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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."
Different parts of the Federal Aviation Administration regulate the 100-year old aviation industry and the emerging commercial space transportation industry. Unfortunately, the aviation guys want to regulate these new space entrepreneurs the same way they regulate huge corporations like United Airlines or Boeing. If the Wright Brothers had faced such a burden, they would never have gotten off the ground.
Wouldn't it make sense to spin off a portion of the FAA and make it (just an example) the Federal Space Administration? At least then you'd have a separate and wholly defined department to handle both public and government-level space flight regulation.
In it's current form, the Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST) is stuck under the umbrella of the FAA. With the increasing popularity and usage of private/commerical space flight, the AST is continually limited in its scope from the head guys at the FAA. Spinning that department off into it's own regulatory agency frees it from the burden of having to look over their shoulders.
-Cyc
/.'s 10 Millionth
Forgot to add the rest of my message..
Why is it that the FAA can't create designated no-fly zones for general public research purposes? Seems like they could easily spare some airspace in several locations across the country-- just a couple square miles worth here and there.. That would be more than adequate for a good bit of lower end rocketry research and testing. Just make sure any test craft are equipped with self-destruct mechanisms in case they go off course and endanger commercial aircraft.
KappaStone
is it possible the stalling is a result of liability concerns?
consider: spaceflight is the transportation method w/ which humanity collectively has the least experience. if the US government licenses [x] business to ferry humans into space and some horrible mishap occurs, 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?
i mean, that kind of liability would have any bureaucrat shaking in his/her proverbial space boots, but added to that the incredibly high-profile nature of this type of work and the risk...
ed
*and survivors of course, although the likelihood of there being any is mighty small)
Doesn't Arianne operate out of some nowhere place in Central America for that very reason?
--
Slashdot minimum post times. Celebrating slow readers and slow typists for years.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
ah why do they think that Nasa wil allow them to comepte eventually with the shuttle?
NASA wil kill this movement if we let it..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
The whole idea behind this is not to eliminate regulations entirely, but establish regulations that are just enough to keep the industry from hurting the uninvolved general public. Too much rules are bad, not enough rules are bad. There is a terrific middle ground. In fact, a lot of us would PREFER regulation, so that the image of the industry isn't tarnished with really bad accidents that could have been prevented with a little sanity checking and due dilligence.
For a moment I thought this article was about how new regulations threaten to ban the sport of model rocketry. It would be good for that issue to get a little more airplay...
And do I get to file a big ol' lawsuit when one of those burning chunks lands on my roof top, 20+ miles away, and burns down my homestead?
"Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither!"
Seems to me that a private company incorporated in an equatorial third-world country would be better situated than any company in the U.S. I don't see why U.S. citizens cannot own a stake in a foreign enterprise of this type.
Because the US doesn't want it's citizens to fund, indirectly, some third world nation's ICBM program?
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
"...letting out information that could jeopardize security... (T)hat would cause problems, even if it could be implemented"
News Flash: the information is already out there and available to the public.
A product called Flight Explorer allows you to "... retrieve aircraft information from our data center and to provide you with a real-time picture of all IFR aircraft over the US (including Alaska and Hawaii), Canada, the Caribbean and parts of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans."
A nice review (with lots of screenshots) is available at AvWeb and also has a short discussion on how/why the data became available to the public.
Well, if you take the numbers from 2002, the number of air travelers that died in the US was 0.00%
Annoyingly, even after quoting this number, my wife still cringes at the idea of flying somewhere...
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.