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United Kingdom passes comprehensive spaceflight regulations

Capitalism in space: As required by the Outer Space Treaty as well as to lay a framework for commercial and private space launches from within the United Kingsom, the UK this week passed new comprehensive spaceflight regulations that appear modeled closely after already existing regulations in the United States.

From the government’s press release:

The legislation provides the framework to regulate the UK space industry and enable launches to take place from British soil for the very first time. It will unlock a potential £4 billion of market opportunities over the next decade, creating thousands of jobs and benefiting communities right across the UK.

This also puts the UK in a unique position as the first country in Europe able to launch spacecraft and satellites from home soil. This could lead to better monitoring of climate change, as well as improved data for satellite navigation systems, improving journeys right here on the ground, too.

The full law can be read here. It is long, so I have not reviewed it entirely, but it does seem to be closely modeled after several U.S. laws, including the 2004 Space Amendments Act that presently guides FAA regulation and licensing of commercial space launches. The UK even gave its own Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) the same job the FAA has in the U.S.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

6 comments

  • Cloudy

    Making a law that works in the real world is surprisingly hard. Copy and paste is a common approach to making state laws in the US. Do it wrong and you can accidentally do something crazy.

  • Jeff Wright

    Kingdom…the title

  • Jeff Wright. Oy. Thank you. Fixed.

  • Mike Borgelt

    “This could lead to better monitoring of climate change” yada, yada, yada.

  • Mark

    xxxxxxxxx

    In regards to the ‘monitoring of climate’, IMO the U.K. is in a headlong rush to embrace state capitalism. So like Germany they have to tie many government initiatives to ‘addressing climate change’.
    I fear that this state capitalism will to some extent crowd out private space.

    I know that you may think ‘They can’t be serious’. But they are serious about allocating vast sums of capital to tie corporations to the state. As one minor example of stretching claims, the UK. imports wood chips and pellets from the US to burn just so they can claim this ‘biofuel’ is replacing a coal plant. If you want a site that skeptically reviews the latest in the climate change field (science, government, and corporate), you can google WUWT (stands for Watts Up with That?)

  • Mike Borgelt highlighted “This could lead to better monitoring of climate change”

    Yeah, I had a similar thought. Have to reconize the State Religion, or the Cardinals of Gaia won’t recognize you.

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