$42 Million a Year Licenses Every Rocket America Launches

Every rocket that leaves U.S. soil for commercial purposes — a Falcon 9 carrying Starlink satellites, a Blue Origin tourist flight, a Starship test launch — needs a federal license before it flies.▸ One office issues that license: the FAA's Office of Commercial Space Transportation, known inside the agency as AST. It is a small office, its budget barely moves year to year, and on March 10, 2026, the licensing regime it runs on changed for good — the last of the industry's legacy launch licenses expired that day, forcing every operator onto a newer, still-young rulebook at the same moment the industry it regulates is launching more than ever.

Commercial launches and reentries have been climbing for years, but the recent pace is new.▸ AST "supported 148 licensed commercial space launch and reentry operations in FY 2024, an increase of 31% over the previous year," according to the FAA's FY2026 budget justification. The next year blew past that: FAA's own Aerospace Forecast for Fiscal Years 2026–2046 reports that "in FY2025, launch and reentry operations reached 204, the highest annual total in U.S. history" — a 38% jump in a single year, and part of a run that has put more than 600 of the 982 commercial launches and reentries the FAA has ever licensed into just the last five years. The same forecast's high-case scenario has FY2026 opening at 214 operations and climbing toward 507 a decade out.

None of that growth moved AST's budget much.▸ The office ran on $42.018 million in FY2024, the same $42.018 million again in FY2025, and requested just $42.179 million for FY2026 — a 0.4% increase over two years while its workload grew 38% in one, per the same budget justification. Congress has funded AST for 148 positions in each of those three budget years. But funded and filled are different numbers. The Government Accountability Office found that "in 8 of the last 9 years, the number of AST staff employed has been fewer than the positions authorized," and that as of September 2023, only about 80 of AST's people actually evaluated and oversaw license applications — the rest of the office does research, policy, and spaceport licensing. Of those roughly 80, just 16 had any responsibility for overseeing operations that carry humans, even as crewed and passenger missions become a larger share of what AST licenses. GAO's explanation is mundane and structural: AST "competes with private industry for a finite pool of experienced people," and training a new hire to evaluate a license "can take up to 2 years" — years AST does not have while it is also absorbing a mandatory licensing transition.

That short-staffing is exactly what the industry warned Congress about before the deadline arrived.▸ In written testimony to the Senate Commerce Committee in October 2023, SpaceX vice president William Gerstenmaier told lawmakers that "as AST transitions licenses for vehicles previously approved under legacy regulations to Part 450 over the next two years, the entire regulatory system is at risk of collapse. AST is struggling to fulfill its responsibilities today and simply does not have the bandwidth to process the significant additional paperwork of this transition." By June 2025, with the deadline eight months away, the FAA had issued just eight licenses under the new Part 450 rules — and denied one — while roughly 20 legacy license holders still had to complete the switch before March 10, 2026, according to the Congressional Research Service. All of them did, by the FAA's own account, but the margin was thin: a five-year phase-in period that produced fewer than a license a quarter, closing the same month operations hit a record high.

Staffing figures in this piece span two different sources with two different vintages — a funded-position count from FY2024–26 budget documents and an actual-employment count from GAO fieldwork in September 2023 — noted on each row of the tables beneath the charts.