It would seem that my post yesterday (and my Fox column) were quite timely.

I’ve often discussed the chilling effect that regulatory uncertainty can have on investing in private space transportation efforts. Usually, I mean that in the sense that it makes investors hesitant, or reduces the potential pool of them. But you can’t get a more clear cut case than what happened yesterday, when Dennis Tito testified to a Congressional panel, with no ambiguity, that he’s ready to invest, and the only thing preventing him from doing so is fear of the FAA.

I hope that they’re listening.

[Update at 8:57 AM PDT]

The testimony is now on line.

Here’s Tito’s. Key graf:

Please understand me: I am not looking for government funding or technology. I don’t need an investment tax credit or a loan guarantee. I’m not even looking to escape the regulations under which other space transportation companies operate. But I would like to know which government agency, and which set of regulations, will oversee this new industry.

You see, I am willing to risk my money on a technical concept and a team of engineers. I am willing to risk my money on the customers actually showing up. And I am willing to risk my money competing against other companies in the marketplace. But I am not willing to risk my money on a regulatory question mark, on waiting for the government to decide who can give me permission to get into business, and what the regulatory standards for my business will be.

For an excellent tutorial on the history of aviation and launch regulation, and the differences between the two, I also encourage you to read the testimony of Jeff Greason, head of XCOR.

The key point is that the mature aviation industry’s goal is to protect passengers and cargo. At the state of development of launchers, we must be prepared to accept much higher risk to (informed) first and second parties, and focus regulations on protecting third (that is, otherwise uninvolved) parties on the ground, as required by the Outer Space Treaty and common sense.

Elon Musk (founder of Paypal, and now President and owner of SpaceX) also has some useful thoughts, with some specific recommendations for making government ranges more user friendly, and with an optimistic outlook for the industry based on his internet experience:

It is worth noting that the perspective I bring to the launch vehicle industry is drawn from a particularly Darwinian experience in the business world, having founded and helped build two successful Internet companies in Silicon Valley. Seldom have we seen a faster moving, more voraciously competitive business environment or one with more tombstones. However, for all the problems associated with that era, the rise and fall and perhaps rise again of the NASDAQ, it is easy to forget that the vast majority of the monumental work required to build what we know as the world wide web was done in less than a decade.

If you doubt that we can possibly see such progress in space access, please reflect for a moment that the Internet, originally a DARPA funded project, showed negligible growth for over two decades until private enterprise entered the picture. At that point, growth accelerated by more than a factor of ten. We saw Internet traffic grow by more in a few years than the sum of all growth in the prior two decades.

John Kutler’s testimony is worth reading as well, providing the perspective of the institutional investment community. Summary: they’re not ready to jump into this yet, so the startups will have to continue to rely on angels for a while.

Finally, read the testimony from Futron on their space tourism market research study.

As I said, I hope that Congress was listening carefully.

The Houston Chronicle has been running a very good series of articles this week on the mess that is our manned space program.

Too often, press accounts of the space program are either breathless and unquestioning regurgitations of overhyped NASA Public Affairs Office releases, or at the other extreme, dark exposes about activities of minions of the military-space industrial complex, plotting to enrich themselves at the expense of the downtrodden taxpayer and/or carry out secret space missions that will continue to make the rest of the world toiling slaves of the Amerikkkan Empire (TM).

Refreshingly, authors Tony Freemantle and Mike Tolson set just the right, sober tone, and considering that it’s the hometown newspaper for NASA’s Johnson Space Center, they, along with their paper, are to be commended for their willingness to tell stark truths, and to provide a history of the program untainted by local boosterism.

On Sunday, the thirty-fourth anniversary of the first moon landing, they provide the setting–NASA is at a crossroads in the wake of the Columbia loss.

I was encouraged by the fact, as reported here, that many are starting to realize that there is much wrong with the program, far beyond mere vehicle design. I’ve long been agitating for a serious national debate over the purposes of our civil policy, and if this article is correct, that may finally be happening:

“The Gehman report will mark the moment which will be noted in history as before and after,” predicted U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., chairman of the House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics. “After the report comes out, everyone will be committed to charting a new direction for the program that will have discernible goals.”

Of course, that debate should be an informed one, and I would accordingly encourage everyone involved to read Monday’s installment, which provides a great summary history of the space shuttle. Tuesday’s installment describes similarly the history of the space station. Together, they give a good insight into how each program is dependent the other, not just technically, but in terms of institutional support–the shuttle was needed to provide a means of getting to space station and an excuse to build it, and the space station was needed to provide something for the shuttle to do.

A much better station could have been built, and much more quickly, had that been the goal, by developing a shuttle-derived heavy lifter. The costs of doing so would have been trivial in comparison to the cost savings. But to do so would have been to admit that the shuttle wasn’t all that great for building space stations, ostensibly one of it primary purposes. So we spent at least an additional decade in construction, and arguably two (we could have had a fully-capable shuttle-derived station in the late eighties, and the current one isn’t yet complete), to get a far inferior product.

But of course, building a space station wasn’t the goal–having a space station program, that employed lots of people, was. I hope that, in the weeks leading up to the release of the Gehman report a month from now, there will be many more articles like this in the broader press, and that we can establish the basis for a long-needed national debate on not just the means, but the purposes, of our manned space program. And according to this article, the people seem to agree.