by WASHINGTON – Secretary of Transport Sean Duffy says he has invited SpaceX to provide input about improving the air traffic control system of the Federal Aviation Administration, with a company that previously saved with the agency.
In A message on social media At the end of February 16, Duffy said that SpaceX employees would visit the Air Traffic Control System Command Center in Noord -Virginia on 17 February.
“Tomorrow, members of the SpaceX team of @elonmusk will visit the Air Traffic Control System Command Center in VA to look first at the current system, to learn what air traffic controllers like and not like their current Tools and imagine how we can make a new, better, modern and safer system, “he wrote.
“The safety of air travel is a non-party-related matter. SpaceXing so will help to make air travel safer, ”Elon Musk, Chief Executive of SpaceX, responded in another message.
Neither Duffy nor Musk have worked out what contributions they expected that SpaceX could deliver to the modernization of the FAAs Air Traffic Management Systems, and it was not clear what expertise SpaceX could offer.
The role of musk as de facto head of the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), the inverted American digital service organization that now, under an executive order of January 20, “to maximize government efficiency and productivity,” has countless conflict of interest concerned Given the leadership of Musk from SpaceX and other companies.
Those worries extend to the FAA. “The SpaceX Rocket from Elon Musk is launching the airspace with commercial aircraft, and the FAA has the responsibility to keep the entire airspace safe,” wrote Senator Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), Ranking of the Senate Trade Committee, in an Feb. “Duffy secretary, you must ensure that all conflicts of interest between the FAA and Elon Musk are removed.”
The letter from Cantwell was aimed at the supervision of the FAA on SpaceX launches and the sometimes fractious relationship between the company and the agency. This has been expanded to use the airspace, in particular on the most recent Starship test flight on January 16, when the vehicle came apart and rained on part of the North Caribbian area, causing dozens of flights to be diverted or divided .
That led to criticism from some aviation professionals. “SpaceX joined people yesterday and their company with profit should reimburse any other for-profit corporation to distract, change course or delay because of their activities in the National AirSpace system,” Steve Jangelis, Aviation Safety Chair fored The Air Line Pilots Association, in a social media post after the incident.
During a panel discussion at 27one Annual commercial space conference on 12 February, Shana Diez, director of Starship Flight Reliability at SpaceX, said that the company is coordinating with the Air Traffic Organization (ATO) of the FAA on aircraft notifications for launchings. “We work very closely with ATO. We have a great relationship with them, “she said.
One improvement area she mentioned was about real -time information about launches. “That is really the answer,” she said about issues of closing the airspace for launches or in the case of incidents such as the disintegration of Starship. “That would be an advantage for the entire industry.”
In the case of January the launch, Diez said that SpaceX coordinated “debris areas” with ATO in advance, as it had done on past, but this was the first time the areas were activated. “It was only a matter of minutes from the moment it was activated until when the airspace started to be cleared,” she said, sufficiently considering the time it would take before rubble in the airspace would fall. The airspace was erased in about 15 minutes, she added.
Those rubble response areas are developed in coordination with the FAAs Office or Commercial Space Transportation, or AST, said Katie Cranor, acting deputy director of Ast’s Office or Operational Safety, on the same panel. After the accident, she said, “Only certain parts of the rubble response areas were activated to still make traffic freely move.”
Diez acknowledged that, in the case of the launch of January, the airspace was closed longer than necessary. “We did the airspace for longer than we had wanted, and what an improvement that we want to discuss,” she said, adding that “from an abundance of caution was done.”
