I just got an email from Jeff Greason at XCOR Aerospace:

There is a last-minute move by some staffers in the Senate to heavily amend HR 3752. The amendments would completely change the charter
of the office of commercial space transportation (AST), placing the safety of the crew and passengers on equal footing with the safety of the uninvolved public. Since that is well beyond present technology, it would effectively stop development of the industry in the U.S.. It is too late to fix the bill before the session adjourns, but not too late to stop it. If you or people you know have connections to any Senator, please ask them to put a “hold” on HR 3752. That prevents it from passing by unanimous consent. We may have less than 24 hours.

If the bill is “held” there may be opportunity to fix it in a post-election session — but if not, we would still rather the bill die than pass with these poison-pill amendments.

I’m now wondering if the AIAA was aware of this, and if so, whose side they’re on.

[Update at 11 PM EDT]

Alan Boyle at MSNBC has the latest on the issue. Bottom line: the bill is almost certainly dead for this session, and will have to wait for next year. But:

That’s just as well, said Andrew Case, the acting director of the Washington-based SubOrbital Institute and a research associate at the University of Maryland at College Park.

“It leaves us with continuing uncertainty,” Case told MSNBC.com, “but it’s better to have continuing uncertainty than the certainty of bad regulation.”

Perhaps more tomorrow, but thanks to Alan for quickly getting to the bottom of what’s going on in the murky labryrinth of what’s going on inside the Beltway in this matter. That’s why we have professional journalists with the resources and sources to ferret this stuff out. Too bad they don’t all do as good a job.

[And thanks to commenter “gs” for the tip to the MSNBC piece]

[Update on Friday afternoon]

There are some more follow-ups in this more recent post.

Here’s a good roundup of the accelerating trend (that I pointed out last year–scroll down past satirical piece) of dotcom millionaires to become space entrepreneurs.

It’s not looking very good to get HR 3752, the bill to provide necessary regulatory changes for suborbital flight, passed this year. The AIAA (which I’m happy to see supporting this) has a last-ditch legislative alert.

[Via Jeff Foust]

I just noticed that the audio of my interview with Warren Olney on Monday is on line.

Tariq Malik has a piece on the new space prize today, in which he writes:

Former astronaut and U.S. senator John Glenn’s 1998 space shuttle seat cost NASA $50 million, and private orbital passengers like Dennis Tito and Mark Shuttleworth have paid about $20 million for jaunts to the International Space Station, McCurdy added. At present, British millionaire Sir Richard Branson’s announcement of suborbital flights on his newly christened Virgin Galactic venture will cost around $190,000.

I’d be curious to know where he got the fifty-million number. There is no accepted cost for a Shuttle seat–it all depends on how one wants to do the accounting. I’m guessing that he (or whoever gave him the number) came up with an average cost for a Shuttle flight in the year that he flew (perhaps $350M, itself a contentious number, and probably low), and then divided by the number of crew.

But this is a completely arbitrary way to do it, and in fact extremely overprices it, since it values the cost of delivering a payload bay full of tons of cargo at zero.

The reality is that John Glenn’s flight cost virtually nothing, at the margin. They could have flown seat full of John Glenn, or seat empty, and the cost of the flight would have been identical, other than training costs. Unless the services of the Shuttle are “unbundled,” there’s no definitive way to put a cost on a seat.