A summit meeting among the U.S. government, industry, and trade associations to discuss safety improvements to the U.S. commercial rocket fleet is needed soon, the head of the office that regulates the rocket industry said Wednesday. Patti Grace Smith, Associate Administrator for Space Transportation for the Federal Aviation Administration called on industry to vastly improve the current levels of U.S. rocket reliability or see space leadership pass to other nations. "A safety level of 95% would never be tolerated by commercial aviation," Smith told a meeting of the Washington Space Business Roundtable. That is the average reliability of the U.S. commercial space fleet. "We need to focus on how to improve mission success, and how to make it as important as mission safety," she added.

Smith said the current level of launch failures would make the development of a commercial space tourism industry virtually impossible. Growth of commercial satellite launches are also threatened by the rash of launching failures. "We forecast between 1500 and 1700 satellites will be launched over the next decade," Smith explained. Commercial space launches are growing at the rate of nine percent per year. She called upon the federal government to play a a stronger role in assisting the commercial rocket industry in developing new systems and methods to improve the reliability and performance of U.S. rockets. She pointed to her own agency as partly at fault for the unacceptably high failure rates. "It's time we became fully engaged, and made this (reliability) a higher priority," she said.