Commercial space launches are making life complicated for airlines
On Feb. 6, Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched its largest rocket into the blue Florida sky. On board was “Starman,” a dummy strapped into the billionaire’s cherry-red Tesla roadster. Minutes later, fans cheered as Musk topped himself by nailing a simultaneous landing of the Falcon Heavy’s boosters. It was arguably a turning point for the commercial space age.
Airlines were somewhat less thrilled. On that day, 563 flights were delayed and 62 extra miles added to flights in the Southeast, according to Federal Aviation Administration data released Tuesday by the Air Line Pilots Assn., or ALPA.
America’s airspace is a finite resource, and the growth of commercial launches has U.S. airlines worried. Whenever Musk or one of his rivals sends up a spacecraft, airlines must avoid large swaths of territory and incur sizable expenses.
Most of the commercial activity to date has been focused on Cape Canaveral, the Air Force post on Florida’s Atlantic coast, where SpaceX — whose full name is Space Exploration Technologies Corp. — and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin LLC base their stellar operations. It is one of 22 active U.S. launch sites, and a number of other locales — including Brownsville, Texas; Watkins, Colo.; and Camden County, Ga. — are pursuing new spaceport ventures to capitalize on commercial space activity.
Bezos is blasting off from land he owns in West Texas; Virgin Group founder Richard Branson plans to launch tourists from southern New Mexico as early as next year; and Musk is planning an eventual new SpaceX launchpad in extreme southern Texas, near South Padre Island. This trio of space tycoons currently dominate the nascent industry, but more companies will soon join the party. And the potential for what may eventually be daily launches carries major implications for air travel.
“Commercial space launch needs to be better integrated into the national airspace,” said Caryn Schenewerk, SpaceX’s senior counsel and director of government affairs. After launch, the Falcon 9 exceeds 60,000 feet “in a quick 90 seconds,” she said, with its reusable rocket boosters requiring use of the airspace for only one minute before landing.
Tim Canoll is president of ALPA, the union representing 60,000 U.S. and Canadian pilots. He said work is needed to make the two industries operate seamlessly, saying Tuesday at a hearing of a House Transportation and Infrastructure subcommittee in Washington that FAA operations don’t have “real-time data” on rockets’ movements.
The U.S. licensed only 23 commercial launches last year, but that’s likely to increase. As the launch industry matures, the ultimate goal is to incorporate spacecraft into the routine flow of the 42,000 daily aircraft that the FAA controls, making a SpaceX Falcon 9 bound for the International Space Station no different than an American A321 headed to Miami. “The next step,” Canoll said, is to put space travel and air travel together so rockets “can operate along with us.”
There is a lot of money at stake. Airlines say their average cost of “block time,” the industry metric for the period when an aircraft is taxiing or flying, was $68.48 per minute in 2017, or $4,109 hourly, led by crew and jet fuel expenses. The average delay of those 563 flights on Feb. 6 was eight minutes. For perspective, 10 flights delayed by 10 minutes costs about $70,000, ALPA noted. To make matters worse, the block time average is likely to rise this year — further aggravating airline executives and pilots whenever a SpaceX or United Launch Alliance LLC rocket closes airspace.
“These restrictions have led to extensive and expensive delays to commercial air traffic that are unsustainable,” ALPA said in a white paper released Tuesday.
The U.S. airlines’ trade group, Airlines for America, has urged the FAA to “carefully consider the safety and efficiency impacts to the traveling public” in crafting an integration plan, spokeswoman Alison McAfee said in an email. For example, the group expressed “grave concerns” in a June 15 letter to the FAA about a proposed Spaceport Colorado, which would be located at a small airport less than 10 miles southeast of Denver International, the fifth-busiest U.S. airport.
This kind of uneasy coexistence has become the norm as the FAA continues to restrict airspace for commercial launches and reentry, often for an hour or more. The closed space can extend for hundreds of miles along a rocket’s planned flight path, given the potential risks if a craft explodes in flight. That area will need to decrease over time to minimize airline disruptions, industry experts told Congress. They said computer simulations of such disasters block off more airspace than necessary.
In March, the FAA formed an aviation committee to assemble recommendations for a regulatory approach to the commercial launch industry. The new rules will offer safety objectives while not dictating any vehicle design or operational mandates for space firms.
Tests have shown that rocket telemetry data can flow into current air-traffic control systems and give controllers real-time awareness on the vehicle’s movement. Of course, air traffic controllers direct an aircraft’s course and speed — a power they won’t have with space vehicles.
Audrey Powers, Blue Origin’s deputy general counsel, told the House panel: “This is a very solvable problem.”
The industry and regulators need to develop tools to help further existing efforts to build a space data integrator system, designed to automate the flow of real-time rocket data and the release of blocked airspace because, she said, “we are smart enough to solve this problem.”
Bachman writes for Bloomberg.
