Citing slow Starship reviews, SpaceX urges FAA to double licensing staff
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Remember the DOJ's bizarre suite alleging the company engaged in employment discrimination against non-US citizens.
https://nypost.com/2023/09/20/biden-doj-targeting-of-elon-mu...
The FAA?
The media had a field day with the pad damage. But there were chunks of concrete lofted for miles from the launch site. Nobody is targeting Musk from the FAA.
Not sure why you think it is unfair for the US government to be enforcing the law. Especially when these are people who are in the US legally and are more than likely on a pathway to US citizenship.
Would anyone here seriously want a situation where tech companies would only hire US citizens and not those on relevant work visas ? This would decimate the whole industry.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-space...
Does Northrop Grumman hire refugees and asylees? Does Lockheed Martin?
And not all jobs at those companies require clearance, far from it actually.
Clearance requires US citizenship.
> And not all jobs at those companies require clearance, far from it actually.
This is the more important point.
"...if a non-U.S. citizen requires access to U.S. classified information and meets the requirements of the 32 Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) 117.10(k), a Limited Access Authorization (LAA) no higher than the Secret level may be issued."
https://www.dcsa.mil/Industrial-Security/International-Progr...
I mean, I originally thought about lengthening my answer to point out that there are limited ways to allow people of extraordinary necessity to work on classified projects, but I figured it wasn't necessary.
How do you think information is shared amongst NATO? Do they get American citizenship for a day?
Not every Clearance do not require US citizenship.
For NATO, you carry in security clearance from a member nation.
ITAR restricted roles are restricted to "US persons". SpaceX confused that terminology with "US citizens", but "US persons" is a broader term than "US citizens".
And I can assure you, outside the US, even Chinese nationals can have access to ITAR equipment and data. I am no US person neither, and I had in the past. As does every single user of US military gear in nations the US exports to...
Edit: That approach could get you sued for discrimination so.
That being said, ITAR is not a job classification, ITAR covers the move of anything defense or dual use related (data, information, hardware...) outside the US with some weird things about nationalities of people handling those things. It has nothing to do with classified or secret information, that is something different in addition to ITAR.
The thing that puzzles me about roles like janitors: ITAR is "need to know, right to know", meaning if you don't have both, you don't need access to ITAR protected data. And since the normal janitor, or payroll admin, has neither nobody bothers those roles with ITAR normally...
...
(3)“Protected individual” defined As used in paragraph (1), the term “protected individual” means an individual who— (A)is a citizen or national of the United States, or (B)is an alien who is lawfully admitted for permanent residence, is granted the status of an alien lawfully admitted for temporary residence under section 1160(a) or 1255a(a)(1) of this title, is admitted as a refugee under section 1157 of this title, or is granted asylum under section 1158 of this title;
...
b) US government issues security clearances not SpaceX so it is their call whether a candidate is suitable or not. And given that they are filing a lawsuit we can assume this is not an issue.
c) The issues raised by the DOJ do not relate specifically to security clearances.
SpaceX employees are very well compensated.
> working directly on Falcon rockets for that matter, since they aren’t exactly secret or weaponized
There is a long list of adversaries trying to develop technologies that approach SpaceX's. (Every missile program, for starters.)
SpaceX has nothing to do with giving clearances. They just check if they are active (they can pay the government to investigate if someone should be given one)
And many workers will not require security clearance.
"Moreover, asylees’ and refugees’ permission to live and work in the United States does not expire, and they stand on equal footing with U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents under export control laws"
None of this is free.
Edit: Thinking of it, getting ITAR stuff to people and places ourside the US is the point of ITAR.
The DOJ alleges that they excluded asylees and refugees in their job postings. But this doesn't exclude asylees or refugees. It says applicants have to be citizens, permanent resident, or protected individuals as defined in the law: > To conform to U.S. Government space technology export regulations, including the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) you must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident of the U.S., protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3), or eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State.
The referenced law is the one referenced by the DOJ that includes asylees and refugees.
This job posting that is for top-secret cleared individuals has the same language: https://web.archive.org/web/20190513175514/https://boards.gr...
If not then maybe they really do need money for more competent staff.
Hilarious considering how much tax revenue the US Government has.
So, here's Musk, proposing that they government do even more - hire more people. There are three options: Find something else to cut, raise more revenue, or run a larger deficit. Musk's lack of taxes is directly relevant.
There's nothing bizarre about the DOJ prosecuting someone who has no filter and constantly brags about his disdain for the law. In fact, it makes you quite an obvious target for prosecutors. See also: Trump, Donald J.
However, if you read (or listen in my case) to his recently released biography (it presents both his flaws and greatness), you will see plenty of examples of intentionally flouting regulations. This is due to a combination of ignorance/impulsiveness (e.g. the $420/share fiasco), a maniacal sense of urgency, reality distortion (e.g. Full self driving that is not full self driving), and product perfectionism (e.g not including a safety warning on the back of the passenger side mirror because he didn't like how it looked). It's also ingrained in his way of working to question all requirements until it is proved that they are needed- this would also predispose one towards flouting regulation until enforcement.
All of these traits have helped to make him highly successful, but they all come bundled with a dark side that makes for an inevitable clash with regulators.
This never happened.
This wasn't bizarre and was appropriate. The company updated their recruitment policies to comply.
And AFAICT, SpaceX acknowledges these are necessary in the second paragraph.
No, they're saying that the not "urging congress to raise their taxes" take is a straw man.
I don't see a problem with higher use fees for frequent funding new hires. I can't imagine SpaceX would, either. Plenty of regulators charge application fees without getting compromised.
The agency would have a financial motivation to incorrectly reject applications, which is better than having a financial motivation to rubber-stamp them. (Both things are bad, but incorrect reject is slightly better.)
They are still government employees. Where the government takes the money from has little impact on their goals.
We're talking about maybe an extra $20 million. The idea this demands some reassessment of federal tax policy to meet the funding requirements is just hilariously transparent and nonsensical axe-grinding.
[1] https://spacenews.com/omnibus-includes-budget-increases-for-...
If it had a price tag, well, the companies would surely pay for their services, right? The more job there is to do that means the more FAA would get paid.
> For example, the company's Falcon 9 launches from Vandenberg Space Force Base sometimes fly over Jalama Beach, which is due south of the spaceport in California. SpaceX has been performing calculations, based on flight path and breakup analysis, to determine whether the beach needs to be closed. But because this work would compete directly with the FAA's Starship analysis, it has put the Jalama Beach review on hold and attempted to find nighttime launch windows when the beach would be empty.
All safety critical stuff comes down to high-stakes gambling.
One approach that I've seen work well is to estimate the expected number of terrible events per year (which is just the mean time to failure of the system). Things start to be reasonably at about a 0.01 probability per year. (So, we'd expect SpaceX to crash in a populated area once a century. If they launch roughly 100 rockets per year. That means that there has to be a less than a 1 in 10,000 chance that a given rocket crashes and that it kills someone in the process.)
(The 0.01 is picked as an example. I have no idea how many zeros the actual FAA regulatory process aims for, or if they go by expected deaths vs. incident rates, etc.)
"...many large concrete chunks, stainless-steel sheets, metal and other objects were 'hurled thousands of feet away,' along with a plume of concrete particles that resulted in the miles-away scattering. A 3½-acre fire also started on Boca Chica State Park, south of the launch pad, the agency said."
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-04-26/spacex-sta...
Also articles dated 4-26 significantly predated any lab analysis of the particles that reached Boca Chica Ranch and Port Isabel. It was presumed they were concrete particles, but they were just sand.
Like, bruh: blowing up your pad and showering the surrounding area isn't cool.
It's not a surprise that this freaks out local residents. It's not a surprise that lots of freaked out local residents makes for a freaked out regulator.
And the regulator wasn't freaked out. The FAA rubber stamped Starship incident report and list of corrective actions.
That's well below the typical turnaround time for new house construction around here. Heck, I've heard of generator permits taking longer than that.
To be clear how absurd that is, a generator permit is one that gets you permission to pour a concrete pad, place a store-bought residential generator on it, and then trench and run electrical lines between it and an existing electrical panel.
I empathize with SpaceX, but there are similar issues with far larger economic impact throughout all layers of the US government. Ever hear the story about the access road in Marin that they needed to build for Golden Gate Bridge maintenance? It took longer to permit and cost more to build than the bridge (inflation adjusted).
SpaceX is an American company--not even multinational. They're barely profitable [1], however, so most taxes would be paid on fees, payroll and property.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/17/spacex-reported-a-profit-in-...
Tesla pays a lot of taxes.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSLA/tesla/total-p....
In cases where the procedures are complicated, which I'd be willing to be this is, you might find that it takes the better part of a decade for new staff to come up to speed at their jobs. And in the mean time the existing staff are going to be spending part of their time doing training.
> hat is on top of new entrants such as United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket, Blue Origin's New Glenn, and other smaller rockets coming online. Then there is the increased flight rate by Virgin Galactic, the return to flight by Blue Origin's New Shepard suborbital tourism rocket, and the potential for high-altitude balloon flights. ... "We see a trainwreck coming,"
> For example, when SpaceX sought to move its tank farm at Launch Complex 39A in Florida, it submitted...
> "The range has an operational bent, and they’ve been very supportive about being able to support our launch rate,"
> ...has slowed down the company's progress not just on development of the Starship program, but on innovations with the Falcon 9 and Dragon programs as well.
So what I read that FAA is involved into all of falcon flights, into object movements within their territory, with new hardware for falcom, with starship, with new entrants....
And why do I need to repeat the article? They propose the following near-term solution:
> The company also believes that license applicants should be able to opt-in to help fund independent third-party technical support to assist the FAA surge in the near term while the agency goes through the hiring process.