As the Federal Aviation Administration reviews the recommendations of a National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) report on last year’s SpaceShipTwo accident, it is facing new scrutiny that its commercial space office, faced with a heavy workload, may have been under pressure to approve applications without sufficient review.

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Jeff Foust has more than a decade of experience writing about space policy, entrepreneurial ventures and regulatory affairs. In 2001, he established spacetoday.net to aggregate and summarize the day's space-related news stories. In 2003, he started The...