Slashdot Mirror
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."
I, for one, welcome our legislation-passing White House overlords...oh...wait.
My Favourite Meme
Has anyone yet decided who is to oversee "air traffic control" once you pass out of the air and into space? Will each country be responsible for their own spacespace - and will a strike by the space trafic controllers of one particular country cause you to orbit in a holding pattern for 3 days?
http://www.frugle.co.uk/
Please put the tab into the buckle, and pull snug across your waist. Your seat may be used as a flotation device. No smoking in the lavatory.
Yeah? Well I think you're overrated too.
Space is much more analogous to our experience with ocean travel than air travel. You can stay in space until your supplies run out, not just while your fuel does. That means a lot more interaction between people, and more need for regulation of that interaction.
It always strikes me as a bit luddite when the surface-dwellers arrogate for themselves the right to govern those outside the atmosphere, or on another planet.
I expect one of the first court cases to result in the principle that a space Captain has all the rights of a maritime Captain.
I wonder when we'll see the first marriage performed by a Captain in space?
And I wonder how long before the first space battle over control of a "celestial object", or over something else?
Whatever happens, we'll probably have seen it before.
sigs, as if you care.
passed by Congress at the last minute (almost literally).
Passing a bill literally? Sounds painful.
Remember, it takes 42 muscles to frown and only 4 to pull the trigger of a sniper rifle.
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.
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
Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that matters only to them
Even funnier will be the idea of a battle over an orbital position. ie: nothing at all. This isn't quite as funny as it sounds, when you consider Lagrange points. The Lagrange points are mathematical fictions, but can be nifty places indeed for many purposes, possibly worth fighting over.
For the obligatory science fiction reference, read Poul Anderson's "Tales of the Flying Mountains," a series of short stories framed in the setting of the first interstellar flight. The officers are trying to build their history to help educate their young and prevent the culture loss that seems to plague just about every "generation ship" in fiction. One story is about some orbital shenanigans around the Trojan asteroids. To say any more would be a spoiler.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
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.
Hey, I'm the guy who submitted the story. I should've made this more explicit in my submission, but this bill is mostly a good thing, as it was required to open the door to launching paying passengers.
That said, I'm somewhat uncertain about the provisions for unrestrained FAA regulation after 8 years, and the regulation of certain aspects after they prove to be dangerous. That could potentially be misused to unfairly restrict the budding industry, but so far the FAA has been quite supportive of private spaceflight.
Anyways, I'd like to give kudos to Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif) for proposing this bill (which was originally much less restrictive on private spaceflight) and keeping pressure on it. Frownie faces go to Rep. James Oberstar (D-Minn) and a few other House Democrats for trying to kill off the bill, referring to it as having a "tombstone mentality" because it didn't have enough provisions for regulation, and being largely responsible for the 8-year compromise and the provision for regulation after an accident has occurred.