It should be remembered that the unspoken rule of any agency or institution is to justify its own continued existence. For be bureaucracy that is the FAA, all the onerous requirements they place on spaceflight is a feature, not a bug.
The bureaucracy at the FAA has protected millions of airline passengers over the course of decades. Just look at how one minor discrepancy in an aircraft can lead to a total loss of the jet and hundreds of lives lost. Now combine that with a rocket loaded with a hundred thousand gallons of fuel and it's understandable that we should be careful. I don't want our space-faring expeditions to look like China's, where they're okay dumping hydrazine on local villages [1].
To be clear, I'm not saying regulatory agencies are bad. What I am saying, though, is that these agencies don't have an incentive to trim down red-tape in the interest of efficiency. On one level, it would be bad for their employees and budget. On another level, something might slip through the cracks so it makes sense for a safety agency to be far more risk averse than what it watches.
Better efficiencies with significantly more launches per year and eventually interplanetary travel would be bad for the agencies that regulate it? How do you figure?
The FAA has no inherent incentive to slow things down. It seems to me that they do have incentive to encourage growth. Without this base for your arguments, they all seem unstable to me.
When there are mountains of red tape it is easy to over-simplify the reasons. But that usually isn't helpful in correcting the problem.
Over the long run, more volume would provide more work for the FAA and its employees. For now, though, loosening the rules in hopes of getting more launches would serve to reduce work for the agency and diminish it's purpose. I could see a business making the short term tradeoff in the name of long term gains but not a government bureaucracy. Does that make where I am coming from a little more understandable?
And they aren't sending passengers on these autonomous test flights. Nor are they risking multi-billion dollar taxpayer funded payloads. It makes total sense to me to allow SpaceX a faster launch cadence for their prototypes.
