President Donald Trump has signed an executive order aimed at accelerating growth of the U.S. commercial space industry by peeling back federal regulations that companies say slow rocket launches and spaceport development. The directive, issued 13 August, instructs the Department of Transportation and the Federal Aviation Administration to “eliminate or expedite” environmental reviews when approving commercial launch and re-entry licenses and to streamline overlapping assessments conducted by NASA and the Defense Department. The order calls on Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who is also acting NASA administrator, to revisit the FAA’s Part 450 launch-safety framework that took effect in 2021, with authority to amend or rescind provisions deemed burdensome. It also makes the head of the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation a political appointee and creates a senior adviser at DOT focused on deregulation of space activities. Separately, the Office of Space Commerce is being moved higher within the Commerce Department hierarchy, giving it greater authority to serve as a one-stop shop for licensing novel space missions. By compressing review times and clarifying oversight, the White House says the changes will help firms such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX maintain the United States’ competitive edge in a sector where launch cadence and costs are increasingly critical.