Recently, the billionaire and his rocket company, SpaceX, have been beefing with federal regulators, blaming the FAA for delaying the next launch of Starship to late November rather than mid-September. The company said on Tuesday that the delay was “not based on a new safety concern, but instead driven by superfluous environmental analysis.”
The company said in a lengthy statement that the roadblocks were “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.”
A SpaceX spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment sent during the weekend.
In an interview on Monday at the All-In Summit, Musk mocked the FAA for the time it has taken the agency to approve SpaceX launches.
“It really should not be possible to build a giant rocket faster than paper can move from one desk to another,” Musk said.
According to the FAA, overseeing a single rocket launch is a laborious process that can include licensing approval and route planning to ensure a rocket can safely launch into designated airspace.
An FAA spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment sent during the weekend.
FAA spokesperson Steven Kulm previously told BI that “SpaceX submitted new information in mid-August detailing how the environmental impact of Flight 5 will cover a larger area than previously reviewed.” The spokesperson added that changes to the vehicle configuration are also driving the delays.
Unfortunately for the FAA, Musk isn’t doling out any points for trying.
The FAA works overtime for Elon
The agency employs more than 45,000 people and has been scrambling in recent years to keep up with the increasing number of rocket launches from commercial space companies. In 2023, SpaceX launched 98 rockets, according to Space.com, which would account for 87% of the launches the regulatory body said it oversaw that year.
The agency forecasts overseeing three times as many launches by 2028.
To account for this anticipated growth, the Biden Administration requested $57 million to fund the FAA’s licensing office, a significant increase from the $38 million the office received in 2023. The FAA also hired 33 more employees to its licensing office last year, The New York Times reported in April.
Daniel Murray, the executive director of the FAA’s Commercial Space Transportation Office, which handles license applications, said on Wednesday at the Global Aerospace Summit in DC that his office is pouring most of its resources into SpaceX.
“They get the majority of our resources,” he said, according to a Bloomberg report. “80% of the overtime that we log, and this is hundreds of hours a month, goes to SpaceX.”
Murray defended his office against claims from SpaceX and Musk that the agency was needlessly delaying the launch of Starship.
According to Bloomberg, Murray said the recent Starship launch delay was mainly due to an ongoing environmental review process but added that SpaceX also made changes to the scope of its flight plan.
“They chose to do something different,” Murray said, according to Bloomberg. “They pivoted. We pivoted with them.”
Regulatory overreach
The common through-line in Musk’s hand-wringing over the FAA is the billionaire’s general disdain for what he views as excessive government regulation. Musk has repeatedly painted rules and bureaucracy as the death knell of innovation.
“Rules and regulations are immortal, they don’t die,” Musk said at The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit in 2021.
“There’s not really an effective garbage collection system for removing rules and regulations. And so gradually this hardens the arteries of civilization, where you’re able to do less and less over time.”
Musk has been increasingly vocal on social media about taking up a more hands-on role in the White House under a second Trump administration.
Much like his approach during his Twitter takeover, Musk has proposed reducing the size of the government by stripping down federal agencies.
Political science experts told BI that while the government can be inefficient, Musk’s business-like approach to running a government overlooks the fact that it’s partly structured to meet the needs of the people rather than to prioritize profits.
“Sometimes that’s not efficient in an economic sense,” Christian Grose, a professor of political science at the University of Southern California, told BI.
At the All-In summit on Monday, Musk did credit the federal employees he might seek to fire.
“I’m not saying that there aren’t competent people in the government; they’re just in an operating system that is inefficient,” he said.
