Commercial launch companies (especially SpaceX) can breathe easy, now that restrictions on when they're allowed to lift off have been rescinded.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has ended an order designed to help alleviate strain on air traffic control operators. The directive — which went into effect Nov. 10 and was a result of the recent government shutdown — relegated commercial launch traffic to nighttime hours in order to avoid airspace closures around spaceports in Florida, California and the Delmarva area.

Now that the record-long shutdown has ended and the U.S. government is open for business once again, the FAA has ended those restrictions.

The order officially ended on Monday (Nov. 17) at 6 a.m. EST (1100 GMT), an FAA statement said, allowing normal operations at the National Airspace System (NAS) to resume.

“Today’s decision to rescind the order reflects the steady decline in staffing concerns across the NAS and allows us to return to normal operations,” FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said in the statement.

The order primarly affected SpaceX, by far the most prolific American launch company. SpaceX has been lofting Starlink missions to expand its growing wireless internet megaconstellation in low Earth orbit every few days; it has already launched more than 100 Starlink missions this year.

SpaceX wasn't totally grounded while the order was in place, though. The company managed to launch four after-hours missions during the week-long restriction phase, including three Starlink missions and the Sentinel-6B ocean mapping satellite.

A few other launches were also affected, though not unduly. For example, NASA's ESCAPADE Mars mission, which lifted off on the second-ever flight of Blue Origin's powerful New Glenn rocket, got an exemption from the FAA to launch during daylight hours on Nov. 13.

In a post on X, Transportation Secretary and Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy said, "The FAA has determined that normal flight operations can resume after multiple days of positive staffing with air traffic controllers in our towers. Now we can refocus our efforts on hiring and building the state-of-the-art air traffic control system the American people deserve."

Activities at NASA's flagship science center are coming under a Congressional magnifying glass, and lawmakers are calling for the space agency's Office of Inspector General (OIG) to get involved.

A letter from Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), the ranking Democrat on the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, demands that NASA must cease facility closures taking place during the government shutdown at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Maryland, and that the agency must immediately halt its consolidation activities there. The letter cites a previous Space.com investigation that revealed NASA has been prematurely, and possibly illegally, implementing President Trump's 2026 budget request before it has been approved by Congress by dismantling and closing key laboratories and offices at Goddard.

Lofgren's letter, sent Nov. 10 to NASA Acting Administrator Sean Duffy, gives the space agency 24 hours to respond with confirmation that all lab closures and workspace relocations have ceased. "NASA must stop what it is doing at Goddard and submit to oversight by Congress and the OIG before it inflicts permanent damage on agency scientific capabilities with severe and lasting consequences," Lofgren wrote.

Leading up to and throughout the government shutdown, Goddard administration announced and began an accelerated implementation of the center's 20-year "Master Plan," which outlines facility renovations, demolitions and constructions designed to gradually upgrade the campus through 2037. Over the past several weeks, as nearly 15,000 NASA employees across the nation remained on furlough due to the latest U.S. government shutdown, select groups at Goddard have been granted temporary "excepted" status with instructions to return to work to pack up their offices and laboratories within a matter of days for relocation, as whole buildings are deadbolted and marked for divestment.

Since Space.com's initial report, more labs have been marked abandonment, with as many as 13 major campus facilities marked for closure by March 2026. According to project scientists working on NASA's next generation Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is poised to rival the discoveries of predecessors like the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes, they were given only four days to empty a mission-critical laboratory. Their window to do so expires Wednesday (Nov. 12).

For that lab and others, one Goddard scientist told Space.com, "There's potentially millions of dollars of equipment that is being planned to just be abandoned in place."

"This all must end now," Lofgren's letter states. "NASA needs to stop what it is doing at Goddard, explain itself to Congress, and convincingly justify its actions before it can even think about continuing to move forward."

In addition to NASA's 24-hour deadline to comply, Lofgren also gave NASA seven days to provide "a full accounting of the damage inflicted on Goddard thus far," and wrote that both the House Science Committee and NASA's Office of Inspector General would be reviewing the findings.

NASA officials have previously indicated that the closures taking place are all previously approved steps in Goddard's Master Plan, and that many of the buildings being vacated were largely unoccupied already.

Lofgren dismissed justifications from NASA legislative officials and Goddard leadership, who apparently claimed during a Nov. 4 briefing that the moves were "a mere implementation of the Master Plan."

She called NASA's failure to disclose the goings-on at Goddard "a grave error."

"NASA's briefers failed to mention that an accelerated evacuation of additional facilities would occur within just eight days," Lofgren wrote. "NASA compounded its error by taking advantage of a government shutdown to rapidly accelerate the timeline for the Goddard moves while broadening their scale and breadth to a degree that risks drastically negative consequences for agency scientific capabilities."

"I reject the explanation that abruptly and haphazardly uprooting employees and millions (at least) of dollars of equipment without a destination or technical justification could reasonably be considered in alignment with any existing 'plan,'" Lofgren added.

The letter also highlights NASA's reasoning that the consolidations align with "agency priorities," writing that those priorities "seek to eviscerate NASA science, gut its workforce, and threaten the United States' leadership in space."

Lofgren's intervention marks the first formal House oversight action targeting NASA's internal restructuring at Goddard, and complements a Senate report from September, "The Destruction of NASA's Mission," claiming such moves and other reorganizations happening at the space agency were being illegally implemented to follow President Trump's fiscal year 2026 budget proposal.

Lawmakers in both chambers are now questioning whether NASA leadership advanced elements of the FY 2026 budget request before congressional approval. In her letter, Lofgren stated her intention to request an investigation by the NASA OIG "into all of the agency's actions to carry out the so-called 'transformation' of Goddard," but stressed her order with bolded, underlined text "that NASA immediately halt all building, laboratory, facility, and technical capability closure and relocation activities and immediately cease the relocation, disposal, excessing, or repurposing of any specialized equipment or mission-related hardware and systems" before irreversible damage is done.

Editor's note: This story was updated Nov. 12 with a sentence to clarify NASA"s position on the validity of the building closures taking place at the Goddard Space Flight Center.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

When I imagine the future of space commerce, the first image that comes to mind is a farmer's market on the International Space Station. This doesn't exist yet, but space commerce is a growing industry. The Space Foundation, a nonprofit organization for education and advocacy of space, estimates that the global space economy rose to US$613 billion in 2024, up nearly 8% from 2023, and 250 times larger than all business at farmer's markets in the United States. This number includes launch vehicles, satellite hardware, and services provided by these space-based assets, such as satellite phone or internet connection.

Companies involved in spaceflight have been around since the start of the Space Age. By the 1980s, corporate space activity was gaining traction. President Ronald Reagan saw the need for a federal agency to oversee and guide this industry and created the Office of Space Commerce, or OSC.

So, what exactly does this office do and why is it important?

As a space scientist, I am interested in how the U.S. regulates commercial activities in space. In addition, I teach a course on space policy. In class, we talk about the OSC and its role in the wider regulatory landscape affecting commercial use of outer space.

The OSC's focus areas

The Office of Space Commerce, an office of about 50 people, exists within the Department of Commerce's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). To paraphrase its mission statement, its chief purpose is to enable a robust U.S. commercial interest in outer space.

OSC has three main focus areas. First, it is the office responsible for licensing and monitoring how private U.S. companies collect and distribute orbit-based images of Earth. There are many companies launching satellites with special cameras to look back down at the Earth these days. Companies offer a variety of data products and services from such imagery – for instance, to improve agricultural land use.

A second primary job of OSC is space advocacy. OSC works with the other U.S. government agencies that also have jurisdiction over commercial use of outer space to make the regulatory environment easier. This includes working with the Federal Aviation Administration on launch licensing, the Federal Communications Commission on radio wavelength usage and the Environmental Protection Agency on rules about the hazardous chemicals in rocket fuel.

This job also includes coordinating with other countries that allow companies to launch satellites, collect data in orbit and offer space-based services.

In 2024, for example, the OSC helped revise the U.S. Export Administration Regulations, one of the main documents restricting the shipping of advanced technologies out of the country. This change removed some limitations, allowing American companies to export certain types of spacecraft to three countries: Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom.

The OSC also coordinates commercial satellites' flight paths in near-Earth space, which is its third and largest function. The Department of Defense keeps track of thousands of objects in outer space and issues alerts when the probability of a collision gets high. In 2018, President Donald Trump issued Space Policy Directive-3, which included tasking OSC to take this role over for nongovernment satellites – that is, those owned by companies, not NASA or the military. The Department of Defense wants out of the job of traffic management involving privately owned satellites, and Trump's directive in 2018 started the process of handing off this task to OSC.

To prevent satellites from colliding, OSC has been developing the traffic coordination system for space, known as TraCSS. It went into beta testing in 2024 and has some of the companies with the largest commercial constellations – such as SpaceX's Starlink – participating. Progress on this has been slower than anticipated, though, and an audit in 2024 revealed that the plan is way behind schedule and perhaps still years away.

Elevating OSC

Deep in the text of Trump's Aug. 13, 2025, executive order called Enabling Competition in the Commercial Space Industry, there's a directive to elevate OSC to report directly to the office of the secretary of commerce. This would make OSC equivalent to its current overseer, NOAA, with respect to importance and priority within the Department of Commerce. It would give OSC higher stature in setting more of the rules regarding commercial use of space, and it would make space commerce more visible across the broader economy.

So, why did Trump include this line about elevating OSC in his Aug. 13 executive order?

Back in 2018, Trump issued Space Policy Directive-2 during his first term, which included a task to create the Space Policy Advancing Commerce Enterprise Administration, or SPACE. SPACE would have been an entity reporting directly to the secretary of commerce. While it was proposed as a bill in the House of Representatives later that year, it never became law.

The Aug. 13 executive order essentially directs the Department of Commerce to make this move now. Should the secretary of commerce enact the order, it would bypass the role of Congress in promoting OSC. The 60-day window that Trump placed in the executive order for making this change has closed, but with the government shutdown it is unclear whether the elevation of OSC might still occur.

Troubles for OSC

While all of this sounds good for promoting space as a place for commercial activity, OSC has been under stress in 2025. In February, the Department of Government Efficiency targeted NOAA for cuts, including firing eight people from OSC. Because about half of the people working in OSC are contractors, this represented a 30% reduction of force.

In March, Trump's presidential budget request for the 2026 fiscal year proposed a cut of 85% of the $65 million annual budget of OSC. In July, space industry leaders urged Congress to restore funding to OSC.

The Aug. 13 executive order appeared to be good news for OSC. On Sept. 9, however, Bloomberg reported that the Department of Commerce requested a 40% rescission to OSC's fiscal year 2025 budget.

Rescissions are "clawbacks" of funds already approved and appropriated by Congress. The promised funding is essentially put on hold. Once proposed by the president, rescissions have to be voted on by both chambers of Congress to be enacted. This must occur within 45 days, or before the end of the fiscal year, which was Sept. 30.

This rescission request came so close to that deadline that Congress did not act to stop it. As a result, OSC lost this funding. The loss could mean additional cutbacks to staff and perhaps even a shrinking of its focus areas.

Will OSC be elevated? Will OSC be restructured or even dismantled? The future is still uncertain for this office.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Beginning next week, daytime rocket launches are all officially scrubbed thanks to the government shutdown.

As the record-long shutdown of the U.S. federal government stretches into its second month, commercial air travelers are beginning to feel the impacts at the nation's airports. To help ease the strain, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has issued an emergency order to limit who can access navigable airspace, which includes restricted hours on commercial rocket launches.

Beginning 6 a.m. EST (1100 GMT) on Nov. 10, commercial launches to space can only take place between the hours of 10 p.m. EST (0300 GMT) and 6 a.m. EST (1100 GMT), according to the FAA order. This will help keep airspace restrictions in Florida, near NASA's Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, as well as Vandenberg Space Force Station in California, to a minimum while air traffic delays stack up due to staffing shortages caused by the government shutdown.

Though its impact on greater U.S. air traffic delays across the country will be hard to measure, the restrictions coincide with the busiest coast-to-coast launch cadence in history. The order will primarily affect SpaceX, which routinely launches Starlink satellite stacks into low Earth orbit as it expands its wireless internet megaconstellation, though other launch providers and missions will likely need to reassess their launch manifests. SpaceX has launched over 140 Starlink missions this year alone.

One launch hoping to get off the ground before the order goes into effect is NASA's ESCAPADE mission to Mars. The Rocket Lab-built twin orbiters are scheduled to liftoff on a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket at 2:45 p.m. EST (1945 GMT) on Nov. 9. The impending restrictions mean the ESCAPADE mission won't have a chance to reset for a second launch attempt if the Nov. 9 liftoff is scrubbed for some reason.

United Launch Alliance's Atlas V launch of the ViaSat-3 F2 satellite could face further delays under the new launch restrictions, after two previous mission scrubs earlier this week due to issues with the rocket.

During the shutdown, all federal employees deemed non-essential are furloughed. Those whose job falls into the essential category are still required to go to work, but are not currently getting paid and must rely on backpay once the government reopens.

For NASA, this means nearly 15,000 people staying home from work. That's about 95% of the space agency's workforce. In contrast, 95% of employees at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) are considered "excepted" and have continued to work without pay since the shutdown began Oct. 1.

In a post on X, Department of Transportation Secretary and Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy said the emergency order was, "about assessing the data and alleviating building risk in the system as controllers continue working without pay. It's safe to fly today, tomorrow, and the day after because of the proactive actions we are taking."

More than 15,000 NASA civil servants have been furloughed as the U.S. federal government enters a shutdown.

The grinding halt forces NASA and other agencies to scale back nearly all of their day-to-day operations after lawmakers in Washington D.C. failed to pass a government funding bill by the deadline. Only a fraction of NASA's workforce remains on duty, assigned to missions that cannot be paused without risking astronaut safety, critical hardware, or the Trump administration’s highest priorities.

With most science programs and public-facing activities frozen, the shutdown leaves NASA in a holding pattern until Congress approves new funding.

NASA's updated shutdown plan, released Sept. 29, outlines how the agency will operate during the funding lapse, and confirms the scale of furloughs now underway. Out of NASA's 18,218 civil servants, 15,094 have been sent home, while a little more than 3,100 are classified as "excepted" and remain on the job.

By comparison, NASA's August 2023 continuity plan projected 17,007 furloughs and just 1,300 excepted employees. The smaller furlough number this year likely reflects newly expanded exemptions for Artemis, which now cover the entire program, rather than only operations necessary for "safety and protection of life and property."

The added stipulation reflects NASA's push to launch its Artemis 2 mission on time, currently scheduled for no earlier than Feb. 5, 2026. Artemis 2 will fly a crew of four around the moon for the first time since NASA's Apollo missions, and sets the stage for Artemis 3, which aims to land astronauts on the lunar surface.

NASA's efforts to return to the moon are being challenged by a similar push by China — a race which, if lost by the U.S., would lead to geopolitical turmoil back on Earth, according to lawmakers. Any significant delay to Artemis 2 would likely create ripple effects for its follow-on mission, further stressing a strained timeline that experts warn may already be in jeopardy of falling short of its goals.

The new shutdown guidance confirms predictions made by NASA’s Exploration Systems acting Deputy Administrator Lakiesha Hawkins during a press conference on Sept. 23, who said, "we anticipate being able to request, and being able to continue to move forward on Artemis 2 in the event of a shutdown."

Another addition in NASA's latest shutdown guidance includes a directive that restricts the use of carryover funds (leftovers from last year's appropriation) to "presidential priorities."

Space policy experts say the language is unusual and could reflect a broader effort to prioritize White House initiatives during a funding lapse. Casey Dreier, Chief of Space Policy the Planetary Society, told Space.com in an email on Oct. 1 that while it's too early to know exactly how the guidance will be applied, the wording suggests leftover funds from the previous fiscal year could be redirected away from their original allocations.

"Carryover funds are not lapsed appropriations, so they can fund some number of limited activities," Dreier explained. "This could functionally consolidate those into preferred activities to continue various functions that the White House would like to do to mitigate the pain or disruption of a shutdown."

NASA estimates it will take around half a day to secure facilities and complete the orderly shutdown of non-excepted operations.

As for missions deemed too critical to interrupt, the International Space Station remains staffed, with flight controllers and engineers working around the clock to keep astronauts safe and systems running. Earth-observing and weather satellites considered vital to public safety, also maintain their operation, ensuring that data on weather, natural disasters and space debris remains available.

Most of NASA's research portfolio, from science grants to technology development, has been placed on hold, freezing progress across a wide range of projects. Public engagement efforts such as visitor centers, NASA TV and social media platforms have gone dark, limiting the agency's ability to communicate with the public.

Contractors are in a mixed position. A small number can continue temporarily if their work is already funded, but even programs with those resources may stall without their NASA counterparts present to offer oversight. Furloughed employees are legally prohibited from doing any NASA work, even on a voluntary basis, and have been reduced to a select few who will spend the shutdown's first half-day facilitating an "orderly shutdown" at agency centers across the country.

Federal law guarantees that civil servants will eventually receive back pay, but the timing of those payments depends entirely on how long the shutdown lasts and how quickly Congress acts.

NASA is bracing for the possibility of a federal government shutdown if Congress fails to pass a funding bill –– a recurring crisis that grinds activity to a halt across most civilian agencies in the U.S.

A government shutdown would force NASA to scale back most of its activities, sending the majority of its workforce home without pay. Only a small number of essential personnel would remain, tasked with protecting mission-critical assets such as spacecraft in orbit, astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) and other safety operations, while most research and development would come to a halt.

NASA’s contingency plan, as outlined in its shutdown FAQs from 2018, emphasizes that only "activities which are necessary to prevent harm to life or property" are exempt from being affected. So, without a funding bill by the end of Sept. 30 — the end of the current fiscal year — agency offices will close, labs will go quiet and most of NASA's employees will find themselves facing a furlough.

“The appropriations process is ongoing. All essential and safety-critical NASA activities will remain operational," NASA officials told Space.com in an email on Sept. 29.

In addition to keeping the ISS operational and monitoring satellites that provide things like weather and climate data, the agency can also request exceptions for other activities deemed critical.

For example, perhaps NASA's most notable upcoming mission, Artemis 2, will fly a crew of four astronauts around the moon for the first time since the Apollo program in 1972. A recent mission briefing revealed that Artemis 2 could launch as soon as Feb. 5, but any delay in preparations could easily push the target date closer to the end of its launch window in April.

Lakiesha Hawkins, NASA’s acting deputy administrator for exploration systems, said the agency expects to win such exceptions for Artemis 2.

“This is obviously very safety-critical, and we anticipate being able to request, and being able to continue to move forward on Artemis 2 in the event of a shutdown,” Hawkins said during a press conference on Sept. 23.

During a shutdown, NASA employees who are not assigned to those exempt duties are barred from working, even on a volunteer basis. During the 2018 government shutdown, about 95% of NASA’s workforce was sent home. That left skeleton crews at centers across the country to ensure spacecraft remained operational, while research, contract management, public outreach and most programs went dark.

Contractors face a patchwork of outcomes. Some may continue working for a spell if their contracts are already funded, while others would be sidelined at the loss of facility access and the inability to coordinate with furloughed civil servant colleagues. A small handful would be tasked with "orderly shutdown" duties, such as powering down systems, before stepping away, according to a NASA contract employee not authorized to speak on behalf of the agency.

Work on new missions, hardware testing, technology development, and non-critical science would be paused until funding is restored, adding potential delays and costs once normal operations resume.

The potential damage is magnified by NASA’s current budget environment. The agency is bracing for more cuts as the White House signals its intent for agencies to implement further reductions in force (RIFs) — a euphemism for layoffs. A prolonged shutdown would compound uncertainty for workers, with furloughs layered on top of existing concerns about layoffs and reorganizations.

Paul Shearon, formerly a Boeing engineer, was elected in the summer of 2018 as the president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers. Across the nation, IFPTE represents 80,000 highly-skilled, workers in both the public and private sectors, including 8,000 scientists and technical workers at NASA. The union is an affiliate of the AFL-CIO. Shearon contributed this article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

"Houston, we have a problem." Remember back when NASA missions, such as Apollo 13, were scrubbed due to mechanical issues? Today, NASA's missions are being delayed and the space agency is being damaged for the long-term — not by equipment failure, but by the failure of our elected leaders to reach a budget agreement. On Dec. 22, 95 percent of NASA's scientists, technical workers and other employees were furloughed — for the third time in the past year.

The appropriation process is broken and has been broken for a while, but the White House is making a bad situation worse. The current shutdown is longer than the previous two combined. It's also different, because this lockout may be the straw that breaks the camel's back for the NASA workforce. [NASA's 10 Greatest Science Missions]

As the president of a union that represents 80,000 highly skilled professionals in the public and private sector, including 25,000 Boeing engineers and 8,000 rocket scientists and technical workers at NASA, I understand how much demand there is for professionals with advanced degrees in science and engineering. I also understand the frustration dedicated NASA scientists have when they're given two hours on Dec. 26 to remove their personal possessions from their labs and offices because after that the gates to their research center will be padlocked. I understand their frustration when not only will wages possibly remain stagnant after the first of the year because of President Trump’s recommended 2019 pay freeze through an executive order, a paycheck won't even come. Furthermore, when the President of the United States, the top administrator for federal workers, seemingly couldn't care less if government operations such as NASA are operating, I completely understand why some scientists, engineers and others with technical skills may seek employment elsewhere.

And make no mistake, the president is absolutely wrong with his claim that "many" federal workers support the shutdown and have told him to "stay out." I don't know where he gets his information. I have heard from only one member who supports the president's inaction. Most are extremely frustrated and view this as an act of ineptitude. Oh, and by the way, our membership includes significant numbers of Republicans and independents, as well as Democrats. The president seems to think all federal workers are of the opposing party. 

As the head of the administrative branch of government, as the nation's top administrator, President Trump should be deeply concerned about the morale of his employees, the productivity of government agencies and the ability of the government to attract and retain the best and the brightest. Instead, he is literally tweeting the words "poor me" while holding dedicated professionals hostage, creating unnecessary stress and financial hardships for their families, undermining their work product and treating them as a chip on a giant poker table. [In Photos: President Donald Trump and NASA]

"You can't build something someone's never built before sitting on your ass doing nothing," Paul Greenberg, a research scientist and physicist at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland and an active member of my union, recently told The Washington Post. "Everything just stops." 

He also told The Post that "retirement's looking more attractive all the time." Greenberg, who is working on a project funded by Homeland Security to build sensor packages that first responders and firefighters can wear to monitor their exposure to airborne substances, as well as a telescope to send data back from deep space, has spent 30 years at NASA. Younger scientists and engineers are also looking at the exit signs, and that should concern everyone who wants to see a vibrant space program.

Younger workers see NASA TV being mostly shut down during the furlough, the agency's website not being updated and no one keeping tabs on their projects. They feel devalued and expendable. They believe that they're being treated as poker chips in a dispute that should be settled by overhauling the budget process, debating a wall as part of an infrastructure spending package, or as part of a grand bargain on immigration involving the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy. NASA workers aren't poker chips, and they don't want to be treated that way.

If the president wants to gamble, perhaps he should go back to running casinos. A casino is where it's commonplace for chips to be tossed around. Gambling with the lives of NASA workers is not acceptable and not in the best interest of the future of the space program.

Follow us @Spacedotcom or Facebook. Originally published on Space.com.