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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."
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.
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.
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."
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...
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.
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.
95%?! That would be 1 in 20 flights biting the big one. In actual fact you're taking more of a risk every single morning by walking down the stairs.
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"
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 ----
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
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...
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.
The 9/11 attacks were carried out by middle-class people funded by an extremely rich man. The stereotype of terrorists being poor and desperate is not based on reality so much as people's inability to grasp the idea that an educated, well-off person might actually hate them enough to kill them.
English is easier said than done.