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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."
The space industry is stuck at a standstill. Too many regulations are cutting into innovation anymore... Not that I want to see one of these suborbital crafts get plastered on the windshield of a 747, but geez.
KappaStone
I think this was meant to be a post under "Engineering From Science Fiction", not a story in its own right.
"We're not happy until you're NOT happy."
They want CONGRESS to help cut through the bureaucracy?
Once they get done forming the committe to form the committe to investiage the possiblity of feasiblity the Chinese will all ready have colinized Mars.
Sanity is overrated...Being CRAZY is much more fun!!!
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.
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
if one of these rockets does fuck up, a LOT of people could wind up dead or injured. Not just the people in the rocket.
There's a pretty good list of names there, but funnily enough, no mention of Lockheed, Boeing, NASA or the other Government funded big boys of the space industry. Surely they're not afraid that deregulation might allow a little competition?
And another thing, who on earth are the Objectivist Center and Reason Foundation??
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
In other news, they're also searching for a suitable 'A' word so that the acronym doesn't look so stupid.
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)
Move the tests to southern Mexico, or even further south. I'm sure they have lighter or even no regs covering this.
IIRC, it's easier to get into orbit from close to the equator. Does that apply to suborbital flight too?
I am having trouble with all this red tape and would like your help with my rocket programme. I think that you should slacken the rules for us hard done by amateur rocket makers...
I also wonder if you could help fund my rocket programme like you have helped with my other projects in the past?
Regards
Osama b. Laden
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
Range safety is an integral part of government and commercial launch vehicle operations in the United States. Range safety ensures that the launch vehicle, or its components, impact in a safe area if there is a problem with the launch vehicle. This involves redundant systems to monitor the velocity, position and health of the launch vehicle, impact prediction systems (where do the pieces land if it blows up), and thrust termination systems (the big red button). The operator of the launch vehicle has to provide a high degree of assurance that no failure mode will result in injury, death or property damage in areas outside the range. This is not a trivial task, and not something to be built from bubble gum and bailing wire.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
it's best to keep pressure on them. When I wrote software for the Air Force a couple years ago, we had to test out new system with the FAA. As lead programmer, I was put in charge of test coordination. The problem with the FAA is that no one will actually make a decision. If you get stuck in a loop where person X says "Sorry, person Y will have to make that decision," and person Y tells you it's person X's call, you're in trouble. And this happens frequently. I was able to call NOT EMAIL them repeatedly until they got so sick of dealing with me that they made it happen. I was working with people at the GS-14 level. I don't know if this helps at all, but don't worry, others have been there and made it work!
"One day I'll wake up and realize that everything is real" -Andy Palmer
I don't care who's juristiction they fall under, it's who they fall on that worries me (-;
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
Wouldn't it make sense to spin off a portion of the FAA and make it (just an example) the Federal Space Administration?
I think that this is a great idea, but good luck getting anyone to fund it. What, exactly, would this agency do right now? We have no shuttle flights (nor do we have any planned for the near future), Mars continues to be a pipe dream, and the ISS is serviced by Russian craft. There's not much to regulate right now. I agree that we'll need one in the future, it's just that the future seems an awfully long way away right now.
I think that the only real chance we have for space exploration, at least until China starts kicking our asses in the race to Mars, is commercial. How about a lottery where a couple of people get a ticket to Mars? Zubrin proposes a $30 billion long term Mars program. At $1000 a ticket, that means we have to sell 30 million tickets (assuming absolutely 0 investment, 0 government aid, and 0 commercial sponsorship (The Pepsi Landing Module, anyone?)). I'm just a poor college student, but you can be damn sure I'd scrape up the cash. Many of the rich and famous would by several tickets, I'd bet. Maybe we couldn't sell 30 million tickets here. Our population is about 280 million, so that's about one person in 9 buying tickets. Pretty unlikely. Our chances get better, however, when we open the lottery up world-wide.
So, before I get modded off-topic, I guess what I'm trying to say is that the space exploration of the future needs to be a cooperative effort.
The government needs to deregulate. Anyone who tries to make space something other than the Wild West is a bit delusional. By stepping back and letting explorers take over their doing nothing that we didn't already do in Tennessee, or Montana, or California.
Commercial ventures need to come up with the money. With all of the MBAs pouring out of Harvard alone you figure that someone could come up with a viable business model. Keep the lottery idea in mind, it's a quick way to make the cash roll in.
Citizens need, at the very least, to vote for Pro-Space Exploration congressmen. How are you going to get Joe Sixpack to vote at all, let alone for such a seemingly trivial issue? Make it exciting again. We need imminent, impressive goals. Mars doesn't count. Even now a landing is 15 years away.
What can we do to:
A) Help the plight of commercial space programs bogged down in bureaucracy?
B) Increase funding to government space programs?
C) Let congress know that there are people interested in space exploration?
Why, I'm glad you asked. Write your congressman. The Mars Society has a well developed lobbying system, including mailing lists and meeting reports. Don't know whether your congressman stands on this issue? Get their report card.
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without letting out information that could jeopardize security. Surely, rocketeers would be overjoyed to have a javascript applet of where every plane is at any time, but clearly that would cause problems, even if it could be implemented. For my money, it should be really, really hard to get a permit to shoot things into space. NORAD has enough to worry about without having to nuke JoeBob's CO2-propelled trashcan with fins.
stuff |
Interesting though it may be, commercial space flight is a nuclear proliferation nightmare: what if anyone with (say) $50M to spend could put any payload he wanted, anywhere on the planet, reliably?
As Gen. Pete Worden (former head of U.S Command) used to say, "We're more concerned about people sending surprise packages...".
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...
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.
from Area 51? After all, there's nothing really there according to the government.
Competition leads to a lot of these benefits being passed on to customers. Also, even monopolies often have to pass on a lot of savings to their customers, depending on the shape of the demand curve and a monopolieis inability to charge different prices based on each customer's willingness to pay.
The public has benefitted from better hurricane warnings, more accurate weather prediction, video of news happening around the world in real time, earlier affordable phone and internet service to obscure locations (these get replaced by cables, but satelite links often are far more economical for the first decade and build the volume that makes it profitable to lay the cable). Even things like better prospecting for oil and other natural resources provides environmental benefits from not having to do as much drilling or mining. One could go on for pages about these benefits, just look at the recent Slashdot article on the Global Positioning System for one minor example.
Cheaper access to space could improve all of these services and probably make feasible many new ones. Just having faster deployments of GPS upgrades would go a long way toward facilitating highway autopilot for cars or affordable internet access from airplanes.
It seems to me that, historically, space has benefitted more than just "the people involved, and companies who might someday benefit from that technology." You have presented no evidence about why that trend is likely to be different in the future.
Besides, even if you show that more than 50% of the surplus value would be retained by sellers ("the benefit is mostly to the people involved [...]"), is not relevant to arguing acceptable risks. Instead, the relative information is how much benefit the public might get in absolute terms, regardless of what proportion of the total surplus value that constitutes.
A stray rocket landing on an elementary school wouldn't be "worth it" under any circumstances.
To me, whether such a scenario is "worth it" definitely depends on the circumstances, and I will vote accordingly. I suspect lots of model rockets have landed on schools, although the circumstances were probably that school was usually not when they were in session at the time, just because school athletic fields often make good launching areas for students, perhaps some from school activities. Even in the case of a high powered rocket landing on a school that is in session, I could be convinced that that was "worth it" to the same extent that a truck plowing into a school in session would be "worth it", depending on statistical likelihood and benefits of the technology.
GPS satellites are not geostationary ... they're actually in a fairly low orbit. There's just a lot of them, so there should always be 3 or so of them above the horizon wherever you are.
if they are suborbital, ;-)
don't they fall under the law of gravity?
(the ultimate authority in such matters...
> 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