TL;DR
The Federal Aviation Administration is planning for a sky where rockets go up the way planes take off: it projects 10,000 licensed launches and reentries a year by 2035, which works out to more than one every hour. To get there, it has proposed three new rules that would let rocket companies switch their flight-abort systems off during certain parts of a mission, spell out when an abort has to begin, and count a spacecraft breaking apart when they estimate the danger of an uncontrolled fall back to Earth. The news comes by way of a secondary report, and the rules are proposals, not law yet. Still, they are the newest piece of a much bigger push: a White House order for more than 1,000 launches and reentries a year by 2030, a SpaceX request to fly Starship up to 456 times a year from Texas, and Blue Origin pads built for several flights a week. More flights is how getting to orbit stops being a rare event and starts being a schedule. To see our odds on when the paperwork catches up with the rockets, and the timeline of steps that leads there, subscribe.
Below the line, for paid subscribers: The full story: where it stands, how we got here and what's dated next; our labeled speculation on what it adds up to; and every source.