Re: Premature Stackulation?
Regulatory capture is a problem to solve, though I think that since the 737-MAX the FAA, US Gov, and for the moment US politicians (who fund the FAA) have realised the importance of an independent regulator (and, more importantly, one that is very evidently independent) to the reputation of the USA and its industries.
The MAX crashes and the independent actions of regulators globally was effectively the rest of the world deciding - officially, at national leader level - that "Made in the USA" was not to be trusted.
A Problem that is Uniquely Unfixable in the USA?
The rest of the world fully understands how the FAA got captured by Boeing, and part of it is related to how the FAA is funded (by US politicians), and how the politicians in both parties down the decades consistently cut the budget, staffing, and scope of the FAA's work. However, the means by which the FAA's budget is set (and therefore its capabilities) has remained unaltered. The politicians still hold the purse strings. The politicians will change, forget, and so on.
We're probably (at best) only 10 years away from US politicians once again saying, "why do we put so much money into the FAA when there are no crashes happening?", and once again cutting the budget. The meta-issue going forward is that the rest of the world sees this, sees no changes to protect the FAA from politicians, and knows that the FAA is still vulnerable to a reduction in funding / scope. Other world regulators have to report to their lords and masters that there is no guarantee coming from the USA that effective regulation continues indefinitely.
In other words, "Made in the USA" still cannot be fully trusted. And given that this is essentially a political problem and the USA seems to have a lot of paralysis over such matters, there seems little prospect of change.
Geopolitics
In my view, this is a huge geopolitical / industrial problem for the USA going forward. The implication is that the US's former dominance in aviation came into being despite the polticial set up in the USA, not because of it. If a political system is effectively loaded against the success of an industry, that industry will, long term, cease to be.
It has other consequences. With rockets, ineffective regulation by one country might have disasterous consequences for another. One country's failed experimental rocket launch can look to another country like a deliberate act of war, especially if it keeps happening. This very thing is going on at the moment with one of China's launchers, where they simply abandon the booster to fall back to earth in some random, uncontrolled location.
To date, with rockets launched from the USA on the eastern seaboard, so far as I can tell launches are either in the drink or safely in orbit long before they could trouble countries on the other side. Similarly any worst case hypothetical re-entry mishap would result in minimum damage caused by an errant capsule, or a Shuttle gliding in to open countryside somewhere. It's very easy for other countries to be relaxed about it.
However, with StarShip, the USA is in a particularly interesting position in that StarShip is intended to re-enter the atmosphere still carrying a load of fuel and LOX to be used for landing. It's not called a bomb, no one is intending it to be a bomb, it's not got "bomb" painted on the side. But, coming back into the atmosphere uncontrolled and detonating on impact, it would definitely go off like a pretty convincingly big bomb.
By "big", well; Wikipedia lists it as having a capacity for 1,200 tons of fuel/LOX, some of which will have been used up getting into orbit. But, it's easy to see it still having a couple of hundred tons after re-entry for landing. If that detonated on crash landing, it'd not be on quite the same scale as the explosion in Beirut explosion in 2020, but it'd be up that way (depending on the explosive equivalence to TNT of a methane/LOX explosion).
So the USA and the FAA are on the hook to make certain that StarShip re-entry accidents do not ever occur. Especially not in other countries' cities. Can you imagine the ramifications if that happened in, say, Beijing, or Moscow? How comfortable can we be, knowing the fragility of the FAA's funding / effectiveness, and that the company boss seems to have a "send it" approach to getting things right? The USA and the rest of us is depending on the FAA to ensure that SpaceX / Musk doesn't cause a major geopoliticial incident, either by accident or by design. It's one of those low probability, high impact events that people like to dismiss, but probably shouldn't.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
