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."

Comments

Here we go again.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

This is, yet again, why I can't stand /. stories about space. The commenters rarely know jack shit about space exploration, space flight, space robotics, or space commercialization. Yet they often unfortunately think they do.

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.

Re:Its the liability

[georgewilliamherbert]

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.

Please don't go around sticking your foot in your mouth. The anon coward a few back is an industry outsider (I have a guess who, but it's obvious from what they said that they at least know the insiders). I participated in some of the discussions leading to comments filed with the FAA about the proposed rules which are now final. I know most of the people who wrote the industry comments, and saw a number of the comments in draft form prior to submittal. The FAA AST staff who did this are also people who've come out into the community. The industry objected to some details of the proposed rules; those objections are noted appropriately and either got changed or explained well enough that the justification is sensible, though some of us may disagree with individual pieces of it. The rest of it was ok, with a little jockeying back and forth to optimize some of our particular operating paperwork burdens for our spacecraft designs. Characterizing this as random government abuse of a new industry is bullshit.

Re:Telemetry

[evanbd]

While I haven't read this version, I have read some of the drafts, and talked with people intimately involved in the industry and the regulation drafting. You're a bit off base here -- taken in context, what they're actually saying is that such links are fine, as long as the operator can prove they're safe enough. That is, the burden of proving the reliability of the system (including airframe, propulsion, controls, avionics, telemetry links, etc) is on the operator. They won't reject your plan just because you use ground-based controls, you just have to meet the same level of safety as everyone else. Seems eminently reasonable to me. (Also note that you will be required to do a detailed FMEA (Failure Modes and Effects Analysis), that addresses things like common-mode failures.) This is all as it should be -- regulating agencies shouldn't mandate techniques, they should mandate results. Rather than specify how you should control the craft, or whether you should burn LOX/kerosene or tetroxide/hydrazine, they just mandate that you fly safely enough, and demonstrate to their satisfaction that you can do so.

Seems reasonable enough

[Animats]

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.)

Re:Who cares?

[at_18]

The comparison between Russian flights and Virgin ones is misleading:

Russian flights are orbital flights. Virgin will only shoot people 100 km up, without giving them the required 8 km/sec sideways velocity.

The two are vastly different and, as you can guess, Virgin's job is much easier. That's why it cost 100x less. And that's way you'll still need the Russians (or a Shuttle) if you want to go to the ISS.