An agency’s notice of proposed rulemaking (an NPRM) does not get written overnight. An agency must identify a problem, come up with its proposed solution, justify it by explaining the legality and need for it in an explanatory preamble, and subject it to a regulatory evaluation, which is bureaucrat-speak for an analysis of the costs and benefits of the proposed requirements.
Sometimes the public and industry are surprised by an NPRM. They don’t need to be. A Unified Agenda provides the public a way to learn about an agency’s rulemaking priorities. The Unified Agenda reports regulatory and deregulatory activities under development in the agencies of the federal government, but not Congress. Fall editions provide The Regulatory Plan, in which agencies state their regulatory priorities and identify their most significant regulatory activities in the coming year. An agency may also list long-term actions scheduled for more than 12 months away. It may list completed actions as well.
This page provides a space for inputting the agency you are interested in. The FAA is in the Department of Transportation, so I selected that, and it took me here. I scrolled down, and noticed rulemakings addressing both aviation and space. There is one, for example, for a rulemaking on Reciprocal Waivers of Claims for Licensed or Permitted Launch and Reentry Activities. If you click on the linked RIN number and scroll down, you’ll see that it shows links to the Federal Register notices for the NPRM and for a re-opening of the comment period. There is no link to a final rule, but it’s always good to check–using the search engine of your choice. It turns out that the final rule has been published, and may be found here.
The list contains other space rules, including one addressing risk (which we know is out as a final rule, too), civil penalties (which we can tell apply to space because the summary refers to part 460 of the Title 14 of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR)), orbital debris (in which the FAA proposes to align its requirements with government guidelines and practices), procedures and equivalent level of safety determinations (which we know because the summary contains numerous citations to parts of 14 C.F.R. chapter III), and flight restrictions in the proximity of launch and reentry operations (which relies on the Federal Aviation Act for its authority).
From this exploration we can see that the Unified Agenda is a useful tool. It may not always provide the latest information, so double checking the status of any given item is a good idea.