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FAA Releases Requirements for Space Tourism
An anonymous reader writes "Due to companies such as Virgin Galactic, SpaceX, and Benson Space (SpaceDev) announcing their commercial spaceflight ambitions, the FAA has just released space flight requirements for safety and experimental permits. Virgin Galactic has already received nearly 200 bookings while Benson Space just recently started accepting reservations, although they plan to be first. The companies desire to have tourists in space as early as 2008 or 2009. All that it takes is a spare two hundred thousand dollars, and maybe a little courage."
Yes, I wonder who really cares. If the FAA starts making tourism such a hassle, most would be tourists will go to space via Russia, on Russian rockets that are more reliable and on the cheap! Now beat that.
Yeah, I know what you mean -- it ruined the prospect of commercial aviation, too!
Ughhh ... reading the requirements is about as interesting as reading a Swedish dictionary. Anyone have any highlights or links to summarized requirements?
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
Now who has the 200 thousand dollars.
The above post is an editorial, the poster cannot and will not be held responsible for all or in part for it's contents
It's going to be a real pain to be made to remove your space boots before you enter the airlock.
Sign me up as long as I'm allowed to have sex with green alien women.
After all, somewhere on the equator would be better and almost certainly cheaper too.
Deleted
Airlines and pilots need to have licenses and permits.
So what's the big hassle here?
Insert any joke here....
Excellent - my tax`dollars at work again. I know this will benefit myself and my family.
200k is not that impossible an amount to amass.. if you REALLY want it to be the only bit of tourism you ever do.
I could- if I pared my life down to the BONE, set aside 30-40k a year right now...
I'd have it then, in 5-6ears.. my kids would not go to college, and I'd miss things like tv and chocolate...
but it's not beyond most of the slashdot demographics I'll wager- if thats ALL you want...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Something I noticed while skimming the document is that they're not entirely ruling out vehicles guided entirely from "the ground" via telemetry, stating that redundant links should be safe enough, citing UAVs as an example.
Boy, they have a lot of misplaced faith.
According to TFA the candidate must be able to do the following:
1) 100 push-ups in 3 minutes
2) 2 miles in 8 minutes
3) low BP
4) BMI in lowest 20% in population
5) level 3 physical fitness test
6) ability to hold breath for 1 minute with minimal BP change
7) minimum 20 minutes average sexual stamina from vaginal penetration to completion
While I've never been into space, I bet you get much more fun per money flying planes, and you can still afford to buy chocolate after you land. You also get to be at the controls instead of just glorified ballast. Odds are if this kind of article makes you shake your head wishing you could afford a ticket, you'd be interested in more conventional forms of flight as well, and you can probably afford them too. If you haven't checked it out, give some serious thought to it.
I spend maybe $40/hour flying gliders. $200,000 buys me 5000 hours of flying at that rate. If you like engines you'll pay more, but it can still be reasonable if you manage your money well.
Requirement #1: If you ever dropped your Wii remote, you are automatically disqualified.
I will bend like a reed in the wind.
Similarly, it's much cheaper to go diving in certain countries. But when you're 80 ft down and realize you're swimming in dangerous shark-infested waters and you're not even sure if your rasta pilot is going to wait for you to resurface before he heads back to the beach for more weed... was the money-saved worth it?
In the case of the original topic, the regulations don't appear that they would be much different than those imposed on airlines with flights entering/leaving the US. The purpose is not to restrict industry or even to pork-barrel a niche industry of space-travel-safety-consultants, but to create a safety standard for the carriers & crew conducting these flights. Yes, the free market would eventually level the playing field but the artificial restrictions created by the government in this scenario attempt to level this playing field without sacrificing peoples' lives in unnecessary crashes first.
Do these regulations cause a slightly higher operating cost for the carriers? Perhaps. Is it worth it to make sure that when you spend $200k to fly to space your craft won't be manned by a drug-addicted geriatric with heart problems and no flight experience? I think so.
>> "...if you REALLY want it to be the only bit of tourism you ever do."
If you want it to BE the only tour you ever do, try a U.S. Shuttle: the odds are still higher than a private flight and, everything going your way, they'll build a neat monument to you somewhere and schoolchildren will cry.
can you bring liquids?
This is, yet again, why I can't stand
The FAA regulations are good. They were well thought out, in careful consultation with the parties involved.
They require things like informing passengers about the risks, and obtaining written consent. They clarify the liabilities and responsibilities of parties involved. They require insurance based on the maximum-probable loss resulting from operations.
They don't impose a massive paperwork burden. They allow the participants to assume great risk, while mandating some basic, sane, minimum standards, and they aim to mimimize (not eliminate) the risk to uninvolved third parties.
The commercial spaceflight companies wanted these rules. They provide a well-defined regulatory environment. If you're building a rocketship that will be carrying people, you want to know roughly for what you can be sued or thrown in jail.
Oops, sorry. I recant. Our elected Federal government enacted regulations. That must hurt pioneering development and be bad. I forgot.
Requirement #42.(a): No person who has ever held a slashdot account shall be allowed to travel in space.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Civil aviation was well on its way before the original FAA type organisation was constituted and it took years before it learned how to be come a red tape type organization. In that case of space filght, no learning curve is required.
1924 - regular scheduled flights are started along the Transcontinental Route.
1925 - The Kelly Air Mail Act puts the Post Office out of the flying business. Specific segments of the air mail routes are put out for bid. The early airlines are formed as contract mail carriers.
1936 - The airlines establish three en route centers in Newark, Cleveland, and Chicago.
1938 - The Civil Aeronautics Act creates the first CAA - Civil Aeronautics Authority. Airport and Airway Traffic Control Sections are established.
1940 - The CAA is reorganized into the Civil Aeronautics Administration. Airport Towers are taken into federal service. The CAA receives support and guidance from the War Department to expand and improve the air traffic system.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Who will be the first space terrorist?
You know it's only a matter of time.
Will the one way ticket be the tip off?
IMAGE VERIFICATION IS EVIL!
"The commercial spaceflight companies wanted these rules. They provide a well-defined regulatory environment."
These rules are driven by politics, not by sound engineering. Most of the people making the rules probably don't know enough about flying to fold a paper airplane.
What the rules provide - that is of greatest interest to big companies - is liability protection. If a company kills people or destroys property, but they can point to laws and say that they were acting within the law, their liability is decreased, or at least limited.
All other things being equal, most companies do not want any government agency to tell them what to do. But with the current lawsuit-happy culture that we have, they can't get the necessary venture capital unless they can demonstrate limits to liability. At this stage, before there are paying customers, venture capital is the primary if not sole source of funding.
( And, yes, the rules will probably hurt development. Remember, this is the same government that thought that it was a good idea to put a teacher into a problem-plagued shuttle, and that thinks that terrorists use hair gel. )
Well, when the industry was 'regulated' no one could compete on price. They had to compete purely on service.
Now because the industry is less regulated, you can get a ticket across the US for VERY cheap compared to 20-30 years ago.
Less government regulation is actually a good thing because it allows the free market to do its thing and uses capitalism as a vehicle for progress.
Libertas in infinitum
The requirements seem reasonable enough. Under the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act of 2004, the FAA isn't allowed to regulate early stage commercial space travel that heavily. It's accepted that this is a high risk activity, and everybody involved has to be so notified and sign an acceptance of that.
The requirements are all rather low. No physical exam is required for passengers, although one is recommended. Pilots and crew just have to pass a class 2 physical exam, not even the class 1 physical required of airline pilots or the even tougher physicals for military pilots. The pilot has to have just a commercial instrument rating and training on the specific vehicle. An ATR, let alone supersonic flight experience, is not required. There was much discussion over that one. If the spacecraft is a ballistic capsule launched on a rocket and landed by parachute, pilot qualifications don't matter much. If it's an upper stage that reenters the atmosphere on wings, the pilot has to be really good. (Chuck Yeager had his worst accident doing that and had to eject.)
You're new here, aren't you? Logic is not appropriate, or approved of by slashtards.
As someone else pointed out, the space tourism industry needed liability protection. And you can only get that if there's a set of rules to follow. My take is that the industry had a lot of input into the current rules and these rules are satisfactory for creating a space tourism industry in the US.
All that it takes is ...a little energon, and a lot of luck?
"You don't own space, so stop acting like you do."
You forgot the Air Commerce Act of 1926, which started government regulation of air commerce.
I can't wait to hear the FAA mandated flight attendant speech for sub orbital flights...
"Please put lower your seat backs and raise your tray tables into their freefall ready positions..."
"Please do not remove your seat belts until boost phase has completed and we have left the atmosphere."
The thing that bothers me most about the new rules is that those under 18 are not allowed to fly into space, even with a parent or guardian's permission. It seems like even a teenager that has been emancipated before the age of 18 still isn't allowed. I yell 'boo!' on hard age limits.
Bruce
In TSA speak, this means: no liquids/gels over 3.5 oz; please remove your shoes and prepare for you cavity search.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
But do they tell you what to do if there are snakes in a suborbital plane? Until then, I don't feel safe in space.
My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. Vladimir Nabokov
I'm sure that "feeling safe" and suborbital flight will be mutually exclusive at least for a little while. But once we start getting almost disasters in space due to the snake menace, the FAA will step in and regulate that particular danger away.