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

Who cares?

[bogaboga]

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.

Re:Who cares?

[TheWart]

Or people might like the thought of flying with companies that have strict rules regarding safety, etc, espcially when you are rocketing into outer space.

Re:Who cares?

[tehcrazybob]

I care. I care a lot. I mean, don't get me wrong, I don't care if the airlocks are any good or whether the passengers are allowed to bring food on the flight. I also don't care about the insurance regulations, fire extinguishers, acceptance of liability, or anything else like that. If I'm ever a passenger, I might care about those things, but right now I'm not a passenger, so those things are completely irrelevant.

What I DO care about are the things I didn't see in that article. Like what people can leave up there, and where they can go. The most significant part of getting something into space is accelerating it to 17,000 miles per hour. The rest, all the computers and airtight boxes full of people and fire extinguishers to stop the people catching fire, is just garnish.

Now, aside from tourists and science experiments that are probably important but don't really affect me, the space around earth is cluttered with two things - communications satellites and debris. The communications satellites are absolutely essential for modern technology to work. I imagine you'll be using at least one as you read this sentence. The other one, the debris, is a big issue. It's small rocks, and bits and pieces of old rockets, and satellites that ran out of fuel and were moved out of their orbit to a less important one to clear the way for a new satellite. These rocks and bits of metal are all still moving at 17,000 miles per hour - the have to be, in order to stay in their orbits.

When the debris hits anything important, the important thing stops being important and becomes more debris. Fortunately, that doesn't happen very often. NASA keeps track of all the biggest chunks, and keeps satellites and space stations out of the way. They just accept the risks posed by the stuff too small to track, since space is quite large and the chances of one hitting something important are acceptably small. However, if private companies start throwing things into space and don't bring it all down, the debris is going to become overwhelming, and space will become absolutely useless for communications, navigation, science, AND tourists. We'd also be trapped on Earth and unable to explore other planets until we can come up with a way to clear the debris, or just wait a few million years for it to clear up naturally.

Personally, I like the internet, cell phones, GPS, and pictures of Mars. I'd like to keep space as free of debris as possible, and I'd really like to see regulations governing what can be left in orbit and where.

Re:Its dead Jim.

[SpiffyMarc]

Yeah, I know what you mean -- it ruined the prospect of commercial aviation, too!

FUD, FUD, FUD

[FunkeyMonk]

TFA doesn't seem to have anything unusual in there. Hobbyists need to have clearances and permits for rockets over certain sizes and altitudes.

Airlines and pilots need to have licenses and permits.

So what's the big hassle here?

Re:Excellent - my tax`dollars at work again

[Deadstick]

If you and your family live anywhere near the launch site, or ride an airliner anywhere near it, you better damn well hope it does.

rj

Its the liability

[Harmonious Botch]

"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. )