When the Office of Commercial Space Transportation was established at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in 1984, it took the agency five years to commission its first mission.
According to the FAA Associate Administrator for Commercial Space Transportation Kevin Coleman, in 2023 alone, the FAA approved 123 commercial space operations and is on track to approve even more this year.
“The very first commercial mission from the U.S. private [sector] was in 1989,” Coleman said during GovExec’s inaugural Space Project event in Washington, D.C., on Aug 28. “Since that time, we have licensed more than 800 commercial missions.”
“Eight hundred may not seem like a big number, but it’s a big number when you talk about commercial missions – missions that are completed on the international stage and licensed by government organizations like ours,” Coleman said. “I joined the organization in 1996 and if we had five or six missions, we had a great year – a busy year for us.”
“Just last year, we had 123 operations,” he continued, “We’re 40 years old, more than half of that 800 has occurred in the last five to six years. So, we had 123 missions last year. We’re already at 134 and counting this year, with a few months left.”
“The U.S. by far has the most commercial licensed missions in the world, 800 and counting,” Coleman said. “One thing that’s changed dramatically is the cadence of operations. We see more companies. Back in those days, it was McDonnell Douglas and Boeing, but now you’ve seen the likes of SpaceX and Blue Origin and Rocket Lab and ABL, Virgin Galactic, Virgin Orbit, other companies that have come forward with proposals to put things out in space. And we’re seeing that space … become more busy and our office is certainly busy with the increased demand of our services.”
During a separate panel, NASA Deputy Chief Engineer Akash Vangani also highlighted that the commercial space industry is booming and has seen a huge shift over the past few years.
“When I started in ‘97 we had Delta II, we had Atlas, and we had Pegasus, and all of them were launching on the order of once a month, maybe once every two months – a good year would have been 12 launches,” Vangani said. “With SpaceX, they’ve come in, and they’re launching two to three times a week.”
“Now everyone wants to get into the launch industry, but they’re coming up with some really brilliant ideas,” he continued, “It’s a total shift. Before it was NASA going to launch these big satellites, these huge robotic payloads.”
Vangani said the new, young companies that are coming out are changing the technology and lowering the cost “for almost anyone to have access to space.”
“It’s just a huge shift in the industry,” he said.
In the next decade or so, Vangani said he predicts that the market will be strong with three to four big providers in this space and six to seven smaller businesses.
“We’re hopeful that we’re going to have three or four really big providers for our missions, and maybe six or seven small providers for future missions. I could actually see that as a real possibility,” he said. “I don’t see 30 small providers survive, but I do see six or seven probably that are going to be able to get there in the next five or six years and be strong enough to compete for a long period of time.”
“Everyone wants access to space, and I think that the demand is still going to be there,” Vangani said. “It’s whether or not these companies can mature fast enough and develop the new products.”
