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Space

US Draw Up Rules for Space Tourism 238

Posted by CmdrTaco from the rule-one:-must-be-sexy dept.
AsiNisiMasa writes "The BBC reports that the United States Federal Aviation Administration has drafted a report proposing some regulations regarding space tourism. Among the rules is a set of guidelines to prevent terrorists from gaining access to the space ships in order to use them as weapons. Many of the other regulations are similar to those regarding regular commercial flights, including safety advice precluding the flights. From the article: 'Space tourists should also be given pre-flight training to handle emergency situations such as a loss of cabin pressure or fire. However, the FAA has so far left any medical requirements in the hands of the tourist, who should decide themselves if they are fit to fly.' The final report will affect enterprises such as Sir Richard Branson's SpaceShipOne."
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US Draw Up Rules for Space Tourism More

US Draw Up Rules for Space Tourism

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  • Easier to screen (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dannytaggart ( 835766 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @10:28AM (#14421565) Homepage
    The good thing is that it's much easier to screen space travelers, since there will be so few. It's unlikely that terrorists would bother going through such scrutiny.
    • Well, for now at least but since it's such a hot topic they just have to make sure they bring it up. Afterall, those terrorists will want every opportunity that they have to blow up the earth from miles above!
      • they have to blow up the earth

        So obviously they will be profiling Martians, and looking for Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulators!
        • If only we had time travel. Then we could just listen for the Earth-shattering kaboom!, and work backwards. Finding terrorists would be a piece of cake!

          PS, love your sig.

    • Re:Easier to screen (Score:2, Interesting)

      by NewKimAll ( 923422 )
      Terrorists wouldn't bother with hijacking a space plane to do another 9/11 job for the following reasons:

      1. Most of the mass of the space plane will be burned away just to reach its high altitude. And will most likely glide back to the Earth.
      2. The space plane will, most likely, take off from some remote desert area (for now). The only way to reach any major landmarks would be to?... Turn on the rocket engine or take over the mothership.
      3. I would expect that turning on the rocket engine at low alt
      • Any post-9/11 hijacker would have a plan in place to remove the passengers/people from the equation. Off the top of my head, I can think of half a dozen ways to accomplish that very quickly and easily.

    • Re:Easier to screen (Score:5, Insightful)

      by eclectic4 ( 665330 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @11:57AM (#14421928)
      It has always been interesting to me to see how invasive the fear of "terrorists" have been installed into the minds of most. Terrorist, the current bogeyman. No more communists to be afraid of (really?), bring in terrorists. Next it will be asteroids, and then space aliens. Whatever it takes to breed consent via fear. It's worked wonders so far...

      A story about space tourism, and how easy it's going to be to screen people to make sure we're "safe" getting an instant 5 Insightful is hillarious to me, sorry.
      • Theres still plenty of communists [nbp.nad.ru], its just not a good boogeyman because with our current state of culture/society, communism not only isn't scary but isn't a bad idea to the 20 crowd whos only knowledge of our govt involves clinton and bush. Capitalism didn't work, if you gave the majority an accurate description of both capitalism and communism, you'd be surprised what the response is.
        • Speak for yourself or what ever idiotic group of 20 year old you represent. I don't know any 20ish year olds that consider communism a good idea. The best you can find are people that consider socialism (and by that I don't mean Cuban communism dressed up as socialism, I am talking the Scandinavian style, cradle to grave government involvement style)

          We even had "socialists" (read: communists) parked out front of a building on campus (and the liberal arts side of campus at that) and most people thought they
    • Can we drop the "terrorists" thing already? Does anybody believe that a person with up to millions of dollars in funding and a few individuals with a suicidal drive to do something can be stopped?

      Have muggings stopped now that we have ICBMs?

      TFA says:

      It has recommended security checks similar to those for airline passengers.

      That makes sense I guess, and that is the whole story.

    • I think for the moment at least there will be no way of taking things up with you. You won't need luggage, and it will be difficult to conceal things whilst boarding etc.

  • What to do in an emergency! (Score:5, Funny)

    by anti-human 1 ( 911677 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @10:29AM (#14421572) Journal
    'Space tourists should also be given pre-flight training to handle emergency situations such as a loss of cabin pressure or fire.'

    ...Hold your breath?

    • Bad idea. If the cabin loses pressure, and you don't hold your breath, your lungs will empty through your throat and you lose consciousness pretty soon, but will revive if pressure is restored fast enough.

      On the other hand, if you try to keep the air from escaping, it will force its way anyway, damaging your lungs and throat on the way out. Consequently, you will die, even if cabin pressure is restored.

      This is the reason why you need training before going to space.

      Oh, and in the even of fire, the best

    • Re:What to do in an emergency! (Score:5, Funny)

      by lxs ( 131946 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @10:48AM (#14421668)
      -ding-dong-
        Good evening passengers, please take a look at our charming colleague Betty who will demonstrate emergency procedures for you...

      ...In case of fire please break the window next to you. Without oxygen the fire will be over quickly, which brings us to loss of cabin pressure. In the case of loss of cabin pressure, please assume the bloated expression demonstrated by Betty, stay calm, and wait until all your bodily fluids boil off.
      In case of a crash, make sure you wear your swim-vest with integrated whistle, even though both are useless when we smash into the moon.
      Thank you fo listening and enjoy your flight
    • Actually, there will be no flights. It says: "...including safety advice precluding the flights". If the safety advice precludes all flights, no one will be going anywhere.

      pre-clude verb [trans] prevent from happening; make impossible

      Maybe they meant preceding the flights?

  • Useless (Score:5, Insightful)

    by d_strand ( 674412 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @10:31AM (#14421584)
    I fail to see the relevance of the US drawing up rules for this. It's not like the passengers care where they launch *from*, hopefully the important thing is where they end up (say, in space). Thus any space tourism entrepreneur who dont like the US rules can just launch from another country.
    • You either support the US Gov't or you support Terrorists.

      Does that help clear up what other sovereign nations might consider to be motivation to do what Sam Says?

      • mod parent up (Score:3, Insightful)

        by path_man ( 610677 )
        This is exactly what the government is doing. By laying down some set of pointless bureaucratic rules to govern space travel, the government isn't hoping to mandate safe space travel, they are hoping to preempt other countries from making themselves "THE RULES BODY" for Commercial Space Travel.

        • By laying down some set of pointless bureaucratic rules to govern space travel, the government isn't hoping to mandate safe space travel, they are hoping to preempt other countries from making themselves "THE RULES BODY" for Commercial Space Travel.

          Why not? The US is trying to appoint itsself the 'rules body' for everything else. Why should space be anything different?

          Granted, since they might have the ability to start shooting down anything they decide might be hostile, it might be worthwhile at least le

    • The key here is to give all organizations some baselines to operate from. It also provides a method for insurers to operate under. This also provides an idea to tourist as to what to expect and guard against. If all operators have a consistent set of rules to base their own on the industry should be much better, for tourist as well as provider.

      You can always go above and beyond the rules and I fully expect some will. It may even become a point of sales. As far as the terrorist angle, remember for the m
      • for the most part no one actually expected terrorist to crash jets into skyscrapers

        Except for The Lone Gunmen [mightyponygirl.com] (March 2001 -- actually targetting the WTC) or Tom Clancy [clancyfaq.com] (1994).

      • The key here is to give all organizations some baselines to operate from

        But it's entirely irrelevant becuase the USA will not be doing the launching due to the lack of an operating launch vehicle. If a private US company does launches it is likely that they would launch from a site a bit closer to the equator than Florida. NASA is trapped into a bread and circuses "We're going to Mars but a later administration is paying for it" trick and has little money to meet its ISS obligations and ongoing missions

    • Re:Useless (Score:4, Funny)

      by DerekLyons ( 302214 ) <fairwater@gmai l . c om> on Sunday January 08, 2006 @01:28PM (#14422380) Homepage
      I fail to see the relevance of the US drawing up rules for this. It's not like the passengers care where they launch *from*,
      There is more to space tourism than passengers - there's also the space craft operators, the airframe manufacturers, the insurers, etc... etc... And a bunch of them are in the US and want a cleanly defined playing field rather than a chaotic mess of rules arising from varied state regulations and court cases.

      These rules from the FAA provide exactly that.

      Thus any space tourism entrepreneur who dont like the US rules can just launch from another country.
      Look around and note the up and coming providers for suborbital flight - there isn't but one serious contender outside of the US. The heavyweights are all in the US. The biggest single market is in the US.

      There's also big issues with technology transfer and export regulation, and non-profliferation... It's virtually a certainty that any sub orbital provider will develop in the US or the rest of the West. It's almost impossible for a US based company (or any company based in the West) to go to some third world nation for a launch.

      • Look around and note the up and coming providers for suborbital flight - there isn't but one serious contender outside of the US. The heavyweights are all in the US. The biggest single market is in the US.

        Sure. But the fact that they do their developement in the US doesn't mean they have to launch from US soil, does it? US-based companies doing business in china aren't prosecuted in the US for what they do in china. Even the US government does some work (torture for example) in other countries to get away f

      • Look around and note the up and coming providers for suborbital flight - there isn't but one serious contender outside of the US

        How about the Chinese and Indian governments? In comparison the "heavyweights" often don't have anything as effective as a manned V2 rocket. Even North Korea could do a better job - they scare the world because they have decent missile technology as well as some sort of nuclear research going on.

        There's also big issues with technology transfer and export regulation, and non-prof

    • Well, for technical reasons relating to fuel-efficient orbit paths, you want to launch from somewhere vaguely near to the equator - don't expect to see many orbital craft going up from canada any time soon (IIUC it doesn't matter so much if you aren't intending to make a stable orbit). And you need a highly developed local industry to support the launch site operations. But you still have several good choices outside the US.

      I expect that this will mean there will be a fair number of launches from US territo
    • tourism entrepreneur who dont like the US rules can just launch from another country.

      What other country? I'm serious... Virgin is launching from the US. Anything else is speculation and rumor and patently false. This topic recently came up on a mailing list I was on which included several space tourism contendors, and everyone drew a blank. There do not exist any good options. The US is doing this, get over it.
    • Don't be silly. We all know that the USA owns the sky.

  • i wonder... (Score:2, Funny)

    by know1 ( 854868 )
    what the deal is with the law...like so many miles out is international waters for ships and you can have sex cruises and whatnot. How many miles up would you have to be before you can start doing that line of coke off the hookers ass
    • Someone posted the other day about vertical boundaries of countries, but that's not really the issue. To take coke up into space tourism flights, you have to take off and land from america in possession of that coke, which is obviously illegal. The same drugs searches etc would have to be done, especially if they have to have contingency for landing in other countries in an emergency.

  • Why should it affect Branson ? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Richard Branson and his Virgin brand are English, why should he listen to US rules when they are only binding in USA ?, and since the US is now so broke that it has to depend on the Russians for the ISS [mosnews.com] how relevent are these rules when the future of space travel is probably with the Chinese or Russians or even Australia [gizmag.co.uk].
    • Richard Branson and his Virgin brand are English, why should he listen to US rules when they are only binding in USA ?

      Because he'll be launching from the USA, and chances are that his prospective customers (millionaires, but not billionaires - the billionaires would fly Soyuz) are disproportionately located in the USA.

    • Richard Branson and his Virgin brand are English, why should he listen to US rules when they are only binding in USA ?

      Branson intends to fly in the only place he can get his spacecraft - The US. (Which also happens to be where 90% of the market is.)

      and since the US is now so broke that it has to depend on the Russians for the ISS

      It's true the US has to depend on the Russians - but it's not because the US is broke. (And in reality, the Russians are also one failure away from a grounding - and their spa

  • Seriously... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by danro ( 544913 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @10:37AM (#14421617) Homepage
    Among the rules is a set of guidelines to prevent terrorists from gaining access to the space ships in order to use them as weapons.
    Do anyone else think this terrorist hysteria is getting a bit overboard?
    What kind of terrorist would this protect against? Dr Evil [google.com]?

    Could the slashdot editors please refrain from mentioning teh terrorists in just about every piece of totally unrelated news. (I know, I know the BBC did it too, but I would much rather have news for nerds, or stuff that matters. Mentioning terrorism here is neither.)
    • Could the slashdot editors please refrain from mentioning teh terrorists in just about every piece of totally unrelated news. (I know, I know the BBC did it too, but I would much rather have news for nerds, or stuff that matters. Mentioning terrorism here is neither.)

      Well, unless there are some terrorists holding hostages at Apple and threatening to blow it up unless we turn over Torvalds.

    • Re:Seriously... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by DarthVeda ( 569302 )
      They're looking ahead. You'd be surprised how fast you can get something going when it's re-entering the atmosphere.
      • One of the most dangerous times for humanity will be when space access is cheap (relatively). At least if we still have people willing to kill millions in the name of their ideology.

        I'd have modded you up had I points. Earthbound terrorists aren't particularly frightening or relavent unless you happen to be in one of the few places where it hapens more than once a year. A terrorist in space though, with fuel to nudge/drop some ceramic bowling-ball sized pellets into the right trajectory though... Acce
    • To be fair: don't blame the editors: TFA itself mentions terrorists... in the first, bold paragraph.

      But yes, it looks like nowadays, anything must have value in its contribution in the "war against terror". I mean, "Among the rules is a set of guidelines to prevent terrorists from gaining access to the space ships in order to use them as weapons"... WTF?

      Hence, I propose we update Godwin's law: s/Nazis/terrorists/g

      And according to this new rule, the submitter, the BBC and the FAA have all lost.

    • Re:Seriously... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by RexRhino ( 769423 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @12:54PM (#14422210)
      Terrorism is revelant here... not because there is any likelyhood whatsoever about terrorists hijacking spacecraft and doing a lot of harm (at least not anywhere in the near future), but it is relevant because it is an politically acceptable excuse for doing things. People will accept any sort of government intervnetion into society, if it is to "stop terrorists". Terrorism, therefore, is worth mentioning in the context of civilian space flight - even if only as a political concept and not as a practicle concern.
      • Terrorism, therefore, is worth mentioning in the context of civilian space flight - even if only as a political concept and not as a practicle concern.

        Yup. Aside from a few airplanes in 2001, the building in Oklahoma in 1995, and the mostly failed WTC bombing in 1993 for less than 4,000 people have died from these things in over a decade.

        Being that Americans kill each other at the rate of 10,000 to 20,000 a year http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm [disastercenter.com], it seems as though "terrorists" suck in compar
    • All the text in the /. story in italics is what the submitter wrote. Editors sometimes add text to that in normal text.

      For example, it was the story submitter who goofed on the "Richard Branson's SpaceShipOne" bit - it should have been a reference to Virgin Galactic [virgingalactic.com].

      And like another fellow said, the terrorism reference was in the linked article.
  • "Companies should give passengers safety advice including the number of flights the spacecraft has been on and any problems they have experienced with the craft, according to further recommendations in the report."

    This could actually be more handy in a regular aviation situation. Being a tad scared of flying, I would love to know how big my chances are :)

    Stewardess: You have a 95% chance of surviving this flight with our current maintenance record, please take your seat and have a nice flight, sir.
    • 95%?! That would be 1 in 20 flights biting the big one. In actual fact you're taking more of a risk every single morning by walking down the stairs.
    • Those thoughts exactly.

      One thing comes to mind, has anyone ever heard of a plane crash, when it just got fixed for something? I see and hear of more planes crashing due to malfunction that was overlooked, or never worked on.

      Now I would be beside myself if the flight attendant informed me that flight 666, has had 400 successful flights, and only 5k in repairs due to misc issues. But just yesterday we got a new engine!

      The last flight I was on was grounded for an extra hour because on

  • Re: You have to ask yourself. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 08, 2006 @10:37AM (#14421619)
    The funny thing is people get more worked up about terrorism which kills relatively few people worldwide then they do about barelling down the highway at 100 mph while drunk and not wearing a seatbelt. Last year car accidents killed about 40,000 Americans, about 13 times the number that died on September 11th, but I don't see the government rushing to make cars safer(hell, they are doing the opposite with lax fuel economy standards that don't punish the mammoths that cause a lot of these fatalities)
    However, that number is rarely mentioned in the news, but if Zarqawi sneezes the media is all over it. The media has seriously distorted people's sense of reality...

    • So, is it... (Score:2, Funny)

      by danro ( 544913 )
      ...time to declare a "War On Cars", yet?

    • The funny thing is people get more worked up about terrorism which kills relatively few people worldwide then they do about barelling down the highway at 100 mph while drunk and not wearing a seatbelt.

      I'll be one of the first to agree that the US stance on terrorism seems completely overboard, and that there's a disturbing amount of apparent (if not obvious) corruption and ulterior motives active in terrorism legislation.

      That said, I don't think it's unfair to point out that if authorities comple

  • Rule No 1 (Score:2, Informative)

    by sparkydevil ( 261897 )
    Don't fart in your spacesuit.

    • Re:Rule No 1 (Score:4, Interesting)

      by mabba18 ( 897753 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @11:00AM (#14421710)

      No kidding, just ask John Young on Apollo 16:

      [In the following, John doesn't realize he still has a hot mike. Charlie is only faintly audible through John's mike and the following undoubtedly contains transcription errors.]

      128:50:37 Young: I have the farts, again. I got them again, Charlie. I don't know what the hell gives them to me. Certainly not...I think it's acid stomach. I really do.

      128:50:44 Duke: It probably is.

      128:50:45 Young: (Laughing) I mean, I haven't eaten this much citrus fruit in 20 years! And I'll tell you one thing, in another 12 fucking days, I ain't never eating any more. And if they offer to sup(plement) me potassium with my breakfast, I'm going to throw up! (Pause) I like an occasional orange. Really do. (Laughs) But I'll be durned if I'm going to be buried in oranges.

      From http://www.history.nasa.gov/alsj/a16/a16.debrief1. html [nasa.gov]

  • Am I the only person who thinks Spaceship One will be the world's most expensive rollercoaster ride and won't be a viable business beyond the first accident?

  • Precluding the flights? (Score:3, Funny)

    by achurch ( 201270 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @10:44AM (#14421648) Homepage
    Many of the other regulations are similar to those regarding regular commercial flights, including safety advice precluding the flights.

    I knew space flight was dangerous, but . . . wow.

    (Somebody's gotta take the karma hit for this, might as well be me.)

  • Put your head between your legs and... Kiss your arse goodbye!

  • Thank Goodness For Government Regulations (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 08, 2006 @10:46AM (#14421658)
    Leave it to the government to put their tentacles into something that was only able to grow out of nothing because of the lack of government regulations in the first place. New regulations on space tourism and privately built spacecraft will likely mean no spacecraft can be built without wheelchair access, without headlights and taillights, without flush toilets with the government regulated amount of power and flush, without seperate and secured pilot cabins, without air marshalls, without a whole system of spacecraft licencing and regulation paperwork to be filled out/ security background checks for pilots/passengers/investors and without government approval for every time they run a test all the way to blasting off. Yes indeed, thank goodness for government. At least those pioneers and inventors have been able to get this far because the eye of Sauron was elsewhere. Thank goodness the Wright Brothers didn't have this government on their asses or there wouldn't even be airplanes now. Geez.

  • Misleading (Score:3, Informative)

    by Sebilrazen ( 870600 ) <blahsebilrazen@blah.com> on Sunday January 08, 2006 @10:47AM (#14421662)
    Branson's endeavour is Virgin Galactic [virgingalactic.com] and it will be using Spaceship Two [blogspot.com]. Spaceship One has been moth-balled [si.edu], next to the Spirit of St. Louis.

  • See I told you so. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by /dev/trash ( 182850 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @10:56AM (#14421691) Homepage Journal
    Everyone was "NASA needs to get out of the way, private corps will do it for them." Yeah, if the Feds don't regulate it so much that it's more expensive than NASA.

    • Everyone was "NASA needs to get out of the way, private corps will do it for them." Yeah, if the Feds don't regulate it so much that it's more expensive than NASA.

      Ah, yes - the Slashdot hivemind belief that if it's evil regulation it's the gubmint or some big corporation behind it. Sadly, in this instance that isn't so.

      These rules are the result of years of work between the FAA and nascent suborbital tourism industry to provide a level and defined playing field right out of the gate. None of them want t

  • there actually IS a point to this (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Before y'all freak, realize that these regs are doing a favor for the industry. If the Feds don't issue rules, it's not like the industry won't be unsupervised. Oh no! What'll happen instead is that it will get "supervised" by the motley crew of lawyers who sue it, and the decisions of the judges and juries who decide the resulting cases. The net result, that is, would be that a random patchwork of State and Federal Courts would exercise some kind of random and mostly unpredictable supervision of the indust

  • Just how far (Score:5, Funny)

    by denissmith ( 31123 ) * on Sunday January 08, 2006 @11:02AM (#14421718)
    Just where does US jurisdiction end? I plan on traveling to the belt of Orion next summer, will US law apply there?
  • >>Among the rules is a set of guidelines to prevent terrorists from gaining access to the space ships in order to use them as weapons.

    Why not just call in a British secret agent?

    He can sneak into their launch facility with a power-boat-hang-glider-thingy, breach security with an explosive watch, disguise himself as one of the shuttle crew, and sneak aboard a space shuttle.

    Once aboard the main space station he can take out the leaders in a heroic shoot-out, and use a space shuttle with lasers to destro

  • Remarkably able terrorists (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Flying pig ( 925874 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @11:37AM (#14421838)
    Correct me if I'm wrong, but exactly how is a terrorist going to hijack a spacecraft and crash it into even the approximate neighbourhood of Pennsylvania Avenue? It's not quite like 'oh there's the White House, change course', is it? You have to know where in the orbital path to fire the engines in order to land rather a lot further round the world, and once you are committed, major course changes are not exactly an option as burning up on re-entry doesn't achieve the objective. Given where a spacecraft is likely to be allowed to land, i.e. lots of water or desert, minor course changes won't achieve much. Well, they might hit the next lot of space tourists if they impact the departure lounge, but something tells me a commercial spaceport won't look much like O'Hare or Heathrow.

    Looks like some people in Government think that Futurama is a documentary. That, or they have to be seen to be "doing something" to protect us, since the things that might actually achieve that - fixing the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan, peace in Iraq and Chechnya, and solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - don't seem to be happening.

  • "regulation to prevent terrorists" (Score:4, Insightful)

    by nurb432 ( 527695 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @11:49AM (#14421894) Homepage Journal
    Anyone else sick of hearing the excuse 'its beacuse of the terrorists' to regulate yet another ascpect of our life..

    They wanted to change the world and make us more like them.. welp, in may ways they did..
    • Anyone else sick of hearing the excuse 'its beacuse of the terrorists' to regulate yet another ascpect of our life..
      Here's a free clue for you: These regulations came about because the nascent launch/suborbital tourism industry asked the Feds to create regulations (which the FAA was mandated to do about a decade ago anyhow) in order to create a defined/level playing field. Terrorism had exactly nothing to do with this regulation coming into existence.

  • Terrorists? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Farrside ( 78711 ) on Sunday January 08, 2006 @11:56AM (#14421920)
    What will they try to do, blow up the orbiter? Given how many airplanes terrorists have destroyed -vs- how many they haven't, even if they managed to double their efficiency for spacecraft I think their average will still be below NASA's.
  • The Moon belongs to America.
  • Sorry to be Johnny Raincloud, but things tend not to happen, at least not in the forseeable future. As long as we don't define tourism as a couple of uber-wealthy men a year flying in a big parabola, the closest any of us will get is watching Airplane 2. I say this not because the technology isn't ready, but there are so many barriers into this market, like getting a green light from the government which has other ways to make money other than letting people float around at the risk of them dying. And if th
  • Every time I flew with my fiancé I found it most amusing she'd get on board with at least one 6" long hair spike keeping her ass-length hair in a bun, whilst people had nail clippers with unusable blades confiscated, LOL.

    One has to realize that all a lot of that bull is to make people FEEL BETTER... a trained man with a bone or wooden sharp point is more-or-less as lethal as one with a sharp metal edge, and a hell of a lot more effective than one with NAIL SCISSORS.
    Unless there's a form of Martial Art
  • US Draw Up Rules for Subject/Verb Agreement
  • The final report will affect enterprises such as Sir Richard Branson's SpaceShipOne."

    Sorry, but the SpaceShipOne is no Enterprise.
  • Folks are rightly poking fun at the terrorist thing. But that's also a small part of these regulations. So far as I can see, they're mostly common sense. I'm normally a very strict anti-statist, but I don't see these regulations as being much different than those which would have been imposed by insurers, or indeed, by any sane commercial rocket airline on their own staff. Nobody benefits when ill-prepared flights blow up or crash.
  • Loss of cabin pressure?!? So.. close your eyes tight, put your fingers in your ears, clinch your nether regions as tightly as possible, and hope you get rescued within 30 seconds?

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