Slashdot Mirror
US Draw Up Rules for Space Tourism
AsiNisiMasa writes "The BBC reports that the United States Federal Aviation Administration has drafted a report proposing some regulations regarding space tourism. Among the rules is a set of guidelines to prevent terrorists from gaining access to the space ships in order to use them as weapons. Many of the other regulations are similar to those regarding regular commercial flights, including safety advice precluding the flights. From the article: 'Space tourists should also be given pre-flight training to handle emergency situations such as a loss of cabin pressure or fire. However, the FAA has so far left any medical requirements in the hands of the tourist, who should decide themselves if they are fit to fly.' The final report will affect enterprises such as Sir Richard Branson's SpaceShipOne."
Yes I do.
This was reported a couple of weeks ago. Why are we reporitng on this again?
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/3 0/0855245&tid=160&tid=14&tid=1
The good thing is that it's much easier to screen space travelers, since there will be so few. It's unlikely that terrorists would bother going through such scrutiny.
PimpMyMazda.com - Crazy mods to a 2002 Mazda Protege DX.
#1 No terrorists in orbit around earth.
#2 No terrorists on the moon.
#3 Human rights are important.
I have to admit my fear, grounded or not, was that the FAA or some federal entity would saddle new ventures with all kinds of crippling rules & requirements, that may make sense for commercial aviation, would maybe not have made a lot of sense for commercial spaceflight.
Not to say that wont happen in the future, but so far so good. Go Branson!
One little thought: does this mean space travellers also have to take their shoes off at the gate and remove laptop computers from their bags?
'Space tourists should also be given pre-flight training to handle emergency situations such as a loss of cabin pressure or fire.'
...Hold your breath?
I fail to see the relevance of the US drawing up rules for this. It's not like the passengers care where they launch *from*, hopefully the important thing is where they end up (say, in space). Thus any space tourism entrepreneur who dont like the US rules can just launch from another country.
what the deal is with the law...like so many miles out is international waters for ships and you can have sex cruises and whatnot. How many miles up would you have to be before you can start doing that line of coke off the hookers ass
Richard Branson and his Virgin brand are English, why should he listen to US rules when they are only binding in USA ?, and since the US is now so broke that it has to depend on the Russians for the ISS how relevent are these rules when the future of space travel is probably with the Chinese or Russians or even Australia.
What kind of terrorist would this protect against? Dr Evil?
Could the slashdot editors please refrain from mentioning teh terrorists in just about every piece of totally unrelated news. (I know, I know the BBC did it too, but I would much rather have news for nerds, or stuff that matters. Mentioning terrorism here is neither.)
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
"Companies should give passengers safety advice including the number of flights the spacecraft has been on and any problems they have experienced with the craft, according to further recommendations in the report."
:)
This could actually be more handy in a regular aviation situation. Being a tad scared of flying, I would love to know how big my chances are
Stewardess: You have a 95% chance of surviving this flight with our current maintenance record, please take your seat and have a nice flight, sir.
Doolittle :
Bomb no.20 : To explode of course.
The funny thing is people get more worked up about terrorism which kills relatively few people worldwide then they do about barelling down the highway at 100 mph while drunk and not wearing a seatbelt. Last year car accidents killed about 40,000 Americans, about 13 times the number that died on September 11th, but I don't see the government rushing to make cars safer(hell, they are doing the opposite with lax fuel economy standards that don't punish the mammoths that cause a lot of these fatalities)
However, that number is rarely mentioned in the news, but if Zarqawi sneezes the media is all over it. The media has seriously distorted people's sense of reality...
I think we should focus on preventing whaleing on the moon
poor, I don't think they'll have the money for a while to take one of these flights. The figure I heard to fly on Branson's flight (on Nova) was over $200,000 US each. So, I don't think there will be 9/11 type of attacks for a while and there'll be screening to keep off the lone bomber, guy with a gun, etc...
As if the cost of losing a vehicle isn't enough incentive for a space tourism provider to supply good security. It also seems, for the moment anyway, that the group of potential customers is small enough that they can go ahead and evaluate the safety for themselves.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Don't fart in your spacesuit.
Am I the only person who thinks Spaceship One will be the world's most expensive rollercoaster ride and won't be a viable business beyond the first accident?
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
...time to declare a "War On Cars", yet?
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
I knew space flight was dangerous, but . . . wow.
(Somebody's gotta take the karma hit for this, might as well be me.)
Then again, as one poster mentioned, they could launch this from anywhere.
Also, Branson's, or any other company, is going to be very safety conscious. Because, just look at what happens when a plane crashes, an airline's business just tanks. See past news on ValueJet. You'd have to be a complete business retard not to keep your passengers safe: which Branson is definately NOT.
Put your head between your legs and... Kiss your arse goodbye!
Leave it to the government to put their tentacles into something that was only able to grow out of nothing because of the lack of government regulations in the first place. New regulations on space tourism and privately built spacecraft will likely mean no spacecraft can be built without wheelchair access, without headlights and taillights, without flush toilets with the government regulated amount of power and flush, without seperate and secured pilot cabins, without air marshalls, without a whole system of spacecraft licencing and regulation paperwork to be filled out/ security background checks for pilots/passengers/investors and without government approval for every time they run a test all the way to blasting off. Yes indeed, thank goodness for government. At least those pioneers and inventors have been able to get this far because the eye of Sauron was elsewhere. Thank goodness the Wright Brothers didn't have this government on their asses or there wouldn't even be airplanes now. Geez.
Branson's endeavour is Virgin Galactic and it will be using Spaceship Two. Spaceship One has been moth-balled, next to the Spirit of St. Louis.
"There are no facts, only interpretations." --Friedrich Nietzsche.
New Mexico, actually, according to TFA, and the Virgin Galactic website.
WHY doesn't anyone ask, or better, TELL about how the darned BATHROOMS are going to work?
That's scientifically interesting, and a practical thing to know about. But it's IGNORED by all the "reporters" who talk about this stuff.
Sort of like the Jupiter II and all the 'Trek ships, loads of fancy stuff going on (such as transporter rooms that don't appear to be necessary) but NOWHERE do you see a cussed bathroom!
Everyone was "NASA needs to get out of the way, private corps will do it for them." Yeah, if the Feds don't regulate it so much that it's more expensive than NASA.
Before y'all freak, realize that these regs are doing a favor for the industry. If the Feds don't issue rules, it's not like the industry won't be unsupervised. Oh no! What'll happen instead is that it will get "supervised" by the motley crew of lawyers who sue it, and the decisions of the judges and juries who decide the resulting cases. The net result, that is, would be that a random patchwork of State and Federal Courts would exercise some kind of random and mostly unpredictable supervision of the industry.
Now, think of the McDonald's "Yes The Hot Coffee Is Actually Hot" case, or the Texas Vioxx case, or John Edwards' channeling unborn babies in the Courtroom, or any number of bizarre legal circuses, and you can see why the industry would rather drink liquid oxygen than let that lawyer's Wild West scenario happen.
So what they're getting from the Feds here is a set of clear and comprehensive rules which put an "official" stamp on certain best practises. That way, when -- notice I don't say "if" -- somebody gets sued, then as long as they've followed those regulations they're pretty safe. In Court they just point to the regulations, produce the signed inspection reports, and say they followed the rules, the passenger signed the waiver -- end of story, sorry Charlie. The bad operators will get toasted of course, but they should. The good operators won't win all their cases (Handicapped Single Minority Mother Of Five Rhodes Scholars Crawled Over Broken Glass To Sell Pencils For Nine Years To Pay For Son's Graduation Trip To Space: Court To Decide Evil Capitalist Spaceship Owner's Liability For Tragic Accident Today). But they'll win most of them.
Furthermore, these regulations give the industry a consistent national policy. No random variations from county to county, depending on which fool is sitting in the judge's chair this month. That's worth a lot, since these are going to be national-scale ventures, and it sucks up a lot of company resources to make sure you're complying with 50 sets of state regulations, not to mention a few hundred local rulebooks. Much better to have one set of Federal rules trump them all. (And a mere 120 pages is nothing compared to the tens of thousands of state and local regs that could have come into play.)
Not to mention that unpredictable liability rules mean high interest rates when you borrow money, because investors don't like unmeasurable random risks.
So maybe just take a deep breath and all. There do have to be some rules, after all. As long as they're sensible, this is a good thing. I believe also these rules are issued in lieu of any FAA meddling, too -- as I recall, the FAA is forbidden by Executive order from issuing any regulations beyond this set here for 8 years, or until an avoidable fatal accident happens, whichever comes first. Sounds sensible to me.
Just where does US jurisdiction end? I plan on traveling to the belt of Orion next summer, will US law apply there?
I have nothing to hide. So, why are you spying on me?
The key here is to give all organizations some baselines to operate from. It also provides a method for insurers to operate under. This also provides an idea to tourist as to what to expect and guard against. If all operators have a consistent set of rules to base their own on the industry should be much better, for tourist as well as provider.
You can always go above and beyond the rules and I fully expect some will. It may even become a point of sales. As far as the terrorist angle, remember for the most part no one actually expected terrorist to crash jets into skyscrapers. Some suspected it but it was always pushed aside as too extreme. We, the public, deluded ourselves into thinking that some people would never go so far. Always the idea was hostages and possiblity of exploding a plane load of people in the air or on ground. What could be far more headline grabbing than exploding one of the first tourist filled spaceplanes or ensuring it never comes back? While it might not be damaging economically to the countries involved as a whole it will grab headlines and set back a fledgling industry.
Do you really want no enforcement of rules and protections so that we are stuck on this rock forever? Face it, for civilian use of space to occur it is going to have to be proven safe, effective, and eventually reasonably priced. Lose one flight and the effects are going to be devastating on the industry. Lose two and you can hang it up. Lose one to terrorist and its probably the same as losing two or more flights.
and Terrorist doesn't just mean guys from the Middle East. There are enough religious nuts to go around and enviro-nuts to find something like this a major attraction. We live in a world of nut-cases and unfortunately too many have the means to act on their horrid ideas of self-righteousness
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
>>Among the rules is a set of guidelines to prevent terrorists from gaining access to the space ships in order to use them as weapons.
Why not just call in a British secret agent?
He can sneak into their launch facility with a power-boat-hang-glider-thingy, breach security with an explosive watch, disguise himself as one of the shuttle crew, and sneak aboard a space shuttle.
Once aboard the main space station he can take out the leaders in a heroic shoot-out, and use a space shuttle with lasers to destroy any weapons of mass distruction that are heading towards earth.
You could even show the world a live video link up as he attempts re-enty.
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated up.
As a USAF pilot and mild space enthusiast, much of the proposal sounds very well thought out. The discussion points about topics such as licensing and qualification requirements and medical standards show that they have considered numerous alternatives and are interested in creating regulations that enhance safety and protect the public, without placing unnecessary burdens on companies, crews, and passengers wishing to participate in spaceflight.
Plus they're actively asking for input, and discuss input they've already received.
It really looks like a good faith effort to allow reasonable spaceflight efforts, with an eye on public safety.
I thought it telling that right away, they list "citizen explorers" as a category of people who will be conducting spaceflights under these regulations. They're specifically addressing the understanding that this will be a risky business that should still be allowed and encouraged.
Lots of blah blah comments so far including one tard griping about the pdf document format (get a life dude), but very few have bothered to read any of the proposal. I recommend taking the time to at least browse through it... I think it will be educational.
Someone modded this insightful? Did they really mean to mode it inciteful? Insightful of what? That the poster is completely uniformed and does not understand how finances work? Really every point (if you can call them that) was a non point. Even the article he linked to did not support his points.
Looks like some people in Government think that Futurama is a documentary. That, or they have to be seen to be "doing something" to protect us, since the things that might actually achieve that - fixing the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan, peace in Iraq and Chechnya, and solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - don't seem to be happening.
Pining for the fjords
Those thoughts exactly.
One thing comes to mind, has anyone ever heard of a plane crash, when it just got fixed for something? I see and hear of more planes crashing due to malfunction that was overlooked, or never worked on.
Now I would be beside myself if the flight attendant informed me that flight 666, has had 400 successful flights, and only 5k in repairs due to misc issues. But just yesterday we got a new engine!
The last flight I was on was grounded for an extra hour because one of the ground crews found that there was something wrong with a hydralic pressure thingy. took them an hour to fix it(I didn't mind the wait, my laptop w/ UT2k4 kept me entertained, along with the other two people sitting next to me. When it comes to my safety/life, they can take all their time).
"Don't Forget to Salt the Fries"
I've said this before and I'll say it again: the FAA will be useless based on their desire to want to regulate space tourism.
The country that offers the LEAST regulation in regards to launching orbitals will be the country that takes in the most tourists in this incredibly expensive (but always getting cheaper) business. The initial costs to build the base of launch pads and terminals is very high -- once built, I can't imagine them being moved around.
If the FAA over-regulates this business, businessmen will go elsewhere. The next few years will set a financial precedent to where the space companies will go. My guess? Australia, South America or even islands off of Africa. Remember, if a trip costs $100,000 and 2 weeks of planning, the extra few hours of flying to some remote location is no big deal.
Anyone else sick of hearing the excuse 'its beacuse of the terrorists' to regulate yet another ascpect of our life..
They wanted to change the world and make us more like them.. welp, in may ways they did..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
That is just something I have never understood here. OK so the post a dupe story. How does this affect anyone so negatively that they need to whine about it? OMG your life is over you spent 15 seconds looking at a dupe story. Then you wasted 2 minutes whining about it. Ugh.
OMG Ponies!!! with Glitter!!!! I miss Pink
What will they try to do, blow up the orbiter? Given how many airplanes terrorists have destroyed -vs- how many they haven't, even if they managed to double their efficiency for spacecraft I think their average will still be below NASA's.
This is exactly what the government is doing. By laying down some set of pointless bureaucratic rules to govern space travel, the government isn't hoping to mandate safe space travel, they are hoping to preempt other countries from making themselves "THE RULES BODY" for Commercial Space Travel.
The surest sign of intelligent life in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us. -- Calvin & Hobbes
That is just something I have never understood here. OK so the post a dupe story. How does this affect anyone so negatively that they need to whine about it? OMG your life is over you spent 15 seconds looking at a dupe story. Then you wasted 2 minutes whining about it. Ugh.
Hippie: You can't OWN space, man.
Farnsworth: I can, because I'm not a penniless hippie!
The Moon belongs to America.
For an example of things tending not to happen, look at the World Trade Center rebuilding's progress.
And this is something I will never understand. So he complained about a dupe story, but now you, instead of just ignoring the 15 seconds it took to look at the post, have decided to waste two minutes posting your reply about how it was a waste of time to post a reply. But now I've wasted MY time posting a reply about how you wasted your time posting a reply about how the original poster wasted his time posting a reply. OH NO!
I put the 't' in electrical engineering.
Every time I flew with my fiancé I found it most amusing she'd get on board with at least one 6" long hair spike keeping her ass-length hair in a bun, whilst people had nail clippers with unusable blades confiscated, LOL.
One has to realize that all a lot of that bull is to make people FEEL BETTER... a trained man with a bone or wooden sharp point is more-or-less as lethal as one with a sharp metal edge, and a hell of a lot more effective than one with NAIL SCISSORS.
Unless there's a form of Martial Art I don't know about... nail-scissor ninjas perchance?
But everyone was scared and ineffective and costly 'safety' measures that make the ickle baa-lambs feel happy in cattle class (okay, sheep ain't cattle, but you know what I mean) are the order of the day.
It's exactly the same psychology as puts a life jacket under seats... wanna know how many people have been saved by life-jackets under seats outside of sight of land, in all of commercial aviation history??? LOL. They're there to make you FEEL BETTER.
So, people's biggest risk in orbit will be a hang-nail... wooo...
cause we all know that the constitution was not drafted to include the moon.
You've seen Star Wars too many times, haven't you?
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
All the text in the /. story in italics is what the submitter wrote. Editors sometimes add text to that in normal text.
For example, it was the story submitter who goofed on the "Richard Branson's SpaceShipOne" bit - it should have been a reference to Virgin Galactic.
And like another fellow said, the terrorism reference was in the linked article.
"People" using "unnecessary" quotes should be "shot".
....terrists, terrists, terrists, terrists.
You said: "It's almost impossible for a US based company (or any company based in the West) to go to some third world nation for a launch." The problem is that even if they're not really third world nations - the possibilities for terrorists and the like are always present.
Virgin Galactic could always move their operations to another launch site - so let's look at the contenders:
The European Space Agency (ESA) launches it's missions from their French Guiana base which is in South America. Not exactly a third world nation since it's "part of" France - but the area itself is hardly developed. I imagine they could more easily bribe and conspire in that environment [outside the base itself].
The only other serious launching site are the Russian ones (Baikonur etc) - they're already in the business of serving the rich space tourists. Now, the Russians have lived through more terrorism than the US ever will - they know their stuff. Still a few extra dollars will get you far...
On another note NASA used an African site in Gambia as backup for several missions - I imagine the Gambians would welcome the business. They would certainly accept a few extra dollars - and we all know where that leads...
On a final note there's always SeaLaunch - though I hardly think that they're going to launch SpaceShipOne from there!
tourism entrepreneur who dont like the US rules can just launch from another country.
What other country? I'm serious... Virgin is launching from the US. Anything else is speculation and rumor and patently false. This topic recently came up on a mailing list I was on which included several space tourism contendors, and everyone drew a blank. There do not exist any good options. The US is doing this, get over it.
US Draw Up Rules for Subject/Verb Agreement
My Greatest Heist - Muisc partly inspired by the unbeatable Qwantz
Wrong. Russia put *far* more people into space.
Mod +3 Funny!
One, the government has put a long major effort into regulating car and road safety. Traffic cops didn't always exist. Neither did air bags. Within living memory cars were being sold without seat belts. Look at annual traffic fatality numbers over the last thirty years. The numbers have been going down while population and traffic have been going up.
Two, there's a significant difference in that cars have not announced that they feel a religious duty to acquire nuclear weapons.
Three, cars did not threaten the seat of government, trigger a strategic alert, and activate evacuation plans that had been snoozing peacefully in the Vault of Cold War Nightmares.
The final report will affect enterprises such as Sir Richard Branson's SpaceShipOne."
Sorry, but the SpaceShipOne is no Enterprise.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Folks are rightly poking fun at the terrorist thing. But that's also a small part of these regulations. So far as I can see, they're mostly common sense. I'm normally a very strict anti-statist, but I don't see these regulations as being much different than those which would have been imposed by insurers, or indeed, by any sane commercial rocket airline on their own staff. Nobody benefits when ill-prepared flights blow up or crash.
I know i'm afraid of all the terrorists. I mean come on, didn't you see the pictures of their training camps with all the retired Soviet and US Space capsules to train in?
I'll be one of the first to agree that the US stance on terrorism seems completely overboard, and that there's a disturbing amount of apparent (if not obvious) corruption and ulterior motives active in terrorism legislation.
That said, I don't think it's unfair to point out that if authorities completely ignored the threat of terrorism, there would be a much bigger chance that a small number of terrorist actions could easily kill (and/or maim/injure) several million or tens of millions of people in the space of a year, whether by a massive nuclear explosive attack, by subversively releasing deadly diseases amongst large US populations, or whatever else.
Of course, there are methods of reducing the likeliness of this that don't involve slamming down a fist in the name of terrorism. One place to start might be for the US government to take a serious look at and review its long term strategy for foreign policy and how it treats people in other nations. Terrorism might be inevitable in the world no matter how nations act towards each other, but most of it seems to just be more symptomatic of a much more serious problem.
Loss of cabin pressure?!? So.. close your eyes tight, put your fingers in your ears, clinch your nether regions as tightly as possible, and hope you get rescued within 30 seconds?
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Also count his CIA salary as "Tim Osman"?
Would someone please MOD DOWN this asswipe? How downhill has /. gotten when a poorly-researched, poorly-reasoned post by some shit-brained asstard gets a score of 2??
Again, mod this down, please!
"How does this affect anyone so negatively that they need to whine about it? OMG your life is over you spent 15 seconds looking at a dupe story."
You just answered your own question. Most humans have a finite lifespan. Therefore, they shouldn't waste even one picoseond on any unnecessary activity, suck as reading dup articles. Therefore, they should whine whenever they are exposed to dup articles, because doing so will spur the editors to do everything in their power to prevent duplicate articles from appearing in the future. You can see for yourself how brilliantly such whining has worked in the past. It can only get better in the future.
Despite the fanciful opinions of most citizens of the US, the US, much less the FAA, has no jurisdiction in space. Surely the UN should be involved in the writing of any legislation which tries to "police" space and space travel.
Just because the near future seems to point to the US having the only viable companies (and customers) who can partake of space tourism (even though the Russians have sent up more tourists than anyone!), that doesn't mean that all commercial space flight should be governed by one country's Aviation Administration. Imagine the outcry if the Russian equivalent tried to do the same!
Are they still going to teach us "the intricate workings of a belt buckle"?
...even Osama can only afford about 8 tries.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...which is clearly an initiation of force (threat thereof)
not wearing a seatbelt
...which is clearly an act of free will which endangers nobody but oneself.
Perhaps the two acts shouldn't be lumped together as if they are the slightest bit comparable?
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."