How the Trump administration wants to make it easier for commercial space companies to do business

The Trump administration’s National Space Council met publicly for the second time this week to talk about upcoming changes to the US space policy agenda, and the big topic of the day was regulatory reform.

The council, a newly formed advisory group led by Vice President Mike Pence, discussed ways that regulations are “stifling” the commercial space industry. “While American industry and technology have leaped toward the future, our government agencies have too often remained stuck in the past,” Pence said at the meeting at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Now, the Council says it’s going to work on a number of changes that will make regulations less burdensome to commercial companies, such as streamlining launch licensing and creating a new undersecretary of Space Commerce.

It’s a familiar refrain from an administration that has made it very clear it wants to decrease government oversight. In August, Trump signed an executive order that directed all agencies to repeal two existing regulations for every new one that gets introduced. Meanwhile, the administration is already rolling back a number of environmental statutes, such as the Clean Power Plan aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Now it’s the space industry’s turn, and the Space Council has come up with four different types of regulatory issues it wants to change over the next year. Here’s what the group is proposing:

The commercial space industry is calling for a more streamlined way to get a launch license. Right now, any aerospace company that wants to launch a rocket or land a spacecraft back on Earth has to get a license from the Federal Aviation Administration. These licenses are meant to ensure that such vehicles will not harm any unsuspecting bystanders or cause any damage to public property when they launch or land.

The process for getting a license is a little disjointed. For instance, the FAA has a unique set of licensing guidelines for each type of launch site. Companies that want to launch from a site overseen by the federal government have a different set of specific rules they have to follow than companies launching from a private spaceport. “Today’s launch licensing regime is plagued by burdensome government barriers,” Pence said. “To make matters worse, launch licenses can’t be transferred often from one site to another.” Additionally, different classifications of vehicles have their own licensing rules, too: a rocket considered expendable has a separate checklist from one that is considered reusable.

Companies argue that this makes getting a license time-consuming, and instead, they want a much more simplified process that could apply to everyone — regardless of vehicle type or launchpad. “Obviously rockets that are very small and launch from a [commercial] spaceport are different than great, big heavy-lift launch vehicles like the Falcon Heavy,” Jim Muncy, founder of PoliSpace, a space policy consulting agency, tells The Verge. “So taking into account the differences in launch vehicles and design, the industry wants to write more general rules that apply to things equally.”

Space companies have grown much more ambitious over the last decade. SpaceX did launch a sports car into orbit around the Sun, after all, and the company has not been shy about its goal to send humans to the Moon and Mars. Meanwhile, other companies want to do more than just launch satellites. Some plan to launch robots that can service satellites in orbit, operate space habitats, or mine asteroids and the Moon for resources. The problem is that there is no current regulatory framework in place that would allow the government to oversee these specialized activities in space.

Now, the Commerce Department says it wants the job of creating that framework. At the meeting, Wilbur Ross, the US secretary of Commerce, proposed creating a “one-stop shop for space commerce” at the department. He also proposed creating a new undersecretary of Space Commerce (what many have referred to as a “space czar”), who would oversee all these advanced operations in space and propose regulations.

The Commerce Department wouldn’t be responsible for every space-related regulation — the FAA would still likely oversee licensing for launch and spacecraft reentry, for instance — but this move could help fill a big gap that has been growing in the space industry. In 2016, Moon Express had to seek special government approval for its future mission to the lunar surface. A “space czar” could help to consolidate space regulation in a big way and allow companies to do more than simply launch satellites to orbit.

“Basically, they’re saying if you come up with something new and innovative, they can give you authorization to go do that,” Brian Weeden, a space expert at the Secure World Foundation, a nonprofit that specializes in space security, tells The Verge.

Aside from streamlining the launch licensing process, companies are also calling for an easier way to get access to the radio frequencies they need to communicate with their satellites. That’s key for controlling and downloading information from those probes.

Right now, companies have to apply for a license with the Federal Communications Commission, but the approval process has grown complicated and lengthy, according to the industry. In fact, there is only a small — and finite — spectrum of radio frequencies that companies can use, and a lot of companies want access to this spectrum.

Commercial companies are also having a hard time coordinating with the US government, especially when it comes to operating Earth-observation satellites. Both private companies and the government have to share a very narrow band of frequencies to operate these satellites, and they’ve had problems coordinating with one another. “When you share, there is a coordination process,” Thomas Stroup, CEO of Shared Spectrum, tells The Verge. “And that coordination process takes a lot of government approval.”

As a result, the National Space Council is asking for better approval and coordination processes for the commercial industry. Additionally, the Department of Commerce is tasked to come up with better ways to manage how the spectrum is used.

Another big area that the commercial industry wants to be reformed is how spaceflight hardware is exported. Predictably, companies want fewer restrictions on how they do business internationally. “That’s a no-brainer. It’s been coming for a long time, and they did part of it a couple years ago,” Laura Forczyk, a space consultant and owner of space research and consulting firm Astralytical, tells The Verge.

The US government maintains three big lists of items that need to be licensed for export: the Nuclear Regulatory Commission Controls, which covers nuclear equipment; the US Munitions List, which covers defense-related technology; and the Commerce Control List, which covers mostly commercial items that could have a military application. The goal of keeping such lists is to prevent deadly weapon technologies from falling into the wrong hands.

Throughout the 2000s, satellites and other space-related technologies fell under the Munitions List. That means that everything from software to a working spacecraft to a screw on that spacecraft is subject to strict regulations on how these items can be transported and shared with foreign countries. “Let’s say [a company] wants to operate from a foreign location, they have pretty stringent restrictions on who can access the facility, the guards they can use, etc.,” says Weeden.

Some reform came in 2014 when the Obama administration moved many satellite technologies on to the Commerce Control List, which is less restrictive. However, most items related to human spaceflight are still on the Munitions List. And with many companies looking to fly passengers in the next decade, the industry wants more reform. “Can we work more closely with our international partners, and can we do business internationally?” says Forczyk. “They could make it clear and open it up a little bit.”

The Council set a number of deadlines for when recommendations for changes need to be made. The deadline for how to deal with export control reforms is January 1st, 2019, while ideas for launch licensing reform need to be in by March 1st, 2019. So it’ll be a while before we know what changes are in store for the industry, but it looks like reform is on its way.