Herman Rubin wrote:



I don't think there is any law against that nowadays; if a number of
people wanted to get together and build a manned orbital rocketship at
their own expense or via public donation, I doubt the government would
have any problem with that, provided that they had a safe place to
launch it from.



There is no explicit law, but there are laws which have
been misinterpreted that way. The government would decide
what is "safe", and they are likely to invoke laws against
dissemination of certain types of information and materiel
(including laptops) to "unfriendly" nations.

Of course Gerald Bull got in trouble in this regard in relation to Iraq,
but I don't think that the government would have any problem if you
choose a fairly benign nation for a launch site, say something out in
the Micronesian area; in fact, we own several small islands in that area
so you'd still be on U.S. territory, and you'd be close to the equator,
so you'd need less fuel to reach a given orbital altitude due to the
advantage of being able to use the Earth's spin.


Other things
have been invoked against space uses by Americans, including
at one time preventing radio amateurs from using foreign
launches for their equipment.



I would be concerned about a fly-by-night organization doing a "The
Producers" routine in this regard though- raising a huge amount of
money, putting it into a design that they know won't work, and then
saying "We tried really hard, but..." and pocketing the majority of the
cash. But proper financial oversight should avoid that problem.



I am not worried about that many people being suckers.



Oh, I think that has probably happened more than once already, given all
the failed private launch systems that have been developed over the
years, yet never built.
Contact Scott Lowther; he stated that he bought stock in more than one
private launch system that went bust.



I think the new space tourism bill that passed Congress recently
specifically was aimed at making that happen. Burt Rutan privately built
a spacecraft and flew it successfully with minimum government
interference to win the Ansari X Prize; SpaceX is trying to get their
private Falcon 1 to work properly.



I am not at this time interested in space tourism. The
government prizes are not for anything other than suborbital
at this time, and are for snails-pace progress.



Ansari's was a privately, not government funded, prize.
NASA has prizes, but they are for the development of specific
spaceflight technologies more than complete booster/spacecraft systems
(although I do think they recently put out a prize for that also in
regard to a spacecraft to carry crews to the ISS.)



If you want to run a private space program via public subscription, more
power to you. Hell, I might kick in $5 or $10 toward such an endeavor
provided that the company doing it was on the up-and-up, and I got some
sort of certificate to hang on my wall.



Will it be approved by the government? There are restrictions
on non-profit organizations, and they are VERY strong.


Given the present cost of spaceflight, I'm willing to bet that your last
problem will be turning a profit or having your system cost less than
you thought it would. :-D

You know why? Space pirates, that's why! (cut to image of grizzled
codger with one eye in pressure suit, one-eyed, peg-legged parrot, also
wearing pressure suit, floating from umbilical cord attached to his
shoulder.) ;-)



No; it would provide a place for man not under their control.



We aren't heading toward that Libertarian Utopia inside the L5 station
concept again, are we?
That sounds wonderful until you realize that the environment you are in
is so hostile that somebody had better be in control or somebody's going
to do something stupid and kill everyone.
After the communists took power in Russia, they set in place new rules
for the military as a revolt against the strict autocracy of the Czars.
These included giving the sailors far more individual rights of free
choice than they had ever had before, and a guarantee that they would
never have to do jobs that they had not agreed to under their
enlistment. They had a submarine that sank after it began to submerge
with its rear hatch left open by mistake. One of the few survivors of
the sinking explained that he was indeed within a few feet of the open
hatch as the water began flowing in, and could easily have closed it-
but that was not his assigned job and he'd be damned if he was going to
do someone else's job for them, as that was not fair.
If anything big comes about in the line of a non-government funded space
program, it will be done by big business to make a profit...and if you
think governments can be cruel and tyrannical, try on capitalists sometime.
Up there, outside of the control of any Earth government's regulations,
"getting fired" might be a reference to your velocity as you exit the
airlock sans spacesuit.




Wait around; major breakthroughs happen every few years now.



I know of none, other than the improvement of radio
communications and computers, which have any value
whatever. One of the late Willy Ley's articles pointed
out that the last scientific discovery used in the
German rocket development was made in 1906. Has the
development of tiles really helped space exploration
that much? Right now, the Russians are the only ones
with good capability to supply the space station. The
successor to the Shuttle is still on the drawing boards.

We need a scientific breakthrough, not engineering, and
have we had any recently in physics?



Well, we are starting to play around with teleportaion, even if it's
just an atom or two at a time.

Pat