ORLANDO, Fla. — Federal Aviation Administration officials say that are increasingly confident that they can move commercial launch licenses to a new set of regulations by a March 2026 deadline despite industry complaints about the rules.
Launch companies have a March 2026 deadline to transition from launch licenses issued under older regulations to new ones under regulations called Part 450 that went into effect in 2021. The Part 450 rules were intended to streamline the process for licensing commercial launches and reentries.
Industry, though, has complained that getting Part 450 licenses has been difficult, citing a long “pre-application” process and limited guidance from the FAA. At one Senate hearing in October 2023, Bill Gerstenmaier, a SpaceX vice president, warned that the “entire regulatory system is at risk of collapse” because, he believed, the FAA could not handle the workload of shifting launch licenses to Part 450.
However, Dan Murray, executive director of the Office of Operational Safety in the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, or AST, is optimistic that companies with 20 older launch licenses will be able to shift to Part 450 by next March.
“Every single one of the license holders for those 20 licenses is working on transitioning now,” he said during a panel discussion at the Space Mobility conference here Jan. 28. His office is creating plans with those companies to get those licenses moved to Part 450. “We set a goal, putting together a schedule with each of the companies, that gets us to a transition before the end of this calendar year.”
He added AST has been encouraging with the companies to get information on their vehicles in earlier to enable a shift to Part 450 licenses as soon as October “and give ourselves a little more breathing room.”
Murray acknowledged that effort will be “challenging” as it takes place while both companies carry out launches under their existing licenses and AST works on other license applications. “It is a resource crunch for us and something we’re going to have to keep a very close eye on,” he said, particularly if companies fall behind on their schedules “and begin to bunch up on us towards the end of this year.”
“But, at this point we’ve seen some really good responsiveness from each of the companies and we are seeing some progress,” he concluded, a far cry from just one to two years ago when none of the existing license holders had started work on moving to Part 450.
The transition to Part 450 continues as the FAA works with industry on ways to improve the regulation. The agency announced in November the creation of an aerospace rulemaking committee, also known as a SpARC, that would examine potential changes to the FAA’s Part 450 rule for licensing launches and reentries. That SpARC, which held its first meeting in early December, is charged with coming up with recommendations by late summer on ways to revise the regulations.
Congress has also pushed for the FAA to improve the licensing process. In a Dec. 6 letter to then-FAA Administrator Michael Whitaker, two congressmen called on the agency to pursue “all actions short of rulemaking” to expedite the Part 450 licensing process.
“We’ve spent a lot of time looking at Part 450 and the licensing process, and ways we can improve that and make that process smoother,” Kelvin Coleman, FAA associate administrator for commercial space transportation, said during a Jan. 27 presentation at the annual Spaceport Summit by the Global Spaceport Alliance.