David Chandler (who interviewed me a few years ago for a similar article) has a piece in the Boston Globe that provides a good overview of the fledgling commercial space passenger industry, with a suitable cautionary note at the end:

All of this growing interest and activity could still be thwarted, though.

Last week, a bill that had been painstakingly negotiated in Congress for more than a year was suddenly about to be amended at the last minute. Instead of helping to enable the new space tourism business, as intended, a new provision would have required safety standards comparable to a mature industry like the airlines. The bill is still in backroom negotiations and might be salvaged in the lame-duck congressional session.

It would certainly be ironic, said Boston-based aerospace engineer and consultant Charles Lurio, that if, as enthusiasts gather next month to celebrate the human and engineering triumph in Mojave, the industry it might have spawned was being strangled in the halls of Washington.

Henry Vanderbilt at the Space Access Society has more on the ongoing legislative crisis. An important point:

Don’t assume because you didn’t read this until a week or two after we sent it out that it’s no longer urgent. The window for effective action
on this will likely be open well into November. Stay tuned for further word; we’ll report as soon as we know anything. Meanwhile – fax and call!

This columnist at the Daily Cal likes the idea of rides in space, but he’s (irrationally and ignorantly) worried about the military implications:

But just as the discovery of oil in the Middle East set the stage for decades of conflict, the prospect of energy resources in space could drive its militarization. Because of its technological advantage, the United States has a clear shot at becoming the first

I found a dumb letter to the editor in my new hometown paper this morning (scroll down):

Use money for space travel to develop alternate fuels

Commercial space travel is a dubious and dangerous prospect for mankind (“Private rocket wins $10 million prize,” Oct. 5). It is bad enough that governments are devoting scarce resources to space travel while there should be an intensive program to develop nonpolluting energy sources. All would benefit if a replacement were found for nonrenewable fuels.

Commercial space travel as well as governmental space programs will benefit only the very few and the very rich. Each venture pollutes and helps to destroy the upper layers of Earth’s protective atmosphere. The few who will partake in space travel will leave the rest of God’s creation choking on rocket fumes.

RABBI NASON GOLDSTEIN

Royal Palm Beach

Even ignoring the scientific ignorance about “rocket fumes” (it’s quite possible and even likely that most rocket exhaust in the future will be di-hydrogen monoxide, or a combination of that and CO2), the good rabbi manages to combine the fallacy of false choice (the notion that money not spent on space will be spent on alternative fuels, particularly absurd in the case of private space travel), ignorance of economics (all innovations initially benefit the wealthy, who provide the initial markets needed to drive down the price to those less so), and the mistaken notion that there will be “few” going into space, and that there is no benefit to anyone doing so.

That’s what The Independent says:

The man behind the lunar mission was Dr John Wilkins, scientist, theologian and brother-in-law of Oliver Cromwell. In 1640, as a young man of 26, Dr Wilkins wrote a detailed description of the machinery needed to communicate and even trade with beings from another world…

…Although earlier philosophers and poets had written about visiting the Moon, the writings of Dr Wilkins were in an altogether different league, Professor Chapman believes. Wilkins lived inwhat he describes as the “honeymoon period” of scientific discovery, between the astronomical revelations of Galileo and Copernicus, who showed a universe with other, possibly habitable worlds, and the later realisation that much of space was a vacuum and therefore impassable

Even if true, it seems improbable that it would have been successful–he was a little dodgy on his physics:

According to Dr Wilkins, the gravitational and magnetic pull of the Earth extended for only 20 miles into the sky. If it were possible to get airborne and pass beyond this point, it would be easy to continue on a journey to the Moon. Inspired by the discovery of other continents and the great sea voyages of explorers such as Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh, Wilkins conceived an equally ambitious plan to explore space.

I’ll be curious to see if this story stands up to peer review. If so, it’s an interesting new and unknown chapter in the history of man’s dreams of spaceflight.

[Via Jim Oberg]

Keith Cowing has obtained a copy of the draft legislation in the Senate that contains the poison pill. Jeff Foust has the latest description of what’s going on, including an analysis of the text.

And for those who say that this won’t kill the industry, that it would just move it off shore, Taylor Dinerman points out that if so, it won’t be done by Americans, due to ITAR restrictions.

All in all, it’s very important to both fix this legislation, and get it passed, as soon as possible, if we want to continue to build on the momentum provided by last week’s successful Ansari X-Prize win.

Only four days after we lost Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper, Max Faget (pronounced French-style, “Fah-zhay”), the man who designed his capsule, has died.

[Update on Monday morning]

Here’s a profile of the man by Jim Oberg from almost ten years ago.

That’s what Michael Mealing is doing at the Space Frontier Conference. You’ll particularly want to read his description of Jim Muncy’s talk about the new launch legislation.

“…the poison meat is in the Senate sausage machine so we’re going to stop, clean out the machine, and start over…”

The Air Force has come out with a new badge.

That’s the subject of this column by Mark Whittington.

Clark Lindsey explains the issues involved with yesterday’s legislative emergency for passenger spaceflight.

And he points out a very good piece by Richard Foss on the prospects for space tourism and the town of Mojave.

[Update in the afternoon]

Here’s a related piece from Space.com with several good points made by Jeff Greason:

Greason said he is in total agreement that it is necessary for regulators to ensure that potential passengers have adequate information. But he sees a “critical distinction” between the risk faced by the uninvolved public and that faced by those who want to fly into space.

“The uninvolved public has to be held to a very high level of safety,” he said. “There’s no reason they should be exposed to a level of risk that’s different than they see from any other aspect of industrial life.

“The involved passenger, the people who are deliberately putting their lives and treasure at risk to open the space frontier they’ve dreamed of their entire lives, as long as they know what they’re getting into, I think they have to be allowed to take that risk.”

One of the nation’s advantages, he asserted, is that there is still a “culture of risk acceptance as long as it’s only for the participant…”

…Greason said commercial space transportation, for it to succeed, has to chart new ground to improve the level of safety set by government programs such as the space shuttle.

“That means the classic regulatory prescriptive approach of ‘We’ll do it just like all those other successful very safe personal space transportation vehicles’ can’t work,” he said. “It’s a paradoxical, hard to understand thing, but in order to achieve greater safety, we have to allow many approaches to be tried, because only in that way can we find out experimentally those which offer greater safety.”

[Update at 3:45 PM EDT]

Jeff Foust has the latest word from former committee staffer Jim Muncy on the bill status, from this morning’s session of the Space Frontier Conference in Long Beach (which I wish I were attending, and almost certainly would be if I were still in southern California).