Faa to Restrict Commercial Rocket Launches to Overnight Hours
Postedabout 2 months agoActiveabout 2 months ago
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Faa RegulationsCommercial Space LaunchesAir Traffic Control
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Faa Regulations
Commercial Space Launches
Air Traffic Control
The FAA has restricted commercial rocket launches to overnight hours due to air traffic risks caused by the government shutdown, sparking controversy and concerns about the impact on launch schedules and safety.
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Unfortunately, the article title is somewhat incomplete, as the restriction on commercial rocket launches is only for certain hours (for now, at least):
> Accordingly, with respect to commercial space launches and reentries, under the authority provided to the FAA Administrator by 49 U.S.C. §§ 40103, 40113, and 46105(c), and authority delegated to the FAA Administrator under 51 U.S.C. § 50909(a), it is hereby ordered that, beginning at 6:00 a.m. EST on November 10, 2025, and until this Order is cancelled, Commercial space launches and reentries will only be permitted between 10:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. local time.
> Beginning 6 a.m. EST (1100 GMT) on Nov. 10, commercial launches to space can only take place between the hours of 10 p.m. EST (0300 GMT) and 6 a.m. EST (1100 GMT), according to the FAA order.
I just wanted to make that clear since not everyone reads the article before hopping into the comments and the title could be easily interpreted to prohibit all rocket launches.
That's going to really piss off everyone around Ventura, CA (they get the sonic-boom when landing a booster on a barge for most launch trajectories from Vandenberg).
The order also only applies to domestic flights, so observed percentages on flightaware will be lower than those in the order.
It's not even technically difficult - we only allow error-prone humans to do the job because of inertia.
Build the system now, and then next time there is a government shutdown or shortage of air traffic controllers, we can say 'only planes equipped with an ipad with automatic air traffic control are allowed to fly'. Within 24h every plane in the nation will be equipped.
Making an autopilot for airplanes is significantly easier than cars.
On a side note, I will use this thread to air out my biggest pet peeve - air travel isn't in fact safer than car travel. Well, it is, per mile, but that's cheating because planes travel so fast. Obviously a 3 hour commercial flight is safer than 40 hours of driving. But cars are still safer per journey.
So, if you drive to the airport and get on a flight, your car ride wasn't actually more dangerous than your flight as the saying goes. The only road-based transportion more dangerous than a plane is the bicycle.
Automobile travel in the US has 1-2 fatalities per 100M miles. [1]
So maybe you are technically correct. Barely. And it has nothing to do with airplanes being fast — planes only need to go a few tens of miles per trip to be significantly safer than cars, and plane trips are a lot longer than that.
[0] https://www.airsafe.com/events/models/rate_mod.htm
[1] https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta...
Which is vanishingly small.
It means the average driver can expect to be a fatality in an automobile accident once ever one to two hundred years or more.
“Or more” technically includes a factor of 20-80x, but I think you were way low.
I’m half an Australia away from my usual internet-rant tooling, and I find multi-tab cross referencing on mobile pretty unenjoyable.
This is intuitive and obvious and yet is somehow beaten out of us by "quick facts" that we accept blindly touting commercial aviation as some kind of miracle. It's still a miracle but not quite to the degree that people believe. Hurtling through the sky at 0.8 Mach in a metal tube will always be more dangerous than rolling down a highway in a metal cage at 70 mph.
None of the people who responded to me yet have refuted this.
If it’s to go from one place to another, referencing statistics to per-mile seems to make more sense and, to me, it’s in no way “cheating because planes travel so fast”.
> In 2022, the fatality rate for people traveling by air was .003 deaths per 100 million miles traveled. The death rate people in passenger cars and trucks on US highways was 0.57 per 100 million miles.
Planes travel about 10x-20x faster than cars, but that’s still 0.06 vs 0.57. Seems like quite a difference. Which numbers are you using?
An autopilot for airplanes is only "easy" until something goes wrong. For example, one failure mode for autopilots is that if the aircraft gets progressively more and more out of trim the autopilot will automatically compensate until it hits its design limit. Then it suddenly disengages, leaving the human pilots in manual control of a nearly uncontrollable aircraft. If you talk to an actual flight control engineer they can give you plenty more examples of why building a safe autopilot is quite hard.
"Easier" != "easy"
Airplane autopilot is more like the cruise control feature in your car, not a self-driving computer that does everything for the pilots while they sit back.
Car autopilot and airplane autopilot don't share much in common other than the word "autopilot"
I’m not suggesting the pilots are sitting there doing fuck-all, or that they are not necessarily.
I think what the automate ATC advocates are suggesting is to bring ATC in to the 21st century.
https://www.faa.gov/nextgen
My knowledge is mostly limited to a casual watching of the aviation YouTube boffins.
You still have a human in the loop double checking everything constantly and stepping in as soon as something isn’t routine (which is actually quite frequently).
An aircraft has fewer and simpler variables to deal with than ground vehicle.
If a ground vehicle runs a red light, it’s potentially fatal error. There are more of these for a car than there are for an airplane.
You don’t have to write automation to avoid hitting trees in a plane. An airplane just needs terrain data and a few algorithms.
There are a few enough airplanes and airplane manufacturers that you could regulate a specific algorithm for traffic avoidance.
Half of this comment section has strangely simplified ideas of how airplanes work and how a flight might get into trouble.
It's crazy that so many comments are convinced that completely automating airplane flight is some relatively trivial problem.
There are about 46000 aircraft registered in the USA, plus more that sometimes fly in from foreign countries. Many aircraft were manufactured decades ago by companies that no longer exist so major upgrades aren't economically practical.
Than again, ATC needs to deal with people talking on the radio, so the current system has a really long way to go to be completely automated.
It's funny to read all of these confident comments claiming ATC is easily automated from people who obviously don't understand what ATC entails.
ATC isn't just planning and scheduling. There is a lot of quick thinking and communication with pilots. You might only be thinking of the everything-goes-perfectly-right case, but the real value of having trained ATC operators is handling all of the edge cases and making quick decisions under high pressure scenarios that may not have even been represented in the training set.
ATC is also partially a visual job. Did you ever notice that there's literally a tower at the airport for air traffic control people? The people in this tower will manage things like traffic on the ground and immediate airspace around the tower. Visual inputs and critical thinking skills are very necessary.
1. The system knows where every plane is going
2. Every plane is talking to ATC
3. Every plane that is currently taking to ATC will be reachable a minute from now
4. If you issue a plane an instruction, it will follow it
5. The planes want to go the most direct route to the destination (winds aloft can often mean direct is slower and more expensive than a more circuitous route)
6. If a plane has an emergency, they will declare an emergency.
7. Planes that are not currently talking to ATC will not fly into the regions where they are supposed to be talking to ATC
8. Planes that are not talking to ATC will not just show up and land at the airport. This happens for a variety of reasons.
9. All planes have working transponders
10. All planes are traveling from one airport and landing (once) at another.
It feels like a tractable problem from the outside, but the variety of issues ATC solves every day is staggering.
Yeeeeah… we just went through the ADS-B mandate. It took a decade or more, cost pilots thousands and thousands of dollars, still doesn’t have 100% compliance, and does weird stuff sometimes. And this was orders of magnitude easier than any kind of two way system.
Respectfully, do you have any time in the front seat of an aircraft or a tower/TRACON position?
11. Planes have radios that can select all ten digits.
Someone's radio broke where they couldn't enter '2' into it, so we had to find frequencies along their path that they could use and where ATC could relay.
plane 1 > assign code 4563
plane 2 > reject
plane 1 > assign code 0827
plane 2 > accept
Also assigning short codes like that isn't something likely to be necessary in an automated protocol like this. Why not just have every message sent between 2 planes include a sender_id: UUID header?
This is not a system where you get to do clean slate greenfield development. Whatever you do must work for the lowest common denominator. ATC is a fairly cheap societal expense compared to developing, certifying, installing, and maintaining systems with the level of integration you want in hundreds of thousands of diverse planes.
You responded to the wrong comment then. I did not say in any place it would be easy. Just that they're very different class of problems. Nether did I say it's only planning and scheduling. Even the vision part is very different than cars. (Static in known environment vs dynamic in entirely random one)
You're arguing against others or a straw man here.
Doesn't ATC also need to actually deal with vision?
We've known how to do identification and known object tracking for decades (for example https://www.academia.edu/122937237/Computer_vision_system_fo...)
“See and avoid” has a very high priority in the cockpit - not everything out there is on radar, not everything on radar is under ATC control.
We are very, very, very far from automated ATC. We can't even get automatic TRAINS to work reliably and thats a far simpler problem.
Air traffic is not a deterministic system, it is squishy and significantly more complicated because it involves humans, complex mechanical systems, and weather floating on top of a sea of limited resources.
Those could be sent as short text messages that appear on a screen in the cockpit, for the pilots to acknowledge receipt of with a limit set of responses, and would give ATC a lot more time to focus on their other duties.
Anyway, this wasn’t my idea, it came from one of the handful of active / recently retired commercial pilots on YouTube.
https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/data-communications-data-comm-0
The general experience from the last 50 years is that reducing the human capacity for error by automation was mostly helpful in air traffic safety.
At the very least, safety mechanisms such as TCAS should be introduced where possible [1], to act as a protection of last resort when humans fail.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision_avoidance_sy...
But the money comes from ... ?
There are a ton of details on the page that go into why it is so hard. One reason is that there are a lot of fundamental things to build and deploy before anything can be automated. E.g. before ADS-B (equipment on planes that detects its own location with GPS and automatically broadcasts it), ATC needed to talk to pilots and ask them where they were in a lot of cases. ADS-B has only been required on commercial flights since 2020.
Then it also suffers like every large government software project where a bunch of $100+ million contracts get paid out to private companies while nothing gets built. And it's part of annual appropriations, so funding was unpredictable. It's like working at a software company that had a major layoff or hiring spree every year for the last 20 years. If we could figure out how to run major project, the value to humanity would be enormous.
Edit: More automation is certainly an idea that ATC should continue to pursue, and there has been progress already. But the idea that total automation is possible much less easy ignores a lot of the complexity and reality of how air traffic actually works.
1. When an FAA owned and operated facility does not have adequate staffing levels, ATC may elect not to provide the following services:
a. Radar Traffic Information Service;
b. Radar Assistance to visual flight rule (VFR) aircraft;
c. Terminal Radar Services for VFR aircraft;
d. VFR Traffic Pattern Operations;
e. Practice Approaches to VFR aircraft;
f. Flight checks services to restore inoperable equipment and approaches;
g. ATC services to parachute operations; or,
h. ATC services to certain special or unusual operations
The others do directly increase workload and regularly get denied at busy airports (some outright "ban" training activity or charge so much as to make it impractical).
Now the difference might be that ATC will be more likely to deny these requests, which could be somewhat disruptive to flights that were expecting to be approved. But it should never be assumed so hopefully they have backup plans.
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