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

Telemetry

[1310nm]

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.

Re:Who cares?

[evanbd]

While I basically agree with what you said, you're a little off target. These rules are really for suborbital tourism, aka the SpaceShipOne flight -- up and down, not orbit. That's much easier technically, and doesn't involve the 8 km/s sideways velocity of an orbital flight. Also, the vehicles people are talking about so far will only go to a little over 100 km altitude, which is lower than any Low Earth Orbit satellite -- even at 100 km, the air is so thick orbits decay rapidly.

So, at least for this first generation of vehicles, there's no real worry about space collisions. These rules are more aimed at dealing with things like participant awareness of the risks, and protecting the uninvolved public. Both very important things, and fortunately AST (the branch of the FAA in charge of space flight stuff) is taking a very sane and reasonable approach to most of this.