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Elon Musk on Tuesday said his aerospace firm will retaliate after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) proposed civil penalties related to two launches last year.
The FAA said it was eyeing a $633,009 fine against Musk’s SpaceX, which dominates the market for commercial space launches. The regulator said that in May 2023, SpaceX submitted a request to revise a plan related to its license to launch rockets from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, a military base in Florida. That included adding a new launch control room and removing a readiness poll from its procedures.
The following month, SpaceX used the unapproved launch control room for a mission and failed to conduct the poll. The FAA said it was proposing a $175,000 fine for each violation. A $283,009 penalty is being proposed related to SpaceX’s unapproved use of a rocket propellant farm in July 2023.
“Safety drives everything we do at the FAA, including a legal responsibility for the safety oversight of companies with commercial space transportation licenses,” FAA Chief Counsel Marc Nichols said in a statement. “Failure of a company to comply with the safety requirements will result in consequences.”
Musk replied by naming the proposed fines “lawfare,” or the use of legal systems and institutions to delegitimatize an opponent. Accusations of lawfare have run rampant during the course of the 2024 presidential election, often levied by Former President Donald Trump against officials prosecuting him.
“SpaceX will be filing suit against the FAA for regulatory overreach,” Musk wrote on X, the social media platform he owns, on Tuesday.
The move comes about a week after SpaceX criticized the FAA and said regulations were holding it back from flying its rockets, pointing to fines and inquires from government agencies. The aerospace firm also said the FAA had pushed back its fifth test of the Starship megarocket from September to November because of “superfluous environmental analysis.”
Trump, building on Musk’s recommendation in August, has said the billionaire could take a post overseeing a commission “tasked with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government and making recommendations with drastic reforms.” That could put him in charge of overseeing the very agencies regulating his companies, including the FAA.
Besides his aerospace company, Musk leads electric vehicle company Tesla, artificial intelligence startup xAI, brain chip startup Neuralink, and the tunneling firm The Boring Company. His nonprofit, the Foundation, is also accepting applications for a private school in Texas, and he also helped found a pro-Trump super political action committee over the summer.
Musk has supported naming the commission the Department of Government Efficiency, with its acronym, DOGE, being a reference to his favorite meme-based cryptocurrency. Earlier this month, he said that “No pay, no title, no recognition is needed.”
But such a job — regardless of any “recognition” or title Musk would receive — would come rife with conflicts of interest. Taking such a position could see Musk put his stock in a blind trust or divest, which would likely tank Tesla’s (TSLA+6.16%) stock price.