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).

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]