WASHINGTON — The Government Accountability Office is recommending that the Federal Aviation Administration improve its process for investigating launch mishaps, one that currently relies heavily on launch providers.
In a Dec. 7 report, the GAO recommended that the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation “comprehensively evaluate” its processes for investigating launch mishaps, including developing criteria for when those investigations should be led by the launch operator.
The report, which examined commercial launch mishaps from 2000 to January 2023, noted that the FAA was the lead agency for investigating all but one of the 50 mishaps during that period. The exception was the October 2014 SpaceShipTwo fatal accident, where the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) led the investigation.
The FAA says it decides on a case-by-case basis whether to conduct the mishap investigation itself or allow the launch operator to handle it with FAA oversight. In practice, all 49 investigations were operator-led.
“FAA relies on the operator-led approach, agency officials told us, because, given highly specialized vehicle designs among companies, the agency does not have adequate resources for in-house investigations,” the GAO report stated. Those officials estimated that an agency-led investigation might take 10 to 20 times longer because the FAA lacks the “intimate knowledge of vehicle design” needed to effectively investigate mishaps.
Both FAA and industry support operator-led reviews, which are guided by the FAA to varying degrees based on the nature of each mishap and the experience level of the launch operator. However, the GAO report stated that several unidentified industry stakeholders questioned the independence of company-led investigations as well as their ability to identify broader organization issues versus technical causes of mishaps.
The GAO found that while the FAA says it decides individually who will…
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