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Suborbital Rocketeers Ask FAA For Fair Rocketry Rules
HobbySpacer writes "John Carmack, Dennis Tito, Eric Anderson of Space Adventures, Brian Chase
of the National Space Society and other notables in the world of rocketry and space activism issued a call today for the FAA to cut the regulatory tangle that threatens to hold a nascent fleet of suborbital space vehicles firmly on the ground. The FAA needs to make it clear that these rocket vehicles fall under the jurisdiction of its own Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST) and not let intra-agency bureaucratic squabbles over control and power stall the development of this promising new industry."
I think the author meant interagency, in other words squabbles between different agencies, rather than intra-agency, which would refer to arguments where all participants were part of the Federal Aviation Administration.
-Mike
Arianne operates out of some nowhere place in Central America because:
you should read everything on the internet as if it had "but I'm probably talking out of my ass" appended to it.
It's closer to get into geostationary orbit which is directly above the equator itself, but not orbit itself. That geostationary belt is pretty crowded airspace. It doubt it makes the trip up any easier since you still need to hit the same escape velocity (25,000 MPH / Mach 34) regardless of where you launch from. The challenge lies in achieving that speed as cheaply as possible, not an easy task.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
Actually, for orbital flights, it IS better to be closer to the equator. At the equator the earth's rotation adds a free 1,000 mph to the launch velocity. Boeing and a Russian firm actually launch rockets from a platform in the middle of the Pacific for just this reason.
Thus companies already have a great reason to relocate launch facilities further south. Making it difficult to obtain launch permission just adds another reason to ship more jobs out of the country.
who's thinking that the families of the deceased* won't slap the mother of all class-action suits against, among others, the licensing body?
/. is a great place for reading about clueless tech users. Let me be the first to inform you: you are equally clueless about the legal system. So are the people who modded your clueless post up to +5, so you need not feel as though you are alone here.
Two words: sovereign immunity. You can't sue the king except under certain limited circumstances where the king agrees to let you sue him.
Also, do you have any idea what a "class action" is? It's a lawsuit brought by members of a "class" that usually cannot be individually identified. In almost any case I can possibly imagine, any harm resulting from the destruction of a plane or of property on the ground would result in specifically identifiable and ascertainable victims. A mass tort would not be an appropriate remedy in such a situation.
In the event that there is a pollution release-type event that causes some minimal level of harm to a large number of people, a class action may be a realistic possibility.
In any case, I don't see why the government would be involved in any of this. Giving someone a license hardly subjects you to liability when a third party is harmed by the licensee. For instance, do you see victims in auto accident cases suing states when they are hit by careless drivers? Do you see victims suing state licensing authorities (successfully) when doctors commit malpractice?
If you're going to bitch about lawyers and some nebulous fear of lawsuits, at least understand what you are bitching about.
If there's one thing tech people do not understand, it is tort law.
GF.
Lots of petrified grits
Ummm....no, Arianne launches from FRENCH GUIANA (which is in south america) because they are a FRENCH COMPANY. French Guiana is essentially a colony France has held on to for the purpose of launching space vehicles. They used to have a nasty prison there too.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
It doubt it makes the trip up any easier since you still need to hit the same escape velocity (25,000 MPH / Mach 34) regardless of where you launch from. The challenge lies in achieving that speed as cheaply as possible, not an easy task.
Equatorial launch from, say, Ecuador (high elevation which reduces weight and air resistance at launch. Rotation of the earth has to be a benefit, too, as compared to regions closer to the poles. Same deal with the shape of the earth (slight equatorial bulge).
While these may all be very minor, in the aggregate, if you can increase lifting capacity by even ten or twenty pounds, it is not insignificant.
GF.
Lots of petrified grits
> And another thing, who on earth are the Objectivist Center and Reason Foundation??
Followers of Ayn Rand (affectionately known in some circles as "Randroids"). You gotta read Atlas Shrugged, or at least The Fountainhead to get into Rand's philosophy known as Objectivism, which is not without its merits, but is predicated on an interesting mixture of shoddy logic (it loves tautologies) and vitriol toward fictional strawmen constructions of opponents (anyone who doesn't believe in absolutely unregulated capitalism) that makes the Two Minute Hate look like a love-in. I'm not going to pan it completely, it's a decent branch of existentialism, but it's not well-known for being very self-critical or indeed taking criticism of any sort gracefully. More of a culture problem than a belief one.
Again, her distinctly populist philosophy is called Objectivism, and thus you get names like The Objectivist Center. TOC (nee IOS, or Institute for Objectivism Studies) is actually one of the more moderate groups, because Rand's "official" legacy is carried on by a pinhead by the name of Leonard Piekoff of the Ayn Rand Institute who, to put it charitably, is nuttier than a fucking crate of baklava. Strident and dogmatic doesn't begin to describe Piekoff... but those internal politics are another story.
Anyway, obLinks:
Ayn Rand Institute
The Objectivist Center
opposing viewpoints aren't terribly well-organized, but my favorite is a paper called The Unlikeliest Cult In History. I suggest reading it only after reading one of the books (I'm sure you can do a very uncapitalist thing and download a copy over p2p), since you won't really know where it's coming from otherwise.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
That location is Korou, French Guiana. And it was chosen due to its proximity to the equator because the faster rotation of the Earth at the equator gives launchers a significant "free" boost. This is also why Soyuz rockets will begin launching from Korou soon -- they will be considerably more powerful than they are when launching from Baikonur in Kazakhstan, which is much farther north.
Florida was chosen for the US space center because launch accidents will only drop debris in the ocean rather than on populated areas (unlike Baikonur and China's launch center) and because Florida is quite far south as far as US states go.
i am a soviet space shuttle
Almost. There are two factors to consider:
From anywhere, launching due east is most efficient. This places the spacecraft in an orbit whose inclination is the same as the launch site's latitude.
The closer you are the equator, the more assistance you get from the Earth's rotation.
So for the vast majority of commercial launches, which are in to geostationary orbits (i.e. zero inclination), you really do want to launch from somewhere close to the equator
You will note that the orbital inclination of Mir (and now ISS) was very close to the latitude of Baikonur (they launch slightly north to avoid launching over China, just in case). Molniya-orbit satellites are routinely launched from Plesetsk (orbital inclination = latitude = 63 degrees). Heavy Shuttle missions are launched due east from Kennedy (orbital inclination = latitude = 28 degrees). And so on.
The U.S.A. launches polar-orbit satellites from Vandenberg. This is a range-safety issue, nothing to do with orbital mechanics: you can launch due south and there are no people to be hit by falling debris for a very long way.
...laura
> What happens when one of their toys take a nose-dive into the heart of a heavly-populated city?
Unlikely. These "toys" go awry on occasion, for sure, but the existing regulations prevent launch arcs that fall over heavily populated areas already. Also, modern rockets are required (again, by existing regulations) to have a self-destruct mechanism on board, and there's only one documented case of said system failing in use.
> NASA got damn lucky where and when the shuttle came apart. What would've happened if a large chunk of it survied intact and had plowed into downtown Dallas?
Having a bit of trouble wrapping our hands around the term "suborbital", are we? Suborbital rockets do not burn up and fragment on reentry, because they don't undergo reentry. And as to what would have happened, it's vanishingly unlikely that any significant damage would be done by stuttle fragments that fell on a populated area. First, it would have to be very big (the entirety of the shuttle would not be very big in terms of collateral damage). Second, it would have to hit something full of people. If you think that's a definite, you should be aware that more than 50 percent of the ground space in any given city isn't occupied buildings, it's roads, parks, factories (which are very sparsely populated on a per-square-foot basis), waterways and other stuff no more densely populated than anywhere else. Third, it would have to hit those people in a soft target, and, 9/11 not withstanding, buildings are not soft targets. Remember that it was fire and the subsequent collapse from fire that destroyed the Twin Towers, both of which withstood the initial collisions. Since falling debris from orbit isn't generally full of high-test aviation fuel, that fire damage simply wouldn't occur.
You sound like someone who takes information from watching reruns of "Armageddon". That's a movie, not reality.
Virg
I was just positing that perhaps Arianne operated outside of France to escape French regulations as an example of how an American company could operate outside of the U.S. to avoid U.S. regulation.
Apparently the point was too subtle for the slashdot crowd. I'll make sure to write in crayola next time.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.