Saturday was a little-noted anniversary for the space program. Jeff Foust has some thoughts.

FAA’s authority from Congress extends only to takeoff and landing. This is duly implemented in the new proposed regs. The Outer Space Treaty makes the US liable for damages caused by US spacecraft and citizens to other signatory’s people and stuff whereever they are. That includes outer space and the rest of the planets. These areas too should be considered and governed for every US citizen and corporation that wants a US flagged spacecraft. There are excellent opportunities for US (mobile home) colonies in unoccupied territory. It’s time to appoint someone whose job it is to make that happen. A new position should be created: the Governor of Outer Space Territory.

Like the Space Paidhi in C.J. Cherryh’s Foreigner series, there would be a need for bridging tremendous cultural gaps between political leaders and spacers, quick thinking about governance modes, and even some rough frontier justice.

Why stop there? We should have an Ocean Territory Governor, a Sky Territory Governor and (an underground) Crust Territory Governor.

Mark Whittington has an idea to solve the methane problem (no, not that methane problem–that one we’ll solve by burning down the rain forests):

If NASA feels that building a methane/LOX engine is too risky for the ESAS, there is a solution. Make such an engine one of the Centennial Challenges. Critics of the Vision for Space Exploration will be less unhappy because that would be another piece of technology developed by non traditional means. NASA will benefit because it gets the engine for the CEV and Mars Lander relatively cheaply.

Well, maybe. The problem is, I guess I don’t see LOX/methane engines as particularly risky, at least no more so than any other generic propulsion development. It’s not a technology risk (in the sense that there may be some unknowns out there that prevent it from being possible) so much as a programmatic risk, in terms of schedule delays or cost overruns. NASA has a lot of experience with these in propulsion programs, so they’re wary of new engine developments (though I suspect that XCOR has broken a lot of the conventional industry cost/schedule estimating models for propulsion system development). Our lack of methane propulsion isn’t because it’s a Hard Problem, but because no one has had sufficient requirement to date to fund it.

If we have unlimited money for prizes, I guess that a prize would be a good way to fund this, but prizes are better employed in those cases for which innovation is required to solve a really difficult problem that many have attempted and no one yet solved, not for a straightforward development program. Rather than offer a prize, I’ll bet that someone like XCOR (or the other companies working on the problem) would be happy to take a fixed-price contract to develop engines to NASA’s specs (they could use the technology contract they have from Marshall to develop a reusable cryo tank as a model), and it would be a lot cheaper than funding a cost-plus contract to Aerojet or Pratt. There are lots of other ways to do innovative procurement than offering prizes.

We’re starting to see the programmatic consequences of NASA’s political inability to get the Shuttle/ISS monkey off its back. I was reading the final Call For Improvement from NASA on the CEV program, that just came out this week, and noted that one of the biggest changes in it from the draft that came out late last year was that the word “methane” had been excised from it, whereas in the draft, it had been baselined. Apparently, NASA doesn’t have the funds to pursue this propulsion technology, despite its potential for improved safety, reduced operational costs, and extensibility to eventual Mars (and Near-Earth Object) missions.

The Shuttle and ISS have both been programmatic disasters exactly because of decisions made early in their development to skip key technologies that could have dramatically reduced down-stream costs, and (as seems to be inevitable with a space program funded on an annual basis by a Congress that’s focused on the next election), we’re apparently following the same path with CEV.

NASA Watch has more on this subject, as does Clark Lindsey:

The fundamental criticism of the Exploration program that has come from the alt.space community is that the program as currently designed will make little progress towards development of a sustainable, long-term, in-space infrastructure. This decision further pushes the program towards “flags and footprints” rather than “return to stay” or “steppingstone to Mars.”

Clark Lindsey points out a potentially interesting program tonight for those of my readers who get BBC2.

This isn’t really big news–Burt has always said that he wants to get to orbit, but it looks like Virgin Galactic has made an announcement recently. What will be really interesting is when they reveal the design (if they have one), because the current “badminton birdie” approach isn’t going to work for orbital entry velocities.

This year, the Space Studies Institute is doing what used to be known as the Princeton Conference on Space Industrialization in conjunction with the National Space Society’s International Space Development Conference, in LA in May. They have a call for papers up for anyone interested in presenting relevant ideas.

[Update on Wednesday morning]

As Lee Valentine notes, the full name of the conference is Conference on Space Industrialization and Space Settlement, making it rare, if not unique, among regularly held space conferences.

February 8th, at 4:30 PM Pacific time.

Or at least without educating oneself on the subject. Over at this week’s Carnival of the Capitalists, the very first post is a libertarian (my guess) whining about government regulation of space tourism. This is always the knee-jerk response of small-government types (of which I’m one) when they’re completely unfamiliar with the history of commercial space and space law in general.

The FAA NPRM that Mr. Cohen is so exercised about was not a spontaneous power grab by the federal government, and didn’t appear ex nihilo, even if he wasn’t following the subject–it was the result of years of discussion with the industry, and a result of a consensus between them and the regulators (though there are a few dissenters, but even they don’t want no regulation–they just want a different set of rules and a different part of the FAA to regulate it).

Like it or not, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty obligates the federal government to regulate launches. It will continue to do so until we decide to renegotiate or withdraw from it (good ideas, in my opinion, but unlikely to happen soon). There was never any option for non-regulation–the only question was what form the regs would take. Absent any defined regulations for it, it was impossible to raise money for it (because investors hate uncertainty in general, and regulatory uncertainty in particular), which is why the nascent American space tourism industry fought very hard a couple years ago to get legislation to legally define this new flight regime, and expand the FAA’s legal authority to explicitly deal with space passenger launches, in a way that would green light investors and not stifle the industry. So far, it has been quite successful, since the money is now flowing, and no serious player (other than Burt) is complaining about the regulation level. If you look at the comments on the NPRM so far (and ignore the nutty ones), you’ll see that they’re constructive, and meant to fine tune a good first cut by the agency. So far, they seem to be in keeping with both the letter and intent of the legislation.

Before people let loose with their keyboards on this issue, they might serve their readers better if they review and familiarize themselves a little with the history first.

[Update on Monday evening]

Here’s an equally naive, but more optimistic (and realistic) take:

Last week, for probably the first time in my life, I got excited by the prospect of U.S. government bureaucracy. The Federal Aviation Administration took a step toward developing rules for space tourism, issuing more than 120 pages of proposed guidelines for

Of course it is. And, as Ron Bailey points out, there’s never been a time when it wasn’t, for all the reasons he describes and more, and the Dems are just as (if not more) guilty of this than the Bush administration (contra Chris Mooney’s ideologically blinkered thesis).

The same applies to space “science” (though in fact much of NASA spending has very little to do with science, despite the popular myth). And in light of how something as supposedly objective as “science” can get politicized, it’s foolish to think that major government-funded engineering projects (like the president’s Vision for Space Exploration) aren’t, or that the politics don’t drive the architecture decisions much more strongly than economics or the loftier goal of building a space-faring civilization.

It may indeed be the case that the “stick” and a Shuttle-derived heavy-lift vehicle are necessary to maintain (at least in the short term) Congressional support for the overall program (though that’s not at all clear to me), but we shouldn’t fool ourselves that this will result in significant progress in our space capabilities, particularly relative to more flexible, versatile, diverse and ultimately lower-cost means of achieving the desired goals.