Legislators contemplate ways to regulate emerging space travel industry

• MOJAVE -- While entrepreneurs explore how to put ordinary folks into space, federal officials are pondering how to regulate the emerging commercial space industry.
• In the afterglow of Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne winning a $10 million prize for the first private reusable spacecraft, House and Senate negotiators had hoped to be able to get a bill approved this year providing regulatory guidance for the new space-tourism industry.
• "'Highest standard' is a phase that sounds good, but it doesn't provide any guidance to regulators," said Jeff Greason, president of XCOR, a Mojave company working on a spacecraft of its own.
• The major provisions of the Rohrabacher bill included extending an existing government indemnification for the commercial space transportation industry and creating an experimental permit process to make it easier to launch new types of spacecraft.
• The bill also contained language eliminating confusion over who should regulate suborbital spacecraft, placing the authority firmly under the Federal Aviation Administration's Office of Commercial Space Transportation.
• Even in a "fly at your own risk" environment, the federal government and the industry will need to come to terms on what information needs to be made available to a prospective passenger, said Federal Aviation Administration Administrator Marion Blakey.
• "There will be risks," Blakey said after watching the Oct. 4 SpaceShipOne flight.
• Burt Rutan, the Mojave designer behind SpaceShipOne, will be designing a spaceliner for Virgin Galactic, a space-tourism venture from British billionaire Sir Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Atlantic airline.
• Plans call for Virgin Galactic to begin passenger flights in 2007 out of Mojave.
• "We expect that for space tourism to occur we must be safer in doing space flight than the early airlines were in during airline flights," Rutan said.
• A public policy position paper by the National Space Society notes that, even more than 100 years after the auto industry was born, car crashes are still a leading cause of deaths.