Space Access Update #105 10/19/04

Space Access Update #105 10/19/04
Copyright 2004 by Space Access Society
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If you've begun to detect a pattern in the intros to our last few
Updates, you're not alone. Once again we write in extreme haste, and
have to pass over much good and interesting news - this time to cover a
subject of considerable urgency.
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Contents this issue:

- HR 3752 In Jeopardy - License To Fly, Or Death Of An Industry?

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HR 3752 Current Status

(See our Update #102, at http://www.space-access.org/updates/sau102, for
some background on Federal regulation of the promising new US private
passenger-carrying spaceflight industry.)

A law usefully clarifying current Federal commercial launch regulations
as they affect carrying commercial passengers, HR 3752, The Commercial
Space Launch Amendments Act of 2004, has been working its way through
the Congress since last winter. In brief, HR 3752 alters existing law
to both allow and encourage the Federal Aviation Administration's
Advanced Space Transportation division (FAA AST) to license low-cost
reusable commercial passenger-carrying space vehicles on an informed-
consent-to-risk basis that gives the new industry a chance to grow,
rather than strangling it in the cradle with unrealistically rigid
standards that the new technology cannot yet support.

HR 3752 passed the House by a vote of 402-1 this summer, in a form that
wasn't perfect (it created considerable uncertainty via a too-narrow
definition of "suborbital rocket" that excluded some serious current
design approaches) but that with a bit of common sense from the FAA
might have worked reasonably well.

The bill then went to the Senate Commerce Committee, where it ran into
its first major snag - a Senator from a state hosting a reusable rocket
company whose design fell outside the "suborbital rocket" definition put
a hold on the bill. This part of the story has a happy ending; the FAA
division that had previously refused to budge on that overly narrow
definition eventually budged, and a new expanded definition was written
into the Senate version of HR 3752.

By then though two more months had passed, the elections were close at
hand, and the practical options for passing HR 3752 had narrowed down
to Senate Commerce Committee staffers working out an acceptable version
with their House counterparts, then both Senate and House passing
identical new versions under fast-track "unanimous consent" rules. This
should have been no problem; we're told the House was (and is) happy
with the revised more-inclusive definition of a suborbital rocket.

But someone, for whatever reason, threw a spanner in the works, altering
another section of the bill that defined allowable levels of risk in a
manner that would have killed the budding new industry stone dead.
Briefly, HR 3752 said that risk to uninvolved members of the public had
to be kept many-nines low, risk to crewmembers was a matter for FAA AST
to work out with individual companies as part of the licensing process,
while passengers simply had to be fully informed of the risks involved.
The change was a simple one - FAA AST was to become responsible for
ensuring the same many-nines level of safety for crew and passengers of
the new vehicles as that required for uninvolved bystanders.

This may even have been well-intentioned; it could have sounded
reasonable to someone not well-informed about the field. But the
practical effect would be to require astronomical numbers of successful
test flights of any new vehicle to statistically prove a many-nines
reliability level, before either passengers or crew would be allowed on
board. The relatively immature state of reusable rocket technology
aside, no unpiloted or remote-piloted vehicle has ever come close to
that reliability level. This change was an industry-killer.

The bill as fatally altered was set to move out of the Senate Commerce
Committee for quick unanimous-consent passage by the Senate at the start
of October. Only another hold by a Senator on the Committee stopped
this at the last second, at which point the various parties agreed to
sit down and work out differences over the election break, and if a
version could be agreed on, pass it by unanimous consent in the final
post-election session of this Congress. That's where things stand now.

What To Do

If you're a US citizen from one of the fifty states, you have two
Senators. Fax or phone them in DC, or contact them back at home if the
election campaign gives you a chance, and ask them to support a version
of HR 3752 acceptable to the FAA and to the members of the new reusable
rocket industry. If appropriate, go on to give a very brief supporting
pitch, to the effect that this new industry has huge promise for the US,
that it's appropriate to have the FAA stringently regulate risk to the
general public, but that industry participants have to be able to take
some risks in these early days in order to learn enough so that rockets
can eventually be as safe as airplanes only got after generations of
accumulated aviation experience.

For contact info, go to http://www.vote-smart.org and enter your nine-
digit zip code (look at one of your bills) in the Find Your
Representatives box. Scan down to your two Senators, click on their
names, and you should have all the info you need.

If you fax, be polite, brief, and straightforward - keep it well under
one page of reasonably large and readable print (a paragraph that's
read is better than an essay that isn't), make your basic point at the
start, support it briefly, then sign it with your name, city, and state
and send it. (No paper-mail letters - word is those currently are
backed up for months by security checks - and email comes in such
volumes that individual emails carry almost zero weight. If you want to
write, fax it.)

If you phone, ask to speak to whoever handles commercial space matters
for your Senator, then when you're connected to that staffer (or more
likely their voicemail) do the same as for a fax - make the basic
support request, then if appropriate back it up briefly, thank them for
their time, and ring off. If they have questions, do your best to answer
them - briefly! - you might want to go over the background here and in
SAU #102 before calling - then once done, thank them and ring off.

Don't assume because you didn't read this until a week or two after we
sent it out that it's no longer urgent. The window for effective action
on this will likely be open well into November. Stay tuned for further
word; we'll report as soon as we know anything. Meanwhile - fax and call!
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in the cost of reaching space. You may redistribute this Update in
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Space Access Society
http://www.space-access.org


"Reach low orbit and you're halfway to anywhere in the Solar System"
- Robert A. Heinlein