FAA-registered drones in the US

In the same years that NASA has been assembling the pieces of a return to the moon, the Federal Aviation Administration has been quietly registering a great many small flying cameras, and the two numbers have risen together (r = 0.961) with the companionable air of two agencies sharing an airspace. Rockets ascend to the Sea of Tranquility; quadcopters ascend to the neighbor's backyard. The federal government, it seems, has become fond of vertical motion.

The FAA's drone registry passed 860,000 registered units by 2023, up from essentially zero when the rule was introduced in 2015, while Artemis funding rose from early study dollars to roughly $7 billion annually by the same year. Both reflect something genuinely new: the democratization of flight at the hobby end and the recommitment to human spaceflight at the institutional end, both funded by a federal establishment comfortable with aerospace spending at multiple altitudes. The same years that saw DJI dominate consumer drones also saw SpaceX win the Artemis lunar lander contract, and both industries largely did not exist a decade before.

Airspace has grown crowded from the ground up. The moon is getting new neighbors at the same rate.