Holman Jenkins has a column in today’s WSJ about the launch legislation being held up in the Senate (link may be subscription only–I’m not sure). With the title, “The ‘Final Frontier’ May Be a Senate Waste Basket,” he’s clearly not impressed with that body. He makes an analogy with what happened to the general aviation industry in the eighties (in which it almost went under from fear of lawsuits and costs of insurance), that was only revived in the nineties by farsighted legislation limiting liability for aircraft makers. He also asks an interesting question, that I’ve been wondering about as well:

For a pair who say they want to spend $100 million making space tourism a reality, Messrs. Rutan and Branson have displayed an odd indifference to the legislative battle. Either Sir Richard is peddling vaporware and doesn’t really intend to fly — or he’s making an improbable bet on the FAA’s willingness to let paying clients fly in an “experimental” spacecraft in violation of every rule in the book.

My guess is that Branson is taking his cue from Burt, who wishes that AST would dry up and blow away. He wants to be regulated by AVR. He should be careful what he wishes for.

I don’t think this is necessarily a bad idea, but I do think that it’s extremely premature–a couple of European scientists have come up with a plan for conservation parks on Mars.

I think that their concern here is vastly overblown:

“It is the right of every person to stand and stare across the beautiful barrenness and desolation of the Martian surface without having to endure the eyesore of pieces of crashed spacecraft scattered across the landscape,” they write in the latest edition of Space Policy.

Mars is big. Mind bogglingly big. It has about as much surface area as the land of the earth. The likelihood that you’ll see any traces of humanity over most of it for the next century or two is vanishingly small. They seem to be dramatically overestimating the amount of potential activity there, and by the time we get around to sending enough spacecraft for it to even start to be a potential problem, we won’t be “crashing” them there. The notion of destroying a sufficient number of probes for them to become an eyesore anywhere one goes on Mars is ludicrous, logically and economically.

But he’s not a total moonbat (or in this case, Marsbat):

But Cockell argues that if a planetary parks system were in place, it would free up the rest of the planet for exploitation and claim-staking, which might encourage these nations to sign up to the system.