Countdown to Efficiency: Accelerating Commercial Space Launch Approvals

Commercial space operations are becoming more frequent—whether to put communications satellites in orbit, resupply the International Space Station, or give space tourists a view of Earth from the Karman line. All this intensifies pressure on the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to process commercial space launch approvals faster than ever before. A MITRE team is heading an effort to help the FAA accomplish that.

"Today, commercial space activity is about five times what it was in 2019," says Tim Gruber, who leads the team. "That has created a massive amount of new work for the FAA's Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST), which is responsible for processing applications for commercial space launch and reentry operations."

To keep pace with the accelerated demand, AST reached out to MITRE—operator of the FAA's federally funded R&D center—for help in streamlining its launch approval process.

"Approving commercial space operations is not a rubber stamp process," Gruber says. "These operations must be integrated into the National Airspace System in a way that is safe and that minimizes impact on air travel."

That's a tall order. A rocket explosion can create a huge debris field that puts people and structures at risk. AST's top priority is protecting people in the air and people on the ground in the event of a malfunction.

Protecting people in the air and on the ground also became a MITRE priority as Gruber's team took on the assignment. "We worked to help them go faster without compromising safety. It was challenging, but we believe we've come up with a solution that—once fully implemented—could deliver a 60 to 70% reduction in the time it takes to complete a license evaluation."

Currently, the FAA is statutorily required to process applications within 180 days. "Our process is designed to have applications approved in as little as 80 days," Gruber says.

Several other organizations had tried and failed to tackle the problem.

"While they were looking for a purely technical solution, we took a more holistic approach," Gruber says. "We have a number of safety experts on our team, and one of the things about being a safety expert is that you have to consider all of the possible root causes and how they interlink."

That's what the MITRE team did.

Creating Enhanced Workflows and Process Improvements

Opportunities for some of the biggest improvements involved organizational psychology and human factors, he says.

That meant clearly defining roles and responsibilities to prevent duplicated effort. New process flows were created to establish standardized decision points and the criteria required for those decisions. The team also developed standardized terminology for describing particular issues staff find in launch applications to improve understanding and communication.

"A lot of our efforts were in the realm of organization design," Gruber says. To do that right, the team worked with AST to gain an in-depth understanding of their current state and their vision for the future.

An area of keen focus was how issues with applications should be raised and resolved. Technical disagreements arise frequently, it turns out.

"We created a dissenting opinion process," Gruber says. That included a standard process for defining when a decision should be elevated and to whom. 

Helping Applicants Help Themselves … and FAA Evaluators

The team also examined how they could improve the lengthy, detailed applications themselves.

"We put a lot of emphasis on making sure the instructions are written in plain language so that it's clear what the applicant needs to do to submit a successful application," Gruber says.

In all, Gruber says, the team identified 50 different initiatives the FAA could pursue to improve the licensing process. "We then identified nine priority initiatives that could be implemented quickly with high impact." Some of those initiatives are underway, with the final licensing policy expected to be completed by September.

A MITRE-developed "scoring process" is now seeing widespread use as a decision and dispute resolution tool. "Using the recommended process has made it easier to resolve disagreements and enabled AST to move forward with applications that had become stuck in their legacy process," Gruber says. 

"The entire organization's day-to-day activities are already being shaped by the tool and the concepts the MITRE team has introduced so far."

Scaling Improvements with AI 

"We're working now on new ways to integrate AI and large language models into the process," Gruber says. 

For instance, the team sees opportunities to train certain models to take on particularly tedious and time-consuming tasks in the licensing process. "We think we could reduce the time an analyst or evaluator takes to perform those tasks from months to seconds," with human review then taking only a few minutes to validate the output.

"We believe what we've done so far is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the improvements we can make," Gruber says. "We see some other big potential gains on the horizon as we continue our work."