On a clear evening this January, flights out of Miami, Orlando and Fort Lauderdale suddenly ground to a halt. The culprit wasn’t weather or a software glitch — it was a rocket launch. SpaceX’s Starship, the largest spacecraft ever built, had lifted off from Texas and exploded mid-flight, raining 100 tons of debris at over 13,250 miles per hour over the Caribbean. The FAA swiftly issued an unprecedented order: a temporary freeze on air traffic at four major Florida airports. Then another Starship exploded on its next test launch in March. According to FAA data reported by Reuters, the disruption affected about 240 flights with delays averaging 28 minutes, forcing 28 of those aircraft to divert, and left 40 airborne flights in holding patterns. Passengers as far away as Philadelphia felt the shockwave in scheduling. It was a dramatic wake-up call that our airspace is no longer the exclusive domain of airplanes. Rockets have arrived, and the system isn’t ready. These incidents aren’t a fluke — they’re a glimpse into what happens when rockets and airplanes share the same sky.
Incidents like this highlight a growing tension in the skies. Private spaceflight is booming. Companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin and Rocket Lab are launching rockets at a cadence unimaginable a decade ago. In 2025, the FAA expects up to 172 commercial space launches — a number expected to more than double by 2028. Each launch forces air traffic controllers to carve out huge chunks of restricted airspace, often for hours, to ensure no aircraft strays near a rocket’s path. Even when missions go perfectly, these precautionary no-fly zones can disrupt hundreds of airline flights and congest the busy highways in the sky. During one routine Delta II rocket launch from Cape Canaveral, for example, 56 flights had to be rerouted roughly 65 nautical miles each — adding over 3,600 miles of total detours. What used to be an occasional NASA shuttle launch is now weekly private missions, and what was once a minor nuisance for air travel could soon become a major choke point. The convergence of air traffic and space traffic is creating a new kind of traffic jam, and it’s one with high stakes for safety and commerce alike.
I know these stakes firsthand, having spent over a decade as a U.S. Air Force air traffic control (ATC) specialist, directing fighters and airliners through congested airspace, and from watching the new space race from an international perspective. This helped me see the writing on the wall: our 20th-century air traffic system wasn’t built for the rocket era. Aviation authorities need to fundamentally rethink how we manage the skies when spacecraft are part of the mix. My research, which I published in my master’s thesis at American Military University, identified three critical gaps in today’s approach: the lack of integrated launch data, overly broad flight restrictions and limited automation to assist controllers. In plain terms, controllers can’t see or predict rocket flights with the same fidelity as plane flights, so they compensate by shutting down swaths of airspace “just in case.” My proposed solution: bring rocket launches into the fold of air traffic control through real-time tracking and smarter software — essentially, give every rocket a digital license plate and trajectory forecast that ATC can monitor moment by moment.
Right now, air traffic controllers rely on blunt instruments like Temporary Flight Restrictions — static, hours-long closures of air corridors — because they have no direct insight into a launch’s progress. The airspace bookings for spacecraft launches are hours long, while the spacecraft is only in the air and presents an actual threat for minutes. Today’s rockets don’t broadcast their positions to civilian radars, and they can’t alter course to avoid a mid-air conflict. I envision a system much more like how we track aircraft. Every airliner now carries an Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) transmitter that constantly radios its GPS position to controllers and other planes. If rockets had a similar real-time tracking feed — call it “ADS-B for space” — controllers could see a launch’s arc in real time on their screens. Coupled with predictive algorithms (which could project where the rocket or any debris will go), ATC would only clear other aircraft when there’s an actual risk. Think of it as drawing a moving bubble around the rocket instead of a giant static circle in the sky. The result? Planes keep flying with minimal interruptions, and the dangerous overlap of air and space is managed dynamically.
We currently close off a huge chunk of sky because we can’t precisely track the rocket. My goal is to shrink that down to only what’s necessary to maintain safety.
Implementing such a system won’t be easy, but the pieces are starting to fall into place. The FAA’s ongoing NextGen air traffic modernization is already shifting towards trajectory-based operations and automated decision support tools for controllers. In fact, FAA officials have begun collaborating with the commercial space industry to improve launch integration, developing new protocols to share data between rocket companies and ATC.
There will be technical and regulatory hurdles: rocket telemetry would need standardization; international agreements would be needed so that, say, a launch from French Guiana or a reentry over the Pacific triggers the same kind of coordinated response. But the alternative is to continue with ever-growing flight disruptions or, worse, a potential accident. Safety analyses have shown that even a one-pound piece of falling metal from a rocket could puncture an aircraft’s fuselage– a nightmare scenario the current rules are designed to avoid at all costs.
Mathew Lewallen is an air traffic control specialist and aviation expert with over 11 years of experience in the U.S. Air Force. He currently serves as an international airspace manager (European Central Altitude Reservation Facility-EUCARF) at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, coordinating and de-conflicting flights across the Atlantic, and through European and African airspaces. Mathew holds a Master of Science in Space Studies from American Military University and is pursuing a Ph.D. in Aviation at Liberty University. His research focuses on integrating commercial space launches into national airspace systems. The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Air Force, Department of Defense or the U.S. Government.
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