Soon, businesses would have to pay to use their rockets in the same airspace as airlines.

 Soon, businesses would have to pay to use their rockets in the same airspace as airlines.

In an effort to provide the Federal Aviation Administration with the resources it needs to stay up with the quickly expanding commercial space industry, the agency may soon start charging fees to businesses applying for launch and reentry licenses.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) last week released a budget reconciliation bill that includes a clause requiring the FAA's Office of Commercial Space Transportation, or AST, to start collecting space firms licensing fees the following year. The FAA would then modify the fees to reflect inflation once they were phased in over an eight-year period. The funds would be placed in a trust fund to assist with the FAA's commercial space office's operating expenses.

Last Monday, Cruz's office released a measure that addresses government agencies that are governed by the Senate Commerce Committee, which he chairs. The FAA and NASA are two examples of these organizations. While the Trump administration wants to eliminate Gateway and terminate the SLS and Orion programs after two crew missions to the Moon, Cruz recently proposed to Ars that NASA maintain the Space Launch System rocket, Orion spacecraft, and Gateway lunar space station.

The FAA's Office of Commercial Space Transportation would receive $42 million in the Trump administration's fiscal year 2026 budget request, which was made public last month. This is a small portion of the agency's $22 billion overall budget request. The funding amount for the FAA's commercial space office was about the same in 2024 and 2025.
This is essentially a budget cut for AST when inflation is taken into account. Between 2021 and 2024, the office's budget grew from $27.6 million to over $42 million as businesses like SpaceX started to protest that the FAA lacked the resources necessary to keep up with the rapidly evolving commercial launch sector.

In 2015, when AST had a $16.6 million budget, the FAA granted licenses for 11 commercial launch and reentry activities. In 2025, the US sector is expected to carry out over 200 commercial launches and reentries, with the number of space operations rising to 164 last year. The majority of these launches are carried out by SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket.

The budget hasn't increased to keep up with the speed of commercial spaceflight, even though the FAA's commercial space division now receives additional federal funds. Following delays in obtaining launch licenses, SpaceX officials encouraged the FAA to expand its licensing workforce in 2023.

Adding it up

The FAA will tax commercial space corporations per pound of payload mass, starting at 25 cents per pound in 2026 and going up to $1.50 per pound in 2033, according to Cruz's portion of the Senate reconciliation measure. Inflation would determine future charge rates. A cap of $30,000 would be placed on the total cost per launch or entry in 2026, rising to $200,000 in 2033, and subsequently being modified to account for inflation.

Cruz's suggested cost schedule has not received any response from the Trump administration, but during a Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday, Bryan Bedford, Trump's choice to be the next FAA administrator, supported the necessity of launch and reentry license fees. The majority of the question-and-

Increasing space launches will "add considerable strain to the airspace system" in the United States, according to Cruz. Private owners pay the FAA a fee to register their aircraft, and airlines and their passengers pay fees set by the FAA for each flight segment. Even if an aircraft doesn't take off or land in the US, the FAA still assesses overflight fees to aircraft that are flying through US territory.
"Nearly every user of the National Airspace System pays something back into the system to help cover their operational costs, yet under current law, space launch companies do not, and there is no mechanism for them to pay even if they wish to," Cruz stated.

Trump's FAA nominee indicated that he agreed when asked whether he did. If he is confirmed by the Senate, Bedford, the president and chief executive officer of Republic Airways, will be ready to lead the federal aviation authority.

The FAA removes commercial and private aircraft from the airspace near rocket flight routes during launch and spacecraft flight pathways during return to Earth. The agency's main responsibility is to make sure that commercial rockets do not pose a risk to the public. There are 29 million square miles of airspace across land and sea that make up the National Airspace System (NAS). According to the FAA, 2.9 million airline passengers and over 45,000 planes traverse the area daily.

Bedford stated that until the Trump administration takes a formal stance on the issue, he did not want to discuss particular policy recommendations.

Bedford said, "But I'll confirm you're exactly right," to Cruz. Significant taxes are paid by both passengers and airlines, and the purpose of those charges is to update our NAS. Making sure the NAS is designed to support a higher cadence in space launches is one of the most important aspects of modernization, thus I wholeheartedly endorse your direction."

The business most impacted by the suggested licensing fees would be SpaceX. SpaceX uses Falcon 9 rockets to launch its own Starlink broadband satellites on most of its missions. The majority of the launches have a useable payload mass of roughly 17 metric tons, or 37,500 pounds.

According to a fast estimate, if Cruz's measure is enacted into law, SpaceX would have to pay about $9,400 for an average Starlink launch on a Falcon 9 rocket next year. Last year, SpaceX launched 89 specific Starlink flights. Under Cruz's licensing plan, that would equate to more than $800,000 in yearly fees entering the FAA's coffers. This amount would probably surpass $1 million when you take into consideration all of SpaceX's past commercial launches.

The costs would increase to about $56,000 for each launch. By then, SpaceX might have moved all Starlink missions on its massive new Starship rocket, which would put the business in line with the FAA's proposed $200,000 charge ceiling per launch.

Industry reaction

In 2023, a top Biden administration transportation official expressed a provisional endorsement of a charge structure like to the Senate's proposal. Last year, former FAA administrator Michael Huerta, who served in both the Obama and the first Trump administrations, told NPR that he is in favor of the proposal.

SpaceX and Blue Origin are members of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, an industry advocacy group, which indicated last year that it opposed the creation of launch and reentry fees, or taxes as some industry executives refer to them. FAA fees have been waived for commercial launch and reentry firms in order to reduce regulatory costs and support business expansion.

Last year, the federation told NPR that it would not be appropriate for space companies to pay into an FAA trust fund just yet because the commercial space industry needs access to US airspace far less frequently than the aviation industry.

Ars's inquiries on the situation were not answered by SpaceX. With multiple missions in its backlog to launch massive stacks of Internet satellites for Amazon's Project Kuiper network from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, United Launch Alliance would probably be responsible for becoming the second-largest payer of FAA fees, at least for the next few years.
Ai tech was informed by a ULA representative that the corporation is now examining and evaluating the proposal from the Senate Commerce Committee. "In general, we are supportive of fees that are affordable, do not disadvantage US companies against their foreign counterparts, are fair, equitable, and are used to directly improve the shared infrastructure at the Cape and other spaceports," stated a spokeswoman.

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