Elon Musk’s SpaceX will have to improve its reliability before receiving approval for its target 10,000 launches annually within five years, Bryan Bedford, Head of the U.S. civil aviation agency, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), has said.
Bedford, Administrator of the FAA, said SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell had told him about the firm’s goals to conduct 170 launches in 2025, deploying around 2,500 satellites.
Bedford said on Wednesday (20 May) that Shotwell told him "about the SpaceX five-year vision to get to 10,000 launches a year,” but the FAA chief cautioned that such a target wouldn’t be authorised until much greater reliability was achieved.
"We need to see a lot more reliability," Bedford told reporters after the forum.
The FAA licenses all commercial space launches and takes steps to streamline key hurdles. It imposes restrictions to ensure operations or space accidents do not interfere with passenger air traffic.
Bedford said the purpose of his meeting with SpaceX "was to go through the constraints that we see and what can we do planning wise now to put ourselves in a position to accommodate that type of a stretch goal."
He said the FAA was reviewing data from prior launches to better understand risks. To address safety concerns, the FAA had to bar flights in some areas at the time of launch and "that can be very disruptive," Bedford said.
He added that the FAA was not currently the limiting factor for space launches, but said he could see a future where that was the case due to a lack of funding the agency's space section received.
SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In a Forbes video interview that aired this week, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk noted the company already has 10,000 satellites in orbit and eventually wants to launch 10,000 communications satellites per year, though he did not specify a timeframe.
In January, SpaceX said it wanted to launch a constellation of one million satellites that will orbit earth and harness the sun to power artificial intelligence (AI) data centres.
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