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."

Comments

What to do in an emergency!

[anti-human 1]

'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?

Re:What to do in an emergency!

[lxs]

-ding-dong-
  Good evening passengers, please take a look at our charming colleague Betty who will demonstrate emergency procedures for you...

...In case of fire please break the window next to you. Without oxygen the fire will be over quickly, which brings us to loss of cabin pressure. In the case of loss of cabin pressure, please assume the bloated expression demonstrated by Betty, stay calm, and wait until all your bodily fluids boil off.
In case of a crash, make sure you wear your swim-vest with integrated whistle, even though both are useless when we smash into the moon.
Thank you fo listening and enjoy your flight

Re: You have to ask yourself.

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

See I told you so.

[/dev/trash]

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.

Remarkably able terrorists

[Flying pig]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but exactly how is a terrorist going to hijack a spacecraft and crash it into even the approximate neighbourhood of Pennsylvania Avenue? It's not quite like 'oh there's the White House, change course', is it? You have to know where in the orbital path to fire the engines in order to land rather a lot further round the world, and once you are committed, major course changes are not exactly an option as burning up on re-entry doesn't achieve the objective. Given where a spacecraft is likely to be allowed to land, i.e. lots of water or desert, minor course changes won't achieve much. Well, they might hit the next lot of space tourists if they impact the departure lounge, but something tells me a commercial spaceport won't look much like O'Hare or Heathrow.

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.

Terrorists?

[Farrside]

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.