pretty revealing about the true thinking and motivations on the part of the FAA Administrator.

    There is nothing more to add.

  7. So, when DoD takes over Starship and ULA takes over Falcon 9, when Trump lies dead in a pool of blood and Musk is in prison somewhere… “The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!”

    1. Had to use Generative AI to look that one up. My lack of liberal education is showing.

      However apropos of the thread here is the final quote from Kipling’s 1919 poem:

      When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins, As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!”

      A Copybook Heading is a maxim children would write in their school notebooks. Sayings like Honesty is the best policy, etc.

      1. It was Jerry Pournelle’s favorite poem, I think.

        There’s no reason you shouldn’t fill in your education now. Read a compendium of Kipling. read all of Rider Haggard’s She series, starting with King Solomon’s Mines and ending on Wisdom’s Daughter. Figure out that Qautermain is pronounced “Quite-a-Man” not Quarter-Main, and that he was far from racist. Read as much Edgar Rice Burroughs as you can stand, if you haven’t already.

          1. I’ve got all of Farley’s Radio books, and thought they were pretty weird when I was 14! I’ve read most of ERB. Sometimes he chose to write in what for him was an old-fashioned idiom, other times he was a Hemingway-class stylist. And sometimes he wrote for pecker-headed editors, just like the rest of us. I’d rate Kipling the top writer of his age, and he was despised by the elite literati while was alive. No surprise there/

          2. Love the 2nd in the Radio Planet (hint: Venus) series, where the hero Cabot, builds a radio transceiver set from scratch on Venus. And I do mean scratch. Building electron tubes first by setting up the ability to blow glass bulbs and then evacuate them with the proper materials inside. All the native Venusian species communicate by radio rather than sound as they have naturally evolved to do. The Earthling Cabot builds a special helmet so that he can communicate with them, including the giant ants.

          4. Well at least they didn’t need overhead drive shafts with belts. Although I must admit as a kid I thought those were super cool.

  9. This is clearly the Biden/Harris Administration weaponizing FAA against Musk. I refuse to believe it is organic within AST, having known the people there for nearly half my career – and been one myself for the last 10 years of my career.

    I’m just glad to not be in that environment anymore, and can’t imagine the misery of those remaining.

    2. Apparently ULA’s Vulcan can lose nozzles off its Vulcan rocket strap on side boosters w/o warranting an FAA investigation. Clearly Starship/SuperHeavy needs to add solid rocket boosters as an FAA warranty item.

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