Companies may soon pay a fee for their rockets to share the skies with airplanes
Companies may soon pay a fee for their rockets to share the skies with airplanes
Companies may soon pay a fee for their rockets to share the skies with airplanes
The text of a budget reconciliation bill released by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) last week calls for the FAA's Office of Commercial Space Transportation, known as AST, to begin charging licensing fees to space companies next year. The fees would phase in over eight years, after which the FAA would adjust them to keep pace with inflation. The money would go into a trust fund to help pay for the operating costs of the FAA's commercial space office.
While the FAA's commercial space office receives more federal funding today, the budget hasn't grown to keep up with the cadence of commercial spaceflight. SpaceX officials urged the FAA to double its licensing staff in 2023 after the company experienced delays in securing launch licenses.
Cruz's section of the Senate reconciliation bill calls for the FAA to charge commercial space companies per pound of payload mass, beginning with 25 cents per pound in 2026 and increasing to $1.50 per pound in 2033. Subsequent fee rates would change based on inflation. The overall fee per launch or entry would be capped at $30,000 in 2026, increasing to $200,000 in 2033, and then adjusted to keep pace with inflation.
Licensing fees could make sense if they help the FAA staff up and speed up. I don't see how the payload mass plays into that goal. They must have some other motivations. It could just be "heavy payloads can afford a more expensive license", which isn't inherently true in the era of cheap mass to orbit.
That fee per pound of payload also doesn't preclude crazy edge cases like Starship bidding to launch the TROPICS cube sats.
I wonder if that could be a way to provide a lower barrier to entry for newer launch startups which typically have smaller rockets. Folks like RocketLab, Firefly, and Stoke. Though I think a cadence-based metric (everyone gets 5 free launches per year) might be a better system for that.
Based on who wrote it, my guess is more that it's an easy way to tax bigger companies that can afford it, not a way to be nice to startups / small launch.