Report recommends Congress allow full regulation of commercial human spaceflight
The modern instruction manual for America
A new report by the RAND corporation has recommended that Congress allow the moratorium on full regulation of commercial human spaceflight, established by the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act of 2004 and extended several times, to expire on October 1, 2023.
That recommendation came despite a lack of progress on voluntary standards and key industry metrics. While standards development organizations like ASTM International and ISO have published 20 standards related to commercial spaceflight, the RAND report noted that “companies have yet to clearly or consistently adopt them in a manner that can be confirmed or verified publicly.” A diversity of technical approaches also hinders the development and implementation of standards.
The report also found that while the FAA had developed key industry indicators to assess readiness for adopting safety regulations, there were no goals for those indicators to determine when it was time to implement regulations. “It is, therefore, difficult to assess whether there has been progress toward meeting key industry metrics when there are not clear targets that could be met,” the report concluded.
Despite that lack of progress on standards or metrics, the RAND report nonetheless concluded that allowing the learning period to expire this year was the best approach. Doing so, it argued, would allow FAA and industry to start the process of developing safety regulations in a gradual manner and avoid a rush to regulate imposed by Congress should a high-profile accident take place while the learning period is still in effect.
It also recommended additional resources for the FAA to support that regulatory process, but did not quantify an increase in the budget for or personnel assigned to its Office of Commercial Space Transportation, or AST. [emphasis mine]
The highlighted words illustrate the crushing fundamentals of all government regulation. First, it always wants to establish “standards” that do not allow for “a diversity of technical approaches. To do so requires that government to squelch that diversity, thus choking off the kind of innovation we have seen in the past decade that has brought America’s rocket industry to life.
Second, the goal of all this regulation is never its feel-good stated goals. Instead, it is always aimed at growing that government bureaucracy. More rules must require more bureaucrats! Or to put it more bluntly, the regulation is always aimed at transferring power to the government.
When the moratorium expires commercial human spaceflight will immediately transition from being run like most of American business since the nation’s founding, free and independent and open to quick innovation and little regulation, to the modern America of heavy regulation and no innovation, with control increasingly passed from the private engineers who know the business to Washington bureaucrats who only know how to wield power and stymie creativity.
I noted these basic facts back in 2005 when I was writing a weekly UPI column when the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act of 2004 finally passed.
Nonetheless, in reading these guidelines, one wonders about the future. For example, the guidelines propose requiring every passenger to “provide his or her medical history to a physician experienced or trained in the concepts of aerospace medicine.” If the doctor has further questions, the guidelines also propose that he or she require the passenger to undergo a physical examination.
Imagine if the airline industry had been required to develop commercial jet travel under these rules. Though at first such medical checks might have seemed reasonable, after the industry matured such rules would have only discouraged passenger travel.
Another suggested guideline – under the guise of making sure future passengers will be fully informed of the risks of spaceflight – proposes that a launch company not only provide information about its own safety record, but also submit “the safety record of all launch and re-entry vehicles that have carried one or more persons on board, including both U.S. government and private-sector vehicles.” Under this rule, each private company would have to track both its own activities and somehow keep records on all other private American space efforts, a requirement that seems incredibly odious and unreasonable.
At that time, most space industry people were in favor of the law, thinking it would ease their ability to raise investment capital. Instead, it put the sword of Damocles over their heads. Though many officials quoted in the link above say that Congress will likely extend the moratorium, this merely delays the inevitable. At some point Congress will allow the moratorium to expire, and at that point this cutting edge industry will be forced to operate like a modern airline, as it will no longer be ruled by customer demand and innovation and engineering creativity, but by bureaucrats in Washington who know little of demand or engineering or especially innovation. All these Washington pencil pushers know is wielding power.
At that point the emerging space industry we have seen in the past decade will begin to wither and die, at least here in the United States. We will then pass the torch to other nations who will have greater wisdom and more courage.
Readers!
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your support allows me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
The modern instruction manual for America
A new report by the RAND corporation has recommended that Congress allow the moratorium on full regulation of commercial human spaceflight, established by the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act of 2004 and extended several times, to expire on October 1, 2023.
That recommendation came despite a lack of progress on voluntary standards and key industry metrics. While standards development organizations like ASTM International and ISO have published 20 standards related to commercial spaceflight, the RAND report noted that “companies have yet to clearly or consistently adopt them in a manner that can be confirmed or verified publicly.” A diversity of technical approaches also hinders the development and implementation of standards.
The report also found that while the FAA had developed key industry indicators to assess readiness for adopting safety regulations, there were no goals for those indicators to determine when it was time to implement regulations. “It is, therefore, difficult to assess whether there has been progress toward meeting key industry metrics when there are not clear targets that could be met,” the report concluded.
Despite that lack of progress on standards or metrics, the RAND report nonetheless concluded that allowing the learning period to expire this year was the best approach. Doing so, it argued, would allow FAA and industry to start the process of developing safety regulations in a gradual manner and avoid a rush to regulate imposed by Congress should a high-profile accident take place while the learning period is still in effect.
It also recommended additional resources for the FAA to support that regulatory process, but did not quantify an increase in the budget for or personnel assigned to its Office of Commercial Space Transportation, or AST. [emphasis mine]
The highlighted words illustrate the crushing fundamentals of all government regulation. First, it always wants to establish “standards” that do not allow for “a diversity of technical approaches. To do so requires that government to squelch that diversity, thus choking off the kind of innovation we have seen in the past decade that has brought America’s rocket industry to life.
Second, the goal of all this regulation is never its feel-good stated goals. Instead, it is always aimed at growing that government bureaucracy. More rules must require more bureaucrats! Or to put it more bluntly, the regulation is always aimed at transferring power to the government.
When the moratorium expires commercial human spaceflight will immediately transition from being run like most of American business since the nation’s founding, free and independent and open to quick innovation and little regulation, to the modern America of heavy regulation and no innovation, with control increasingly passed from the private engineers who know the business to Washington bureaucrats who only know how to wield power and stymie creativity.
I noted these basic facts back in 2005 when I was writing a weekly UPI column when the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act of 2004 finally passed.
Nonetheless, in reading these guidelines, one wonders about the future. For example, the guidelines propose requiring every passenger to “provide his or her medical history to a physician experienced or trained in the concepts of aerospace medicine.” If the doctor has further questions, the guidelines also propose that he or she require the passenger to undergo a physical examination.
Imagine if the airline industry had been required to develop commercial jet travel under these rules. Though at first such medical checks might have seemed reasonable, after the industry matured such rules would have only discouraged passenger travel.
Another suggested guideline – under the guise of making sure future passengers will be fully informed of the risks of spaceflight – proposes that a launch company not only provide information about its own safety record, but also submit “the safety record of all launch and re-entry vehicles that have carried one or more persons on board, including both U.S. government and private-sector vehicles.” Under this rule, each private company would have to track both its own activities and somehow keep records on all other private American space efforts, a requirement that seems incredibly odious and unreasonable.
At that time, most space industry people were in favor of the law, thinking it would ease their ability to raise investment capital. Instead, it put the sword of Damocles over their heads. Though many officials quoted in the link above say that Congress will likely extend the moratorium, this merely delays the inevitable. At some point Congress will allow the moratorium to expire, and at that point this cutting edge industry will be forced to operate like a modern airline, as it will no longer be ruled by customer demand and innovation and engineering creativity, but by bureaucrats in Washington who know little of demand or engineering or especially innovation. All these Washington pencil pushers know is wielding power.
At that point the emerging space industry we have seen in the past decade will begin to wither and die, at least here in the United States. We will then pass the torch to other nations who will have greater wisdom and more courage.
Readers!
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your support allows me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
Well why not? The bureaucracies have already stifled private aviation around the world.
The FAA was actually the best of the bureaucracies but lately seems to have caught the European disease.
Aviation isn’t safe because of regulation. It is reasonably safe because after 120 years the human race has learned how to do it.
My favorite illustration of the futility of government over-regulation comes from a very early film of a Wright Brothers flight. This was in Fort Myer, Virginia and was to demonstrate that the Wright Flyer was a viable scout plane.
In the film, government observers track the Flyer as it flies at low altitudes around the parade grounds of the fort. One notable scene is when an earnest observer with a clipboard bends down low to the ground in an attempt to see under the plane as it swoops past. He is clearly attempting to make sure it never touches the ground!
To me this has always been the perfect illustration of how hopelessly the “officials” of the day were equipped to deal with what was then advanced technology.
Mike Borgelt wrote: “Aviation isn’t safe because of regulation. It is reasonably safe because after 120 years the human race has learned how to do it.”
This is correct. For half a century, the FAA was adding regulation after regulation, but airline accidents continued to happen through the 1970s.
Around 1980, the airlines realized that with the increasing number of airliner flights, if the accident rate didn’t decrease then there would be weekly headlines of major airliner crashes. It was the airlines, not the FAA, that got serious about learning how to do it right. About that time, there were two major airliner crashes. These two had a common theme that the airlines corrected with Crew Resource Management techniques. Proper maintenance and easier human-machine interfaces were also developed, and there were other improvements, too. One century after the invention of the airplane, the United States had finally dramatically reduced the number of passenger deaths. It took two decades of serious dedication by the airlines, not the FAA or regulators, but the U.S. airlines learned how to do it right. Rather than wait for the regulators to figure it out, the airlines took charge and figured it out.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXbdJ3kyVyU (7 minutes, Bill Whittle: “The Deal”)
3:38: “The reason that we have cheap, affordable, and safe air transportation today and no space transportation whatsoever is simply because we were serious about air travel, serious enough to pay the price in blood and money, and we’re not serious about space. My friend and noted space expert Rand Sinberg summed it up perfectly when he said ‘we’ll know we’re serious about space travel when we have entire cemeteries full of dead astronauts who lost their lives showing us how to do it right,’ just like Gann’s generation did. Because that’s the deal. That’s what it costs.”
4:17: “As with civil aviation, we learned from these events, that wishful thinking is a poor substitute for good engineering. So we went back and fixed the engineering, but we lost the stomach for it, because we didn’t go anywhere or do anything new. Part of the deal, you see, is that you pay in blood for progress. If there’s no progress, what’s the point?”
“You see, either you live for something, something worth dying for, or you just rot on the installment plan. That’s the deal.”
Government wants a dangerous endeavor to be totally safe, like the U.S. airlines almost are,* but that is not yet in the cards. All we can hope for with overregulation is that government will get the blame for accidents, because they failed to regulate them out of existence rather than learn how to avoid them in the first place, as the airlines did. It is too bad that these regulators are more eager for power than for safety.
______________
* Around 2018, Southwest Airlines had an unconfined engine failure, and an engine part broke the window next to a passenger, who was sucked halfway out the window and succumbed to her injuries.
“The reason that we have cheap, affordable, and safe air transportation today and no space transportation whatsoever is simply because we were serious about air travel, serious enough to pay the price in blood and money, and we’re not serious about space. My friend and noted space expert Rand Simberg summed it up perfectly when he said ‘we’ll know we’re serious about space travel when we have entire cemeteries full of dead astronauts who lost their lives showing us how to do it right,’ just like Gann’s generation did. Because that’s the deal. That’s what it costs.”
Shorter version:
If blood be the price of admiralty,
Lord God, we ha’ paid in full!
Rudyard Kipling
‘The Song of the Dead’ (1896)
I’ve maintained similar strategy versus the TSA, an unnecessary bureaucracy. That is the airlines could have always policed their own security and safety, and far more efficiently. That’s the way enterprise and competition works.