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FAA Releases Requirements for Space Tourism

Posted by Zonk on Fri Dec 15, 2006 10:02 PM
from the good-luck-space-cadet dept.
Space United States Government Science Politics
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."
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[+] Politics: One Step Closer To Spaceport America 149 comments
space_hippy writes "The next step for a project we've previously discussed has now come around: thanks to a sales tax increase it seems as though the residents of Dona Ana county in New Mexico will be playing host to the first American commercial spaceport. From the BBC article: 'Residents in the US state of New Mexico have approved a new tax to build the nation's first commercial spaceport. Dona Ana County is a relatively poor and bleak swath of desert in southern New Mexico with fewer than 200,000 residents. But voters passed a 0.25% increase in the local sales tax to help contribute to the cost of building Spaceport America. Sir Richard Branson has signed a long-term lease with the state of New Mexico to make the new spaceport the headquarters of his Virgin Galactic space tourism business. The spaceport is expected to open in 2009, and Virgin Galactic says space flights will cost around $200,000 for a 2.5-hour flight.'"
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  • Who cares? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by bogaboga (793279) on Friday December 15 2006, @10:09PM (#17264938)
    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.
    • Exactly. Kazakhstan has everything a budding space tourism company needs without the burdensome regulations.
      Also, why are these laws exactly necessary? Honestly, FCC?

    • Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by TheWart (700842) on Friday December 15 2006, @10:53PM (#17265266)
      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.

    • 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.
      I care, and don't care.

      I care because this means that I may be able to go to space in my lifetime.

      I don't care because if I'm going to space, the FAA rules will not affect me.

      Screw you guys, I'm going to outer space!

    • Here we go again. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 15 2006, @11:45PM (#17265622)
      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.


      This is, yet again, why I can't stand /. stories about space. The commenters rarely know jack shit about space exploration, space flight, space robotics, or space commercialization. Yet they often unfortunately think they do.

      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.

      • Re:Here we go again. (Score:5, Funny)

        by arthurpaliden (939626) on Saturday December 16 2006, @12:14AM (#17265800)

        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.

        Like shoe checks and no liquids since they might be parts of binary explosives.

      • Its the liability (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Harmonious Botch (921977) * on Saturday December 16 2006, @12:36AM (#17265946) Homepage Journal
        "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. )

        • Re:Its the liability (Score:5, Informative)

          by georgewilliamherbert (211790) on Saturday December 16 2006, @12:58AM (#17266060)
          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.
          Please don't go around sticking your foot in your mouth. The anon coward a few back is an industry outsider (I have a guess who, but it's obvious from what they said that they at least know the insiders). I participated in some of the discussions leading to comments filed with the FAA about the proposed rules which are now final. I know most of the people who wrote the industry comments, and saw a number of the comments in draft form prior to submittal. The FAA AST staff who did this are also people who've come out into the community. The industry objected to some details of the proposed rules; those objections are noted appropriately and either got changed or explained well enough that the justification is sensible, though some of us may disagree with individual pieces of it. The rest of it was ok, with a little jockeying back and forth to optimize some of our particular operating paperwork burdens for our spacecraft designs. Characterizing this as random government abuse of a new industry is bullshit.
          • Please note: I didn't say that it was random. I said it was politicized. Of course they will ask you for input - somebody who knows something about good engineering must contribute. But in the end, the goals are political.

    • 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.

      Actually things will prevent this fantasy from coming true.

      1. Russian flights cost nearly 100 times more - and consume six months to a year of your time vice a week or so.
      2. Russian flights are (at best) 2-4 times a year, as compared to the 2-3 times a week that Virgin plans.
      3. Russian rockets are no more, and

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by at_18 (224304)
        The comparison between Russian flights and Virgin ones is misleading:

        Russian flights are orbital flights. Virgin will only shoot people 100 km up, without giving them the required 8 km/sec sideways velocity.

        The two are vastly different and, as you can guess, Virgin's job is much easier. That's why it cost 100x less. And that's way you'll still need the Russians (or a Shuttle) if you want to go to the ISS.

    • Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by tehcrazybob (850194) <ben,geek&gmail,com> on Saturday December 16 2006, @01:33AM (#17266282)
      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:Who cares? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by evanbd (210358) on Saturday December 16 2006, @02:36AM (#17266546)
        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.

      • Actually you're partially wrong. Most communications are carried by terrestrial or submarine fiber optic cables. They're cheaper, higher bandwidth, lower latency (geosynch orbit and back at light speed is a good fraction of a second). I'd be concerned about satellites (e.g. weather monitoring), but not the communications ones (most of those are military, and quite often they're placed in elevated orbits to avoid just this sort of problem).
      • Don't be so negative towards space debris... if we leave lots of it in space, then it may act as a shield against sunlight, effectively reversing global warming!
  • Ughhh ... reading the requirements is about as interesting as reading a Swedish dictionary. Anyone have any highlights or links to summarized requirements?
    • This is a government document. It's purpose is to amend the US Code. You'll never find a summary but if you want to see the new section that was added, pull up the document [spaceref.com] and do a text search for "PART 460--HUMAN SPACE FLIGHT REQUIREMENTS."

  • I have the courage (Score:5, Funny)

    by Typingsux (65623) on Friday December 15 2006, @10:27PM (#17265074)
    Now who has the 200 thousand dollars.
    • 200k is not that impossible an amount to amass.. if you REALLY want it to be the only bit of tourism you ever do.

      I could- if I pared my life down to the BONE, set aside 30-40k a year right now...

      I'd have it then, in 5-6ears.. my kids would not go to college, and I'd miss things like tv and chocolate...
      but it's not beyond most of the slashdot demographics I'll wager- if thats ALL you want...

      • Re:If it's worth it to you... (Score:3, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        >> "...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.

  • I can't wait (Score:5, Funny)

    by misanthrope101 (253915) on Friday December 15 2006, @10:29PM (#17265086)
    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.
  • After all, somewhere on the equator would be better and almost certainly cheaper too.

     

    • After all, somewhere on the equator would be better and almost certainly cheaper too.

      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 tho

  • 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?

  • Telemetry (Score:3, Interesting)

    by 1310nm (687270) on Friday December 15 2006, @11:01PM (#17265340)
    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.
    • Boy, they have a lot of misplaced faith.

      True. Because we all know how many space vehicles have been saved by last-minute operator adjustments during liftoff and final descent.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by evanbd (210358)
      While I haven't read this version, I have read some of the drafts, and talked with people intimately involved in the industry and the regulation drafting. You're a bit off base here -- taken in context, what they're actually saying is that such links are fine, as long as the operator can prove they're safe enough. That is, the burden of proving the reliability of the system (including airframe, propulsion, controls, avionics, telemetry links, etc) is on the operator. They won't reject your plan just beca
        • Actually, I basically agree with you -- it's impossible to prove you have the requisite reliability. Therefore, no one will fly with ground based control. But mandating methods instead of results is always bad regulatory policy, because fundamentally the public doesn't care *how* you guarantee to fly safely enough, just *that* you do so. In this case, I can't see any arguments against an onboard pilot -- but that doesn't mean I should assume there are none. There are plenty of instances of other regulat

  • It's as if millions of geeks cried out... (Score:3, Funny)

    by dangitman (862676) on Saturday December 16 2006, @12:04AM (#17265740)
    ... in terror and were silenced.

    Requirement #42.(a): No person who has ever held a slashdot account shall be allowed to travel in space.

  • Seems reasonable enough (Score:3, Informative)

    by Animats (122034) on Saturday December 16 2006, @03:05AM (#17266694) Homepage

    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.)

  • The thing that bothers me most about the new rules is that those under 18 are not allowed to fly into space, even with a parent or guardian's permission. It seems like even a teenager that has been emancipated before the age of 18 still isn't allowed. I yell 'boo!' on hard age limits.

    Bruce
  • From TFA: ...a space flight participant may not carry on board any explosives, firearms, knives, or other weapons ... As the commercial activity in this sector expands, the TSA will likely take a larger role in developing standards and monitoring compliance.

    In TSA speak, this means: no liquids/gels over 3.5 oz; please remove your shoes and prepare for you cavity search.

    • Re:Its dead Jim. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by SpiffyMarc (590301) on Friday December 15 2006, @10:17PM (#17264994)
      Yeah, I know what you mean -- it ruined the prospect of commercial aviation, too!

      • 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 carr

      • Well, when the industry was 'regulated' no one could compete on price. They had to compete purely on service.

        Now because the industry is less regulated, you can get a ticket across the US for VERY cheap compared to 20-30 years ago.

        Less government regulation is actually a good thing because it allows the free market to do its thing and uses capitalism as a vehicle for progress.
          • I hoped we'd lose more after September 11, but unfortunately, the government stepped in. Airlines and the airline labor unions have been protected for far too long even after deregulation.
    • As someone else pointed out, the space tourism industry needed liability protection. And you can only get that if there's a set of rules to follow. My take is that the industry had a lot of input into the current rules and these rules are satisfactory for creating a space tourism industry in the US.
        • I'm sure that "feeling safe" and suborbital flight will be mutually exclusive at least for a little while. But once we start getting almost disasters in space due to the snake menace, the FAA will step in and regulate that particular danger away.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Deadstick (535032)
      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
      • 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.

        I understand your point, but I would bet that liability insurance and other potential legal recourse, plus the desire to stay in business and make a profit would vastly surpass anything that the FAA could make up.

        Going to space is not trivial. Its not cheap, and even though everybody wants to go, in reality its only going to be people with money that are going to do it, and the
    • I know this will benefit myself and my family.
      Indeed. Just like the Wright brothers and other early aviators did.
      • Blockquoth the poster:

        Of course the FAA regulations aren't a direct part of that, but they are a step.

        Actually, the FAA regs are a direct part of that. They create a known, rational regulatory environment. Ever wonder why, with all the opportunities available in (say) the former Soviet Union, lots of investment capital keeps flowing to the uS and Europe? In no small part because we have well-established regulations, a judicial infrastructure, and the oft-maligned rule of law. It's safer for money to liv

    • 7) minimum 20 minutes average sexual stamina from vaginal penetration to completion

      Well, I don't know if I could meet all of these requirements, but if this is one of them, I'll be happy to take the test as often as necessary.

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