Reports of the suborbital passenger launch legislation’s demise were greatly exaggerated, but it’s still on life support. According to Alan Boyle, here’s the problem:

Goldston said it was not clear to him whether the bill would be acceptable to Rep. Oberstar, the ranking Democratic member of the Transportation Committee. But Jim Berard, communications director on the panel’s Democratic staff, made Oberstar’s view quite clear to MSNBC.com: Oberstar believes the bill still does not go far enough to safeguard the safety of crew members and passengers on future suborbital spaceships, he said.

“If the bill is brought up under unanimous consent, Congressman Oberstar would most likely object, unless something can be done to address that particular language,” Berard said.

In a straight up-and-down vote, the opposition of just one member wouldn’t pose a problem. But so little time remains in this lame-duck session that congressional rules have to be short-circuited in order to approve the suborbital spaceflight bill. The easiest way would be through unanimous consent, and Oberstar’s objection would close off that avenue.

Rep. Oberstar apparently thinks that he has to destroy the industry (or prevent it from coming into being at all) in order to save it.

I hope that they can do a rules change to get around him, but I don’t think that they should capitulate to him. I have a feeling that no bill will be better than one worded the way he would want it.

Reports of the suborbital passenger launch legislation’s demise were greatly exaggerated, but it’s still on life support. According to Alan Boyle, here’s the problem:

Goldston said it was not clear to him whether the bill would be acceptable to Rep. Oberstar, the ranking Democratic member of the Transportation Committee. But Jim Berard, communications director on the panel’s Democratic staff, made Oberstar’s view quite clear to MSNBC.com: Oberstar believes the bill still does not go far enough to safeguard the safety of crew members and passengers on future suborbital spaceships, he said.

“If the bill is brought up under unanimous consent, Congressman Oberstar would most likely object, unless something can be done to address that particular language,” Berard said.

In a straight up-and-down vote, the opposition of just one member wouldn’t pose a problem. But so little time remains in this lame-duck session that congressional rules have to be short-circuited in order to approve the suborbital spaceflight bill. The easiest way would be through unanimous consent, and Oberstar’s objection would close off that avenue.

Rep. Oberstar apparently thinks that he has to destroy the industry (or prevent it from coming into being at all) in order to save it.

I hope that they can do a rules change to get around him, but I don’t think that they should capitulate to him. I have a feeling that no bill will be better than one worded the way he would want it.

My promised (well, actually, hoped for) rebuttal to Alexander Tabarrok’s mistaken hit piece on the space tourism industry is up at TechCentralStation.

[Update at 10 AM EST]

I have to say that I’m underwhelmed by Professor Tabarrok’s response to my rebuttal. He seems to have read it, or at least glanced at it, since he complains about my use of the (admittedly overused, but appropriate in this case, I believe) word “paradigm.” However, he doesn’t seem to have comprehended it, or if he did, he chose not to provide a substantive response.

He is still apparently unable to discern the distinction between orbital and suborbital, and between reusable and expendable, and why such a distinction is important. He accuses me of relying on “faith,” when in fact I made a very clear and rational case as to why these new vehicles are different than the ones from which he mistakenly draws his misleading statistics.

In this last graf, he displays a fundamental lack of understanding of the economics of the space industry (disappointing–one would hope that as an economics professor, he could get that right, even if he doesn’t understand the technical issues):

What’s so great about space tourism anyway? Even though an increase in rocket safety of a factor of ten is not much when considering the safety of large numbers of people it is very significant when thinking about satellite launches or temporary low-orbit launches. A reduction of risk of this amount means much lower insurance costs that will open up space to new private development.

What’s so great about space tourism is that it is the only market, or at least the only one that doesn’t require some technology breakthrough beyond the development of low-cost vehicles themselves, that is sufficiently large to get us to the scale of operations necessary to reduce costs and improve reliability.

And if he believes that the high cost of launch insurance is the barrier holding back private space development, he understands nothing at all about the current launch industry, either technically or in a business sense.

David Masten isn’t impressed, either.

I’ve allowed myself to get sucked into a discussion in comments over at Marsblog, and decided it made more sense to post about it here. There are a lot of misconceptions about the president’s Vision for Space Exploration (and they may actually be deliberate strawmen by those trying to twist it to their own ends).

Foremost among them is that the plan is to go to Mars via the moon, with the implication that everything that goes to Mars will therefore have to first go to the moon. Having established this as a fact, it is then blasted by some as a proposal to “build Cape Kennedy on the moon,” which is obviously ridiculously infeasible and expensive. It was the basis of this so-called argument by “Mark” against using the moon to get to Mars.

I believe the figures in the book demonstrate that the deltaV to get from LEO to moon is higher than that of getting to Mars. This is due to aerobreaking [sic] I think. Thus, even if there are prepaired [sic] fuel tanks waiting for you there for free, it’s more expensive to stop off at the moon. I could be fudging this as I don’t have the book in front of me.

He assumes that everyone going off to Mars “stops off at the moon.” If that were the case, then the relative delta Vs would be of interest.

But it’s not. This is nonsense, of course, and not what the president proposed.

What the president proposed was using the moon as a place to learn how to operate on another world, much closer to earth in case something went wrong, and looking into the potential to get resources there that could help go to Mars, particularly propellants. Propellants for a Mars expedition have to come from somewhere. They can either come from earth, by launching them from earth to LEO or L1 or some other staging point, or they can come from the moon.

If launch costs are such, and the ability to mine ice on the moon are such, that it’s cheaper to get the propellants from the moon than from the earth, then this is what will be done, and it has nothing with “stopping off at the moon.” It is simply logistics.

And no one can say with certainty a priori what the answer to that question is (including Bob Zubrin). We will only know after years of studies and initial robotic exploration, which are only starting to be performed now.

This article about the safety of the space tourism industry is wrong on several levels. I’ll be rebutting it one way or the other within the next day or two.

[Update at noon]

Clark Lindsey beats me to the punch (at least as far as publishing–ahh, the wonder of blogs), with many of the points that I’ll be making, probably in a rebuttal at TCS tomorrow.

If statistics were a child, Alexander Tabarrok would be arrested for abuse…

Heh.

[Update on Friday morning]

I have to say that I’m pretty underwhelmed by Professor Tabarrok’s response to my column. He seems to have read it sufficiently to complain about my use of the (admittedly overused) word “paradigm,” but not comprehended it. He certainly doesn’t offer any substantive response to my arguments or criticism, except to cling to his old myths. David Masten wasn’t very impressed, either.