If you want to launch a rocket, you go to the FAA. If you want to operate a satellite that talks to the ground, you go to the FCC. But if you want to build a factory in orbit, refuel someone else's spacecraft, run a data center on a satellite bus, mine or manufacture on the Moon, or open a commercial space station — there is currently no single federal office whose job it is to say "yes." That gap is what a House Science Committee panel spent Wednesday morning examining, as lawmakers reviewed a Trump administration proposal to create the first dedicated approval pathway for the commercial space activities that today's regulatory system was never built to handle.
The hearing, held by the Space Subcommittee of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee at 10:00 a.m. ET in Washington, DC, addressed the Trump administration's Mission Authorization proposal for commercial space activities. Its sole witness was Taylor Jordan, director of the Office of Space Commerce (OSC), the small Commerce Department shop under NOAA that has been tasked with designing the framework.
What OSC Is Actually Proposing
The centerpiece is something OSC calls the "Space Commerce Certification" — an opt-in, consolidated approval that companies could apply for instead of trying to shoehorn a novel business into existing launch or spectrum licensing rules. According to the agency's own description, the certification is meant to cover what it calls "novel activities": in-space manufacturing, orbital computing, satellite servicing, lunar operations, and commercial inhabitable space stations — none of which map cleanly onto the Federal Aviation Administration's launch-and-reentry authority or the Federal Communications Commission's spectrum authority. Rather than replacing those agencies, OSC's proposal is a coordination layer. The certification would consolidate approvals that currently sit scattered across the Commercial Remote Sensing Regulatory Affairs (CRSRA) office, the FAA, and the FCC, and the FAA and FCC would be free to fold OSC's certification into their own processes rather than duplicating the review from scratch.
Speed is the proposal's other selling point. OSC has floated a 120-day review timeline for certification decisions, paired with what the agency and outside reporting have both described as "light-touch" requirements — a deliberate contrast to the multi-agency, open-ended reviews that companies pursuing genuinely new space business models have complained about for years.
"We're working on a framework that allows the government to say yes to innovative space activities," Jordan said, according to reporting on the proposal. OSC's director of policy, advocacy and international division, Gabriel Swiney, put the harder political problem more bluntly: "It's going to be really critical that our certification carries some water with the other regulators." In other words, a fast, friendly certification from a small NOAA office is only useful if the FAA and FCC actually treat it as authoritative rather than as one more piece of paperwork to review independently. OSC says it is negotiating memoranda of understanding with other regulatory agencies to try to lock that recognition in.
Where This Came From
The proposal traces directly to Executive Order 14335, signed by President Trump in August 2025, which directed agencies to pursue deregulation of commercial space activity. OSC published its formal draft of the Space Commerce Certification framework on March 24, 2026, opening it for public comment through the address [email protected]. The agency has been explicit that the March release is non-binding — a draft meant to gather industry and public feedback before any rule is finalized — which is part of why Wednesday's hearing mattered: it was Congress's first extended public airing of the plan since the draft dropped nearly four months ago.
Why It Matters
Regulatory uncertainty has been a recurring complaint from companies working in the newer corners of the space economy — the sort of ventures that don't fit neatly into "we're launching a rocket" or "we're operating a communications satellite." A startup planning to manufacture pharmaceuticals or fiber optics in microgravity, or a company proposing to refuel and repair other operators' satellites in orbit, has historically had to guess which agency, if any, has jurisdiction, and then negotiate a bespoke review. That ambiguity is itself a cost: it slows financing, complicates insurance, and can push companies to incorporate or operate activity through other countries with clearer rules.
A single opt-in certification with a defined 120-day clock would, at least on paper, give founders and investors something they don't currently have: a predictable answer about whether and how the federal government will sign off on a novel orbital or lunar business. That predictability is also precisely what OSC's own materials point to — the agency has framed the effort as offering companies "predictability and speed."
But the proposal's success hinges on the interagency buy-in Swiney flagged. If the FAA or FCC decline to give OSC's certification real weight in their own reviews, companies could end up navigating the new "light-touch" process on top of the existing ones rather than instead of them — adding a layer of bureaucracy rather than removing one. That's also why the MOU negotiations OSC is pursuing with other regulators, and the substance of Wednesday's hearing, matter as much as the certification's paper design. For an industry moving into orbital manufacturing, satellite servicing, and lunar operations largely without a rulebook, how Washington resolves that interagency question will shape which of those business models actually get built — and where.
