How Trump can cut the regulatory red tape to launch rockets — and companies

The new frontier of space is a repurposed swimsuit warehouse. It is a gutted shipping container in a nondescript parking lot. It is a rented vibration table in a leased industrial building.

It offers cramped, tandem parking right off an alleyway, kitty corner from the dumpster. Don’t go into the makeshift clean room, but feel free to look. Like the rest of the company, it’s brand new.

The new frontier of space is many things, but it is generally no further than 15 minutes from the nearest In-n-Out. Okay, 20 max, with traffic — this is Los Angeles, after all.

In this new space frontier, Americans are doing what they do best: world-beating innovation. They are growing seed crystals in microgravity for therapeutic drugs. They are developing low-power processes for high-energy lasers to enable deep-space, platinum group metal refinery. They are building modular, plug-and-play launch platforms and orbital vehicles ready-made for scientific payloads and equipment. They are developing more efficient, smaller and rapidly deployed earth stations capable of managing data backhaul to power on-orbit operations. And they are hitching rides on commercial launch providers to do it. Some make rocket bodies so light that you can move them around with one hand.

There are no two ways about it: Elon Musk made this possible. Without commercial launch, this new generation of space startups doesn’t exist. And without SpaceX, commercial launch — at least, at this level of maturity — does not exist.

But Musk did not succeed in a vacuum (well, he has literally, just not metaphorically). He had help. Among them were his investors, co-founders and advisors, and a team of dedicated, world-class engineers.

Oh, and one D.C. deputy agency head: Lori Garver.

Garver is a Democrat, appointed by former President Obama as deputy administrator of NASA. There, she hatched a plan: to radically accelerate the pace of private launch by (to oversimplify a bit) getting Washington the hell out of the way.

Garver cut red tape, fast-tracked projects, cultivated relationships with private space companies, sourced funding and, most importantly, prevented regulatory retrenchment and agency domain capture in launch. To a rough approximation, Garver cleared private launch by working hard to, in some ways, ground NASA.

I am a Trump-appointed Republican regulator, but I have no compunctions about stealing good ideas wherever I find them. Our approach to the next chapter of space innovation should be Garveresque.

The current regulatory environment in which space startups seek to operate is, at this point, so full of regulatory requirements and permissioning that it is at least as recondite as some of the engineering needed to accomplish the actual work of satellite and launch operations. And it operates as a dragsail on the companies themselves.

You say you want to do a space startup? Better check with the FCC for spectrum. Is that a full-fledged experimental license, or just an STA? Oh, the FAA will definitely need launch coordination. You know you have to touch base with the NTIA because your operations impact federal spectrum, right? What does NASA have to say? And NOAA? You’re proposing to do what kind of communications? Oh, I’m not sure that works with the ITU frequency allocations. Oh, you want to land it on U.S. soil too? Better ask the DOD.

While improvements at my own agency, the FCC, are readily available — including, among other things, satellite license grants conditioned on meeting well-defined parameters rather than nebulous moving targets and implementing “shot clocks” to which commission decisionmakers must adhere — a single agency overhaul is not enough. A future Trump administration can, and should, harmonize and simplify the process of getting America’s most exciting startups onto a SpaceX rocket, launched and into operation. Get every unnecessary cook out of the kitchen. Create a single point of regulatory contact. Create a uniform playbook. Act with urgency and a bias toward “yes.” Deem requests granted if not actioned within a reasonable timeframe. Ask for forgiveness, not permission (or don’t ask at all).

In short, a future Trump administration can create enough regulatory “delta-v” to raise the American space economy to new orbital heights. And to dramatically reduce the current frictional load of regulation against space innovation, I hope a future administration would consider issuing an executive order with guidance and direction to accomplish the same.

This sector is, or can be, the next Bell Labs or Los Alamos. It can potentiate a cascade of new discoveries with terrestrial applications. It can improve America’s security posture through dual-use applications. It can help us to stay ahead of further Chinese telecommunications and data network entrenchment. And, ultimately, if we are going to get humanity on Mars, it will be where we develop the critical infrastructure to accomplish that goal.

The next administration can help to accelerate America’s lead in space. Now let’s reduce the payload weight by getting the regulators off the rocket.

Nathan Simington is a commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission. He previously served as a senior adviser at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration.