FAA proposes three changes to commercial launch safety rules, citing a 2025 executive order

The Federal Aviation Administration published three proposed rules in the Federal Register on November 9, 2026, that would change how rocket operators demonstrate protection against what the agency calls high consequence events, such as incidents that could involve multiple casualties. The proposals are not in force: the FAA is taking public comments on all three until December 9. The same day it issued a separate final rule, effective immediately, that corrects six errors and inconsistencies in its commercial space regulations.

All four documents amend Part 450, the launch and reentry licensing rules the FAA issued in December 2020, in force since March 2021. The agency presents them as part of its response to Executive Order 14335, signed on August 13, 2025, which directed the Secretary of Transportation to “reevaluate, amend, or rescind” Part 450, as appropriate and consistent with the law. The order states a policy of streamlining commercial license and permit approvals.

Random reentries

The first proposal concerns what the FAA calls an uncontrolled atmospheric return, commonly known as a random reentry: a vehicle that comes down from orbit through natural decay rather than under the operator's control. Today an operator must guard against high consequence events in one of three ways: flight abort, keeping the conditional expected casualties from any reasonably foreseeable failure below a set threshold, or demonstrated reliability.

For random reentries, the FAA says, flight abort does not apply and none comes close to the required demonstrated reliability, leaving the casualty calculation, which the agency says can be labor-intensive. The proposal would let an operator show instead that the vehicle, its components and any undeployed payloads would break up enough to rule out a single event expected to cause multiple casualties. The FAA says operators could make that showing with debris and consequence analyses they already submit, and that it would give an equivalent level of safety. Its reasoning: debris from such reentries spreads over very large areas, most likely sparsely populated ones, so separate fragments are unlikely to injure several people if the rule's collective risk limit is met.

Under the proposed definition, only natural forces such as aerodynamic drag could bring the orbit down, and the operator could have no control over the trajectory. A vehicle whose propulsion lowers its perigee below 70 nautical miles, which the FAA treats as the threshold of being in orbit, would not qualify. The agency estimates the option would save each applicant about 60 hours of engineering work, worth $5,777, and the FAA $3,897 per application. It expects about 40 new license applications over the next five years, though not all would involve a possible random reentry.

Flight abort, phase by phase

The second proposal concerns section 450.108(e), which tells an operator when it no longer needs to abort a flight to protect against high consequence events. Among its conditions, an abort must no longer materially reduce the risk and no key flight safety events may remain. The FAA would apply those conditions to a single phase of flight rather than, as now, to the remainder of the flight, so that an operator could switch abort capability off for one phase and back on for a later one, which the agency anticipates operators may seek to do.

One casualty figure, not two

The third proposal rewrites section 450.108(c)(4), which requires flight safety limits that keep conditional expected casualties in uncontrolled areas at or below 0.01 for off-trajectory failures. According to the FAA, some applicants have read it as calling for two calculations, one for aborted flights and one for flights straying outside the limits of a useful mission, while others counted only one, and its guidance did not end the confusion. The new wording would require a single averaged figure that combines both outcomes for each failure mode in each significant period of flight. The FAA puts the saving at $1,347 per operator, or $53,880 undiscounted over five years.

Corrections already in force

The final rule makes what the FAA calls non-substantive corrections, issued without prior public comment, which the agency found unnecessary for such changes. One fixes the reentry risk criteria, which referred to the flight of a launch vehicle where the agency meant the deorbit of a reentry vehicle. Another updates the written risk information that operators must give space flight participants, replacing the terms accident and incident, which the rules no longer define, with a reference to parts of the current definition of a mishap. The FAA expects no additional costs.

What happens next

Comments on the three proposals can be filed on regulations.gov under their docket numbers until December 9, and the FAA says it may change each proposal in light of them. It expects each, if finalized as proposed, to count as a deregulatory action under Executive Order 14192.