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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!
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.
Airlines and pilots need to have licenses and permits.
So what's the big hassle here?
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
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.
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.
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
"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. )
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.)