FAA Setting Up Commercial Spaceflight Center

coondoggie writes "The FAA this week took a step closer to setting up a central hub for the development of key commercial space transportation technologies such as space launch and traffic management applications and setting orbital safety standards. The hub, known as the Center of Excellence for Commercial Space Transportation, would have a $1 million yearly budget and tie together universities, industry players, and the government for cost-sharing research and development. The FAA expects the center to be up and running this year."

Comments

1 miilion??

[spiffmastercow]

Do you know how far 1 million dollars goes in a government project? They won't even have a building for 30 years at that rate.

Re:1 miilion??

[JWSmythe]

Maybe, but they had already slated Edwards AFB to be the American spaceport for commercial ventures. There's no mention of Edwards in the article nor the associated pages, so this may be yet another great waste of time, where one department didn't realize that they had set aside resources towards their goal already.

    Edwards has been the defacto second space center in the US, with many space shuttle landings there. White Sands is a third US landing site, but from what I understand the dust made the shuttle rather messy.

    There were a whole bunch of other emergency landing sites too.

    Ya, $1 million won't buy enough land and the first construction trailer, much less a spaceport. $1 billion would be a good start, but that isn't even enough. It sounds like they're hoping to get other companies and universities to foot the bill. Good luck with that.

$1 Million? Wha?

[johnthorensen]

$1 Million dollar budget? It's a nice gesture, but it seems pretty small for the responsibilities they're claiming this center to have. Seems more like a 'token' gesture made to *look* like they're doing something than taking real action to make things happen. That said, I'd rather see them save that money and get out of the way altogether...

From what I understand...

[MZeora]

I understood it as using 1M to gather up groups (unis and such) to gather together and use the joint gathered funding to build the place and get it running.
So yeah, 1M to gather groups together to work on it MIGHT maybe. Get 2 Big Unis with some clout. Or 4 or 5 smaller Unis together to help. But still 1M in comparison to the Ivy League Schools that might actually have some powers to make it happens to mean little to nothing.

Well!

[Un pobre guey]

Yep, gotta handle all that space traffic. Yessiree Bob! No more waiting in line, no more congestion in the TSA security line, no more risk of getting bumped off your spaceflight. Yeah, times have changed, what with all the commercial space flight going on.

Re:There will never be commercial spaceflight

[SteveFoerster]

There is nothing in space. Where would you go? In other words, once the novelty-seekers got their thrills, what's the motivation?

Precious metals and other mineral resources, for one.

Re:FAA? DONOTWANT

[selven]

I, for my part, am a libertarian, but that is a little extreme. The FAA should definitely have nothing to do with what goes on above 100km, but there are some aviation concerns that the FAA might need to handle. Things like discarded stages falling on people's heads, rockets crashing into (or at least spraying exhaust onto, or destabilizing the flight path of) planes flying through the rocket's launch trajectory and spacecraft landing (most designs involve making the craft into an airplane). There should be no regulations in space, but things going up and down are still passing through everyone else's airspace.