No, the FAA isn’t fining SpaceX because of Elon Musk’s politics, former FAA head says

This week, Elon Musk identified a new constraint for his Mars-bound ambitions. It wasn’t the -85°F surface temperature, or the 140 million miles he’ll need to travel. Rather, it’s something far more pedestrian: “The fundamental problem is that humanity will forever be confined to Earth unless there is radical reform at the FAA,” he posted on X.

That post followed a previous one in which he vowed to sue the government agency, arguing in a series of X posts that the FAA was politically motivated when it levied $633,009 in fines against SpaceX on Tuesday. One fine was for allegedly using an unapproved rocket propellant farm in a launch last year; the other was for using an unauthorized launch control room. SpaceX said in a letter to Congress Thursday it “forcefully rejects” the notion that the company didn’t follow FAA launch procedure.

“The FAA space division is harassing SpaceX about nonsense that doesn’t affect safety,” Musk posted, adding, “I am highly confident that discovery will show improper, politically-motivated behavior by the FAA.”

But Billy Nolen, the former acting administrator of the FAA in 2023, pushed back against Musk’s assertion that the FAA was unfairly targeting SpaceX because, as Musk implied, the billionaire's choice of political candidates to support.

As an agency, the FAA “is about as apolitical as it gets,” he told TechCrunch.

Nolen, who is now the chief regulatory affairs officer of aircraft company Archer Aviation, pointed out that FAA heads purposefully have five-year term limits. That means presidential administrations don’t automatically get to appoint a new FAA leader each time a new party is sworn in. “We don't operate on behalf of Republicans or Democrats,” he said.

Musk’s meatier complaint was about the perpetual slowness of the agency. “It really should not be possible to build a giant rocket faster than the paper can move from one desk to another,” Musk said at the All-In Summit on September 10.

That was an argument that Nolen could empathize with. The FAA, he said, is burdened with an enormous mandate, yet “there's never enough money.”

The roughly $24 billion budget he was given during his time at the agency may seem like a lot of money. But, he said, about $19 billion was committed to salaries and operations and about $4 billion went to upkeep on an increasingly aging infrastructure.

“The agency still has a lot of legacy systems,” he said, pointing out that the FAA itself maintains over 200 ​​air traffic control towers. “Some towers are still using paper strips,” he said, referring to how some towers are still tracking flights on paper.

Nolen said that the agency often doesn’t have the budget for new technologies that could help it better regulate a rapidly growing space industry. “The FAA has to be funded to the level of what our expectations are of having a world-class, best-in-class system,” he said.

Now that Nolen is at Archer, a company working on newfangled electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft — one of the upstarts that tends to chafe against FAA bureaucracy — he's thought a lot about what agency changes could help new technology. Within his lifetime, he wants the FAA to become “100% fully predictive” using artificial intelligence, he said.

Think of the sheer amount of data soaring through the sky every minute: A single Boeing 787 flight generates a half terabyte of data, according to a 2017 interview with a Boeing engineer. Imagine, Nolen said, “the ability to pull all of that together, synthesize it and say, is there anything in that data that gives us pause?”

He emphasized that it would help the agency move faster and speed up approvals for things like, say, SpaceX launches.

But Nolen also points out that the FAA relies heavily on experts, turning to engineers, founders, and academics to guide its policy, and Musk’s anti-FAA rhetoric is damaging. Nolen said it’s crucial for someone like Musk, who is “one of the greatest creative minds we have,” to cooperate and help the FAA understand what new age space companies need.

“We don't ever want to be in a place where there's one set of rules, but if you've got enough money, they don't really apply to you,” he said.