SpaceX invited to provide input on FAA air traffic control modernization

WASHINGTON — Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy says he has invited SpaceX to provide input on improving the Federal Aviation Administration’s air traffic control system, reaching out to a company that has previously sparred with the agency.In a post on social media late Feb. 16, Duffy said SpaceX employees would be visiting the FAA’s air traffic control system command center in Northern Virginia Feb. 17.“Tomorrow, members of @elonmusk’s SpaceX team will be visiting the Air Traffic Control System Command Center in VA to get a firsthand look at the current system, learn what air traffic controllers like and dislike about their current tools, and envision how we can make a new, better, modern and safer system,” he wrote.“The safety of air travel is a non-partisan matter. SpaceX engineers will help make air travel safer,” Elon Musk, chief executive of SpaceX, responded in another post.Neither Duffy nor Musk elaborated on what contributions they expected SpaceX could make to any modernizations to the FAA’s air traffic management systems, and it was not clear what expertise SpaceX could offer.Musk’s role as the de facto head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the rebranded U.S. Digital Service organization now charged, under a Jan. 20 executive order, “to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity,” has raised numerous conflict-of-interest concerns given Musk’s leadership of SpaceX and other companies.Those concerns extend to the FAA. “Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket launches share the airspace with commercial airplanes, and the FAA has the responsibility for keeping the entire airspace safe,” Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee, wrote in a Feb. 6 letter to Duffy. “Secretary Duffy, you must make sure that all conflicts of interest between the FAA and Elon Musk are removed.”Cantwell’s letter focused on the FAA’s oversight of SpaceX launches and the sometimes-fractious relationship between the company and the agency. That has extended to the use of airspace, particularly on the most recent Starship test flight Jan. 16, when the vehicle broke up in flight and rained debris on part of the northern Caribbean, causing dozens of flights to be rerouted or diverted.That prompted criticism from some aviation professionals. “SpaceX put people in danger yesterday and their for-profit corporation should reimburse every other for-profit corporation that had to divert, change course or delay because of their operations in the national airspace system,” wrote Steve Jangelis, aviation safety chair for the Air Line Pilots Association, in a social media post after the incident.During a panel discussion at the 27th Annual Commercial Space Conference Feb. 12, Shana Diez, director of Starship flight reliability at SpaceX, said the company coordinates with the FAA’s Air Traffic Organization (ATO) on airspace notifications for launches. “We work very closely with ATO. We have a great relationship with them,” she said.One area of improvement she mentioned was on real-time information on launches. “That’s really the answer to this,” she said of issues of closing airspace for launches or in the event of incidents like the Starship breakup. “That would be of benefit for the entire industry.”In the case if January’s launch, Diez said SpaceX coordinated “debris response areas” with ATO beforehand, as it had done on past flights, but this was the first time the areas were activated. “It was only a matter of minutes from when it was activated to when airspace began to be cleared,” she said, sufficient given the time it would take for debris to fall into the airspace. The airspace was cleared in about 15 minutes, she added.Those debris response areas are developed in coordination with the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, or AST, said Katie Cranor, acting deputy director of AST’s office of operational safety, on the same panel. After the mishap, she said “only certain sections of the debris response areas were activated to allow traffic to still move freely.”Diez acknowledged that, in the case of January’s launch, airspace was closed for longer than necessary. “We did clear airspace for longer than we would have liked to, and what’s an improvement that we want to discuss,” she said, adding it was done “out of an abundance of caution.”