Veteran space tourist Dennis Tito is ready to invest in a suborbital spaceship… but he is worried the FAA is going to regulate them like aeroplanes. He and others are worried this would kill the infant industry:
Jeff Greason, president of the Mojave, Calif.-based XCOR Aerospace, testified before the panel that holding suborbital vehicles like the one his company has in development to the same standards as airplanes would ensure that commercial space flight never gets off the ground.
In aviation, Greason said, the FAA’s focus is on keeping planes in the sky. When it comes to rocketry, the FAA assumes that the launch vehicle will fail and places most of the regulatory burden on ensuring that adequate measures have been taken to safeguarding people on the ground.
Greason called on lawmakers to help ensure that reusable launchers are treated as rockets, not as aircraft, as some in the FAA would prefer.
“If we insist on perfect safety at the beginning of the industry, we will get it, because no one will ever fly.” Greason said.
Perhaps one of our readers will drop in and expound on this at length. (wink, wink, nudge, nudge Jeff)
This link from Xcor points to the written testimony.
Can you imagine if autos or trains had not been invented yet? There is no way they’d be allowed today. Much too dangerous, indeed. Could harm the children.
I shudder to think how a stone age socialist society would have reacted to the discovery of fire. After all, we wouldn’t want little Ug to burn his fingers now would we?
Not to mention the environmental impact statement…
Dale, I can try to write something up if you think
the audience is there for it.
Also, one has to keep a sense of perspective. Yes, it can seem ridiculous, almost a paraody, to have a new industry have to stand up and beg for permission to exist before we can start creating wealth. It sounds like something from Ayn Rand.
However, we still live in a society where I think we will sucessfully resolve these issues and get permission to operate. And, all kidding aside, these are high energy vehicles that overfly populated (albeit sparsely populated) areas. It isn’t unreasonable for the State to be taking some precautions to make sure the uninvolved public is kept safe. It is only when they start questioning how much risk the customers should be “allowed” to take that I think they are exceeding their mandate.
Jeff. Thanks for responding. Yes, I think there is a non-traditional but interested crowd here. Samizdata isn’t playing to the same old spacer crowd we’re both familiar parts of, and I think it is all to the good to introduce more people to these pragmatic issues of exactly how do you build spaceships in the early 21st and make enough lucre while doing it so that you can keep doing it. And how to not have your business plan ruined by State intervention while you do so…
If you’d like a front page podium, just email me directly and I’ll post an article with your by-line.
Ad Astra, Dale.
Spacecraft are nearly all fuel as a percentage of launch mass. They have to be, due to the “rocket equation”. Meaning that once a rocket has burned up its fuel getting up into orbit and then deorbiting, it is as light and floaty as a badminton shuttle-cock. A space-ship crash would be less likely to harm people than a car crash. The public does not need to be “kept safe”.
Ah…. Julian. I think Jeff knows that. He’s the CEO of Xcor. He stands by his rocket engines 😉
Heh, oops. A thousand pardons, o spacefaring one.
And if they refuse you permission, launch anyway, whatta they going to do, jail a hero?
Does anyone know where I can find Carl LaFong? That’s LaFong—capital L, small a, capital F, small o, small n, small g. Carl LaFong.
Just seeing the name replayed the whole scene. Thanks for the best laugh today.
Julian, it was a reasonable comment, and obviously I agree that we can keep the public quite safe. The standard of safety we are held to is less than one third party casualty every 33,333 flights, and we certainly think we can meet that.
However, while the fuel and oxidizer are most of the launch mass, and are burned early in the trajectory, the point of the exercise is to convert as much as possible of the chemical energy in the propellant into kinetic and potential energy in the vehicle. Therefore, especially for high performance vehicles, there is still a lot of energy tied up in the vehicle, and it has hazard potential.
I think it is a reasonable State interest to make sure we meet the 1 in 33,333 flights risk standard; we mostly do that by flying in sparsely populated areas and by including highly reliable means (in our case, a pilot) of stopping the flight if the trajectory goes out of acceptable bounds (e.g., over a city).
Cobden Bright wrote:
I shudder to think how a stone age socialist society would have reacted to the discovery of fire. After all, we wouldn’t want little Ug to burn his fingers now would we?
Read Ayn Rand’s novella “Anthem”, about just such a society — well, actually one that followed our industrial age, but which was technologically not much past the Stone Age.