Mathew Lewallen
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.
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