Private Spaceflight Law Revived

Lord Byron II writes "In an update to this earlier Slashdot story, after the defeat of HR3752, California representative Dana Rohrabacher reintroduced the legislation as HR5382. This new bill has just passed the crucial role call vote necessary to maintain it during the "lame-duck" session. MSNBC has more information on this bill that will enable the private spaceflight industry to (both literally and figuratively) takeoff and from Google News."

Comments

Well...

[jacksonj04]

And how do you propose that foreign law is useful in space? You can't really work with airspace zones since orbiting craft will cross them in a few minutes, and to be honest you're not going to scramble jets up to those violating the law are you?

Uh, wouldn't no laws at all be better?

[vudufixit]

Wouldn't a lack of regulation really allow private spaceflight to "take off?" Say what you want about Ronald Reagan's presidency, he was spot-on with what he said regarding the government's treatment of new (and for that matter, existing) industries: "If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it. "

Re:Uh, wouldn't no laws at all be better?

[Meredeth]

Absolutely not. I might be persuaded to trust Burt Rutan. But would I trust the company that will run /lease/buy his spaceplane? And what about the other startup companies? There needs to be regulation of this so that we can be confident that there is some accountability for things if they go wrong.

Re:Uh, wouldn't no laws at all be better?

[mordors9]

But as we saw with the FCC decision to take on extra duties recently, it is probably wise to tell the FAA to keep their hands off most of the program. I would have also liked to see them ban any lawsuits arising out of injuries or deaths of people involved. This is a risky experimental program. Anyone signing up for it, knows that.

Go right ahead. Just don't crash

[Meredeth]

I thought it was a fair compromise for the FAA to only consider crew and passenger safety if it "Has already been shown in real flight to cause problems" It may be hard even with that clause and legal waivers for passengers, to avoid law suits should someone die. It is in the companies best interests for any craft they build to be safe. Any accident in space would likely be fatal and destroy the craft, so no company would allow a safety issue to exist. Can an expert on aviation law say what this proposed limitation of FAA regulation will mean?

Let's not have a Wild West private space race!

[beaststwo]

With the exception of the last few years, I think the FCC has traditionally shown a reasonable regulatory model: Create a structure that industry can work within and stay out of the way! The FAA is more intrusive, and has some serious mission conflicts, but at least it's safe to fly.

Recent forays into totally unregulated services include the cell phone industry, where the Government left it up to industry to determine the underlying technology and phones have to support at least 6 different standards to function on this continent, much less the rest of the world. Euorpeans have many more services available on their cell phones because governments used the standards process to set a single operating standard everywhere, creating a framework within which industry could build services.

I'd prefer have some minimal level of regulation up front to having space turn into what we see on our streets these days (imagine sitting in your spacecraft when the driver of the vehicle next to you breaks into "space rage"). Good or bad, the FAA model generally does keep idiots out of pilots chairs and makes crashes a fairly rare occurence.

"literally"?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think the space flight industry will *literally* take off.

Not like the hair dressing and telephone sanitising industry anyway.

No, it is figuratively only. The actually space craft may take off literally.

Finally, a bill that doesn't take away rights.

[vijayiyer]

It's good (but exceedingly rare) to hear about legislation that doesn't take away rights. Perhaps it's even more sad that we need the legislation, rather than being free to travel in space by default. But I think it's progress, and it's coming from my representative in Congress to boot!

Re:Finally, a bill that doesn't take away rights.

[sjb21043]

Are you daft? All legislation takes away rights. Almost by definition. Legislation identifies things you can't do. The only way a bill can create rights, is to modify a previous one that took them away.

Seems to prohibit making money off experiments.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

The text of HR 5382 isn't up on the congressional web site yet. But the text of HR 3752 is. And it seems to split the life of a vehicle design into a permitted experimental phase and a type-approved commercial phase.

The kicker is that the experimental phase doesn't allow carrying a payload for a fee, while the experimental permit dies upon the granting of the license for type-approved commercial operation.

Net result is that the entire development period MUST be financed off capital investment - including the jumping through ALL regulatory hoops to get the final approval for commercial use of a production design. You have to get to airline-level regulated convince-the-bureaucrats safety and red-tape levels before you collect your first cent (except for prize money, of course).

IMHO this is NOT a bill to encourage general private space development by entrepreneurs.

Instead it's a bill to give the current aircraft manufacturers a lock on spacecraft design and production, protecting them from competition by upstarts.