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Private Spaceflight Law Passes Senate
Neil Halelamien writes "HR 5382, the commercial spaceflight bill which has been previously mentioned on Slashdot, has been passed by Congress at the last minute (almost literally). The bill had previously been stalled several times due to disagreements about how much the FAA should regulate crew and passenger safety. It's now headed to the White House to be signed into law. Under this legislation, the FAA's role until 2012 will be to protect the uninvolved public on the ground, and allow passengers to ride as long as they've been properly informed of the related dangers. Also, the FAA will be able to regulate certain aspects of the vehicles if they prove to be dangerous."
no right to interfere with what a person does on their private land
It's more about regulating what happens above the private land rather than on the private land. How far above your land does your ownership extend?
Besides, if you build a rocket and launch it from your private land and land on me as I sit (in private) in my washroom, it's too late to go to the courts!
EricPlease, people: JavaScript is not Java
Our pile of bureaucrats are afraid of losing a shiny toy to some other country's bureaucrats. Governments that have to compete for something can - SURPRISE - do a much better job of not mucking it up too much. If Scaled Composite's design involved specialized launch facilities instead of a flat piece of concrete, you can bet this bill would've been really restrictive... Because the control freaks in congress would've had a better opportunity to control it.
"Wow. Now THAT'S a lot of angry Indians." - Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer
Also, the FAA will be able to regulate certain aspects of the vehicles if they prove to be dangerous.
uh, wouldn't it be in everyone's best interests if this could be regulated *before* it's "proven" to be dangerous, ie an accident's occured?
Why is it our responsibility to protect them? Of course, the bill specifically doesn't protect the involved parties, and that's great. Why should we have to go beyond that? If some idiot wants to buy a ticket that has a 50% chance of blowing himself up, or if he wants to drink and smoke himself to an early grave and doesn't hurt any other people in the process, why should we prevent him?
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
What hath Rutan brought?
Should spacecraft have to go under the spame standard as any other experimental aircraft? Should the standard be higher or lower. And should there be any regulation at all? If I were a spacecraft designer/manufacturer, and the US gov gave me too much of a headache, why wouldn't I pack my bags and go somewhere else? I'm sure there are plenty of third world countries that would love to become the capitol of intergalactic travel. Spaceport Nigeria, anyone? (Wait, I already got an email about the new spaceport in Nigeria, and if I send .........)
If this law works out the way it looks then Congress might have gotten it just about right. Protect the public from the nutballs, but let people make their own choices about risk/reward. That's how exploration should work.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
It is always a Good Thing when people get involved in the legislative and judicial processes. It's a Good Thing when they question a court's decision, or question a proposed resolution, etc.
But please, oh please oh please oh please, see what you're doing from the lawyer's perspective. If a lawyer with no training in electronics came up to you and ask you to "install Windows on his RAM", or something to that effect, you'd be laughing your ass off, might make a joke of it here on Slashdot, put it in your sig, and generally ridicule those with no knowledge whatsoever of computers.
On the other hand, lawyers go through an extra three years of school to get to where they are, and their backgrounds are diverse. Yes, there are in fact many many engineer-lawyers who know far more about either profession than people on here.
Now stop, and think for a moment, about what uninformed comments about our legislative or judicial system look like to a lawyer. You look just as dumb as a luser looks to you. Not that you probably give a rat's ass what the average lawyer thinks, but I want to believe that geeks WANT to learn, and legal knowledge is LEARNED, not bestowed upon birth. So please, everyone, take some effort to actually understand our legislative process before criticizing it, to understand our legal process before criticizing it.
I promise, if you take the time, you will find that the system works a whole lot better than people give it credit for.
Thank you.
Done that, seen the paperwork..
Back in the 70's when Ultralight aircraft first hit the scene with powered hang gliders, the FAA pretty much did the same thing.
Those laws were fair and just for the classification of that type of aircraft. And look where those planes went! We got paraplanes, ultralights that look like real homebuilt planes, we got law enforcement ultralights, even cropdusters built on the cheap!
This is just a paper tiger that congress grinds out whenever a new invention really shows its potential.
I got my two tickets to The Ride, wanna come?
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
Government regulation is un-American and inefficient. Let the market decide. Those companies whose flights don't end in smoking craters will get more business.
Personally as a libertarian I don't think that people should be protected from their own stupidity/sense of adventure. However I don't want someone's idiotic spacecraft to fly into my house. I don't have problems with relatively unregulated spaceflight putting the passengers in danger, but I do not think that innocent bystanders should be in easily preventable danger. To me it's like drunk driving - I don't give a damn if some fool kills themself that way (that's the consequence of their own judgement), but the fact is drunk drivers kill plenty of innocent people - as the result of a completely preventable situation no less! Orbital spacecraft use energies that boggle the mind, and are dangerous if not properly contained.
Er, on a serious note, isn't pollution of space a fairly important issue as well? Left alone, companies will just dump their crap up there, and in 20 years time every launch will run the risk of being hit by orbiting junk
Well that has a pretty simple solution - earth orbit is a "public resource", like the EM spectrum, or natural parks. Companies should be forced to be liable for damages their junk causes, and the cost of tracking it. This is just like most other cases of pollution (but rather than smoke or something it's more like leaving land mines laying around, the energies involved are similar).
Or maybe people would be clueful enough to only support companies which didn't pollute space? Well we can wish :)
Cheers,Justin
BTW, NASA did it with only 32kb of memory.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Yes, all well and good, but you don't go to prison for not understanding what an IRQ is.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
And it's utterly absurd to let people forbid others from using property in a way that doesn't hurt it at all if the property owner physically cannot use it. It doesn't use up your sky when an airplane crosses your slice of it. They can't harrass you, they don't make off with stuff you left hovering in midair, they don't mess up your nice tidy air.
If you don't like this, the only thing you have to do to keep people from using it is to put something there. Build a giant 'no trespassing' sign or a giant disco ball or a middle digit upthrust to heaven. At which point not only will they avoid your sky, they'll avoid nearby sky, too.
Of course, it's illegal to do that, because of the danger it presents to others around you when your stupid mile-high sign falls over. But that's not the Federal government doing that, that's local zoning code.
For other examples of this, look up 'easements', which is when 'land-locked' property owners are given the legal right to cross someone else's land to get to the public roads.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?